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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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...?
  2. 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!
  3. 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.
  4. 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).
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Reina was... at least in the first episode.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Doesn't look to be, yeah...
  9. 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.
  10. 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?
  11. 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...
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Effusively so. Then again, being drawn as basically Spike Spiegel is pretty effective shorthand for "He's a badass".
  13. 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.
  14. 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.)
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Well, the reason you haven't found a topic about that probably has a lot to do with the profound lack of legal options... Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Macross II: the Movie, and the Macross Plus OVA are the only titles available through legitimate channels, and everything else has to come through either imported (and largely unsubtitled) DVDs and Blu-ray discs from Japan or extralegal means like torrented fansubs and bootleg streaming sites. Legally, outside of watching the watered down Americanized (I won't say that R-word) version of the original series on Crackle, Amazon is pretty much the only option. XBox TV had episodes from Macross II and Macross Plus for a while, but I think that's gone now. Looking for unauthorized uploads on YouTube is your best legal option, really. Yeah, you won't find anything else. Harmony Gold USA has the license to Super Dimension Fortress Macross and are keeping it bottled up on Amazon Prime while they promote their watered-down Americanized version on Sony's Crackle, Netflix, etc. Manga Entertainment US has been inactive and in a holding pattern since 2011, and is only just starting to come back to life after being acquired by the Lionsgate Entertainment Group's home video division back in 2017. There really isn't a reason to... new licensing is all kinds of not happening until Harmony Gold's Macross license and associated trademarks expire, which at its earliest will occur on 14 March 2021, and the existing arrangements are not prone to change often.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    That's the gist of it, yes.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, the only Southern Cross Bioroid kit was Imai's 1/48 scale... and that looks too big to be one. The unevenness of some of the lines on the hands and knees makes me suspect either a bootleg kit or something someone scratch-built.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    As I've said in many previous posts, we'd expect an announcement that a new series was in the works around the end of October. No such announcement was forthcoming, so we're probably not getting a new series after all. Just another Delta movie. It's always been the #1 complaint I've seen about the series... that they were so determined to be upbeat that Bellri doesn't react to anything like a sane person.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, Macross 7 does reuse the same handful of action shots of the VF-19 Custom transforming and VF-11Cs getting blown up in practically every episode... I'm not sure those two can be put on an equal footing for the sake of comparison. Macross 7 was a success in Japan on the merits of the series as a whole. If you look to its fanworks and merchandising, you'll find a well-balanced collection of artbooks, albums, audio dramas, doujinshi, character goods, model kits, toys, and other collectibles. Macross Delta seems to be coasting entirely on the popularity of the idol group Walkure. I doubt it's even the actual characters in the show, given that three of the five members of Walkure got token or zero character development. Coverage of the non-Walkure parts of Delta is token and of almost universally poor quality, low in detail, and generally short. We've had one artbook that was exclusively character-focused and with minimal coverage outside the main trio's profiles and Walkure's. The one "artbook" for the mecha, Variable Fighter Master File: VF-31 Siegfried, was about 50% plagiarized from the VF-25 Master File and the other half was a terrible mess that contradicted the series and itself. Character goods are almost exclusively Walkure. Magazine articles? Walkure. Promotional art? Walkure. It's all Walkure all the time... like the other 90% of the cast aren't even there. Now, that said, I suspect it has less to do with audience interests and more with what shows set the tone... the series they saw first. In Japan, you'll see a major influx of new fans every time a new Macross series airs so the fandom is always balanced between old and new fans. The western fanbase is mostly made up of long-time fans who were introduced to Macross via locally-available licensed releases. The three most commonly available licensed releases were the Robotech localization of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, the heavily UC Gundam-influenced Macross II: Lovers Again OVA, and the action-focused Macross Plus OVA. All three of those are a good deal darker and more serious than the average Macross fare... and that's what the western audience derives its expectations from. The Gundam franchise had a similar, but reversed, problem in the not-too-distant past with Reconguista in G. Fans the world over were so used to Gundam shows, and the Universal Century shows in particular, being dark and gritty and depressing that when a more lighthearted and optimistic Gundam show came along in that same timeline they simply couldn't get their heads around it. It felt strange and out of place, and the lightheartedness felt silly and wrong.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, but at least they remembered that variable fighters transform... you could almost have passed Delta off as an Ace Combat anime crossing over with IDOLM@STER like Bandai is so fond of doing.
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