Jump to content

Seto Kaiba

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    13168

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    Hopefully they'll go back and revisit the subtitle options and such once the region-specific remasters and releases are done.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    It's kind of pointless now, considering the prices of the Macross Blu-rays in the west are basically at price-parity with Japan... but for a long time it made really good sense to take action to prevent re-importation of media because the US DVDs and Blu-rays were about half the cost of the Japan domestic market releases.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Well, the end is here... with "The Real Good Guys". I really have to hand it to whomever in the art department designed the At Attin safety droids. They look so generic and unthreatening on their own, but jerky way they move and their croaky voices are lend a genuine air of quiet menace to them when they need it. Their unblinking security camera stare is genuinely unnerving in its presentation. We do get a statement that suggests that, while At Attin has been isolated from the greater galaxy for a very long time, it hasn't necessarily been out of contact. As bosses go, it seems like the Supervisor was load-bearing... I love that Neel gets a Big Damn Heroes moment after so often being The Load in this series. After eight episodes of dithering, we finally get the answer to one of the bigger questions... Jod's powers. There's an absolutely beautiful effects shot as immediately thereafter... followed by the arrival of the New Republic. All in all, I'm pretty satisfied with this ending. It's not the direction I thought they'd go with the ending, but it works pretty well. They made pretty good use of all the characters, the story wrapped up in a reasonably satisfying way that offered both closure and enough of an opening that they can continue the story in a second season should they decide to. A very strong ending, on balance. The only real problem with the story and/or the ending is the previously-discussed "if you think about it at all" one regarding the value of Old Republic credits.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    It's the experience I've seen on Smart TV apps running Hulu, I have not tested it yet on any of the sets at my place so I am not sure that's just a thing that's happening on certain TV or mobile device versions or if that's a universal thing in the video stream.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    If it's right in the middle of scenes, that sounds like it's probably to support the unskippable in-app advertisements for people on the lower subscription tiers.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yep! That guy. Thanks to Star Wars: the Clone Wars being the longest Star Wars TV series by an enormous margin and Hondo's status as fan favorite character, he's pretty much THE space pirate in Star Wars. (Search "Star Wars pirate" in Google and five of the first eight image results are him as are almost all the article results.) He seems to have been one of the few pre-Disney fan favorites that Disney willingly ran with rather than replacing, alongside Saw Gerrera, Ahsoka Tano, and Cham Syndulla. In comparison, Jod and his crew seem both a lot more threatening and a lot less competent... but a lot of that is probably just Hondo being from a much less dangerous era and having Creator's Pet level plot armor. 🤣 It'll be interesting to see what they do with Jod in the end. Skeleton Crew's finale is about 24 hours away.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Caught the latest episodes of Headhunted to Another World and Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms today. Headhunted to Another World feels like it's struggling with its own premise after just a few episodes. The diplomatic work is being done offscreen by someone else, and the whole episode is basically given over to ship-teasing the protagonist and his demon girl coworker, with an extended digression to explain that having every demon dress like they're in a Boris Vallejo painting is a totally necessary part of their culture and the story and not just blatant fanservice.😅 Medaka Kuroiwa is Impervious to My Charms isn't beating the B Gata H Kei allegations. Mona's just Yamada if she were incredibly vain instead of lowkey horny all the time, and Kuroiwa's just Kosuda with a (religious) reason to not put up with her sh*t. It's still funny, but its premise is going to wear out its welcome pretty fast.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Not s'much. After all, the few times we see a Zentradi on foot disable or destroy a Valkyrie it's one of the larger, stronger, and more durable Zentradi command types doing it. The kind of soldier who is a monster even by Zentradi standards. The few other times we see Valkyries taken down hand-to-hand by Zentradi, they're usually doing so with the benefit of a battle suit's mechanical strength like the few we see in the OVA Macross II: Lovers Again.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    The Clone Wars started out reasonably kid-friendly, and despite the fairly consistent level of scenery-chewing ham from the villains it gets surprisingly dark in its later seasons. Kind of a pattern with Filoni's work, really... and for better or worse he seems to have essentially set the tone for the vast majority of new Star Wars development. Skeleton Crew is one of the few titles that ISN'T tying in to his work in some way. That's probably WHY the pirates are a lot more bloodthirsty and cruel than the franchise's usual. Not buyin' that argument any more than the last time you tried it. I see way too many Star Wars costumes on the trick-or-treaters every year to believe for one second that the only people watching Star Wars are adults. 😉 My niece and nephews are about the right age to take an interest too, though ours has always been more of a Star Trek family. By in large, the only bloodthirsty bilge rat who's been outsmarted by the kids is Jod... who seems to be ill-prepared to deal with children in general. Possibly a product of him being a padawan who survived Order 66 if the show's incessant is-he-or-isn't-he teasing pans out. I kinda suspect the kids will ultimately trick Jod, and possibly his crew, into destroying themselves.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's a pretty accurate read on Hondo. He was a very flamboyant leader who would offer great rewards for crew willing to charge into danger, and was usually the first one to leg it when things went south. He usually bordered on being an ineffective comic relief villain. Compared to Hondo's crew, who were more the "rob you and leave you alive" sort with occasional ransoming of VIPs, Captain Silvo's (or Brutus's) pirates in Skeleton Crew come off feeling shockingly bloodthirsty and violent.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, as I noted a few posts back, the overtechnology materials (OTMat) used in a Valkyrie's structural frame and armor are incredibly strong all on their own. Initial-generation OTM composites are said to be around 200 times as strong as conventional alternatives in the oldest versions of the technical materials. Enough so that those same materials describe the (pre-energy conversion armor) VF-1 as "lightly armored" yet able to effectively laugh off fire from any conventional weapon. The example weapon the text cites as ineffectual against the armor is a cannon so laughably huge it has no real world equivalent. The armor material is so tough they needed to invent new kinds of armor-piercing ammunition and high-energy explosives to defeat it.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    🤣 I know, right? As much as I complain about exactly that, Hondo is so intrinsically associated with space pirates in Star Wars that seeing space pirates without him feels wrong somehow. Ironically, Hondo is far too affable and principled to do the kind of things Jod is doing. Before we got cast photos, there was speculation that Jaleel White was hired to play Hondo in live action.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    So... so far, I'm Getting Married to a Girl I Hate in My Class is definitely feeling like it's on course to ecchi romcom territory after the most recent episode. It's still fun and funny, but the fanservice has started to creep in. I'm going to keep at it, because it's still a lot of fun. Blue Exorcist's latest season is as unstintingly dark as I remember it being from the manga, with Rin using Mephisto's master key to explore the world before the Blue Night that drove his brother quietly mad. Okitsura: Fell in Love with an Okinawan Girl, but I Just Wish I Knew What She's Saying is on course to be my favorite for the season. It's an adorable little love story tied to a very affectionate introduction to Okinawan culture, which has enough of a sense of humor to make incredibly dense jokes about it. (They also seem to be on a mission to include a major reference to another anime series in every episode in the process... first Zombie Land Saga as a metaphor for how common "Hina" is as a surname, now Jojo's Bizarre Adventure to explain the locals relaxed attitude towards timeliness.) I Want to Escape from Princess Lessons really is something. What, I don't know... but it's something! It started out like a serious drama, jumped ship from that genre about halfway through its first episode, seemed set to become a "slow life" series with a comedy aspect, and after a Deadpool-esque extended fourth wall break wherein the former queen-to-be turns and delivers an explanation directly to the audience seems set to become a romance series instead. One thing I will describe it as is "feel good". After running out on that dippy and unfaithful prince, Leticia seems to be determined to live her best life with a level of abundant good cheer that is downright infectious.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    🤣 It's not literal... at his worst in The Clone Wars, Hondo Ohnaka is Disney levels of family friendly as a space pirate. He's just obnoxious and incredibly flamboyant, and he shows up so much during The Clone Wars that one could be forgiven for assuming he was the Galaxy Far Far Away's ONLY space pirate captain. So he's "f*cking Hondo" as if to say "and then there's this *sshole again". He returns in Star Wars: Rebels, having lost his crew and resorted to solo acts of piracy, con artistry, and general scoundreldom. After watching The Clone Wars and Rebels, having a Star Wars story prominently featuring space pirates but with no sign of Hondo feels subtly off, like seeing a photo of a family member but someone's photoshopped out one of their eyebrows or a front tooth.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, Maul was confirmed (and then shown) to be alive way back in the fourth season of The Clone Wars... about six years before Solo: a Star Wars Story, in an episode that aired ~6 months before Disney acquired LucasFilm. The reason he's a crime lord in the movie also goes back to pre-Disney Filoni material from the show's fifth season. Creator's pets in Star Wars seem to be pretty death-proof. It's why I'm so surprised the crew working on Skeleton Crew have been able to restrain themselves from including f*cking Hondo, who often seemed to be the only space pirate in the galaxy in Filoni's work. (I kinda see why they didn't, though. Hondo's really not an intimidating man, he couldn't pull off what Jod is pulling off.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Now, in all fairness, the Star Wars franchise had already developed a profound love of the Disney Villain Death trope long before George sold it to the House of Mouse. The old Expanded Universe had Boba Fett survive his trip down the sarlacc pit and Palpatine treating death like a revolving door. It was already a tired trope when Filoni used it to bring Darth Maul back as half a robot spider in The Clone Wars a year or two before the Disney acquisition. Disney's twist was reducing lightsaber stab wounds from "instantly fatal" to "a booboo requiring a really big band-aid".🤣
  17. Seto Kaiba
    OK, that's a fair point... though, in his case, redemption equalled death (after an amputation, humiliation, and being barbeque'd alive in his black leather gimp suit) so it's not like he got off lightly or got to stick around. He didn't get a free heel-face turn or any forgiveness for what he did. 🤔 I'll give the most facual weight to what shows up on Disney's quarterly and annual earnings reports WRT LucasFilm and Disney+. It's a bit of a wait, but the best data is first party data. Let's just agree that he died... it's preferable to acknowledging that The Book of Boba Fett exists.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Tried Even Given the Worthless 'Appraiser' Class, I'm Actually the Strongest and whooboy is it a stinker. It's yet another one of those isekai-adjacent j-fantasy stories where the world runs in MMORPG logic for no adequately explained reason and the world is full of fantastic bigotry as people discriminate against each other based on character class. The whole first episode is mostly just devoted to showing how horrid the setting is, in all the usual ways like the protagonist being left to die by the rest of his party, getting maimed by overpowered mobs, etc.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Nobody in this show is memorable, that's a big part of the problem. It's an unnecessary sequel to Rebels, where the few returning characters have that problem where their story is picking up after The End and any character development is in "Well, sh*t, what do we do with them now?" territory.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    It's mentioned in the show's Wikipedia... aggregators TVision, JustWatch, and Whip Media have variously had the series as the top-streaming show in the US, in the top five in the US, or in the top ten in Canada. IMO, it'd be pretty weird if Jod were "redeemed" in the final episode. The last few episodes have made a point of having him Kick The Dog to remind the audience he's a cruel, evil, bloodthirsty space pirate who has no real qualms about killing.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    We'll see. As has been noted in other threads for Star Wars shows, measuring the actual performance of direct-to-streaming titles is difficult to do accurately since the only ones in possession of the complete viewership data are the first-party content creators themselves. Nielsen says it didn't chart in the top 10 on the basis of total minutes watched, though other streaming data agregators assert the series was pretty consistently in the top 10 in terms of the number of households watching in the US and Canada. 🤔 Disney, of course, are going to have their own criteria for judging if the series is a success or not. The bar may be a bit lower than The Acolyte's was, since Skeleton Crew's reviews have been broadly positive rather than overwhelmingly negative like its predecessor's and it cost $100 million less to make. Either way, Skeleton Crew seems set to be remembered as one of The Few Good Ones from the Disney+ Star Wars lineup.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    An especially aggressive one at that. Nobody tell Boimler. No kidding! 🤣 When I started watching Lower Decks I HATED Mariner. She reminded me a lot of Michael Burnham in all the worst ways. She was a mean-spirited, toxic, manipulative person in Starfleet and she seemed to enjoy preying on anyone who wasn't as bitter and hateful as herself. UNLIKE Michael Burnham, it quickly became apparent that she knew the kind of person she was and was still capable of being better. Lower Decks was a lot of fun not just because of the comedy, but because the characters still grow and develop in a fairly believable way for Star Trek.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yep. I am 100% looking forward to the ending of Skeleton Crew's first season, and I wholeheartedly hope it gets the second season the showrunners have been hoping for.👍
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, a lot of people seem to be satisfied with Skeleton Crew. It's a light, fun, engaging little story that has a great deal of charm and is doing something new and different with the Star Wars IP. It doesn't have to be the best thing since sliced bread. It just has to be something people enjoy watching... and it definitely seems to be that. If anything, it's a solid argument that Star Wars can and should put more distance between itself and the "Skywalker Saga" since so many Skywalker-adjacent stories are trash.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    One detail I should probably check with toy collectors on... the name of the company that was responsible for "space metal" development and production in the oldest lore is, I think, a nod to a toy manufacturer or toy line from the 80's: Dyna-Metal.
×
×
  • Create New...