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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Man, what'd we do to make you want to punish us with this stuff month after month? So everyone else gets a pilot suit made out of actual fabric, but Lisa's still rocking the body paint? Also, did they forget to draw the temples on Max's glasses... or has this depressing dystopian spacefuture invented birth control pince-nez?
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Is Shinichi Watanabe an acceptable substitute for Shinichiro? (It's a safe bet Kawamori-san will be in his usual "overall director" supervisory role, while the regular unit direction will be done by other directors.) Still, it's rather telling that that felt jarring and out of place and it was the only incident of its kind... well, unless you count Luca's earlier imagine spot involving dominatrix Sheryl and slave Alto. There wasn't really any fanservice going on there, though... that was played for pure comedy and a bit of fan disservice with her homicidal expression in that EX-Gear.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I'll take your word for it. As I said, I didn't really pay attention to the MPC line until the big to-do over not doing Southern Cross came out because it wasn't all that impressive, and I've never been much of a toy collector. None of the store pages I've seen, archived or current, mention separate production runs for them... just a flat limited edition cap. (I suppose it could be as simple as what I heard from IIRC Tom Bateman at one point about them usually expecting to sell about 1/2 of the limited edition's production cap... if they had orders for more than half they would have had to reorder even if the cap was always set to 15,000.) Yeah, I mentioned and linked to that a few posts back... the thread started out as an attempt to rustle up interest in an Auroran kit, and sort of expanded into a simultaneous interest check in a Spartas kit as well. Unfortunately, we were only able to secure 18 of the required 30 preorders for either design so it all ended as a non-starter.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Probably not. Of the five Grand Cannons that were planned, only Alaska's Grand Cannon I is known to have been completed and brought online. Grand Cannon I was, as we all know, badly damaged in the orbital bombardment by the Boddole Zer main fleet and only managed to fire once. Grand Cannon II's construction site in Australia was destroyed in an Anti-Unification Alliance attack shortly after the Tsiolkovsky incident in 2005. It was never completed. The incomplete Grand Cannon III in Africa and Grand Cannon V in South America served as shelters during the Boddole Zer main fleet's attack, but they were incomplete at the time and probably were damaged further (possibly beyond repair) in the bombardment. Grand Cannon IV in the Lunar north pole region is the only real candidate for a postwar completion, though the resources to finish it probably wouldn't have been available when rebuilding Earth was a top priority. The nearby Apollo Base in the Mare Tranquillitatis survived the war basically intact and its adjoining colony is still inhabited, so it may have been finished at least for its command center.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Again, none of these corporations are the least bit interested in what their customers want or think unless it affects their bottom line. They're in business to make money. They are not going to sink time and effort into producing a product that they don't think will sell well enough to justify those efforts no matter how badly fans want it. Quality suffers when a company proceeds with a project that's not in sufficient demand, and opts to cut corners in order to maximize their profits from the lower expected sales volume instead of (or on top of) raising prices. You're mistaking their pragmatic interest in producing products that will sell well for some kind of personal interest in your satisfaction. This is all business. They've been saying it for well upwards of a decade, and people keep buying their sh*t despite the hilariously poor quality... so there would appear to be a problem with your hypothesis.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC it's just the Combo Pack versions of the movies.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    You may be overstating it a bit. The Galaxy Executives and the Macross Galaxy Corporate Army's cyber-soldiers were cyborgs with almost totally artificial bodies, but the available information points to the adoption level of implant tech being pretty low among the fleet's civilian population (mostly just network-enabling their brains). Curiously, this is hinted to be something of a cruel mercy, due to the Macross Galaxy fleet being a rather unpleasant place to live and that being trapped in an illusory paradise is preferable to its real nature. Sort of. A big part of the problem with the Ghost X-9 was that its AI core was built around technology from Sharon Apple's system, and that technology proved to be pretty unstable even before it was "completed" with a bio-neural processor. It was able to behave like a real human brain because that's what the system was set up to emulate. Later iterations of the design rolled the AI tech back to a more traditional hardware that wasn't capable of fuzzy logic or unpredictable behavior and curtailed the AI's autonomous air combat program. Even though Luca's Ghosts were running the same basic software, they weren't capable of the unpredictable AI behavior of the prototype. Galaxy's AIF-9V Ghosts were almost certainly running under the same conditions. The novelization of Frontier does, IIRC, make mention of true AIs (one of which is implied to be built on the digitized personalty of Manfred Brando), and those AIs do serve the Galaxy Executives. As far as we know, yeah... they lost Battle Galaxy and a bunch of escorts but the main fleet is still out there somewhere. Mind you, theres no hard guarantee that all or even most of the Galaxy executives were on Battle Galaxy or Mainland... being the fold network cyborgs they are, they did a lot of their conferring over zero time fold communications links. They could be pretty much anywhere in the galaxy. Galaxy's bigshots have gone full Ghost in the Shell, being brains in artificial bodies. Grace is no exception, and most of what we see of her is apparently bodies that she is operating remotely over a zero time fold communications link. (Cybernetics don't seem to be quite advanced enough to permit straight-up body surfing yet.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Huh. Well... that's a thing that is happening. I'll admit I'm surprised CBS went for a relative unknown for an important role like Spock. I expected them to go all-in on someone with more experience and a serious reputation. His filmography is a genuinely depressing read. Most of the films he's been in were box office flops or at least critically panned, with the high water mark apparently being either an Olsen Twins direct-to-video movie in '99 or a Mariah Carey vanity project. The only TV role he's had that wasn't a bit part was in the 10 Things I Hate About You series that bombed and was canceled by ABC after just one season. Either this is Mr. Peck's big break, or Star Trek: Discovery has gone full Springtime for Hitler and he's their L.S.D. EDIT: Or maybe someone is just being terribly savvy by hiring someone who can't act to play an emotionless character... Admiral Marcus was, at least, nicer about it than Kelbor-Hal... he didn't blow up the dock and kill all the construction workers to keep it secret. Still, the "top secret super-powerful ship constructed without anyone knowing" schtick is pretty bad writing IMO... unless you've got a galactic-scale civilization where something the size of a city could legitimately fall through the cracks, someone is going to notice either the small mountain of money that's gone walkabout or the enormous number of material requisitions being delivered to a space P.O. box and start asking questions. Proper prototypes like the Excelsior or the Crossfield-class strain suspension of disbelief way less.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Much like the USS Vengeance in Star Trek: Into Darkness, a completely over-the-top warship built in secret and meant to go toe-to-toe with entire fleets on a mission of approximate genocide.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Hopefully they'll tell us who's writing the new series at some point in the next few months so we can calibrate our expectations appropriately.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    It may have something to do with the users who would've provided that information being banned a while back... I'm working on a project that'll get heavy into the contents of various Macross publications, but we're not planning to branch out beyond that one franchise. There's just too much stuff coming out for every show that airs that I doubt any one blog or site could stay on top of it all. You'd run out of places to store the books you reviewed in a year or two at most.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It wouldn't be the first time Peter Weller played a "dead" man in a metal mask out for revenge... It's a popular trope... it was also used in Warhammer 40,000's Horus Heresy series, except the secret shipyard was built into the (very real) Jupiter-orbiting asteroid 279 Thule.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    AFAIK, Toynami's manufacturing orders were done in the form "enough to fill existing preorders + a few hundred extras to sell on and get us to a nice round number to maximize our bulk discount". I don't recall them ever revising the advertised size of a limited edition run after it was announced... but I confess I didn't pay much attention to the MPC line until the whole "Why we don't make toys for Southern Cross thing first reared its ugly head" around ten or eleven years ago. But we're dealing with the opposite situation to what you're describing. The manufacturer needs to make and sell X many statues in order to keep the price of the statue at a reasonable level to avoid pricing themselves out of the market and to ensure enough of a profit from the endeavor to make it a viable business proposition. If they can't be assured of receiving AT LEAST X many orders, it's a waste of their time. Making fewer means making the individual statues will cost more, requiring the sale price increase to preserve the profit margin and cover manufacturing costs... which means fewer people will be able or willing to buy it, resulting in further scaling back and more cost increases, 30 GOTO 10. They're making very little money on the Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA portions of the license. That said, there's nothing preventing Tatsunoko from attempting to sell Harmony Gold a renewal for Southern Cross and MOSPEADA only and making a separate deal with Big West over Macross... at least, from Tatsunoko's side. (That said, they don't seem to be at all happy with Harmony Gold trying to claim, in defiance of copyright law, that they own the designs of either show and can continue using them even after their license expires.) Since Robotech's merchandising depends almost exclusively on Macross, they're not at all likely to be interested in a renewal that includes only Southern Cross and MOSPEADA. Robotech will likely fold if they can't renew the Macross license, leaving Southern Cross and MOSPEADA in limbo. I don't mean to be rude, but this is surprisingly naive. None of these companies give a flip about the product they're producing or the fans buying it. This isn't a fan-run operation, these are corporations that are responsible to their creditors, shareholders, etc. Like Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, [They're] Only in It for the Money. They aren't going to carry on with product lines that aren't turning a profit, and they aren't going to gamble by making products they have every reason to expect won't sell. That Harmony Gold has not one single f*ck to give was firmly and definitively established a very long time ago. Their own VP of Marketing has, on many occasions, publicly admitted that management is only interested in the bottom line. I personally had a shockingly candid conversation with him about updating their website back in '07, in which he told me point-blank that TPTB considered everything that wasn't directly relating to selling merchandise a waste of time and money. Again, not wishing to be rude, but Southern Cross fans are such a small minority in the Robotech fan community (and borderline nonexistent outside it) that pissing them off is a comically unimpressive prospect. Doubly so when you consider the Robotech fandom's most vocal Southern Cross fans are best known for frequent temper tantrums. There'd be little discernible difference from business as usual. You'd find very VERY few licensees willing to shell out for a license like that. No company wants to be railroaded into making unsellable products. Sentinels is held in EXTREMELY high regard by the Robotech fandom... with demands to revisit and/or finish the series being the #1 fan demand from Harmony Gold and a constant source of frustration in the fandom. Shadow Chronicles was arguably exactly that, since its comic book tie-in picked up right where the Sentinels comics left off (to the extent of literally redrawing whole panels from the comic's final issue) and the "movie" (read: canceled OVA's first episode) concludes its story arc by having the final battle with the Invid from the Expeditionary Forces' viewpoint and the aftermath. (Curiously the revists of the Sentinels invariably purge the Southern Cross designs from the story in favor of MOSPEADA ones.) For the record, Toynami made two Masterpiece Collection entries for Sentinels (a red TLEAD and a green TLEAD) that were both advertised as "seen only in Sentinels" and one from Shadow Chronicles (Maia's VF/A-6ZX) that was the subject of a rather embarrassing recall campaign. Robotech 3000 is... well... a fiasco. It never made it past the first teaser trailer due to the fan backlash against its idiot premise and CG animation, and when it went down it took the animation studio with it. It's not a Kickstarter, it was a thread right here on this forum. And fewer still make products they know they'll lose money on... unless there's a pressing ulterior motive for doing so, like Harmony Gold's money laundering or automakers selling EVs at a loss to ensure they meet EPA and CARB requirements for average fuel economy.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, the Scott Bernard MPC was made between the two reductions Toynami made to the Robotech MPC limited edition run sizes. After the cut from 15,000 to 10,000 but before the run size was further reduced to 5,000. (Then again, I've also heard it said that the MPC line's average performance was about 1/2 of the limited edition run in actual sales.) It makes perfect sense from a business perspective. These companies are not fans, they're buying these licenses because they want to make a profit selling merchandise. They start with Super Dimension Fortress Macross because that's far and away the most popular of Robotech's component shows, and therefore offers the best return on investment. Then they move on to Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, which was something of a distant second in popularity and for which demand is not as strong, and the return on investment is lower. From there, there's the option to move on to Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross... but its very small following among the Robotech fandom, being in fourth or fifth place in overall popularity, means there's no guarantee of a decent return on investment. It's a risk, and since profit margins on these limited edition collectibles aren't huge to begin with the manufacturers are inclined to be risk averse. (It sounds cynical, and it absolutely is, but that's just how this kind of merchandise speculation works.) I mean, look at what happened when we tried to crowdfund Moscato Southern Cross kits for the Spartas and Auroran. Despite a concerted effort to rustle up interest on Facebook and several other forums, we only managed to get about half of the minimum number of pledges (30) to get either design made, and that was with many backers pledging for both. What Southern Cross needs is for some brave or reckless licensee to actually take a stab at it and, by success or failure, test out the validity of the officially-held view of Southern Cross merchandising. If what previous Harmony Gold licensees have said about their contracts is any indication, Harmony Gold usually makes licensees buy the rights to the whole of Robotech in whatever field of merchandise they want to make and then basically leaves deciding the actual product line to them. That was actually the cause of Palladium Books's first loss of the Robotech license, when HG made it a requirement for renewal that they license Robotech 3000 sight-unseen in addition to the three main sagas and Sentinels. I'm not idly speculating, I'm pretty much reiterating what we've heard on the matter from current and former HG staff. Licensees aren't delving into Southern Cross on the American/Robotech side because they don't think there's enough interest for a decent return on investment. That's the reason that was given for Toynami not doing any Southern Cross toys. In Japan, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross is pretty obscure... more a piece of obscure trivia than a well-remembered piece of 80's pop culture. As it was put to me, Tatsunoko barely remembers that they own Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and would likely have forgotten it altogether if not for Robotech. Press coverage of the show has been basically nonexistant since its cancellation. (The only time I've seen it mentioned since was a Macross 10th anniversary feature in B-Club magazine that talked about various shows that were inspired by Macross.) The Southern Cross trinkets on the Robotech store are CafePress-type stuff... print on demand, and never more than a petty cash loss if it doesn't sell. It doesn't require anything like the input of cash and effort or the level of risk involved in something like the transformable toys or collectible statues. Strange Machine Games might delve into Southern Cross if they carry their board game license ahead further, since they're only doing inexpensive cardstock stuff instead of resin/plastic miniatures. They're also doing a new Robotech RPG, so there'll be a Masters Saga sourcebook covering the adapted form of Southern Cross from them as well. (At least until HG's license runs out.) I think our best bet for a Southern Cross collectible is probably Evolution Toy, for the aforementioned reason that they seem to love betting on dark horses and underdogs.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    That, I'll admit, is the one bright spot among Star Trek: Discovery's designs... the show's rendition of the pre-refit Constitution-class USS Enterprise is absolutely gorgeous. So much so that it makes the new classes of ship in the series (Crossfield, Walker, Hoover, Malachowski, Cardenas, Nimitz, Engle, Magee, and Shephard) look even uglier by comparison. It feels a bit like being cheated, really. They've been able to produce gorgeous material all along... but for the actual series they insisted on using ugly, blocky stuff that in more than one case was an actual reject from a prior Star Trek show? If the JJ-Enterprise is any indication, it'd look like a spacegoing Edsel. It hits a few of the same notes, but mostly no. The USS Vengeance never gets treated as a buttmonkey the way Excelsior did in The Search for Spock, and it doesn't seem likely to be a next-generation Starfleet multi-mission explorer when it was set up almost exclusively for Admiral Robocop's preemptive war with the Klingons. A more charitable reaction than mine. My take was "What is this enormous nonsense?" It's just so... fanfiction-y. It's an enormous, super-powerful Starfleet ship somehow developed and built entirely in secret by the Federation's most clandestine intelligence service, more advanced in every way than Starfleet's best production starships, three times faster, so heavily armed it may as well be unstoppable, able to run with a one-man crew, and it's painted all in black because that's super edgy. (Plus the whole thing was kind of silly as a covert project... if you're building a starship to secretly go wreck an enemy's sh*t with plausible deniability, building it to a configuration associated exclusively with your own government and recognizable as such at a glance seems like a really terrible idea.) The Crossfield-class hits a lot of the same fanfiction-y notes with its super-powerful experimental stardrive, secret experimental operations profile, stock of planet-cracking weapons, and its edgy, amoral crew.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Nice. Is there any known event on their respective calendars around the end of September? If they truly are following the same production schedule as the last two times, that'd be around the time we'd expect them to unveil the title of the new series... with a trailer to follow around Halloween.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    It's highly unlikely, IMO. Harmony Gold's licensees have historically used the drop in buyer interest between their Robotech-branded Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA merchandise to gauge the potential ROI for continuing on to Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. Past performance from licensees like Toynami established a base level of interest in MOSPEADA-based merch at less than 1/3* of their Macross-based offerings. With the prospect of even lower demand for Southern Cross-based merch and higher development costs for Southern Cross-based toys due to having to start from scratch instead of copying Japanese toy designs, they usually throw in the towel at New Generation stuff. If anyone's gonna come out of left field and license Southern Cross, it's gonna be Evolution Toy. I may be misreading them, but they seem to like betting on underdogs and dark horses. 1. Slack demand for New Generation MPCs saw Toynami slash its production runs of Robotech Masterpiece Collection toys from 15,000 to just 5,000 units before terminating the Robotech Masterpiece Collection line altogether. Harmony Gold is still sitting on unsold inventory of several of them in their warehouse, a decade after they were released.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I think pretty much all of us are. I grew up on Star Trek and I've been stuck on the same planet my entire life, with a noticeable dearth of faster-than-light starships and green-skinned alien women asking to be taught what this thing called "love" is. Lucky us, Macross's creators have kept the show fairly clean to the point where I don't think it's ever been the target of an outcry from the self-appointed moral guardian types. I'd like very much for Macross to continue with the substance-before-fanservice approach. Even Delta, which focused on its idol group to the exclusion of almost everything else, mostly kept the fanservice tasteful and subtle. They have a golden opportunity to do some early promotion of the new series coming up, since IIRC the Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure BD/DVD release is the 28th.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Clark Kent-ing seems to be realistically ineffective in the Macross universe... though at least Wright wasn't working with the additional handicap of being an interstellar celebrity on top of trying to go undercover on the planet of the empaths.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... it's all but inevitable that a topic about Star Trek: Discovery would periodically boomerang back to the subject of the unrelated* Star Trek movie series and the novel 'verse. CBS's protestations to the contrary, we all know that Star Trek: Discovery is absolutely taking its stylistic and thematic pointers from the movies in the Kelvin timeline rather than any of the previous Star Trek Prime timeline TV shows. Any ongoing stupidity from the Jar-Jar Abrams movies is going to inevitably have knock-on effects for Star Trek: Discovery. Likewise, I think it safe to say that news of CBS's efforts to develop other Star Trek shows will inevitably come up in the course of discussing Discovery given that they'll follow where Discovery has led on CBS All Access and, depending how you want to look at it, they're either coming to fruition because Discovery is a troubled production or because they think it proved that CBS All Access is a viable platform. Same deal with the novel 'verse, since Star Trek: Discovery was part of the licensing SNAFU that nearly lost Pocket Books the license. That and we're all too f***ing lazy to go necro other threads. I don't even want to think of how ugly the Excelsior will be with the J.J.-verse's aesthetic applied to it. Hell, I don't want to see it with Discovery's aesthetic applied to it. U-G-L-Y, it ain't go no alibi, it's UGLY.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    "If they liked it once, they'll love it twice!" Paramount insists they're still going forward with Star Trek's next movie despite two plot-critical characters actors having bailed on the project, though I suspect that's more a bluff intended to make Pine and Hemsworth come back to the table. Normally when you've lost a main character's actor your sequel hopes are screwed. Star Trek is particularly unforgiving in that regard, since viewers are long accustomed to the same actors playing the same characters all the time. I'm more confused by the allegation that Star Trek: Beyond lost money at the box office. From what I'd read, it didn't do great but it still represented a significant recovery from the mess that was Star Trek: Into Darkness. If Beyond really did finish in the red, what the hell is Pine thinking pretending he can ask for more money. Yeah, Pine is definitely reaching by demanding A-list payscale in a Star Trek movie when his only other noteworthy appearance was as Wonder Woman's generic boyfriend (I looked up the character's name not five minutes ago and have already forgotten it). Hemsworth has a better argument, having been in several of Marvel's top-grossing superhero movies as [a/the] main character. He has a good thing going as Thor, so for him Star Trek kind of is a step down.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Just saw a report on my Google news feed that Chris Pine and Chris Hemsworth are both leaving the new movie over contract negotiation issues. http://comicbook.com/startrek/amp/2018/08/10/star-trek-4-chris-pine-chris-hemsworth-exit/
  23. Seto Kaiba
    ... I know you mean to defend the film, but this comes off feeling a bit like "damned by faint praise". I've got a long weekend of PC repair ahead of me, so I may sit down and soldier through Beyond after I run out of episodes of Overlord. Unless you count some of the old storyboards showing the refit Constitution-class doing it. IIRC, the idea goes all the way back to TOS, where they toyed with the idea of having the saucer section be a landing craft/mobile laboratory before deciding it was way too expensive to land the ship every week. EDIT: I think one of the old video games from the nineties let you saucer separate a Constitution-class ship too... I'll check on Memory Beta. That must've been a neat effects sequence, though if one thing can be said of the Abrams trilogy it's that they had a John Hammond-esque commitment to sparing no expense on spectacle... so at least things were pretty most of the time. Style over substance is kind of a bad habit to get into for a series that's normally known for cerebral sci-fi. A habit I wish Discovery hadn't picked up... it makes space battles too tempting a prospect.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, I've read it... translated a fair chunk of it too. I'm usually the one praising it as material that should've been in Macross Delta's TV series, since it does such a good job of developing the Aerial Knights as characters. The scene you're talking about is in chapter 7, on page 40 of White Knight of the Black Wing's second (and final) volume. Keith and Roid bump into an undercover Wright on the path to the Protoculture ruins and Wright's disguise lasts all of two panels before they notice there's nothing coming from his fake runes. They don't make an issue of it because he seems nice. They don't discover the man they met was a New UN Forces soldier until the identity of the pilot who bombed Carlyle was made known in chapter 9. (Trying to go undercover among a naturally empathic species by disguising yourself as one of them is kind of a boondoggle when you think about it.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, but it would have been a more enjoyable movie for all that... Star Trek 2009 suffers from many of the same flaws Star Trek: Discovery does, particularly when it comes to making its main character hopelessly unlikeable. Star Trek: Into Darkness did nothing to improve fratboy-Kirk in my view, and only exacerbated what an unlikeable, unjustifiably smug prick he was in the previous film having an entirely undeserved command. I doubt Star Trek: Beyond did anything to improve that. I'm actually inclined to view Star Trek: Discovery's Michael Burnham more favorably than J.J's version of Jim Kirk, if only because her issues are mostly the Janeway Problem. Star Trek: Discovery's writers can't seem to agree on how to write a "strong" woman, so she's constantly flip-flopping between a standard naive and trusting Starfleet officer, vulnerable flower with mommy issues, and the generic angry antihero (or perhaps villain protagonist). I'll take "inconsistent but occasionally good" over a protagonist who's consistently an arse any day. Hopefully season 2 and some guidance from one of Starfleet's best will turn Burnham into an officer worth respecting and not an officer worth jailing again.
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