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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    It wouldn't surprise me, but I think it's occurring on a higher level than that. I suspect that, by this point, the only reason Harmony Gold is keeping the Robotech franchise limping along is the forlorn hope that a third party will get involved and rescue it. They're either hoping that Big West will cave and offer them royalties to obtain clearance to release Macross in the west, or that Warner Bros will finally move ahead with making a live-action Robotech so all Harmony Gold has to do is either sell the franchise to Warner Bros for a king's ransom or sit back and collect royalty checks by doing no work whatsoever. Neither is a viable strategy, but they don't seem to have realized that yet.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Let's not beat around the bush. Robotech is dead... and it has been for a very long time. When Cannon Films pulled the Robotech movie and Robotech II: the Sentinels fell apart in early production, that was the end. The magic had ended. The clock struck midnight, and the coach had turned back into a pumpkin. Their fifteen minutes of fame were over. Everything else has just been Harmony Gold jumping up and down on Robotech's slowly decaying corpse, occasionally eliciting a squirt of something truly unwholesome from one of the more unpleasant orifices... a succession of abject failures that served only to underline that their initial "success" was purely an accident and throwing their incompetence into sharp relief. This latest mess shows how far they've fallen... the property's owners have so little confidence in the property that they insisted that the fans should fund it instead, and the fans balked at it because what Harmony Gold brought to the table was nothing but misplaced confidence and scorn for the people they were begging for money. This is going to be the elephant in the room for years to come. This is Robotech's Jar-Jar Binks. The fans will likely neither forget nor forgive this particular waste of their time and money. They won't let Harmony Gold forget either. Still... in a way, this is a victory. Robotech fans sent a message that they think Harmony Gold is doing a crap job. They voted with their wallets and said that they'd rather have nothing at all than a half-assed project sold on nostalgia alone. They haven't been this united in a long time. Let's hope against hope that this is inspiration for Harmony Gold to reconsider their approach to Macross and Robotech.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    It's not really subtle... Brera's standing there, holding his bleeding face, and looks over and there's one of those massive birdhuman totem pole things dominating the background. As far as Shadow Chronicles... I could list the reasons it has a bad rap, but there are just SO GODDAMN MANY. Almost all of the non-fanatical Robotech fans found the film offensively awful for a variety of reasons. It really was a film where they did just about everything wrong. The fans who expressed that view (most of them) ended up banned from Robotech.com for doing so, which is why it's a ghost town now. For many Robotech fans, the Shadow Chronicles movie was the straw that broke the camel's back. The tampering with the end from "Symphony of Light", the reinvention of "shadow" technology as an alien development, crowbarring in a Sentinels race as a completely random antagonist, the shoddy animation, the shoddy writing... all of these things drove people away from Robotech and Harmony Gold ended up with a lot of egg on its face because of it. Their hilarious knee-jerk effort to cover up the discontent was to BAN EVERYONE. They had to repackage it with a "new" feature (LLA) to artificially boost the sales numbers. Personally, I'm not sure why anyone would actually want to buy Robotech on DVD anymore. Why buy a new box set when their latest offering is literally the exact same goddamn thing you could buy fourteen years ago, just in a different box. The Complete Collection sets are less than $20 a pop on eBay, though nothing Robotech has much resale value anymore. $20 to get the very same product that they'll ask hundreds for. Who knows? Maybe MEMO wrote it for them. He's borderline illiterate even on a good day.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Odds are they'll simply encounter the same problem they ran into at SDCC... nobody who isn't a Robotech fan (or a stealthy troll) is going to pledge money to this Kickstarter, and anyone who gives enough of a damn to attend the Robotech convention panels almost certainly already knows about the Kickstarter and has either pledged or decided not to support it. They might as well just present their slideshow to an empty room instead of just a mostly empty one, because the result is ultimately the same. Doing one more ill-advised, poorly planned, absolutely underwhelming convention panel presentation will accomplish the square root of f***-all for the Kickstarter.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    They've got one more convention scheduled before the end of the Kickstarter period... one has to wonder if they're saving stuff in a misguided effort to stir up attention at the convention, instead of putting it out on the Kickstarter.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Er... you might want to rewatch it then, because Sheryl Nome's fold quartz earrings are in the blu-ray edition of Macross Zero, and you see the same birdhuman-shaped totems that Sara was singing in front of on the surface of the Vajra planet in the last episode of Macross Frontier. Brera's VF-27 lands next to one. There's no witchcraft in Macross Zero, though... so its absence later on isn't really surprising. Whatever its sins, Macross Zero is still a much more solid story than Robotech: From the Stars was... since th From the Stars comic's chief story goal seems to have been "make Roy look awesome" (something the man needs no help with) and "make Leonard look like a dick" (something he doesn't need help with either).
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, that kinda makes sense... y'see, that's a cover from the old Robotech comics published by Comico, which included art by Svea Macek. It's the memetically terrible art, but at least Svea Macek has a reason to sign it.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Perhaps before Tommy Yune did the From the Stars miniseries, which would torpedo practically every part of Macross Zero's continuity and story. ... so, you haven't seen Macross Frontier then, eh?
  9. Seto Kaiba
    I wonder if they'll back out of the Kickstarter at the last minute to drive the total down... several of them supposedly pledged a tidy sum.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Isn't that a breach of the Kickstarter terms of use though? If it is, they'd get nothing even if they funded it themselves.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    *impressed whistle* $34,361 a day for eight days needed to reach their target. At this rate, 50% is probably a bridge too far for them and 40% is very likely to be a tough order to fill. Their daily take has actually improved, on average, by half in recent days, but it's still not even in the ballpark for what they need to actually succeed. The low end estimate is now a mere $201,758 and falling, and the high end projection, which I consider more realistic than the trendline analysis, sits at a mere $222,418. SideKick's projected chances for success trended upwards briefly from 0% to 1%, but have now returned to 0%. Their idea of a big promotional tease is to have another aging voice actor who also played a hilarious racial stereotype read some dialogue and beg for money... Small wonder the Robotech fans are getting progressively more depressed about this one... the owners of the show that they're so fond of are attempting to morally blackmail them for money while also insulting their intelligence. Moderators on a number of the remaining Robotech web sites have given up trying to quash the increasingly vocal criticisms of the project (apparently they realized that "ban EVERYONE" is not a viable alternative), and the Kickstarter's own backers have largely given it up for a truly lost cause. I know I'm probably asking too much, but I really hope that heads are going to roll at Harmony Gold over this.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Thought that's what a coat of red paint is for...
  13. Seto Kaiba
    The jury seems to be split on whether the "GN Swords" things are going to turn out to be separate ships in their own right, or are just there for the sake of stapling random glowy bits all over everything. We don't know if they just don't know the facts, or if they're just guessing wildly... there are still plenty of Robotech fans who don't know the truth about Harmony Gold's limited rights.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    My read of it was "Incompetence made manifest". Three words, I know, but I'm a heavy tipper. When the gun needs both booms to fire, what's the use of a battle configuration that separates the two into separate craft?
  15. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, the few people trying to kid themselves that Robotech is successful around the world are some of the more notorious fanatical pro-Robotech zealots out there. I'm personally familiar with a few of them, though it surprises me not at all that Treiz is the one doing most of the talking on that side. Like bankofkev back in the day, he's kind of a sleazy bloke and one of the more desperate and delusional Robotech fans. I've seen him lie in debates in some sort of hilariously stupid roundabout effort to get people to buy Robotech art books. I'm pleasantly surprised by the way the majority are not only ignoring the pro-Harmony Gold shills, but are also taking the most reasonable and mature route open to them. If this were happening on the Robotech.com of five years ago, there would be an assortment of frothy-mouthed fanatics sending e-mailed death threats to every Macross fan they could find. EDIT: And they slipped... now they're back to wishing and theorizing about the Robotech live action movie that Warner Bros isn't making, and whether or not Harmony Gold can authorize the use of the Macross designs for that. If we took away their Macross nostalgia, would there even be any Robotech fans left?
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Still too dignified. Pinto mode! Or maybe Corvair mode, if it starts going too quick and then completely loses control. On the production end, that happened back in 1999... they brought some weaksauce CG to the table and the fans booed them over it. Their new distributor doesn't seem to want to put the show out on Hulu, Netflix, or YouTube though, which is lulzy. They finally found someone as primitive as they are. Nah, they've only ever used Plan B... the B is short for Blame someone else! (As far as my sinking ship analogy... it occurred to me that, in terms of his MO, Tommy's an awful lot like our favorite captain, the legendary Zap Brannigan!)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    For Trans-Am mode, of course... honestly, you guys and your silly questions. But that runs into the problems I've alluded to before... nobody wants to join the crew of the Titanic after it's already struck the iceberg. Harmony Gold couldn't draw a decent staff when they were launching their last reboot, and their reputation is FAR worse today than it was back in 2000. Arguably, they haven't been able to draw a decent staff since they fired the decent staff Tatsunoko's side supplied for Robotech II: the Sentinels. The not-so-good ship Robotech ran headlong into that particular iceberg with the late Captain Macek at the helm, and the owners replaced him with Captain Yune in the hopes of keeping her afloat, but it looks like he's managed to make sinking a foregone conclusion instead by running her into a second iceberg. What kind of madman would want to assume captaincy of a ship for which sinking is a already foregone conclusion and no rescue is in sight? All the ship's owners can do is tell the band (Kevin) to keep playing so the passengers don't panic. The way things are now, if they let Tommy Yune, Steve Yun, and Kevin McKeever go, they're not going to be able to draw in a replacement staff that has even their meager level of talent. They've so thoroughly poisoned the well that they can't even beg half a mil for legitimate production expenses from their own bosses, let alone the fans. Anyone willing to sign onto a "new and improved" Robotech staff would be someone with even less credentials and experience than the already questionable skillset Harmony Gold's staff has. You'd end up with some guy who makes high schoolers on DeviantArt look like old pros. I don't think they have the cash or the connections to do an HD remaster... the original remastered edition was something they did while riding high on the sales of the first two box sets and the original Macross-based MPCs.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    They're averaging a little over $1,000 a day, so I think that's a reasonably safe bet... I wouldn't expect them to get much farther than $200,000 though.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    For us, this is light amusement or like reading a newly published Darwin award. The Robotech fans on Robotech.com have to be careful what they say or the Harmony Gold Commissars will execute their forum accounts for heresy and sedition, and the Kickstarter backers are desperately trying to find the silver lining in a mushroom cloud. (You won't really find a silver lining there, plenty of iridium and strontium-90 though!)
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Sadly enough, this is actually right... in the sure-thing event that the Robotech Academy Kickstarter fails, expect Harmony Gold to take the worst possible course of action. They'll point fingers and make a lot of noise about how tragic it is that the last project of Carl Macek himself had its infinite potential wasted by the nay-sayers and those evil Macross purists, they'll find someone directly connected to the project to blame for the mess (probably Creavision), and then they'll package those godawful trailers they made as DVD extras in the next Robotech DVD release and pretend it's something the fans outright demanded. Wait five years, and they'll trot out another direct-to-video abortion and have their forum moderators call all the fans who call it a piece of crap evil, baby-eating, puppy-kicking, Commu-Nazi lizardman Macross purists. You'd be surprised how many no-brainers people with no brains fail to pick up on... For whatever insane reason, Harmony Gold seems damnably determined to continue plowing ahead with Robotech even though there's pretty much no business case for keeping it around anymore. Whether that's because there's nobody in management at Harmony Gold paying attention to the Robotech division's timecards, or the inmates running that asylum are presenting a heavily distorted version of the facts to management, nobody can say... except maybe Tom, though things weren't this dire when he was working there. As much as Robotech fans carp about even the most insignificant changes to the "original 85"? Not bloody likely.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    It's happened once before... so it could theoretically happen again. It's all down to whether or not Frank thinks that the Robotech Academy Kickstarter is as big a failure for Harmony Gold and for Robotech as the Robotech 3000 series concept was. Of course, there is the unpleasant reality of starting over. They'll reboot the continuity again, and with the franchise's reputation even deeper in the toilet than it was in 2000 they aren't exactly going to attract people who are qualified to do the job that needs doing. Anyone they got to replace Tommy and company would probably be even less qualified than the already under-qualified trio of Yune, Yun, and McKeever... though I'll admit I can't conceive of a PR guy WORSE than McKeever, unless they find a guy who's got Tourette's syndrome and a crippling fear of public speaking.* * I'm privately convinced that McKeever is the result of a scientific experiment to materialize a flesh-and-blood version of Wally from the Dilbert comic strip. He exemplifies every negative trait you could imagine in an employee. Exactly what it says on the tin... it was a remastered edition of Robotech with cleaned-up video, audio remixed to 5.1 surround and with new sound effects, and "never-before-seen" footage that was really just the footage that'd been cut from Macross, Southern Cross, and MOSPEADA due to 1980s broadcast standards. The Robotech purists hated it... because it dared to mess with "Carl's vision". Quite a few of them said that it wasn't even really Robotech anymore because of the changes. Everybody's least favorite podcaster dougbendo even accused Tommy and all the Robotech fans who bought it of being pedophiles because of the content of the "deleted scenes".
  22. Seto Kaiba
    The hypocrisy goes deeper than you know... because the Robotech fans themselves used to sub-divide their fandom into various camps depending on what version of Robotech they liked. You had the "purists" who thought the animated series was tops, other groups included the "McKinneyists" who thought the novels were the best, the "Spanglerists" who were proponents of one of their various groups of comics, and so on. The funny ironic twist is that it's Robotech's "purist" fans who were largely responsible for a lot of the shrinkage in the fanbase. They drove a lot of the fans of the other versions of the story away by behaving in a fashion not dissimilar from McKeever's antics here. Mind you, those same Robotech purists also took exception to the release of Robotech Remastered, with the footage which had been deleted from the originals to meet broadcast standards reinserted. They also pitched such a bitch-fit over the changes to the "classic" generic sound effects in the remaster, to such an extent that some of these nutters are actually celebrating that the next Robotech DVD release is going to bring back the grainy, cut-up original video and two-channel stereo sound. Madmen... the lot of them. It's the same plane, but Robotech calls it the "YF-4" instead... I'll dig out the picture of the transformation dreamed up for RRT.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    The fighter mode is, and that's why they can't use it... the exact origins of the transformation they designed for it have not been disclosed, but are probably Ninja Division's doing, since Tommy tried and failed to come up with one back in '02. I don't think it would be accurate to call it "new", since it's just a very rough and clumsy transformation of an existing design. That kind of airframe shape seems to be something Tommy's really struggled with... the abandoned VF-13 Gamma fighter was similar in shape, and Tommy had a real hard time figuring out how to make it transform. So much so that I suspect that was the as-of-yet unstated reason that it was abandoned in favor of slapping Super Packs on a Legioss. Fascinating... if only I could figure out why my brain appended "And knowing is half the battle!", followed by the old GI Joe theme to this...
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Er... I hope you weren't too attached to that $20, Mommar, because that design's actually from the original Macross series. All they did was come up with a (very) awkward transformation for Macross's VF-X-4... which is why they can't use that design in animation. They can't use Macross designs or derivatives thereof.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, I'm pretty sure they coined it... it's something they came up with as a condemnation of Macross fans, a way to dismiss an argument that's critical of Robotech, because those often came from people who wanted to see more of Macross in its unadapted form. Wanting to see the originals in their unaltered state apparently makes you a purist, and since it's the Macross fans who are most vocal about that, the Robotech fans basically turned "Macross purist" into a dismissal of anyone who speaks critically of how things are done in Robotech. If they didn't have that persecution complex Harmony Gold has worked so hard to foster, they'd realize Harmony Gold was the one screwing them. Pretty much, yes... if you look at the broadcast ratings for Robotech in almost any of its airings, you'll find that there's usually a marked drop in ratings starting at episode 37 as people tune in and go "Who the $%@* are these people? Where are Rick and Lisa and...". Historically, this drop has actually been SO severe that it's managed to get Robotech canceled in several markets, and even prompted a few overseas television stations to drop the Masters Saga entirely. That drop is also what killed the show when it made its great return to American television in the formative days of Toonami... they hit episode 37 and then the bottom fell out of the ratings. The one recurring theme in every attempt to continue Robotech and almost every Robotech fan-wish for a continuation is that they want to recapture the "magic" of the Macross Saga. They want to see Rick Hunter, Lisa Hayes, and Lynn Minmei again... those other people are all purely collateral damage.* * So much so, in fact, that Harmony Gold has actually canonized the dismissive fan position that the Southern Cross Army was a bunch of incompetent idiots led by a rabid xenophobic micromanaging a-hole. The New Generation cast only got off easy because they're Admiral Hunter's subordinates.
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