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Everything posted by Seto Kaiba
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Star Trek: Picard (CBS All-Access)
Seto Kaiba replied to UN Spacy's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
Yes. It looks like one of the rejected Enterprise-D designs from the TNG Technical Manual.- 2171 replies
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What Current Anime Are You Watching Version v4.0
Seto Kaiba replied to wolfx's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
I am confused and slightly bewildered that Crunchyroll is now advertising an UNCENSORED version of My Wife is the Student Council President at me... apart from one or two bits, this show's fanservice was pretty tame. WTF is there to uncensor about it? -
What Current Anime Are You Watching Version v4.0
Seto Kaiba replied to wolfx's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
My Wife is the Student Council President has been a real trip. I'm not sure why they keep approving these half-season shows... but this one is trying to win some kind of award for brevity, being just eight minutes long per episode. The lengths they went to to make it cheap are amazing in their own right, with occasional 2-3 minute long cutaways to stills with a text crawl over them. It's a fairly generic romcom sort of show... it's just produced so badly that it's kind of remarkable in a way. They say most of an anime's budget goes to drawing the eyes, but in this case I'd swear blind they spent most of the budget animating and highlighting cleavage... on the rare occasions it's onscreen, it's drawn at roughly ten times the detail level of the rest of the series. (It's like every character is Makina Nakajima from Macross Delta...) -
Since the actual point of sale appears to be in China, it'd go before the Chinese courts. China has been trying, in a sort of halfhearted way, to crack down on intellectual property crimes in its borders... at least with respect to foreign companies that are now operating inside China. Big West would actually have a pretty good chance of winning. Japan also has a much more laid-back attitude towards small-batch amateur works like that, as long as they're not out to make a significant profit. This CalibreWings thing, however, smacks of blatant trademark and copyright infringement... and is likely to bring the lawyers out.
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Really, their entire argument is full of unintentionally hilarious admissions like that... it's like they hired Homer's lawyer from The Simpsons to represent them in every international market.
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Star Trek: Picard (CBS All-Access)
Seto Kaiba replied to UN Spacy's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
Yeah, it didn't help... especially since Sonequa Martin-Green kept shooting off her mouth about what an unprecedented coup it was for her, a black actress, be the lead on Star Trek. Nor did it help that CBS kept crowing about how diverse the show's cast was, and immediately tried to make any discussion about the poor quality of the writing into accusations of racism. It's like everyone involved was so busy virtue signaling they collectively forgot Star Trek's first black lead logged 173 episodes and its first female lead logged 168. CBS put a lot of effort into keeping that one quiet, yeah. It helps that they own several of the hobby news sites like ComicBook.com, and can push their own narrative about how well the show's doing through them in defiance of anything resembling objective reality. One of the biggest red flags was that new Star Trek has almost no licensee support. The J.J. Abrams Star Trek soft reboot movies had some halfhearted support but things didn't sell well, since the movies didn't appeal to fans and didn't create new fans of their own. A lot of licensees took a pass on Star Trek: Discovery because of its aesthetic similarities to the J.J. Abrams Star Trek movies that performed so poorly. So Discovery has some apparel, some cardboard standees, a bit of glassware, a novel or two, and that's about it. No toys, replica props aside from a few Starfleet badges, model kits, games, or anything like that. Star Trek: Picard has even less... it's mostly cheap CafePress-style apparel branded "Chateau Picard", some wine glasses, a cutting board, canvas totes, and some pathetically cheap wine from Sonoma County, CA bottled as a "Chateau Picard" bordeaux or a Federation Reserve vine zinfandel. By all accounts, they've done so much damage to the Star Trek brand that their own recovery plan from their spiraling debt doesn't even consider selling it... it's not worth enough to sell anymore. Their valuation has fallen SO MUCH that they're in danger of violating the terms the US Government set for their merger agreement. They were counting on Star Trek, and especially Star Trek: Picard, to save their bacon. Oh yeah, there's Lower Decks coming too... I'm sure THAT will succeed where everything else has failed, right? Do we really need a Starfleet captain with a foot fetish, though?- 2171 replies
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Star Trek: Picard (CBS All-Access)
Seto Kaiba replied to UN Spacy's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
It does a bit, in hindsight, doesn't it? All told, isn't that premise kind of obviously untrue? Clearly CBS, Bad Robot, and Secret Hideout were fervently hoping that Star Trek's audience had changed. They gambled on being able to sell Star Trek as a brand they could slap on any generic or heavily derivative sci-fi/action "thriller" and lost... REPEATEDLY. They took everything Star Trek out of Star Trek except for a vague visual aesthetic and tried to reinvent the story as a standard issue summer action movie, resulting in something that was a very poor Star Trek story and a very poor action movie at the same time. Predictably, making it more generic in the name of broadening its appeal just made it forgettable and it ended up failing to launch a brand reboot AND failing to break even at the box office. Discovery's bleak, lifeless take on Star Trek was celebrated by the industry press and predictably loathed by most of its audience and especially by Star Trek's merchandising partners. It doesn't sell. CBS had to play fast and loose with what counted as "subscriptions" to make the picture rosier for their stockholders, and there's almost no merchandising support for it. They had to threaten legal action to stop Netflix from bailing on the show after its second season, and got a heavily slashed budget due to the show's poor performance. They tried it all again with Picard, except they tried to cloak the same dystopian setting and garbage writing in familiar names and faces, and it did even worse. The licensees walked. The show did terribly even on CBS All Access, and gave Amazon Prime a hefty case of buyer's remorse outside the US. The fact that none of these attempts to appeal to that changed audience were commercially successful is a pretty strong argument the audience didn't actually change much, if at all. Really, the biggest and most telling sign that the audience hasn't changed is their latest and last attempt to save Secret Hideout's take on Star Trek is... to go back to the classic Star Trek formula. It's a massive admission of defeat. Oh, they're trying... the problem is that audiences young and old think this new take on Star Trek is crap. The reason they're bringing back characters from older Star Trek shows in greater and greater abundance is that the new characters Secret Hideout dreamed up for these shows are testing INCREDIBLY poorly. The closest anyone came to investment in Discovery's characters was purely representational. Sylvia Tilly got some positive press for being Star Trek's first (explicitly) autistic character and the duo of Paul Stamets and Hugh Culber as Star Trek's first openly gay couple. Even that ended up backfiring, since a lot of viewers predictably put Tilly up there with Wesley for obnoxiousness because of her autistic behaviors and the studio got blasted with accusations of trying to bury their gay couple after they killed Culber off partway through the show's first season. Bringing in Spock and Pike was an author's saving throw intended to salvage the series by diverting attention away from Burnham and onto characters the audience was already predisposed to like. They tried the same tactic in Star Trek: Picard, and it got worse as the show went on. You can see right around halfway when the studio clearly decided it wasn't going to be able to sell the audience on new characters like Rios, Musiker, Dr. Jurati, and co. and decided to shift the story's focus to established characters like Seven of Nine, Hugh, Will Riker, Deanna Troi, and yet another identical damn Dr. Soong. The new characters don't even really contribute to saving the day... Picard, Riker, Seven of Nine, and Doctor Soong save the day while the new kids largely just sit around. Their participation trophy is that they're planned to be pushed even farther out of focus as CBS plans to throw in more walk-on roles for TNG veterans if season two gets made. Star Trek in general had pretty damned good ratings from around season three of TNG in '89 to the end of season three of VOY in '97. You don't stay on TV continuously for fourteen years unless you're doing SOMETHING right. If going back to the classic formula doesn't work, then they're screwed... because the last-ditch attempt to make Star Trek profitable again is Strange New Worlds, which is billed as a return to classic form in the most literal sense possible.- 2171 replies
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Star Trek: Picard (CBS All-Access)
Seto Kaiba replied to UN Spacy's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
Seconded.- 2171 replies
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Profoundly unlikely... but not entirely impossible. There are, however, a number of reasons that I suspect this is less than legitimate. First and foremost, there's nothing news-wise that I can find on official Japanese Macross channels that suggests CalibresModels is an official Macross licensee. Second, the Macross Zero footage used in this teaser video is of suspiciously poor quality despite CalibreWings posting their video at 720p60. If this were an official product, there'd be no obstacle to sampling the video from a HD source to make their advert look good. Instead, this was clearly sampled from a much lower quality source... my guess would be its origin was someone's AMV or fansub they found on YouTube or a similar video-sharing site. Third, the music isn't from Macross Zero. As important as music is to Macross, an official product would almost certainly use music from the Macross series the product is for. This is "Get Free", the opening theme for Macross VF-X2. The only detail that would make the idea that this is a legitimate Macross product even slightly plausible-sounding is that this is only available in direct sales from the company in China... since selling through a US-based licensee would be impossible. Still, it's China... one of the epicentres of intellectual property crimes... so IMO it's odds-on this is bootleg, from a Harmony Gold licensee that doesn't realize Harmony Gold doesn't own the rights to Macross sequels. Yes. Big West could take them to court for copyright and trademark infringement. Where this gets REALLY interesting is the possibility that this is being done under license from Harmony Gold... if there's anything to suggest that Harmony Gold signed off on this at any point, it could be the start of a lawsuit that'd bring Robotech down once and for all. The F-14A++ Super Tomcat didn't support a GU-11 in-series. Maybe they mean it to be a GPU-9? But even then it doesn't quite work. Nope... if they advertise it as a Macross Zero product and they don't have a license to Macross Zero, that's trademark infringement even if there was nothing Macross about it. Since this is clearly meant to be Shin's VF-0 from Macross Zero, if they don't have a license that's copyright infringement. They can't claim generic-ness as a defense because they put the characters names on the side of the plane. Probably not, but we'll find out! It wouldn't be the first time a Robotech licensee delved into Macross copyright infringement because they assumed HG's license to the original series meant rights to EVERYTHING. That's why Harmony Gold will never allow most Robotech comics to be reprinted... the licensees did a LOT of infringing on copyrights back in the day. Yup. The VF-0B doesn't even appear in the OVA... only the A, D, and S types do. It might be possible twenty years ago... but in this day in age?
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What Current Anime Are You Watching Version v4.0
Seto Kaiba replied to wolfx's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
Wait 'til you get to the end... it's utterly mediocre until then, when it doesn't so much jump the shark as pole vault every shark that has ever been and will ever be. -
Star Trek: Picard (CBS All-Access)
Seto Kaiba replied to UN Spacy's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
In my assessment, that the writers felt compelled to have every episode end in a cliffhanger to keep the audience watching is only a symptom of a much more pervasive problem. Namely, that the writers currently working on Star Trek for CBS All Access are absolutely and demonstrably crap at their jobs. They did no research or prep work at all. Star Trek: Discovery's first season was a pretty amateurish offering all around, but it had some pretty severe continuity errors WRT the rest of the Star Trek franchise. Putting aside the plethora of issues related to costume and makeup design, pretty much everything relating to the Klingons in Discovery is a mess... like there being a woman Supreme Chancellor when women aren't allowed to serve on the high council at all, the Klingons staging for an attack on Earth when Martok had previously asserted that his people had never been brazen enough to consider it, the anachronistic extent of surgical alteration of Klingon spies, the Klingons possessing cloaking techology that works in exactly the manner described in "Balance of Terror" years before the Federation first encountered in on Romulan ships, etc. Fifteen minutes on Memory Alpha is enough time to poke dozens of holes in Discovery's first season just with respect to the Klingons. Never mind that the whole tardigrade thing was plagiarized from an indie video game and the bit about it engaging in horizontal gene transfer was based on a scientific study that'd been retracted some years earlier when it was discovered their test results were contaminated and had led them to falsely conclude tardigrades engaged in horizontal gene transfer. Zero fact-checking went into that season. Star Trek: Discovery's second season's issues are rather more glaring and obvious. Much of the plot was simply plagiarized from the Star Trek relaunch novelverse's Section 31 series, and what wasn't taken from there was taken from Mass Effect. The entire second half of the season is predicated on a massive misunderstanding of how computers work, as so many reviewers pointed out at great and tedious length, and the entire plot about Control wanting an alien data archive to evolve into an artificial sentience makes no sense given that the plot makes it clear Control is already self-aware and exercising self-determination. Star Trek: Picard is probably the worst critical research failure of all. If you've never seen Star Trek before, the premise of the series might seem sound... but as soon as you know that the Romulan Star Empire was a galactic civilization rivaling the Federation in scale and power it immediately stops making any sense at all. Why is the entire Romulan Empire thrown into disarray and dissolved because they lost one of the hundreds of planets they control? It's a bigger version of the same problem they narrowly avoided discussing at the end of the first season of Discovery... when the writers forgot the Klingon Empire was also an interstellar empire with more than one planet. Why would the Romulans, whose starfleet is as big as the Federation's, need the Federation to handle evacuating their capital for them? Why are they living as refugees in camps inside Federation territory when there are dozens of developed M-class planets under their control? The writing is sloppy, amateurish, and fraught with internal contradictions and continuity problems. It reads like a bad fan fiction... and I think that every episode needed to end with a "To Be Continued..." cliffhanger is a product of that. The Twitter-level social politics of the writing don't help either, the whole "humbling of Jean-Luc Picard" makes as little sense in context as the Romulan Empire's collapse.- 2171 replies
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Star Trek: Picard (CBS All-Access)
Seto Kaiba replied to UN Spacy's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
The frustrating part is that CBS showed that they absolutely know how to make real Star Trek - as seen in the first few episodes of Star Trek: Discovery's second season - but for whatever reason they seem unwilling to actually DO it despite the very vocal demand for it. Maybe Secret Hideout sees having to fall back on making real Star Trek as a sign of defeat for their racist, sexist, xenophobic, pessimistic, action-centric take. To be fair, Enterprise not following the classic Star Trek look and feel was a deliberate creative choice intended to respect the original. The entire goal there was to show the formative years of Earth's space exploration as the newly Utopian Earth took its first steps into the greater galaxy and laid the foundation for the United Federation of Planets to become a force for peace. It was rougher, less principled, and so on intentionally. Some of its best episodes revolved around Archer and crew learning the lessons that would become some of the Federation's oldest principles. The problem is that it was undermined by executive meddling at every turn, same as Star Trek: Voyager was. Wouldn't have worked... audiences were burned out on Star Trek before Enterprise even launched. Star Trek been on the air almost continuously for nearly 14 years when Enterprise made its debut. It needed a break, and the franchise heads argued it needed a break, but the senior execs at the network demanded yet another Star Trek show that immediately fell victim to the same burnout-induced ratings tailspin that afflicted Voyager. Franchise fatigue is a very real thing... they should've spaced their releases out more, took a few years off between shows, etc. Instead, they wore their audience out and the talking heads in the boardrooms blamed everything except their own failure to listen to the franchise's creative team.- 2171 replies
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Post Skywalker Saga Star Wars Movies and Projects
Seto Kaiba replied to jvmacross's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
Maybe it hit an ammunition storehouse or something? I mean, it is a ship the size of a city crashing into another ship the size of a moon. There's gotta be LOTS of explosives there.- 292 replies
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Post Skywalker Saga Star Wars Movies and Projects
Seto Kaiba replied to jvmacross's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
So? It does appear that they're tough enough to survive a crash from orbit in one piece... like the ships dotting the surface of Jakku. Lifting off through a few dozen meters of soil and rock would be no big deal compared to stresses like that. Though the whole schtick was clearly chosen for visual punch and not practicality. Evil is hammy in Star Wars, as evidenced by drama queen Anakin Skywalker.- 292 replies
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Post Skywalker Saga Star Wars Movies and Projects
Seto Kaiba replied to jvmacross's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
Yup... that's basically what we've been saying about it. Disney bought LucasFilm for Star Wars, and the corporate committee running the show took the safest possible approach with their shiny new money printer and just remade A New Hope with a ton of cosmetic upgrades and a vastly less likeable cast meant to have the broadest possible appeal. The problem, of course, is that if you try to please EVERYONE as the Disney corporate leadership did, you'll end up spreading yourself too thin and pleasing nobody. The whole sequel trilogy is the embodiment of Disney's paralyzing fear of losing a few bucks because someone got offended. Now, if you threw a couple adjectives in there about the quality of the comics, the 800 page novels, and what have you, I'd find myself in complete agreement. The parts of the Star Wars Expanded Universe I've been exposed to are almost uniformly badly-written garbage that makes Solo: a Star Wars Story look like Oscar material. Far and away the best of it was the Thrawn trilogy and even a fair amount of that was pretty weak. No, but he was the one who set up the people who did... he put Bad Robot and Secret Hideout in control of Star Trek, and left Star Wars to Rian Johnson's tender mercies. ... when were they not? They're just laser swords. I can recall at least one instance in the EU where they were literally building the damn things on assembly lines. ... why wouldn't they have fuel tanks? They very clearly have engines that use reaction mass for propulsion, and that reaction mass has to come from somewhere. Likewise, they have to be getting power to run all their onboard systems from somewhere. As far as I can tell, that's not the case... The Last Jedi does feature arms dealer intermediaries who sell to both sides, something that happens distressingly often in the real world. Why not? I mean, this is a society that has mastered the casual use of gravity manipulation. It seems to me like it'd be more convenient to build a fleet in secret if you built it on a planet's surface. You wouldn't need to take all kinds of precautions to protect workers in a zero-g vacuum environment and you wouldn't have to ship materials up to orbit from a planetside refinery or factory. They're all massively oversold, TBH. Jango Fett wasn't any better than Boba Fett... they're both the alleged badass but can't back it up. They have a very action figure-friendly costume, but apart from being fairly snappy dressers they're pretty lame. Jango Fett subcontracts out of his actual day job as a bounty hunter, spends most of his screen time running away from Obi-Wan, and in his only actual stand-up fight (in Attack of the Clones) he's nothing more than a nuisance to his opponent and lasts a mere six seconds before being beheaded without once harming his opponent. Boba Fett tailgates the Millennium Falcon, whines some complaints at Darth Vader, and in his first and only fight he tries to tie up the space wizard with the laser sword, fails, and is unintentionally killed when a blind man accidentally knocks him into the waiting mouth of a space anus monster in the desert. They're literally less effective than the Stormtroopers, and the Stormtroopers are memetically MADE OF FAIL.- 292 replies
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What Current Anime Are You Watching Version v4.0
Seto Kaiba replied to wolfx's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
Giving Himouto! Umaru-chan a whirl... it's not quite what the memes led me to expect from it. I'm not sure why I was expecting something more like Lucky Star or one of the more pop culture reference-heavy 12 episode comedy series that've come out more recently. Its content is exactly what it says on the tin... a series about a younger sister who's a himono-onna, a woman who's proper in public but slovenly at home. It's occasionally funny, but most of the humor revolves around the titular character being an incredibly manipulative and selfish brat towards her doormat older brother. It gets old real quick, and then it's just kind of annoying how toxic their relationship is. There isn't even a reason given for it, she's just a naturally sh*tty person. Oh, it was... but, to be honest, that show was one incredible dumpster fire from the earliest phases of its development clear through to its cancellation for low ratings. It changed genres twice during development, from a creepy lolicon slice of life comedy series by an h-doujinshi artist to a reimagining of Japan's Sengoku period in a sci-fi context to being a tissue paper-thin effort to knock off Macross for a quick buck. The designs were done quickly and on the cheap, by an in-house design group at Tatsunoko with an incredibly unflattering name. That would probably have helped their ratings a bit, yeah. MOSPEADA could've been a much better series if there hadn't been so much executive meddling focused on copycatting Macross. It put the Legioss armo-fighter into too much prominence over the titular MOSPEADA. -
Post Skywalker Saga Star Wars Movies and Projects
Seto Kaiba replied to jvmacross's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
As I understand it, Star Wars had a fairly complicated official canon policy that included the Expanded Universe materials before the sale of LucasFilm to Disney and Disney's subsequent decision to throw the entire Expanded Universe in the trash and start over. It's the fact that so much effort was spent making the Expanded Universe coherent and so on that made folks so mad when the Disney crew told them it was going away permanently. ... now this strikes me as complete BS. What did they think people were sending them checks for? A show of goodwill? They were collecting a fairy substantial amount of royalties from things like comic books, novels, and so on and there was a coordinated team of writers working on all of that nonsense. They literally had at least one person whose full-time job it was to make sure all of that stuff was consistent and police the writers of new content. He had some ridiculous title. Keeper of the holo-something? No, Star Trek flew into a brick wall because they put a talentless hack in charge and all he could think to do was to make Star Trek more like Star Wars... locking the franchise into a long-term contract with his like-minded partner. Star Wars flew into a brick wall because it was such a money-spinner that its new risk-averse owners refused to do anything more than recycle old ideas on the assumption that if the fans liked it once they'd love it twice... and once that didn't work, a committee deadlock on part 3 led to a small legion of cooks spoiling the broth as energetically as possible.- 292 replies
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What Current Anime Are You Watching Version v4.0
Seto Kaiba replied to wolfx's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
Mobile Suit Gundam: the Origin was a hard show to watch... the original series was dark, but Origin is darker still by a significant margin. Like showing the Principality of Zeon capturing Island Iffish and starting preparations for Operation British even before they gassed the population... then showing the actual gassing of the population. Isn't it just? I'm running out of shows in my queue on crunchyroll. -
Post Skywalker Saga Star Wars Movies and Projects
Seto Kaiba replied to jvmacross's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't kicking the sequel trilogy to the non-canon curb alongside Star Wars: Legends effectively "dumping" it? Based on everything I've heard and read on the subject, isn't all of the material that was collectively rebranded as Legends officially considered to be broadly non-canonical?- 292 replies
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Post Skywalker Saga Star Wars Movies and Projects
Seto Kaiba replied to jvmacross's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
Isn't that kind of the reason they're allegedly plotting to dump the sequel trilogy in the first place? That nobody - not even the actors who starred in it - is all that invested in the Star Wars sequel trilogy? To a heavily merchandise-driven franchise like Star Wars, there's little-to-no immediate difference between an audience that's indifferent and one that's downright hostile. Either way, they're not buying the merchandise and they're not stampeding into Disney's theme parks to visit the Star Wars Land there. It's all lost revenue regardless of whether that absence of interest is motivated by antipathy or simple indifference. Disney bought Star Wars for the merchandising revenue, and if it's underperforming then Disney's management looks REAL bad in front of the stockholders... especially since everyone believed Star Wars was as close to a Sure Thing as it gets, and you have to be pretty damned incompetent to screw up a Sure Thing.- 292 replies
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What Current Anime Are You Watching Version v4.0
Seto Kaiba replied to wolfx's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
One of the members of my weekly Jojo's Bizarre Adventure watch party had to grab some shuteye early this week... so we ended up watching Ghost Stories. The horrific ADV Films gag dub of Ghost Stories. The original show was a mediocre exercise in standard Japanese ghost folklore, but dear sweet machine god the dub can only be the product of sampling all the pills in every voice actor's medicine cabinet simultaneously. -
Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!
Seto Kaiba replied to Valkyrie Driver's topic in Movies and TV Series
Well, you have to remember that as affluent as the Macross Frontier fleet is... it's still a city-state of just ten million people1 out on the edge of explored space. Local productions likely don't have the domestic audience to justify Hollywood blockbuster-level expenditures.2 The fleet does, after all, have only about 1/12th the total population of Japan. It's not something mentioned in the TV series proper... it comes up in the novelization, the short stories, etc. Mihoshi Academy had a number of VF-1C civilian-use Valkyries that were used for practical training in their aviation/space navigation major. From the sound of it, the VF-1C is a disarmed consumer-grade derivative of the VF-1A similar to how the VT-1C is a consumer-grade derivative of the VT-1 Ostrich. 1. Putting it in the same class, in terms of total population, as Bangkok or Seoul... and would be approximately the 34th most populous city if it existed on Earth today. As a nation, it would rank 91st... behind Azerbaijan and above the United Arab Emirates. 2. To put it in perspective, the entire population of the Macross Frontier emigrant fleet would have to watch Bird Human three times to narrowly edge out the total number of tickets sold for Star Wars: the Rise of Skywalker in its opening weekend, and four times for Avengers: Endgame's opening weekend. Not total ticket sales for either of those real world films, JUST their opening weekends. -
Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!
Seto Kaiba replied to Valkyrie Driver's topic in Movies and TV Series
That Hakuna Aoba named his custom VF-0 for the Allied reporting name for the Mitsubishi A6M Navy Type-0 carrier-based fighter is an odd choice, to be sure... though he's not alone there. Macross Galaxy developed a VF-22 variant named Schwalbe Zwei, the other name for the Messerschmitt Me 262. Can't give it a new design number tho, since it's a one-of-a-kind custom aircraft for (nominally) nonmilitary purposes. Calling it a "VF-0 Custom" feels a bit disingenuous since it's more along the lines of "disguised YF-25", but it's probably the most accurate since it WAS a VF-0 when Katori started and it still looks and transforms like a VF-0. What @Master Dex said. Granted, we don't know what the budget for Bird Human was... but given that the film was set to be the debut of a beauty pageant winner who presumably had no acting experience to speak of, it was probably closer in budget and scope to a Japanese domestic market film than an American big-budget Hollywood film. Tens, rather than hundreds, of millions of dollars for a budget. The most expensive film produced in Japan at time of writing - the 2013 animated fantasy film Kaguya-hime no Monogatari - had a budget of $49.3 million (US). Budgets in the single-digit millions (US) are more typical for a character-heavy drama. The estimated budget for the 2006 Death Note movie was $20 million (US) thanks to the use of CGI for its shinigami, comparable to what was spent on the hilariously camp direct-to-video Starship Troopers 3: Marauder. Purpose-building a handful of replica VF-0's and SV-51's similar to what was used on Uroboros for the dogfight scenes would probably have cost most, or all, of the film's budget... and hiring stunt pilots to fly them wouldn't have been cheap either. They'd already blown a chunk of their budget licensing a Sheryl Nome song for the movie too... that can't have been cheap. It's not clear if Strategic Military Services was hired for the film, or were simply volunteering their services in the name of some cheap advertising. I'm guessing it's the latter. Having the military support filming a movie ain't cheap either. Adjusted for inflation, having the US Navy's F-14's fly outside of their regular duties for filming cost the film's budget around $19,000 per hour just to get the F-14's in the air. Having SMS volunteer the services of highly trained fighter pilots and using their VF-25's for motion capture for CGI VF-0's that the filmmakers would add in post-production would have been a huge savings to the budget. Their only other options would've been to appeal to the Frontier NUNS or maybe Mihoshi Academy's flight school. SMS had the advantage that their VF-25s are similarly sized to the VF-0, where the Frontier NUNS's VF-171s are a bit smaller and Mihoshi Academy's VF-1C Valkyries are a LOT smaller. (In the Macross Frontier short story Actors Sky, the Bird Human movie's lead actor Akira Kamishima had to do some training in a VF-1C in preparation for reshoots because the film's director was unsatisfied with his performance in the cockpit shots... that probably would've cost a fair sum too.) -
Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!
Seto Kaiba replied to Valkyrie Driver's topic in Movies and TV Series
Well, it started life as a VF-0... what it was rebuilt into really belongs more in the same category as the SV-52 орел. "A customized Valkyrie of unknown origin produced to imitate the VF-0". Well, except that we know exactly what its origins are... the above remark is, save for the "VF-0" part, how the SV-52 орел is described since it's indicated to have a lot of VF-17 hardware under the hood despite allegedly starting its life as a SV-51. Katori Brown-Robins did some interesting things to that VF-0 airframe. The end result was more "a YF-25 thinly disguised as a VF-0" than anything. -
Super Macross Mecha Fun Time Discussion Thread!
Seto Kaiba replied to Valkyrie Driver's topic in Movies and TV Series
Yup. There are several pictures in the book that show it flying alongside what appears to be a VF-11B. Oh, absolutely... though the replica VF-0's on Uroboros mainly used parts from the VF-1C and VF-5000. Macross the Ride featured a totally rebuilt VF-0 that was remodeled to use tech from the YF-25, including its FF-3001A engines. That was Hakuna Aoba's VF-0改 "Zeke".