Seto Kaiba

This. So very much this. Macross is going to continue to move forward. It's going to develop its stories in new and interesting ways to adapt to the changing times like it's been doing for decades already. Even the misplaced outrage over this latest announcement from HG is just silly because almost all of the characters and designs in question have been irrelevant to on a galactic stage for half a century of in-universe time and even the ones that haven't are headed that way now that they're pushing 80. OK, yeah the original's a classic but there's so MUCH more to Macross than just that.

That's not about animation, it's about the proposed live action Robotech movie allegedly (but not actually) in development (at WB 2007-2014, at Sony 2015-present). They bought a handful of story treatments from WGA writers over the years in order to make it look like the project wasn't DOA, and that's what they're referencing when they claim that the WGA strike (and now the SAG-AFTRA strike) halted work on the project. It's all BS, but it's all they have to try to convince Robotech's remaining fans that the franchise isn't at death's door since HG stopped funding new animation development itself in '07 and fans refused to crowdfund it in '14.

More important than wanting to avoid a macho "guns blazing" sort of approach to the horror, I'd like to see this Alien series go back to not having the entire cast be standard issue slasher movie morons. Part of what made Alien work as well as it did as a horror movie is that, with the sole exception of Ash and Dallas breaking quarantine, the Nostromo crew were nevertheless professionals who did everything right and it still wasn't enough to save their lives. The same is broadly true for the Marines in Aliens, whose mission ended up sabotaged by Burke and his superiors at WY but otherwise took the job seriously and their best still wasn't enough. It got worse after that point, with the characters becoming the standard monster/slasher movie too-dumb-to-live idiots who deliberately do unsafe things for no clear reasons. Recent installments - Prometheus and Alien: Covenant - contained so much egregious idiocy on the part of the protagonists that it almost seemed like they were trying to die. The dumbass expedition leader in Prometheus taking off his helmet on a planet they only just landed on and have no idea if it's safe, the geologist who gets lost in a cave system that he'd only just mapped, the biologist who can't recognize a threat display, or... y'know... the Prometheus School of Running Away from Things: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/06/13/ouroboros-or-whatever Or how the crew of the Covenant in Alien: Covenant land on an unsurveyed planet and go for a nature hike without any safety gear at all... and the captain who decides to take a good, long, up-close look at the suspicious alien egg that the massively creepy android is assuring him is totally safe. It's hard to get invested in the fates of a bunch of characters who are seemingly doing everything possible to become a xenomorph's lunch.

Kind of the reverse, actually... it was always about license protection, but they were mistaken about the scope of their license so it started as "all of Macross worldwide" and very rapidly de-escalated to "just the original series" after Big West, Studio Nue, and Tatsunoko fact-checked them. Partially. HG sought the license for the DYRL? merchandising rights after they got fact-checked by Tatsunoko but before the actual court filings in Japan were resolved. It was to close a loophole in their attempts to protect the Toynami license, since the DYRL? VF-1s are legally distinct from the TV versions and they would not otherwise have been able to prevent the importation of certain Japanese VF-1 toys. (Yeah, with one exception the court filings ended with the confirmation that everyone owned what they thought they owned. The only area where there was an actual dispute was Tatsunoko took the opportunity to file a separate claim in a bid to claim royalties from Macross sequels on account of its role in producing the original... a claim that was rejected because they only funded production, not development.) Oh, they absolutely use the SDF merch to maintain those trademarks. It's why most of their recent merch is now carrying the Macross logo alongside the Robotech one.

Mind you, I wouldn't put it past them to be taking directions from a Oujia board or something... Long term? Basically nothing. They did pull off a reasonably competent reboot and relaunch of the franchise but couldn't sustain the momentum for various reasons... many of which could be traced back to the reputational damage the brand suffered under Macek. Not exactly, no... you see, they have an exclusive license to the distribution and merchandising rights for Super Dimension Fortress Macross. They literaly paid for that exclusivity, and they acquired the merchandising rights to Macross: Do You Remember Love? in order to preserve that exclusivity from a technical loophole. It's inconvenient for fans, but it's not really bad business from an objective standpoint. They not-unreasonably want to protect that exclusivity because their adaptation of SDF Macross is their primary source of merchandising revenue and they have to produce merchandise in order to hang onto the trademarks that are the only reason Big West hasn't run their franchise out of business. They don't really have an incentive to improve because, in the absence of new material, their customer base has shrunk to just a few thousand fanatical fans who'll buy anything and the low expected volumes make for a poor ROI so the quantity and quality of licensees has diminished as well. Macross fans can, and do, just buy direct from Japan to get that higher quality merchandise regardless of HG's opinion... so nobody really has a reason to care. Macross is gonna keep doing its own thing. The aged-up designs for the legacy characters are legally distinct from the ones HG has a license for, so there's nothing that's really stopping Big West from having those legacy characters appear as they do in Macross 7, Macross Delta, etc.. All it really means for Macross is that the Macross the First anime which Big West wasn't making anyway is still not happening... it's not happening slightly harder than it was before... who cares?

HG did release a couple of shorts and one episode of what was supposed to be a four-part OVA before it got canceled due to a combination of being poorly received in general and a lack of investors to fund subsequent episodes. They tried again with a Kickstarter about 9 years ago, but it missed its funding goal by a pretty significant amount. Their beef with Macross has always been about merchandising. The overwhelming majority of Robotech's merchandise is based on Super Dimension Fortress Macross. Without it, they don't really have much of a merchandise line. So they're very keen on protecting what they have from having to compete with the higher quality toys coming out of Japan. It was that desire to avoid competition that prompted the whole licensing embargo in the first place back in 1999-2001 because their partner Toynami was launching a line of VF-1 toys as a part of their effort to reboot the franchise. It's also why they picked up the merchandising rights to DYRL?, so that nobody could do an end run around their rights under license by importing DYRL? toys based on the same designs as the SDF toys they were making. Carl Macek isn't doing much in HG's boardroom anymore... on account of having passed away 13 years ago from a heart attack. (Not to mention that he hadn't been in charge of Robotech for about nine years at that point.)

OK, looking at it from that perspective makes way more sense. Rather than being a badly-worded attempt to appear to be in control after bending the knee two years back, it's a badly-worded attempt to dissuade Robotech fans from looking into the new Macross series by awkwardly pointing out that it won't be Robotech II: the Sentinels by another name. I guess that's on brand for them, though it hardly seems necessary since what's left of the Robotech fandom seems deeply offended by the Japanese-ness of Macross's sequels on principle.

I'm just completely thrown by how he looks less than half his actual age. I've seen freshmen on the HS football team my brother coaches that look older than he does. Yeah, I'd hope so... they did an OK series of shorts on YouTube a while back, but even those were more focused on spectacle than horror. As long as they avoid trying to tie it into Prometheus and Alien: Covenant I think it'll be OK-ish. My main suspicion is that, since Alien: Covenant ended up being a narrative dead end due to poor reception, they'll try and use that as a springboard for this story since that ended with David, a ship of colonists, and his xenomorph embryos on their way to colonize a new world and that would be a pretty easy jumping-off point. I'd love to see more subtle, claustrophobic horror like Alien and Alien: Isolation. I suspect what we'll get is another cliche outing of the Too Dumb To Live squad exercising every slasher movie cliche as they become WY-brand xenomorph chow.

Yeah... I am heavily leaning towards predicting a one-season-and-done beautiful disaster of a series. I feel like Netflix's One Piece will land in "so bad it's good" territory because One Piece is inherently comedic and silly and they're trying to grim it up. Where they screwed up with the adaptation of Cowboy Bebop was that they tried to make a normally serious noir story lighter by injecting unneeded and unwanted comedy. Trying to grim up One Piece and make it into a serious action/adventure series should provide lots of fodder for unintentional hilarity. My one real complaint with the trailer is that... well... Luffy feels too articulate in this trailer. The Luffy of the manga and anime is the quintessential dumbass protagonist. He's got a dream he's chasing, but outside of that he's kind of a morally gray agent of chaos and idiot savant driven by an enormous appetite and severe ADHD. He runs on cartoon logic at most times, and his whims are frequently nonsensical even to the people who know him best. Manga and anime Luffy is a heroic cryptid who pops out of the woodwork to do the most incomprehensible or illogical things, befriend people seemingly at random, and then disappear after beating up anyone who threatens the people he decided were friends or are just stronger than him and dumb enough to flex about it in front of him. Live action Luffy feels more like a slightly exciteable standard action/adventure protagonist than the Leeroy Jenkins dumbass that Luffy is supposed to be. That said, they're clearly getting a bit ambitious with this one. If this trailer is to be believed, they're compressing all six story arcs from the East Blue Saga into just eight episodes if we assume Wikipedia lists the right episode count. We see snippets of at least five of those story arcs in this trailer alone: Romance Dawn Arc - we see Shanks give Luffy the hat and the Sea King that bites his arm off, Alvida and Coby, and Zoro joining the crew. Orange Town Arc - we see the first encounter with Buggy the Clown and Nami. Syrup Village Arc - we see Kaya's butler and the claws belonging to Captain Kuro and Usopp joins the crew. Baratie Arc - we see multiple shots of Baratie and someone who is presumably meant to be Don Krieg. Arlong Park Arc - we see the final fight between Luffy and Arlong and the destroyed Arlong Park headquarters of Arlong's pirates. The only one we don't see anything from is the Loguetown Arc, unless the detailed depiction of Roger's execution is from that. That's one hundred chapters of material that they're squeezing into eight episodes, with six separate major battles (Alvida, Axe-Hand Morgan, Buggy, Kuro, Don Krieg, and Arlong).

At this point, it's kind of a non-issue... not just because this alleged prohibition probably only applies to the original Haruhiko Mikimoto character designs from SDFM and DYRL? and not the aged-up redesigns from later titles, but because every single character in SDF Macross except Max and Milia's oldest daughter is on the wrong side of retirement age by the time of Absolute Live!!!!!!. There's 56 years of in-universe time separating the events of SDF Macross's final episode and Macross Delta's second movie. Komilia, the youngest character in the original series, would be 57. Max, Milia, and Minmay would be 75. Bruno J. Global would be 95. Claudia would be 83, Vanessa 80, Kim 78, and Shammy 77. At this point, the only way to have those characters be meaningfully involved in... anything... is to go backwards or do a time travel story like they did in Macross 30 and Macross Shooting Insight. Even Max's appearance in Absolute Live!!!!!! stretches credibility quite a bit as a septuagenarian super-ace. The VF-1 was 59 years and 4 generations old by the time it appeared in Macross Delta's TV series too. They haven't been honest about it since it was announced, why start now? (Though in all fairness, with the WGA on strike they probably can't get any more bargain basement story treatments to pretend that the project isn't dead on arrival.)

Wait what? Okay wow, he looks like... 12 or 13 years old in that picture.

They've literally never been able to, so I'm not sure why that would be phrased that way. Of course, a lot of people seem to have jumped to conclusions without thinking it through and concluded that this somehow means that Macross sequels containing characters or designs that were in the original series are somehow going to still be stonewalled. That's obviously not the case given that we already know that those shows have been licensed and Big West is literally showing episodes of Delta that contain designs from the original series at their panel. When all the said and done, this is probably just another nothing burger Harmony Gold is misleadingly phrasing in an attempt to seem like they have some kind of control over the situation.

Well that bodes ill. I'll reserve judgment until it comes out, but my hopes aren't high... albeit because of the way the franchise has neglected subtlety and claustrophobic horror in favor of gore and spectacle, rather than because of this casting decision. Casting a kid makes me think it will probably draw a lot of it's inspiration from Aliens.

Or drops a ROM. Either way, I'm not so hung up on the original series that its absence will be a dealbreaker for me.

Yup... the news is absolutely full of stories of companies that thought ChatGPT and similar bots were going to replace call center workers and software engineers and artists and so on backpedaling hard when they realize that those generative AIs are little different to training a parrot to mimic speech. It doesn't actually understand, it just strings together words or patterns that are adjacent to the prompt until it gets something that sounds plausible. Like a student disguising plagiarism by exchanging every word in a sentance for a synonym. (That and generative AI art can't be copyrighted currently, so it can't really be commercialized.)

Given what's been said previously, the SDFM and DYRL portion appears to be a DLC... they may simply leave that particular DLC option unavailable to US gamers.

Just goes to show this is a perfectly normal scrolling shooter... when the choice of vehicle isn't strictly cosmetic, it's effectively just the difficulty selection. The more forgiving choice defensively has far worse offensive potential and vice versa. If the YF-29 is in this, it'll be a glass cannon for sure. Now if they really go old school with it, they'll lock you out of entire levels and possibly the game's ending if you choose a lower difficulty fighter than normal.

Without spoilers, Max's return kind of puts a damper on much of the rest of the movie... not just because he's a one-man scene stealing squad, but because he comes in with a dim view of the protagonists, validates that dim view, and then shows them up repeatedly in their own movie. The fans who thought critically, but not unkindly, about Delta already kind of knew that the protagonists were small-time operators even as mercenaries go and that the war they nearly lost was a bush league conflict at best. Absolute Live!!!!!! isn't shy about reminding viewers of that... but Max does so slightly less gently than a sledgehammer seating a fencepost. It honestly felt a little mean-spirited in places. More than that, there's nothing for them to do... the Japanese BDs and DVDs come with official English subs. Same as the previous film, and the home video release of the Macross Delta series.

It's been out on DVD and Blu-ray since last September. It's not a US localized release, but the Japanese domestic market release has official US/English subtitles on it. US localized releases are presumably pending now that there's no block on licensing and the main shows have all been licensed. https://www.cdjapan.co.jp/product/BCXA-1756 Max does indeed appear in the film. He was selected as a character to replace the Macross Elysion's captain Ernest Johnson after Johnson's VA Unsho Ishizuka passed away in 2018. You've probably seen a fair number of posts in the toy section about his new Valk for the movie, which is somewhat contentious since he's a supporting character only but absolutely curb stomps the protagonists despite being a decade on the wrong side of retirement age at this point.

The original Southern Cross didn't really get a chance to get into it because the show's writing was a mess and it was earmarked for cancellation early into its planned broadcast run, but these kids are the first generation to grow up after humanity was forced to abandon Earth due to the total destruction of its environment via wars and pollution. They're living on a recently colonized and only tenuously self-sufficient planet that's only slightly less inhospitable than Hoth from Star Wars.* It's implied a few of them, like Jeanne, are there because they were either the people Liberte felt would be least missed in its own government and armed forces or who were so problematic that they ended up on the "ship out" side of "shape up or ship out". * No, really. Creator commentary from TIA10 says that Glorie's average temperature at the 40th parallel (think Japan, Turkey, Kentucky, southern Spain, Sicily) is -40 degrees C in winter... Hoth is -32 to -60 degrees C! The weather on Glorie is subfreezing for 36 years at a time. Hopefully the 18 year long spring is nice, because it apparently swings to 40+ degrees C at the same latitude in the 18 year long summer. None of the series materials ever really address why there's a military at all, never mind one with giant robot weapons, when humanity had encountered no aliens and live was by all accounts relatively peaceful and focused on just plain survival after having to abandon Earth because of the damage caused by unrestricted warfare.

Sara, Shin, and Mao. It's even diagrammed on the Macross Chronicle character sheets. So... how much of a head start are we supposed to give before we hunt the heretics for sport? 😛 It's Suzie-Aegis-Aegis's VF-19 isn't it? A difference as big as Camille being a boy's name too!

I wouldn't hold my breath for that. Bandai Namco Filmworks/Sunrise may be handling production of the animation, but it's a relatively safe bet the series concept and direction will come from Kawamori and that its mechanical design works will come from The Usual Suspects (Kawamori, Ishigaki, Hidetaka). "I want Macross, but without the things that make it Macross" will never not be the weirdest hot take from old fans. Macross has always been a love story first, and a war story second. If you ask Kawamori, the war story has never been more than a backdrop for the love story from the original series onward.

You're definitely in the minority there. From what I've gathered, that's kind of how the main Macross audience in Japan feels about Plus and Zero. Besides, if Macross didn't radically shake its formula up with each new installment it wouldn't be Macross anymore... it'd just be off-brand Gundam.

Not just because Kawamori et. al. have a preference for moving the story forward rather than revisiting existing stories, but also because Zero isn't really all that relevant to other works in the franchise. Its impact on subsequent works as a self-contained story is very small. That honestly sounds like it should be an in-universe b-movie. We know from Frontier that VF pilots have in-universe memes and in-jokes about things that have gotten characters killed in previous shows. This sounds like the Macross universe's version of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. It would actually be rather nice to get a more diverse look at the media in the setting, since almost all of what we've seen of it is dramatizations of the events of past shows, traditional arts, and the occasional conveniently timed TV news report. You know, that might be a fun idea for a future Macross series... a story about a movie or TV series crew producing one of those in universe works of fiction in partnership with the military.

Yeah, it's a shame that Andor did not get the love it deserve when it first debuted. It had to work a lot harder for what it got too, since it's the only Disney+ Star Wars series that's running on the strength of its narrative rather than the sheer quantity of fan service it delivers. As a casual viewer, shows like The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett have little or nothing to offer because they require their viewer to be invested in the expanded universe mythos of the Mandalorian people and of Boba Fett in particular. If you don't have that background then you're left wondering why they based two entire shows on a guy who has maybe 30 words of actual dialogue and is basically just a less inept stormtrooper. Obi-Wan isn't a lot different in that regard, since it's clearly counting on fans being very excited to see Ewan McGregor return to the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi in order to compensate for a plot that could best be described as unnecessary. Andor was able to do so much more with its story than any of the other shows because it's not wrapped up in established lore and instead is focusing on building a compelling narrative around new characters. I am so so glad that it's been nominated for an Emmy. Not just because it's richly deserved, but because I hope it'll set the series up as an example of how to tell a compelling Star Wars story without having to lean so heavily on pre-existing characters and events.