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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    The key difference being that those 40+ year old lifers are Robotech's only fans. Other franchises, like Macross, have been continually bringing in new fans by releasing steady streams of new material. The closest Robotech got to bringing in new fans was when old fans from the 80's rediscovered the series during the brief renaissance the franchise experienced as part of Harmony Gold's efforts to reboot and retool Robotech into a proper bloody anime franchise. Those same fans abandoned it again shortly thereafter, accompanied by a lot of others, when Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles laid a massive egg and Harmony Gold decided criticism of it was verboten. It was all downhill for Robotech after the TV series completed its first broadcast run. While you're (mostly) not wrong in general terms, the problem is that it IS Robotech... so those fans: Are obsessed, not "loyal"... and their obsession is rooted entirely in their nostalgia for the Robotech series. Are blinded by their nostalgia... to the extent that they will reject anything that doesn't fit with their nostalgic memories and headcanon of the Robotech series. If the franchise stops pandering to that nostalgia or tries to develop in any way they feel disrespects their (often inaccurate) memories of it, they will reject it with disgust. Often aren't actually established in a career or otherwise lack disposable income. This is the genesis of the Catch-22 that ensures any effort to continue Robotech is doomed. Robotech's fandom is too small for Harmony Gold to sustain development of new media for a fans-only audience, and Robotech's fans aren't interested in anything that doesn't pander to them directly. Robotech is too obscure and too hated to trade on its reputation for the sake of gaining a new audience, and anything they might do to get the attention of a new audience is doomed to fail because they don't understand their market and their fans (who also don't understand the genre) will pan that effort to attract a new audience for "disrespecting" the series. Consequently, everything needs to be made as cheaply as it can possibly be in order to turn any kind of a profit from a small and shrinking fanbase, which further ensures that it won't attract a new audience because it all looks like arse thanks to having been made so cheaply.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Well, there's one cause for optimism... item 4 under "Fiction" shows that at least they've realized they have to have an actual ending. The whole new trilogy kind of showed that they'd forgotten that. The story ended in Return of the Jedi and then it just kind of forgot to stop... requiring all kinds of convoluted nonsense to justify why they didn't stop.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Most unusually for Macross, it does seem like a throwaway design. There's no line art for it in This is Animation Special: Macross Plus or This is Animation: the Select Macross Plus Movie Edition and it's not covered even in technical publications like Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur. Unlikely, IMO... the VF-17 Nightmare was already in its third year of frontline service when Project Super Nova was going on. If anything, it'd probably have had to be developed from the VF-17's beam adapter.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    It doesn't really seem powerful enough to inflict meaningful damage on a ship... my guess is it's meant for dealing with things like Armoreds.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    This "relative indifference" is actually a relatively recent two-part development. Shoji Kawamori himself explicitly rejecting the idea that Macross II: Lovers Again was "non-canon" or in any way less valid as a Macross series shut quite a few of the haters up, but we didn't achieve this current peace until the MacrossWorld staff and the admins of several major Facebook groups decided to get much stricter about policing toxic behavior and put a number of the worst offenders on notice and later banned several or all of them. Basically, the Macross fan community is every bit as fractious and judgemental as any other fandom... it's just that you're seeing the nice, sanitized communities where the REEEE-ing is simply not tolerated anymore.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    So, the only source I have that talks about what this thing was intended to be packaged with is Macross Chronicle Macross Plus Mechanic Sheet 01B. The little sidebar on the left has a caption on the picture of that pack deploying that asserts that it was an option not normally included in the FAST Pack. To me, that implies that this WAS something that could be taken with the YF-19's FAST Packs. Hell if we know. There's basically no proper documentation of this thing. Given that Isamu one-shots one of the notoriously heavily-armored Destroid Monsters with the big cannon in that pack, it seems likely to be a firepower enhancement intended for use on hard-armored targets.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    It's a 90's thing... I was only a kid back then, so to me it's rather nostalgic. That said, the flight demonstration team colors on combat aircraft thing is never going away because Macross has to sell toys and that makes them very action figure-ous.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    All told, it's a bunch of pretentious logorrhea that boils down to a "no, except yes" in response to the very first point about having not made Star Trek a grimdark dystopia full of senseless violence in order to be trendy. He says that wasn't what they did, but follows it up by basically admitting in a very circuitous manner that that's EXACTLY what they did. These schmucks want to write Star Trek as Game of Space Thrones... for all the senseless violence and sex they can, because that sold so well until Game of Thrones's final season. Can't be... that would be a happy ending, with death as a release from a life of endless suffering and disgrace in this hell Michael Chabon has wrought. I fully expect Jean-Luc Picard will die, and that La Sirena will be renamed Picard in his honor to allow the series to continue without its most expensive cast member.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Wouldn't that just basically be a repeat of the Prequel Trilogy that doesn't end in mass Jedi-cide? (That's a serious question. I'm not trying to be a smartarse, I just don't know much about Star Wars lore.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    ... I hate that you're probably right. He's too good for this sinful Federation. Not a clip show, just a lot of onscreen graphics in this episode are really blatant screenshots from previous shows.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    It has nothing to do with being current or trending. It's about Robotech fans being desperate to have SOMETHING to convince themselves Robotech hasn't kicked up its heels and died. Robotech's "owners" have once again given up on developing a continuation of the animated Robotech series after a string of embarrassing failures. As in the 90's, the only signs of life from the brand are a handful of fourth-rate licensees putting out a trickle of embarrassingly poor-quality merchandise that fans of any competently-run franchise would've laughed out of town. Even though the quality is insultingly low, Robotech fans will still buy it and even sing its praises to each other even if they don't actually want it or privately think it's trash just because it's SOMETHING Robotech-branded... and therefore proof that Robotech isn't dead yet. They buy things like that to validate their faith in the brand.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It's that time again... Jean-Luc Picard and his intrepid band of ridiculous cliches are off to a retired Borg cube in "The Impossible Box". The Good The Bad The Ugly Next episode, Jonathan Frakes cameos as Will Riker... All in all, this episode wasn't something I could call "good" with a straight face... but it was definitely less terrible than the previous few.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    There'll be a lot more of them?
  14. Seto Kaiba
    But how will they sculpt nipples into the Jedi robes?
  15. Seto Kaiba
    He's gotten out of acting, AFAIK... he's been the director of theater arts at the California Institute of Technology since '07. Kind of a shame they didn't get him back, he doesn't seem to have changed much. Here's his staff profile from TACIT: http://tacit.caltech.edu/about/brian
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Macross 7 Docking Festival
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Well, the easy answer is that the Zentradi don't have any control over their factory satellites... and the mass cloning of Zentradi troops is handled by factory satellites dedicated to that purpose. It is, at least the way humans were operating the cloning tech. The Protoculture only separated along gender lines in the movie version of the story (Macross: Do You Remember Love?), where the Protoculture men and women separated after the introduction of cloning tech that took the need for romance and biological reproduction out of their social equation. There was no Supervision Army in that version of the story, the war was between the men's clone army (Zentradi) and women's clone army (Meltrandi). The TV version of the story has the divide that caused the Protoculture civil war be a socio-political one of unspecified nature. The Zentradi were originally all-male, and the female Zentradi were created later along with the Queadluun series when the males proved incapable of operating the Queadluun effectively. The Protoculture decided that they'd build a better pilot instead of downgrading their top of the line battle suit. In both cases, the Zentradi and Meltrandi are based on the ancient Protoculture's DNA... modified to make them better expendable soldiers. As noted previously, totally homogenous clone armies don't really leave any opening for individual excellence because the soldiers are all the same. If there's variety, you have the chance for soldiers to develop individual talents that can be used as the basis for later improvements.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Given the title, I'm actually a little surprised at the lack of 420 jokes about the creative staff.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    One thing worth noting is that every Macross sequel from Flash Back 2012 onwards blends aspects from both the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series and the Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie when flashing back to the events of the First Space War. Kawamori's "broad strokes" attitude towards continuity means there really isn't a single fixed interpretation of the First Space War. Do You Remember Love? is a movie in the universe, but the in-universe version is also apparently different to the one we've seen given footage from it shown in Macross 7 that includes Max and Milia's wedding and other scenes which were not in the theatrical film. Several other takes, like Macross II: Lovers Again's parallel world continuity, the DYRL? novelization, and Macross the First all have takes on the timeline that merge aspects of the TV and Movie storylines. Macross Chronicle offers no guidance as to when the song emerged. It's possible that it was recorded for one of the earlier docu-drama projects, like the one mentioned in Master File that dramatized the events of the First Space War's start. Or it may be that the version of Flash Back 2012 we saw was itself a later dramatization from one of the many dramas about Minmay's life mentioned in later shows, that draws upon the material of the 2031 movie. Minmay's enduring popularity seems to have a lot more to do with dramatizations of her life than it does her actual career.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    George Lucas was the same way from the outset in Star Wars's development... what he wrote was not readable, let alone filmable. He was a great idea man, but he needed writers, editors, and producers holding his leash and hammering his ideas into something people might actually watch. It was both, really... he wasn't happy with some core TOS characters being depicted as racist, and he was also unhappy with the idea that a militaristic Starfleet might actually WANT to go to war with the Klingons. The latter is reportedly why Rene Auberjonois' character, Colonel West, ended up on the cutting room floor. He was the one who, in meetings with the Federation President, was vocally agitating for armed conflict with the Klingons. Like I said, even under Gene Roddenberry's immediate control the Federation Starfleet seemed to wear a LOT of hats. Most of the assignments we see the crew of the Enterprise undertake are diplomatic or scientific in nature, but we do also see a wide array of other stuff like border patrols, wartime planetary defense, managing interstellar cargo shipments, law enforcement operations, coordinating interstellar colonization, etc. If there was a thing you needed a government agency to do, they did it.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    It's not a plot hole, it's an ethical concern. Creating an army of clones to fight your wars for you is slavery... clones are people too, after all. When the clones have the same memories, training, and talents of the originals, you're also stuck with the problem that you now have two identical people who both lay claim to the same past and the same property. The New UN Government did use cloning to increase the availability of people with essential skills, but this was mainly used for staffing emigrant fleets so you didn't have two of the same person in the same place making things weird for everyone. A lot of people would find living and working with an identical copy of themselves supremely disconcerting... never mind a legion of them. Because these clones are people able to think and feel rather than brainwashed borderline organic automata like the clone troopers in Star Wars, you could also very quickly end up with an uprising of PO'd clones. Max and Milia were also important to the New UN Government as public figures, the hard proof that peace was possible between Humans and Zentradi. Duplicating them willy-nilly would dilute the significance of their relationship in propaganda terms. We get an aside note in Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure that cloning for military purposes is very definitely illegal under the New UN Government. I'd expect a big part of it was having identifiable characters among the clones who were important to the story like Vrlitwhai, Exsedol, Boddole Zer, Quamzin, Laplamiz, Oigul, and the lolicon trio (Roli, Warera, and Conda). Having a completely homogeneous clone population also means that you won't see individuals who excel in particular areas.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Sort of. Starfleet's "mildly military" nature was present from a fairly early point in Star Trek's development due to, ironically, the influence of Gene Roddenberry. A lot of inspiration for the organization was drawn from the US Navy from the outset - which is why almost every Constitution-class ship in TOS are is named for a World War II-era aircraft carrier - but Gene would paradoxically insist it was not a military organization and then liken it to the (US) Coast Guard (which IS one). He'd also contributed to a number of stories where Starfleet were depicted as responsible for the Federation's border security (e.g. TMP) and even the general defense of the Federation in wartime (e.g. TOS "Errand of Mercy"). EDIT: Perhaps one of the most blatant items being that the initial Starfleet Tech Manual Gene was so proud of contained things like Starfleet DREADNOUGHTS. Meyer and Moore essentially just acknowledged what was already there... that one of the many hats Starfleet wears is that of the Federation's de facto military, though the organization isn't explicitly military in nature like its counterparts in the Klingon Empire, Romulan Empire, Cardassian Union, Dominion, etc. Gene wasn't a particularly consistent fellow even when he was in good health, TBH.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Nah... Gene was unhappy the militaristic aspect of things was present at all. Rene Auberjonois' character, Col. West, was all but completely cut from the film on Roddenberry's insistence for that reason. According to Shatner, after viewing the theatrical cut of the film, Gene Roddenberry had his lawyer start preparing a demand for a further fifteen minutes of material to be cut from the film. He passed away two days later, and the demand went undelivered.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    He's not nothing on Shammy... she had ELEVEN. For a while there, there were two rabbits on the moon... Still, can you imagine how stressful that time of the month must've been for Max as the only man in a house with nine women? Yikes. (There's a great piece of art by Noboru Ishiguro in This is Animation #5: Super Dimension Fortress Macross Part II that shows Max and Milia in the bedroom. He's holding a book titled "ENJOY OF SHOYA"1 but has been knocked out by her as she tries out things she read in the book she's holding: "HOW TO KARATE". The piece is captioned "I handed her a book of karate by mistake and it was a long first night ahaha... / Max".) 1. Presumably 初夜 - "First Night", acceptably translated as "Bridal Night". I assume I don't need to spell out the implications there.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    CBS's chief obstacle in this current generation of Star Trek properties is that they're so expensive to develop and produce that the network is unwilling or unable to put up the vast sums of money required to do it all themselves. It's too big of a risk. They sank vast sums - reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars - into just the development of Star Trek: Discovery. The demand for such a vast number of high quality CG sequences and digital VFX sequences, combined with set-building, props, and location shooting meant that production was going to cost a second king's ransom. The production budget was $8-8.5 million per episode, and a number of actors have indicated they were over budget on practically every episode due to reshoots and producer shenanigans. That's about $250 million for just the 29 episodes produced so far. Seven seasons, assuming season length stays the same as season two, would incur production costs of nearly $875 million. Factor in development costs, actor negotiating raises, and so on... and you're talking about an undertaking well in excess of a billion dollars. (CBS's quarterly net earnings only total around $1.5 billion, to give you an idea about why a sum like that might make them a bit gunshy, based on their published earnings for FY2019.) Star Trek VI was the one where Gene was preparing to sue and died before the lawsuit could be filed.
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