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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    ... amusingly, also no. Considering Macross Delta basically sold itself entirely on Walkure, that's actually kind of surprising. Even Frontier seemingly couldn't resist giving some measurements for a few of its female cast.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    At this point, it seems safe to say that plans for a new Macross series have been preempted by plans for an all-original second Macross Delta movie... possibly titled Macross Delta II: the Search for More Money. Assuming Big West and Satelight were working to a similar release schedule to the last two Macross TV series, then the "cut-off date" has probably passed. Ordinarily we would have expected to see the first trailer for the series about two weeks ago, and an announcement that a new series was coming about a month before that. We've had nothing except more crossover live announcements and an announcement that they're doing a second Macross Delta movie. The whole thread was rather premature, given that it was posted in January 2017 and even under ideal conditions we weren't going to see anything of a new series until after Christmas 2018.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    That the Shadow Chronicles movie met with near-universal disgust from the fans kind of helped speed the blow... you could've fit all the people who had nice things to say about the movie into a single family sedan and probably have seats leftover. *sigh* Engage your brain for a bit, eh? This is not a complex issue by any stretch of the imagination. True, Harmony Gold can't stop Macross fans from buying Macross goods directly from Japan... but the online stores catering to export sales are a relatively recent market innovation and international shipping costs significantly increase the price of already-expensive collectibles. This might not be an insurmountable obstacle for the dedicated toy collector, but by preventing regional distributors from licensing and localizing Macross works they've effectively locked western fans out of 99% of Macross material. Without fan translators and their grey market efforts, only three Macross shows (SDF, II, Plus) and one manga (II) would be available to western fans under Harmony Gold's embargo. Even with fan translators hard at work, only the animation and a tiny fraction of the print materials have been made available in a language other than Japanese. THAT is why Macross fans have no time for Robotech or HG. HG is standing between us and getting proper localizations of all this Macross material, all in the name of protecting a creatively bankrupt brand that was never really successful to begin with. It's like if Star Wars movies could only be screened or sold in China because of threats of litigation from a cheap knockoff toy line called "Space Wars" that is sold exclusively in drug stores. It says a lot about that place that I can't narrow that down to more than two or three dozen people... ... if you mean MEMO, he's one of the mods responsible for the aforementioned mass bannings.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    They did reopen, but they're still very much the borderline ghost town they were before the old site went down. Yeah, back in '07-'08 there was a back to back pair of big dustups where the volunteer moderators went on banning sprees which ended up largely depopulated the site. What started it was the fandom's overwhelmingly negative response to the Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles "movie". The ensuing deluge of criticism prompted the volunteer mods there to assert that non-constructive criticism was tantamount to a personal attack on the movie's staff and start handing out bans, and since "constructive criticism" was more a code word for "effusive praise" the bans flowed like water. It got worse after fans started asking pointed questions about the Macross legal situation when HG announced that the proposed live action movie was going to be a reimagined "Macross Saga". The volunteer mods dispensed a huge amount of inaccurate and generally malicious misinformation and then banned anyone who corrected them, claiming the corrections had caused them "pain and suffering". The forum's rules were usually OK with legit Japanese non-HG-licensed merch being talked about, but grey market stuff like Cap's models would have been right out.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    While the MythBusters did conclusively demonstrate that it was, in fact, quite possible to literally polish a turd... I remain somewhat bewildered when people seem to think the result of a turd-polishing session will be something other than crap that is now slightly glossier than when they started. Fan edits can fix bad editing, but The Last Jedi was not a badly-edited film. The problem with The Last Jedi was that it had a mediocre, fanfic-ish screenplay directed by the relatively inexperienced fanboy who wrote it. Having seen a few of Johnson's other films I suspect he's one of those writer-director types like Gene Roddenberry or George Lucas who shone when he had someone holding his leash and filtering his ideas through a lense of common sense and turns out garbage when he's left unsupervised. Looper was well-received, so someone well-meaning idiot clearly thought he could be left to his own devices. Simple. It's precisely because they are fans who respect and adore the series that they f*ck it up.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, the very first episode... they toss the whiny brat in the cockpit in his high school uniform and it works just fine. I know the whole schtick in Evangelion is it's a psychological puppet show about Shinji's adolescent anxieties and social dysfunction, but Rebuild turning the fanservice up to eleven by making the flightsuits transparent for no reason was not a welcome change. Macross, at least, did the more-or-less skintight spacesuit thing for predominantly practical reasons. The mechanical counterpressure suits are less bulky and allow greater freedom of natural movement, reduced need for cooling systems, and a greatly reduced need for large air tanks since the only parts of the suit that are pressurized with gas are the helmet, boots, and gloves. (Even though Macross has a fair number of female pilots, it didn't really get fanservice-y until Macross Frontier, with Cpt. Klan Klan's suit struggling to contain her "assets".) (Later designs more actively benefitted from the mechanical compression aspect of the suit design by varying the compression to prevent blood from pooling in the extremities in high g-force loading conditions.) That said, I still like the New UN Forces pilot suit (the model Master File called the TSV-51) way more than the SMS or Xaos pilot suits.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Mirage-as-a-singer was probably never explored because 1. they already had the idol group composed the way they wanted and 2. they'd already done the reverse of that in Macross R with its main character Chelsea Scarlett, a Zentradi idol singer-turned-fighter pilot. That was always my understanding... that the hairpin-things on their heads were the neurological connection and the rest was all...?
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Over two months on from the release of the Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure movie on Blu-ray along with the specs for the movie-specific Armored Pack, and I'm perplexed that the specs haven't made their way into ANY Macross sites yet... None! Not even the Japanese ones!
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Well, it did turn out that they were using technology introduced in Macross Frontier... just not that specific piece of tech. It made a certain amount of sense once it became obvious that Delta was copying anything and everything it could from Frontier in the hopes that that'd be enough to make it popular. Macross was doing mechanical counterpressure suits a solid decade before Evangelion was even a thing... Come to that, I was never super clear on why they needed to wear form-fitting spacesuits in the entry plugs in the first place. They were being submerged in blood-warm LCL, so they didn't need insulation, radiation protection, pressurization, or an external oxygen supply. If she were a cyborg it'd be as easy as dropping a combat AI into her noggin and sending her on her way, just like Maris Stella in Macross R.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I have three copies, and it does... for his work in Macross Zero (VF-0 and SV-51 cockpit design, Octos, Cheyenne) and Macross Frontier (EX-Gear, Vajra, VF cockpits, some ships). Don't forget the interiors for the titular ship in Outlaw Star (amd most of the weapons).
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Are we talking about in the military's TO&E or in civilian hands? Mind you, we should probably be calling them "aerospace craft" nowadays since overtechnology marches ever onwards and there seem to be relatively few things in the air that aren't also spaceworthy. Commercial aviation is still very much a thing in Macross, both in terms of passenger craft and cargo transportation, so there are probably far more non-variable aerospace craft out in the galaxy than variable ones. SMS's parent company, Bilra Transport, was an interstellar cargo service so profitable that Richard Bilra could finance an entire emigrant fleet... so likely he alone owns more cargo planes than most nations have VFs. Helicopters have been shown to be quite popular as a way to get around in cities, and particularly cities inside emigrant ships. We saw the UN Forces troops using the Sea Sergeant and Comanchero model helicopters in the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series, Sharon Apple's production staff used a helicopter to get around Macross City in Macross Plus, helicopters appeared in Macross Zero, and replicas of those same helis appeared in Macross Frontier. Fixed-wing aircraft have appeared more infrequently, but are still very much present after Super Dimension Fortress Macross. Macross Plus had that "eight engine all wing anti-giants bomber" flying wing model that we saw deploying the orange target drones from the YF-21's first big scene. Macross 7 had a number of ducted fan type aircraft including one broadly analogous in role and structure to the Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane with four ducted fans that was used to haul Exsedol down to see the ruins on Lux, a twin-fan helicopter analogue used by the City 7 news crews, a large fixed-wing cargo plane, a smaller (roughly VF sized) recovery craft, and a twin ducted fan lifter that was designed to haul battroids around. Frontier gave us a more jet airliner-esque Galaxy Starliner than the cruise ship type we saw in Macross Plus, and the EX-Gear's flight configuration is arguably the last word when it comes to ultralights (though Guld's wasn't anything to sneeze at in Macross Plus). We obviously saw quite a few in Macross Zero given that it took place before the First Space War, including Shin's F-14A+, various MiG-29s, and a KS-3A Viking carrier-launched refueling craft, EDIT: I forgot one! In Macross 7 Trash, 1st Lt. Heuer owns a QF-3000E that'd been converted with a side-by-side cockpit for use as a leisure craft. Offhand, I can recall at least one instance of lighter-than-air aircraft being used in Macross... City-7's MBS had an honest-to-goodness blimp in at least one episode. I don't recall offhand if we ever saw anything similar in Island-1 in Macross Frontier. Civilian ownership of VFs isn't unheard-of, but outside of professional sport (Vanquish League racing) and at least one planet we've seen where the local topography is so actively unfriendly to ground transportation that VFs and gravity-control flying cargo ships are the only ways of getting around it doesn't appear to have been that common. Our view is likely skewed somewhat by the way stories in the Macross metaseries inevitably revolve around the affairs of soldiers in military or paramilitary organizations.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Personally, I think it bears more of a resemblance to the YF-27-5 Shahar... ... there's a main timeline New UN Forces insignia on its left wing, it has a fold booster, and its pilot identified as an officer from the Macross Galaxy NUNS defense force, so that seems rather unlikely. Of the three mechanical designers who worked on Macross Frontier, none of them were associated with Macross II: Lovers Again and the only one who worked on Flash Back 2012 was Kawamori himself. Junya Ishigaki collaborated with Shoji Kawamori on VF designs, specifically doing the designs for the cockpits and EX-Gear (he had previously also done the designs for the Cheyenne and Octos destroids in Macross Zero) as well as the Vajra. Western fans would probably remember his work best from Outlaw Star, where he designed many of the grappler ships, but he was also involved in many Gundam titles including Wing, Unicorn, Victory, and all three Build series. Takeshi Takakura did some supplemental mechanical design for the series, but I'm not aware of anything specifically flagged as his. His past portfolio includes a personal favorite of mine (Terrestrial Defense Enterprise Dai-Guard), Engage Planet Kiss Dum, Rebuild of Evangelion, Aquarion's three shows, Martian Successor Nadesico, and Samurai Gun... but Macross Frontier is his only Macross design credit.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Reina was... at least in the first episode.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Doesn't look to be, yeah...
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It's that time again! This is a question that gets asked fairly often... and, unfortunately, we don't have an answer. No information has ever been given for that craft, it corresponds to no known design, and it has no evident capabilities beyond being able to operate a fold booster and maybe having a BDI-equipped cockpit given its lack of a canopy.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    That doesn't make sense though... why wouldn't they just use the money they would've wasted on an all-original Walkure Delta movie on the new Macross series instead?
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, their songs are quite good... but as characters go they're not so much "weak tea" as "tepid tapwater". Freyja Wion is the only one of them who got any kind of reasonable character development, Mikumo came with a doctor's note saying she's excused from character development as she'd been born with a bad case of macguffinitis, and the other three are shallow stock characters who barely got more development than the cardboard standees Fire Bomber used when one (or more) of their members blew off a live performance. The most they got was Kaname getting to briefly be broken up about her stalker dying...
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Effusively so. Then again, being drawn as basically Spike Spiegel is pretty effective shorthand for "He's a badass".
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Almost an entire chapter of Gundam Sousei is given over to ooh-ing and aah-ing over Ichiro Itano's mad skillz as an artist, with particular emphasis on the stylistic choices he made in animating funnels (the little remote weapons for newtypes) to make them appear to move VERY fast.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    His third, IIRC. Previously he had worked on Mobile Suit Gundam and Densetsu Kyojin Ideon. (There's a depiction of him in Gundam Sousei as a sort of Spike Spiegel-looking auteur from when he worked on Mobile Suit Gundam. Much fuss is made therein about his stylistic choices regarding animating funnels.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    I'd love to see Five Star Stories toys... though I imagine production would be a nightmare considering the level of detail and how thin many of the pieces would be. Especially on something like the Bang Doll, which had those big whip-blade lanyard things or the Jagd Mirage's legs vs. the twin towers buster launchers.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    That's the thing... what we would expect, given the last several Macross release schedules, would be that the show would be seeing a trailer around this time for a series that would have a teaser episode around the last week of the year and start airing in earnest in April. We've seen nothing so far, which suggests we're probably not getting anything this year or next except that Macross Walkure Delta movie.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    None. They're either following a different release timeline than on previous installments, or the series has been back-burnered in favor of the second Macross Delta movie which was announced around the time we would've expected the series to be announced.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes... I suppose it would be more accurate to say that it's the option where the viewer isn't potentially criminally culpable the way they would be with by torrenting or paying for a pirate streaming service. Thank goodness they've started putting official English subs on the Blu-rays so fans don't have to resort to grey or black market means.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It's all about how you spread the money around. They can afford lavish animation for backgrounds and characters when 80% of scenes are talking heads with minimal motion. When you've got high motion, you have to compromise. Caught the latest episode of Gyakuten Saiban today... I'm surprised they wrapped the whole second case of the story in a single episode with room to spare. Not the show's fault, but the incredibly limited cast definitely feels weird in a TV series. It really throws Yahari's status as the world's unluckiest man into sharp relief when he's dragged into court every couple episodes to give testimony. Gonna give Ulysses: Jeanne d'Arc and the Alchemist Knight episode four a go after dinner and see if it's worth anything.
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