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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    As noted previously, it would appear that this latest Macross production is likely operating on similar production timing to what was used for Macross Frontier and Macross Delta. If that is in fact the case, we shouldn't expect to hear anything of significance until mid-September at the earliest. The last two times it was a title reveal in September, followed by the first trailer in late October, and then the cut-down teaser edition of the first episode airing in the last week or so of December.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I could kinda see that... admittedly not because it's not enjoyable in its own way, but because it's so wildly off-tone from the usual Universal Century War-Is-Hell depression-fest that it stands out like a live peacock in a police lineup of thanksgiving turkeys. As much as the Gundam franchise indulges in continuity porn via the Universal Century, I suspect a lot of that inclination to dismiss it stems from it having been decanonized. The UC's obsession with continuity has reached the point that like half of what gets produced is side story material and they had at least one whole series devoted to continuity porn (Unicorn). The fandom does lapse into an attitude that the UC is for SERIOUS BUSINESS and "fun" and "lighthearted" stuff should go be in a different timeline... like what happened to G-Reco. Which makes it all the more tragic that they didn't cast Tim Curry. (His scenes in Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 were him chewing the scenery with such gusto that it rivals Raul Julia's hammy M. Bison from Street Fighter or his earlier performance in Rocky Horror. "SPAAAAAAAAAAACE!")
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Agh... I'm gonna miss it by three days! Three stinkin' days.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    If it's not an imposition, what all did you hear about G-Saviour from the online community before watching it? I've only rarely seen G-Saviour lumped into the same category of celluloid cancer as the Star Wars Holiday Special. Usually, fans tend to lump it in with other quickly-forgotten adaptations that were accidentally funny because they were campy as hell but tried to play themselves seriously like that 1994 Street Fighter movie or Starship Troopers. I found watching the movie to be a lot like seeing someone's compilation of all the overacted live-action cutscenes in Command and Conquer.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Hopefully another 100% original feature that Sunrise can easily disown if it turns out to be a steaming turd like G-Saviour. I'd hate to see them sh*t all over a classic like Char's Counterattack. Never underestimate the ingenuity of fools... mother nature is always building a bigger and better one.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    They even brought a redshirt (or greenshirt, fittingly for Macross) with them in true Star Trek TOS fashion. You could always tell when Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Ensign Ricky beamed down to a planet, Ensign Ricky's wife was about to collect on a Starfleet widow's pension. To be fair to Star Trek, Starfleet is only ever depicted or described as an actual military agency in its bleak, conflict-heavy alternate quantum realities like the Mirror Universe, the Kelvin timeline, or that short-lived one in "Yesterday's Enterprise". (Discounting fabrications like "Living Witness".) They've always depicted Starfleet as an exploratory, scientific, diplomatic, and humanitarian aid agency first and foremost. They moonlight as soldiers in wartime but they're more like a space coast guard than a space navy. They can't deviate from the TV series story too much... Robotech fans are known for being highly averse to change. She could get away with it, since she was only a 1st Lieutenant and chief flight controller for alpha shift rather than, say, the CO, XO, CAG, or some other high administrative talking head. To be fair, he does an awful lot of making things worse before he saves the day... like covering up for Guld's mental instability and his attempt to sabotage the Shinsei team by framing Isamu for an attempted murder.
  7. Seto Kaiba

    Hi-Metal R

    Seto Kaiba replied to joppewo's topic in Toys

    Got in my preorder for Nex Gilbert's VF-2SS early this morning. Not about to miss out on the Macross II love while Bandai's actually showing it for once.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, one of the 5th Generation emigrant fleets... those bioplant ships look like they're actually pretty nice places to live. Not Macross-25 (Macross Frontier) or Macross-29 though. Getting shot at by space beetles or living in a deteriorating city full of rioting Zentradi because the head of state's a ninny who couldn't negotiate his way out of a damp paper sack wouldn't go over all that well with me. Eden was colonized by a short-distance emigrant fleet in 2013 in the time between the 2012 launch of Megaroad-01 at the head of the 1st Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet and the 2014 launch of Megaroad-02 and the 2nd Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet... around 17 years before the first New Macross-class emigrant ship was launched in 2030.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Assuming they're even aware of his incredibly blatant evilness. You may or may not remember (personally, I try to forget) that the "Macross Saga" holdover characters in Robotech II: the Sentinels failed to notice any of the blatant signs of his sinister intent and Saturday morning cartoon villain behavior and evil dialog for over 21 years until he finally launched a coup d'etat against them. Two decades of cackling about how he's going to get those Hunters and their little dog too, and they were still surprised when he tried to kill them. The hammiest villain in Robotech, and that's saying something considering how crap the franchise's writing typically is and its "creator" being a fan of L. Ron Hubbard.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Nah. In order to set a trend, people have to actually acknowledge the existence of the party doing the trend-setting. One of the constants in the Robotech franchise's history is that nobody really takes any notice of its existence unless its owners are actively f*cking over another, much more popular franchise at the time and is often swiftly forgotten thereafter.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Captains in Star Trek go charging headlong into danger to get captured all the time?
  12. Seto Kaiba
    One travesty is as good as another... though Robotech's fans were doing the militant butthurt fanboy thing before it was cool. So many memories... so many flame wars over TV vs novels vs comics, Macek vs Yune, official canon vs speculation...
  13. Seto Kaiba
    One would imagine they would court Big West first for that purpose... deeper pockets, y'know? In the unlikely event that Tatsunoko were to go bankrupt and have to liquidate assets, they wouldn't have to wait until 2021. I'd have to check how Japanese contract law is written to see if selling their Macross rights would invalidate HG's license outright, or if the new owner would be obligated to continue honoring that license until its term ended. I suspect the former.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    The Best is yet to come!
  15. Seto Kaiba
    That's not much of a loss, TBH. Round-number figures for per-episode anime production costs on a typical late-night anime series c.2016 were cited at approximately ¥19.23 million1 (~$174,300 USD), with ¥250 million (~$2.27 million USD) being the typical going rate for a 13-episode series. In perspective, that ¥50 million net loss that Tatsunoko posted for FY2017 is about what they would spend on production for 2 1/2 episodes of a weekly TV anime. (Or, more depressingly, what they'd spend on the annual salaries of 16 animators at the industry average compensation of ¥3.1 million per annum.) Animation is a hard business to turn a profit in, since so much of it depends on merchandising and events. I'm sure they're used to the occasional lean year if they don't have a hot property on deck at the time. One has to wonder how much of that red ink is Harmony Gold's fault, from the arbitration over the issue of royalties and legal fees, and getting stuck with HG's court costs and attorney fees on top of their own because of it. 1. https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/interest/2015-08-13/anime-insiders-share-how-much-producing-a-season-costs/.91536
  16. Seto Kaiba
    The track is "Nostalgia". It's #30 on Disc-1 of the soundtrack CD set Macross the Complete.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    You misunderstand. I'm saying the preview is torture, and I want to know what I need to do to send the cenobites inflicting it on us back to their hell-dimension.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    The UFP wasn't in a declared war with anyone when the Constitution-class was upgraded to have an automated bridge defense system. Also, for a nominally non-confrontational galactic power, the United Federation of Planets seems to be at war more often than not. Just in the overlapping TNG-DS9-VOY era, you had: The Cardassian War (2347-2367) The Galen Border Conflict (mid-2350s, vs. the Talarians) One or more wars with the Tzenkethi (mid-2360s for the most recent) The Second Klingon War (2372-2373) The Second Borg Invasion (2373) The Dominion War (2373-2375) The Borg-8472 War (2374) The Reman Invasion (2379) Precious few were the years when the Federation Starfleet wasn't fighting a war with someone in the galaxy between 2332 and the present day... which gets worse when you factor in events from other sources (the Relaunch timeline): The Parasite Crisis (2376) The Iconian Gateway Crisis (2376) The Tezwa Conflict (2379) The Third Borg Invasion (2380) The Fourth (and Final) Borg Invasion (2381) Skirmishes with every Typhon Pact power (2381-?) Paramount abruptly reversed course on Star Trek: the Animated Series around 2004-2005. Up to that point, the series had been non-canon. From that point on, it's considered to represent years four and five of the Enterprise's five year mission. Surely it was only a coincidence that The Powers That Be decided to canonize TAS at exactly the same time they announced plans to release the series on DVD while Star Trek: Enterprise season five development (pre-cancellation) had an episode under development under the working title of "Kilkenny Cats" that featured the Kzinti and was explicitly billed as a prequel to TAS's "The Slaver Weapon". (The episode proposal got as far as concept art for the 22nd century Kzinti ship when cancellation killed Season Five.) Yes, surely there was no ulterior motive at play...
  19. Seto Kaiba
    It feels like this cover is trying to copy that iconic scene from Macross Plus when Isamu and Guld narrowly avoid crashing into each other and Guld sees Isamu through the canopy of his VF-11 in mid-transformation. (Right before Guld's BDI system goes down.) What puzzle box do we have to solve to banish the preview from this plane of existence? "WTF" sums up the entire series. Hell, it sums up the entire franchise.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    They're not doing a very good job if they are. But the UFP has used them... that's precisely the reason it came up. One of the less prominent additions to the USS Enterprise in TAS was an automated bridge defense system that took the form of a computer-controlled bank of phasers in the bridge's ceiling that would automatically subdue unauthorized personnel during an intruder alert. They show up again during DS9's Dominion War arc as an anti-Founder countermeasure in Starfleet Headquarters disguised as a wall decoration intended to sweep rooms with a stun force beam for the purpose of detecting changeling infiltrators. (A lot more benign, and a lot less versatile, than Dukat's replicator-based phaser units that could pop up anywhere a replicator was and deliver continuous phaser barrages at any setting up to disintegrate.) I guess the real reason that Starfleet ignores the technology is that it'd make so many Star Trek plots impossible if Starfleet actually had interior defenses on its ships.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    ... and several hundred other Star Trek stories, to be sure. For all their virtues, the UFP Starfleet is absolutely TERRIBLE at matters of internal security... brilliantly lampshaded by Worf on Deep Space Nine when he complained to Odo that his quarters being broken into wouldn't have happened on the Enterprise, and Odo immediately lists (from an apparently pre-prepared PADD no less) a bunch of different times that, on his watch, there were either robberies or hijackings of the Enterprise and Worf has to cut him off in mid-list to save face. Automated defensive emplacements would go a LONG way towards fixing that, esp. since bridge chairs seem designed to make it hard to stand up and virtually guarantee the first one who tries gets shot. Dukat's Counterinsurgency Program on Deep Space 9 proved precisely how brutally effective the idea is, having automated defensive weapons emplacements that can engage to keep attackers occupied or wipe them out entirely.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    As far as I know, the Discovery production staff haven't given that question a definitive Yea or Nay yet... but considering they went to the trouble of doing a largely faithful recreation of the exterior and the Shenzhou interiors (apart from the bridge) were pretty similar but without the eye-searing primary colors everywhere, it's certainly a possibility that's on the table. Considering that Star Trek: Discovery is a troubled production that's done a 180 from mocking the existing fanbase to laying on the fanservice with a trowel in the hopes of drawing them back, that may come back to bite them given that multiple previous shows and the relaunch novel continuity play the TOS aesthetics dead straight... the farthest apart of them being over 37 years after TOS. If they're dead set on courting the existing fanbase to keep the show (and CBS All Access) afloat, the visual reboot idea would definitely be counterproductive. It was screwing around with many time-honored Star Trek visual effects that drove many of them away in the first place. Ex Astris Scientia probably has most of it. Most of it was fiddly exterior details and cosmetic polishing. TAS was the biggest interior one, with the bridge gaining a second turbolift, a ceiling-mounted automated phaser turret for defense of the bridge against boarding parties, and a pseudo-holodeck recreation room complete with a strangely prescient the-holodeck's-broken-again episode. They were pretty consistent until Discovery poked its oar in. Such are the problems of doing a cosmetically advanced prequel in a franchise with a purely visual canon. I suppose it could always be argued that the Discovery refit ultimately tried something that didn't work out structurally and they had to put it back. It would hardly be the first time that Starfleet's engineers made a modification that nearly (or actually) managed to destroy the ship it was being installed on. (Paging Dr. Daystrom. Dr. Richard Daystrom, please come to the red courtesy communicator.) If they were smart, they would've made Discovery a parallel universe and then nobody would have had anything to bitch about visually... but they got gunshy after the hostile reaction fans had to the J.J. Abrams parallel universe (now officially the "Kelvin timeline").
  23. Seto Kaiba
    The original Constitution-class USS Enterprise went through a bunch of refits over the years... which were the studio's way of explaining away the various modifications and refinements that were made to the Enterprise studio model and other alterations made for TAS. The Star Trek: Discovery "Will You Take My Hand" CG model is now arguably the first refit that the ship was subjected to, since the pre-2254 Enterprise and post-2264 Enterprise look similar but not identical thanks to refinements made between the TOS pilot and series proper. Launch Spec (2245): TOS "The Cage"/"The Menagerie" spec. (First Pilot) 1st Refit (~2255): DIS "Will You Hold My Hand" spec. 2nd Refit (~2265): TOS "Where No Man Has Gone Before" spec. (Second Pilot) 3rd Refit (~2265): TOS "The Corbomite Maneuver" spec. (First regular episode) 4th Refit (2269): TAS "Beyond the Farthest Star" spec. 5th Refit (2270): TMP spec. "Explosive Remodeling": ST3 "Get out of there!" spec. This DIS refit would be one of the more severe ones, right up there with TAS's major refit, but it's nowhere close to the scale of the 2270s refit having taken Enterprise all the way down to the bare spaceframe and totally rebuilt her. Any classic Enterprise is light-years ahead of Jar-Jar Abrams' "a terrible transporter accident fused an Apple Store with a wastewater treatment plant" Enterprise. I'll be really interested to see what they do with the Enterprise's interior... since the producers INSIST Discovery is part of the prime continuity and several prior shows including TNG, DS9, and ENT have showed the TOS aesthetic really was the style of the era.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    We don't know yet... the USS Enterprise shows up in the last couple seconds of the Star Trek: Discovery season finale. Whatever's going on is sure to be a bombastic VFX extravaganza, given reports that production of Discovery's second season opener exceeded its budget by a significant margin and may have adversely affected subsequent episodes in season two's first half. All we know at the present time is that, after the USS Discovery successfully escapes from an unplanned detour into the Mirror Universe that was one massive and badly thought-out Writer's Saving Throw intended to make the crew look more heroic - or at least less like a pack of Villain Protagonists - by showing us their Evil Twins from the Mirror Universe being so cartoonishly villainous that even Lord Voldemort would agree they're overselling it, a distress call from the Enterprise is received and shortly thereafter the Big E herself sails into view. (Seriously, if they hadn't tried to play it dead straight it would've felt like one of Voyager's The Adventures of Captain Proton segments with suspiciously high production values... that's how far over the top it was.) That's some kinda heresy right there. Plus it doesn't really look that modified... the only real structural differences are they changed the shape of the nacelle pylons and the impulse engines split in half.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It really is. There are a lot of Star Trek novels that have the usual Expanded Universe problem of feeling a lot like fan fiction. The Left Hand of Destiny isn't one of them. It really should've been a movie or at least a miniseries. The Qo'nos it depicts is a lot more varied than anything in the shows, from the less glamorous regions outside the capital like Martok's old digs in the Ketha lowlands, to a bigger cross-section of the Empire's population including the farmers and the poor right on up the social hierarchy to noble houses and would-be emperors. You really get a good sense for Martok as the Klingon Empire's folk hero, like what Gowron and co. alluded to in DS9, and for the Klingons as a diverse people instead of a pack of foamy-mouthed blood knights like they so often were on TV. T'Kuvma from Star Trek: Discovery reads a lot like a less compelling version of The Left Hand of Destiny's antagonist Morjod, who manages a pretty amzing level of magnificent bastardy on his own, never mind what his mother achieves by manipulating him. The original proposal for a Klingon Arthurian legend built around Chancellor Martok came from the Pocket Books editor (Marco Palmieri) working their Star Trek license, and he was the one who was able to get J.G. Hertzler involved in writing them. He put in over two years on them and all of the actual story is his work, though Pocket Books brought in another writer (Jeffrey Lang) to do some cleanup on Hertzler's manuscript before it went to publication.
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