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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    The propaganda angle wasn't really related to the TV series... it was that the DYRL? in-universe version played up the threat of the Zentradi (as if such a thing were necessary) by showing two fleets instead of one. @Talos put forward a fun theory about the Macross Frontier movies that they were also in-universe propaganda, with the changes in the story being meant to throw all the blame on the civilian Galaxy Fleet executives and exonerate the New UN Forces personnel who'd directly or peripherally played a role in furthering Galaxy's plot. (e.g. Leon Mishima, Grace O'Connor) Almost invariably the official chronologies favor the "series" version of a given story. My guess would be that will probably hold true when we get the next official Macross chronology in, say, Macross Chronicle 3rd edition?
  2. Seto Kaiba
    No, this doesn't set any precedent. This document is just a statement, for the court record, that the two parties named (Harmony Gold and Harebrained Schemes) have mutually agreed that HBS is not a party to this lawsuit anymore and that they won't become a party to it again based on the specific set of claims Harmony Gold enumerated in this specific lawsuit. In short, it just says that HG and HBS agree HBS is off the hook for this very specific set of claims. It wouldn't prevent Harmony Gold from suing HBS for something else, if they found something else to sue them for in a future or current BattleTech/MechWarrior release. This is not a "slap upside the head" by any stretch of the imagination... for HG or anyone else. It's more or less standard legal practice to name all parties that might be involved in the lawsuit, and then later dismiss any who prove not to be involved/liable. That's what happened here. HBS ended up a party to the lawsuit because they were a business partner of PGI and Catalyst's, and HG is now dismissing them... presumably because they were able to demonstrate that they weren't involved in the development of the offending designs. It's great news for HBS, who no longer have to spend flipping great wodges of cash on lawyers and can get back to business. It doesn't really mean anything for the other parties. Depends how the hypothetical agreement between Big West and Tatsunoko is drawn up. This issue with BattleTech/MechWarrior is principally to do with the exclusivity of the merchandising rights, and BattleTech/MechWarrior's unlicensed use of designs covered by those rights. Unless Tatsunoko sold or licensed those rights to Big West, it'd be Tatsunoko's beef... unless the offending designs were in something marketed in Japan, then it'd be Big West's turn at bat.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Really, I'd think the VF-1 would sell itself beautifully well even without that. It's the aircraft equivalent of the slogan they had for the Henry repeating rifle back in the American civil war... it's the plane you fuel on Monday and fly all week long. (Well, more like all month long, but hey.) Plus having an air-to-air gun that doesn't use bullets, high supersonic cruise capabilities, SSTO capability, and an active stealth system that makes it effectively invisible to search radars on modern conventional fighter jets... I could go on. Between Facebook and here, variations on this one usually pops up about once a month if not more often. "Canon" is probably not a word we should be using when it comes to Macross. Shoji Kawamori has little use for the idea of a firmly defined canon, and prefers to connect Macross works with a broad strokes continuity. His view is that all (official) versions of a given Macross story are equally "true", which he has occasionally expanded on by suggesting that all of them are dramatizations of a true history. Big West, the owners of Macross, tend to go a bit firmer on the subject of continuity and favor the TV versions and certain endings in stories with multiple endings when it comes to order of events shown in official timelines. That said, things from the movie versions will usually still be a thing in the Macross universe accompanied by an explanation of how they fit. More on that in a moment. So... the TV series is, you might say, the First Among Equals when it comes to order of events for the official Macross chronology. DYRL? exists as both an alternate version of those events and as the in-universe movie Do You Remember Love? that came out in 2031. The in-universe version is not exactly the same as the one fans have seen though, scenes in Macross 7 suggest that it had a Max-Milia wedding scene and a few other things that weren't in the real world movie. Yep, there's an explanation for that. The SDF-1 Macross wasn't exactly in great shape before the end of the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series, having been shot up pretty bad fighting the Zentradi Boddole Zer main fleet in orbit and surviving the explosion of Boddole Zer's mothership. Ep36 didn't help its state of repair, taking a direct hit from the main converging beam cannon of Quamzin's salvaged gunboat, it also suffered a complete structural failure of its own main converging beam cannon after firing it once, and subsequently took a fair amount of turret fire from Quamzin's ship before losing the right arm entirely to Quamzin's suicidal ramming attack and being caught in the ensuing explosion. The New UN Government decided to completely overhaul the Macross after the battle, and bring it up to the same technological standard as the mass production Macross-class ships that were being constructed in its factory satellites at that time. The DYRL? appearance is essentially the design of the mass production version which the SDF-1 was upgraded to during its ~8 month refit in 2012, being completed shortly before the launch of SDF-2 Megaroad-01 in September 2012. The DYRL? VF-1's different appearance has a similar explanation... the TV and Movie versions were simply different production block variants, making both versions correct. The TV VF-1 Valkyrie was representative of VF-1s produced in Block 1 thru Block 5, and the Movie VF-1 Valkyrie was how the VF-1s looked from Block 6 onwards. EDIT: That said, the creators do seem to vastly prefer the more detailed movie SDF-1 to the TV one. These days, even when a scene calls for showing events from the TV series they usually use the movie version. The one exception that I recall is the model on Ernest Johnson's desk aboard the Macross Elysion, which was VERY badly drawn.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Back when the Sky Angels VF-1 technical manual that cost figure comes from was written, even the newly-launched ATF program wasn't projecting per-unit prices anywhere near that high. A modern fighter jet typically cost ~$28 million per unit back then. The estimated unit cost for the ATF sat at $35 million until a program review in 1990. I think what they were getting at back then, before the movie Macross: Do You Remember Love? came out, was that the VF-1 was supposed to be a vastly more expensive aircraft than anything in the air, at four and a half times the average fighter's price tag.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    A canon is something authors stand behind... a cannon is something you shouldn't stand in front of. In any event, publications like that generally aren't canon in and of themselves. They do make use of production materials that were made for particular episodes but not directly included (e.g. specs for the Enterprise-J), material that was drafted for a series but not filmed (e.g. the NX-class retrofit developed for ENT Season 4's finale and Season 5 prior to its cancellation), and some info that was gleaned from creator commentary/Q&A with long-time staffers like Mike Okuda, Doug Drexler, and Andrew Probert. In some cases, it's simply the only place that info was published outside of blogs run by the respective creators. (The reason the relaunch novels merit special mention is they're the closest thing to an officially-recognized Expanded Universe that Star Trek has... as a coordinated, shared-universe effort that spans post-series continuations of all five Star Trek series with at least some official guidance.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Originally, the VF-4 was just "VF-4". Best Hit Series: Macross Flash Back 2012 Graffiti refers to it at one point as "VF-4 Valkyrie" (pg25, in the bottom right corner) but otherwise refers to it only as the VF-4. IIRC, the first time the VF-4 was given a proper name was in Masaya's 1992 TRPG and Macross II: Lovers Again prequel story Macross: Eternal Love Song. The name it was given for that game was VF-4 Siren. (Prior to 1994, new VF designs were principally given mythological reference names as in the case of the VF-X3 Medusa from Macross: Remember Me, or the VF-2JA Icarus from Macross II: Lovers Again itself.) I'm not sure when precisely the "Lightning" name was first applied to the VF-4. The oldest book in my collection that refers to the VF-4 as "Lightning" rather than "Lightning III" is This is Animation Special: Macross Plus (OVA ver.) from 1995. The earlier Bandai Entertainment Bible volumes (#27 and #51) don't name the VF-4 at all. The Variable Fighters Aero Report article in the book briefly covers the VF-4 and refers to it only as "Lightning". The "Lightning III" version of the name came in with Macross Digital Mission VF-X in 1997, which was the debut of its Kawamori-designed transformation as well. The reason for the name change was a real world development, but it wasn't because of the Joint Strike Fighter program. It was Lockheed's YF-22 prototype in the US's Advanced Tactical Fighter program in the early 90's. Presumably the Lockheed YF-22. It was semi-officially known as the Lightning II during testing in 1990 until the rollout of the first few F-22A and F-22B units in April 1997 when they were formally named F-22 Raptor. The VF-4 would probably be Lightning II if only Macross Digital Mission VF-X hadn't come out a bit over a month before the F-22's rollout and official naming. I don't know if the question was ever directly addressed, but it ought to have. Macross's version of Earth history is basically the same as ours until mid-July 1999. The US's ATF program kicked off in 1981 and had competing prototypes in 1990-1991, and trial production models were already flying by the end of 1997. Whether anyone else got their 5th Generation fighter jet development off the ground before OTM made it irrelevant is anyone's guess... but it seems unlikely. Apart from some failed programs the Russians had going in the 90's that were all superseded by the PAK FA program in 2001, no other country even started their 5th Generation development prior to 1999. Presumably widespread adoption of 5th Generation fighter jets was scrubbed in favor of adopting OTM updates to existing 4th Generation models after the formation of the Unification Government and the kickoff of the 1st Generation Variable Fighter development that led to the VF-0, Sv-51, VF-1, and Sv-52.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, Doug Drexler and Mark Rademaker really knocked it out of the park... though considering the other stuff that was on tap for Season 5 like trying to reuse the Kzinti from the Star Trek cartoon or revealing that T'Pol's emotional control problem is down to her dad being a Romulan sleeper agent, it's probably for the best it never got used. The refit NX-class does feature prominently in the Star Trek: Enterprise relaunch continuity though, as the first new starship class of the freshly-founded UFP. The writers contradict the 2011 Ships of the Line calendar by asserting NX-01 was too badly damaged in the Romulan War to be upgraded, so in that version it's the last surviving NX-class (NX-06 Endeavour) that is the first Columbia-class ship and the Federation's first flagship under Captain T'Pol. (Much fuss gets made over both some of the design compromises like moving the launch bay to make room for the "neck", and getting a number of alien systems like Andorian shields, Vulcan tractor beams, etc. to play nice with each other.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, that's a different user (yui1107). This, at least, is purely a Macross petition. This one's addressed to Kawamori, intended to persuade him to revisit and redo the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series with modern animation technology and techniques (ala Gundam: the Origin?).
  9. Seto Kaiba
    They both link to the same change.org petition.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    D'you reckon there's any kind of contractual language preventing Zachary Quinto from reprising his role as young Spock in Paramount's Star Trek movie reboot trilogy? Seems a waste to recast when there's already a prominently known "young Spock" actor out there.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Wherever that's going, it can't possibly end up weirder than Dan Abnett and Ian Edington's Pike-centric Star Trek: the Early Voyages comic. They did come up with some interesting stuff in that series before it got canceled though, like the USS Enterprise stumbling onto a surviving colony of pre-Surak Vulcans who still had starship-grade psionic weapons (like the anti-personnel one in TNG's "Gambit"), or the TOS-styled version of the Miranda-class.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Just in case this wasn't confusing or frustrating enough, available records indicate that commercial first aired in 1985... after Hasbro and Toei/Sunbow redesigned and reintroduced Jetfire as Skyfire "for legal reasons" (in "Fire in the Sky", which aired on 8 Dec 1984). EDIT: Which, in hindsight, would tend to rule out the theory that Hasbro went into it with foreknowledge that they couldn't use the Jetfire design in animation.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    During the One Year War, as long as your surname wasn't "Zabi" Char/Casval was depicted as a reasonably honorable, competent, and caring commander in the Principality's armed forces. He cared enough about his subordinates to not only try to prevent them from making potentially fatal errors, but also to at least try to rescue them when possible. Unlike a LOT of Zeon soldiers he treated civilians and even enemy soldiers with respect and dignity, he never engaged in the kind of gleeful killing of noncoms that the Zabis did, and he was forthright enough to even basically give Kycilia a warning as to his intentions. (Grudge notwithstanding, he seemed to actually genuinely like and/or respect the few Zabis who were decent people like Garma and Dozle.) He was still a bad guy, but he was a bad guy with some actual standards in a series where most Principality soldiers were cackling puppy-kickers or at least the kind of a-hole who'd hit a woman. It's not a petty grudge, he goes straight-up thermonuclear when he discovers Haman is using Mineva as a puppet in the hopes of rebuilding the Principality of Zeon. That's one of the signs that Char/Quattro hasn't jumped off the slippery slope yet like he does in Char's Counterattack. He spends almost the entire first two-thirds of the series trying to advise people in ways that will prevent them from repeating his mistakes as Char. His treatment of Mineva is basically a "oh come on, this one hasn't even DONE anything don't turn her into another one I'll have to do away with!". Yeah, by Char's Counterattack Char has jumped off the slippery slope completely thanks to his frustration with the Earth Federation's corruption and his kooky dad's ideals being held up by biases against spacenoids. He's reached his personal despair event horizon, and is basically crafting one elaborate do-or-die scenario where either his ideals triumph or he's put out of his misery by Amuro. You get the feeling he knows he's suffered moral decay to the point of acting like Gihren Lite, and wants someone to stop him.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Does anyone else hear that noise? The one that sounds like terrified screaming?
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Tatsunoko's actual stated grievances in the arbitration that the lawsuit spun off from were more to the tune of Tatsunoko thinking Harmony Gold was shorting them on royalties owed for the usage of Macross, Southern Cross, and MOSPEADA in the home video and streaming markets. (Harmony Gold counterclaim being that they were actually allowed to deduct legal fees from the various brand protection lawsuits from royalties owed.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Perhaps not an actual lawsuit in court, but it's possible there was a sealed arbitration or an exchange of cease-and-desists. The "production bible" used by the staff of the Transformers cartoon mentions that Jetfire's design was changed for "legal reasons", but no specifics are given as to what the "legal reasons" were for redesigning Jetfire in the eleven month period between HG acquiring their license to the SDF Macross merchandising rights and Jetfire/Skyfire's first appearance in the cartoon. It's a popular theory among Transformers fans that the change was to avoid a legal fight with HG, but nobody aside from one staffer has commented, and only to affirm that there were "legal reasons" for the change.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Not quite everything. Section 2b says that, on expiration of the license, Harmony Gold USA may no longer use or exploit derivative works produced under the license [using/based on] the works licensed from Tatsunoko. Section 2c is the one that answers Focslain's question, indicating that all copyrights, trademarks, etc. on the original shows Harmony Gold held or filed for under license revert to Tatsunoko. In short, the only parts of Robotech that Harmony Gold will retain access to once the license is up are the parts that were 100% their own original creation. Anything that was simply adapted from the shows licensed to them by Tatsunoko is off the table and owned by Tatsunoko. New material HG created would be owned by HG, but the parts that are based on the shows would be unusable due to being based on a property HG no longer has access to. At the end of the day, all they'd be left with animation-wise is Robotech 3000, the only 100% original work they had. They might still be able to use the names they changed, the show's macguffin, and some of the setting details HG came up with themselves. Pretty much.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Tatsunoko has the international distribution and merchandising rights to Super Dimension Fortress Macross, and the international merchandising rights to Macross: Do You Remember Love?. (Harmony Gold only added the DYRL? merch rights to the scope of its license in the early 2000s, in their bid to stop the higher-quality imported Macross VF-1 toys from competing with their Toynami VF-1 MPCs.) The reason the sequels aren't being released here is the trademarks that HG filed for on Macross's logo and several key terms and symbols like the UN Forces roundel and "UN SPACY", which allow them to block pretty much all Macross licensing by threatening to sue for trademark infringement.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Of course Harmony Gold's Robotech staff are publicly acting like renewing the license is a foregone conclusion... they're literally not allowed not to. The company's default PR strategy when it comes to anything remotely negative is to deny and keep denying even after the truth becomes comically obvious. There are some examples where the truth came out almost 25 years ago and they STILL deny it to the hilt in public appearances. Mark my words, if they're not able to renew the license they'll do the exact same thing Palladium Books did when Harmony Gold yanked their Robotech license. They'll deny anything is amiss and categorically insist that all is well, to the extent of forcibly silencing anyone who claims otherwise from any of their online communities, until just before the license's term expires. Then they'll act like the loss of the license is a brand new stunning development, clearance their leftover inventory, and become mysteriously unavailable until the dust settles. Not to mention Tatsunoko's been spotted extending an olive branch to Big West at events in Japan. If Big West offered Tatsunoko a percentage in exchange for yanking HG's license, I don't doubt for a second they'd jump at the chance. They wanted it badly enough to sue for it back in the early 2000s.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    IF they're following the same release cadence as the last two shows, yeah.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Assuming they're unable to negotiate a renewal, yes. A few years ago, renewal would've seemed pretty likely. Now that relations are souring between Harmony Gold and Tatsunoko, and Tatsunoko is under new management, there's a fair chance it really will end up not getting renewed since Tatsunoko is seemingly feeling sufficiently hard done by over the matter of royalties to blow off an arbitration settlement order to pay Harmony Gold's legal fees.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    That's what the topic post says, yeah... possibly the same technicality is in play that was used in the cases of Macross Frontier and Macross Delta, where a cut-down promo/teaser version of its first episode gets aired in the last week or so of December before the series proper starts airing the first week in April of the following year. For Macross Frontier, the "Deculture Edition" of the first episode was the only part of the series that aired in 2007 (on December 23rd and 28th). The series proper didn't start airing until 3 April 2008. For Macross Delta, the Mission 0.89 cut of the first episode was the only part of the series to air in 2015 (on December 31st no less). The series proper started airing 3 April 2016.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    That'd have to be referring to the original G1 Transformers Jetfire toy having been a redeco of the Takatoku Toys 1/55 VF-1S Valkyrie. All I've ever seen from Hasbro WRT the reason the G1 series staff were instructed not to use Jetfire and eventually replaced him with Skyfire was a non-specific "for legal reasons".
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Or, alternatively, just hire Mikimoto some extra help so he can carry the Mobile Suit Gundam: Ecole du Ciel and Macross the First at the same time. The backgrounds and mecha are drawn to a pretty high level of detail, so that's probably where a good portion of the production time goes on each chapter. Isn't that more a "never subtitle an OP/ED song" rule? I know I've seen at least one title on there in which songs sung by characters in the episode proper were subtitled. Considering they're one of the biggest, if not THE biggest, simulcast streaming outfit handling anime properties for the US, they'd be the most likely candidate.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Nothing yet, AFAIK. If the production of the new series is running on a similar timetable to what was done for Macross Frontier and Macross Delta, we probably won't see any real news until September or October, with the reveal of the new show's title and the first teaser trailer.
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