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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    A bit... but, in context, it's not exactly surprising either. Not only were the Eugenics Wars/WW3 the most destructive conflict in human history by an enormous margin, but Humanity's had a lot of conflicts that validate their decision to ban genetic augmentation in the time since. Pre-Federation Earth had a couple run-ins with groups like the Suliban cabal and its genetically augmented soldiers, or Dr. Arik Soong's rather foolish attempt to prove that augments were evil psychos by nurture not nature that resulted in multiple massacres and nearly started a war with the Klingons in Enterprise before the doctor conceded it was nature after all and began attempting to engineer it out of them. Or Kirk's USS Enterprise finding Earth's greatest dictator floating around in Star Trek: the Original Series and his misguided revenge in the Wrath of Khan. The Federation's own attempts to do benign genetic enhancement (e.g. TNG "Unnatural Selection") unintentionally led to mass death. So it seems that every time human attitudes have started to thaw towards genetic engineering, they've run into a situation that's made them say "Oh yeah, that's why we don't do that." Like they said at Bashir's trial, for every benevolent augment there's the possibility of a non-benevolent super-intelligent madman. The various Doctors Soong couldn't even seem to solve that problem in their switch to AI development, with any Soong-type android or bio-android having at best a coin-flip's chance of being either a saint or card-carrying genocidal villain.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    This. A big part of what sets Strange New Worlds apart from previous Secret Hideout Trek offerings is that the abject misery that defined Discovery and Picard has been replaced with good humor. Star Trek's trademark optimism and idealism is back, and instead of being miserable bastards who hate themselves and/or each other the characters all clearly like their jobs and they people they work with. That easy camaraderie and the sense of humor they have about the situations they find themselves synergizes nicely with the lighthearted tone and writing style to make the whole series just great fun.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Not really. Because Discovery's second season ended with an in-universe "and let us never speak of this again, on pain of death" on Starfleet's part, the references to Discovery are few and either kept deliberately minor or intentionally vague. Strange New Worlds does make occasional references to the events of Discovery's second season, but anything important enough to be more than fanservice is explained in context in the series well enough that watching Discovery is not necessary to understand it. Pike's character arc is driven by an event he experienced in Discovery's second season, and there are some allusions to the Discovery being recorded as lost with all hands in the battle at the end of its show's second season. That aside, it's mainly just nods to the official story that the USS Discovery was lost in battle at the end of Discovery S2 and Spock at one point acknowledges the existence of his "sister" but goes no farther than that. The end of Discovery's second season and the start of Strange New Worlds's first season are separated by somewhere around a year of in-universe time, with the former ending in 2258 and the latter starting in 2259, a bit over five years before the start of James T. Kirk's tenure in Star Trek's original series in 2265. I was rather guarded about it, since Discovery was such a mess and Anson Mount's Captain Pike was the one bright spot in its second season... but Strange New Worlds has exceeded even my wildest expectations to the point that I'd call it a worthy addition to the prime timeline and quite a bit better than many of that timeline's later offerings. It's full on "I came expecting copper and I found gold".
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Still rewatching season one... and I am still blown away every single episode by how much better this is than anything else the franchise has produced since Enterprise went off the air. I am not merely enjoying this, I am having a fantastic time with this. This is everything new Trek should have been from the start. It looked great on a 1080p computer monitor, but it looks amazing on a proper QLED set. The set design is amazing, the characters are engaging, the stories are fun and exciting... in almost every respect this really did feel like the show that could do no wrong.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    I... I... what in the actual **** did I just watch? I just finished watching this trailer a minute ago and it already feels like a fever dream or a hallucination. Like... this cannot be a real thing that exists in the world we live in. It's clear that Netflix learned absolutely nothing from the failure of their Cowboy Bebop adaptation... and I'm not sure if that means this is going to be completely unwatchable or a beautiful disaster. My need to see this goes beyond Bile Fascination. I don't just want to see how they're going to **** this up. I need to see how they're going to **** this up. This is potentially a watershed moment that will redefine the entire field of ****ing things up. I cannot express how very badly I want to see the inevitable edit of this show's opening with the rap song from the aborted 4Kids dub of One Piece.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I can see why you might think so, but it's misleading. Yes, Harmony Gold has been involved in quite a number of "legal disputes" related to their Robotech franchise over the last 24 or so years... if we paint with a very broad brush. In truth, most of those "disputes" were little more than exchanges of Cease and Desist notices like the attempts to stifle the import of Macross toys in 1999. Those have supposedly come from a document prep service rather than an actual attorney. They've only had a few actual court sessions or binding arbitrations since 1999 and it's abundantly clear from the publicly available records of those that Harmony Gold is just as miserly when it comes to their legal representation as they are with Robotech's development and production. Also, one thing we learned a while back was that Harmony Gold wasn't paying for those days in court out of pocket either. They were deducting those court costs and attorney's fees from the royalties they were paying to Tatsunoko for the three shows because the license allowed them to do that in exchange for being required to take legal action on the behalf of the Japanese IP owners in certain cases.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, nobody knows for certain. The one potential explanation that we have that makes logical sense is that WB and Sony each independently picked up the Robotech rights for no reason other than its incidental relationship to Transformers... with neither having any intention to actually produce such a film, only to deny the rights to others. Like I said, the money and the talent to develop original material were just never there for Robotech. The whole thing was a minimally funded fly-by-night operation from the outset and its unremarkable ratings and poor merchandise sales did not inspire anyone to make significant capital investments in it even in the '80s. They did the best they could with what they had, and what they had was a pittance, a bad reputation, and a showrunner who was quite frankly a hack. Which is probably another reason it's never getting made...
  8. Seto Kaiba
    It's doubtful Sony had a plan at all. The only reason WB picked up the movie rights was because Transformers was making serious bank for Paramount, and Robotech just happened to be a contemporary of the original Transformers cartoon that also had giant robots. The same is almost certainly true for Sony, given the Robotech license's only real value is its tangental relationship to the cash cow of one of their major competitors in the event that giant robots became a major trend somehow. Otherwise, the license is worthless because it doesn't grant any access to the actual content of the show. They're paying for a name and nothing else, but they're not paying much. Probably not. If there was a financial argument for the Robotech movie, it wouldn't have spent the last 15 years in development hell with nothing to show for it but a handful of story treatments and possibly some extremely dodgy concept art. As it stands, if they were to somehow convinced Big West to agree to let them use the Macross designs, they'd have to pay quite a bit for a license and presumably pay some pretty significant royalties to Big West for the use of that IP. It'd be a fairly safe bet that Big West would make far more money on the movie than Harmony Gold would... to the point that it would probably be cheaper to cut Harmony Gold out of the loop entirely.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes... but Big West isn't making it, and by all accounts Harmony Gold doesn't want them involved either. The movie proposal is for a reimagining, not an adaptation, because Harmony Gold wants to use it to launch a new Robotech metaseries that isn't dependent on licensed IP. It's all about making something truly original so they can stop living in fear of Big West and Tatsunoko's lawyers the way they've been doing for the last 23 years.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    It doesn't use the word "script" at all... it just mentions that there are things in the pictures that were not in the animation of Macross, Southern Cross, or MOSPEADA. It's just sloppy reportage jumping to assumptions in order to make this nothingburger seem like something to meet a word count. Simply put... because they can't legally do that and because that is counter to their intended purpose of getting away from "you can't legally do that" scenarios. Harmony Gold's license to Macross, Southern Cross, and MOSPEADA only grants them the distribution and merchandising rights to those shows outside of Japan. All they can do with that material is release those shows on broadcast/cable/streaming/home video, edit them for distribution (e.g. dub, cut out objectionable material), and produce merchandise based on the contents of those shows. The intellectual property rights to those original shows - the ownership of the original stories, concepts, designs, etc. AKA the copyrights on that material - belong to the creators of the original shows. Harmony Gold cannot use any of that material in new film works without first obtaining permission to use that material in the form of a license. In the past, they have been able to obtain limited licenses to use the designs from Southern Cross and MOSPEADA in their own original works (e.g. Sentinels, Shadow Chronicles) because those shows are owned by Tatsunoko Production and the cost of the license is peanuts because those shows are old and forgotten and were never commercially successful to begin with. Using designs from Macross has always been a bridge too far because Macross is a popular and successful series with its own much more successful franchise and isn't owned by Harmony Gold's longtime partner Tatsunoko Production. They would have to get a license from Big West and Studio Nue, which would not only be prohibitively expensive but also a difficult proposition due to relations between the HG and Macross's owners being bad. No matter how much money is offered, Big West/Studio Nue can just say "No" if they don't want to dilute their brand by letting HG use part of their IP or take a risk on whatever HG has planned. Harmony Gold's goal for the proposed live action movie was specifically to get away from that legal rigmarole of having to get licenses and approvals and send absolutely every decision through multiple rounds of legal review as they've been doing since ~2000 by making a clean break with the Robotech animated series and starting over from scratch to develop an all-new, all-original Robotech they could capitalize on without needing to buy licenses from, and pay royalties to, Tatsunoko or any other party. The catch, of course, being that Macross is the only part of Robotech that the vast majority of Robotech fans care about and the only part that has any brand recognition. Bereft of the original Macross series, Robotech doesn't have any brand recognition to speak of that would drive audiences to see a Robotech movie so why would any studio actually make a movie if all they're really getting for the license is the title. They could make exactly the same all-original sci-fi movie and pay Harmony Gold nothing just by not using the title, so why bother? That Harmony Gold can't, and never planned to, use Macross in their proposed live action movie also makes it profoundly unlikely that this alleged concept art is legitimately from the project. Why pay for concept art for something you literally cannot do?
  11. Seto Kaiba
    They could always go the TOMYTEC route and make separate kits for Fighter and Battroid so that you have to buy both if you wanna display in GERWALK mode. That was a dick move... that and how those kits were the only decent source of info on the new Valkyries for like half of Macross Delta's actual broadcast run. More than anything, a new Macross series needs some solid coverage in the hobby press. I don't think it's entirely unrelated that Delta got very little coverage and was also the lowest ranked of the four Macross TV shows by fans.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah... Harmony Gold is dodgy AF and Robotech is pretty much the anime franchise equivalent of "peaked in high school guy". Or the guy who posted it could just be lying. That's a very real possibility. That it's all Macross based when Harmony Gold and its licensees know full well they can't do that, and that it looks like it was made with Stable Diffusion or another art AI, is pretty damned suspicious. It'd hardly be the first time a Robotech fan made up a bunch of BS about a cancelled project in an attempt to bolster their fan credentials. The alternatives are that Harmony Gold somehow forgot to tell the artist he can't reference Macross, or that they were just using this to establish a tone the way the Wachowskis did with Ghost in the Shell when pitching and developing The Matrix. Yeah, that's my read of it too... though I lean heavily towards "AI art". As far as we know, they've never gotten farther than paying for a few story treatments...
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It's basically plotless... things happen, but there's no sense of an overarching story connecting it all. It just jackknifes from one random crisis to the next and then forgets to resolve any of them. Yeah, it'd be nice to have some gunpla-style Macross plamodels as an entry level option... those are cheap and cheerful, don't require painting, etc. HG gunpla are like $16 US plus shipping... that's a hell of a lot more accessible than $300-400 for a DX Chogokin.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Strange New Worlds season one finally dropped on home video and digital library the other day, so I'm finally getting a chance to sit down and watch it properly. All I can think, as I watch the first episode on a proper home theater system is... why couldn't the arseholes running Star Trek these days have put this level of effort into the other two shows? Third time lucky, I guess, but it just leaves me wondering why Discovery and Picard tallied six seasons of pure garbage and one of pure fanwank between them if the writers, directors, and showrunners were capable of this all along. I guess the stars just weren't right. It's amazing what a difference swapping misery and bitterness for optimism has done for what is technically a Star Trek: Discovery spinoff. If they'd just done away with the few little nods to Discovery you could almost forget there was any relation.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I doubt it... every new Macross TV series is structured to be an ambassador to new viewers. They don't get bogged down in heavy continuity and any essential info is either given in the story proper or in an info blurb before the opening. My guess is either they're hoping to exploit Bandai Namco's established distribution network and experience in marketing anime to audiences outside of Japan or Satelight decided to pass on it after Delta's comparatively lukewarm reception. Sunrise's standard of writing has not been great lately, so I hope Big West/Studio Nue bring their own writers. I'd hate to see a Macross series turn into a plotless, wandering mess like Mobile Suit Gundam: the Witch from Mercury.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Nice. I am all in on that when it opens.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    I mean, we've seen what they can do when they try and it's pretty damned cringeworthy... But IMO it's unlikely they'd have done any better with original animation as they managed to do with Robotech. Not only is Macross a tough act to follow, as the creators of Genesis Climber MOSPEADA and Southern Cross learned the hard way, but if the Italian court system is correct failure was Harmony Gold's objective. Prosecutors in Italy alleged that HG was one of several companies set up as part of a tax evasion scheme involving trading film rights between shell companies at inflated prices. They prosecuted Frank Agrama for it twice, and actually got a conviction the first time. If it were hugely successful, sure... but it wasn't. It was a middle of the pack performer that did just well enough to consider a movie and a new season, but not well enough to fund either project properly or hire outside talent to develop new material. Even for those, they were trying to build on the one part of the series their audience overwhelming preferred (Macross) until Tatsunoko told them "You can't do that". The talent and the money were just never there.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    It is... but it's basically pure fanservice. That's another really low bar to clear. They did their best back in the day, but the tech has come a loooooooooooong way.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    March-May 2019... and you may have misunderstood, Macross Frontier was the top-rated series and Macross title overall. Macross 7 was the second highest-rated series and the third highest-rated title overall (below Macross Frontier and DYRL?).
  20. Seto Kaiba
    They shared some others back in January.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    There's nothing in the announcements of the new distribution agreement from two years ago that suggests that Harmony Gold would be allowed to use the Macross IP in any way its existing licenses didn't already permit. All they mention is that Big West will now have "a say" in Robotech and that they've agreed to not obstruct worldwide distribution of a Robotech movie if/when one gets made. Of course, per Harmony Gold, the whole point of the (proposed) live action movie was/is to make a fresh start for the franchise with a reimagined and all-original Robotech story they could build on without any of the legal hurdles and restrictions of using secondhand IP. Trying to pitch it with concept art blatantly ripping off Macross would've been counter to the movie's entire purpose.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    It's not ablative armor... it's just far too many coats of paint from repeated renamings.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    I'd wager it will be... likely YouTube/Google TV. They have the rest of the series in "digital library" form IIRC.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I have a REALLY hard time believing that claim. Not just because this looks like the output of an AI art generator that scraped the #macross tag on DeviantArt and a few hundred bargain bin sci-fi novel covers, but because that first image is so blatantly and obviously derivative of Big West's copyrighted Macross IP that Harmony Gold can't use or authorize the use of that this would be a smoking gun for ANY potential copyright infringement lawsuit against the film if it got made. Harmony Gold has been extremely conscious of the limitations of their license for the last twenty-three years and have diligently adhered to them. If this were real, professional concept art commissioned for a movie pitch, the artist would've been given clear direction that they absolutely cannot base their work on Big West's IP the way this stuff obviously is for easily understood "We don't want to get sued" reasons. There's no way in hell this would have got past anyone's legal department. If this were real, this project wasn't merely asking for a lawsuit... it was down on all fours pleading for one in a disturbingly undignified, profoundly upsetting, and possibly sexual manner.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    A major shipyard was destroyed. Utopia Planetia wasn't even the only Starfleet shipyard in Earth's solar system. It's implied that it was the largest and most prestigious shipyard in the Sol system and possibly in the Federation as a whole, but it's one of at least 19 shipyards that have been mentioned over the years. Captain Sisko's USS Defiant was built at the Antares shipyards for instance, and quite a lot of ships were built in the San Francisco yards in Earth orbit including several of the Enterprises and the Titan. As to why Geordi appropriated the stardrive section from the USS Syracuse, that probably has less to do with resources and more to do with the fact that the Galaxy-class was old, obsolete, and quite rare to boot. At least one Galaxy class ship was lost before the Battle of Wolf 359, and that battle was what prompted Starfleet to radically rethink its approach to starship design. Several more were lost after that point, including the Enterprise-D and the Odyssey, and it's likely several more suffered critical damage or were lost in the many fleet engagements of the Dominion war. With the class already considered obsolete and many examples no longer in service, building a whole new stardrive section to complete a museum piece was probably considered a waste of resources when they could simply pull a complete one from a decommissioned sister ship and just repaint its markings. As far as raw materials go... It's worth remembering that quite a lot of starship construction involves industrial replicators. They're very likely recycling garbage, wreckage, and other salvage into fresh starship parts
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