Jump to content

Seto Kaiba

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    12929

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    That's one reason among many that You-Know-Who's proposal for a live-action film will almost certainly never be actioned for production... it's practically begging for a copyright infringement lawsuit by any standard, and it's damn near impossible to determine how far is "far enough" in distancing a project like that from source material they can't legally use. (That's not to say studios don't sometimes do dumb things like proceeding with films that will obviously get them sued... e.g. Halle Berry's Catwoman... but it is a relative rarity.) The Show That Must Not Be Named did it well before then, in actual fact. It was implied back in their adaptation of MOSPEADA, but in the first episode of their canceled OVA they avoided even using the word "Zentradi". They're very much aware of the limitations on what they can use, legally speaking, and it has dominated their creative process since the very beginning (per the remarks of Mr. Macek at a convention in 1995.) Several thousand, yes. According to Records Officer Exsedol Folmo, there are somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 Main Fleets operating in the Milky Way. There were, according to Macross Chronicle, once approximately 5,000 such fleets. They vary somewhat in size, ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of ships per Macross Chronicle. Chlore's fleet was, IIRC, only tens of thousands of ships in Macross 7. She was likely a Direct Defense Fleet commander, since the Macross 7 series treats the SDF Macross version of the war as the more accurate one WRT factions and continuity. Available setting materials suggest that encounters with rogue Zentradi branch fleets occur fairly often and even the occasional skirmish with main fleet-scale forces isn't unheard-of. The rogue fleets don't seem to be regarded as a significant threat, and are generally either destroyed through superior firepower or exposed to Earth culture. It's suggested that main fleets are avoided at all costs, since the amount of firepower necessary to repel one is outside the scope of what an emigrant fleet can provide. (This is probably one of the things that keeps the Federal New UN Forces too busy to intervene in inter-colony squabbles.) It wouldn't really be a new development, story-wise... the Macross II: Lovers Again chronology has it happen with distressing regularity, and by 2092 the UN Spacy there had repelled at least four more main fleets after the Boddole Zer and Laplamiz ones in 2009-2010. They'd gotten VERY good at it, which is one of the reasons they had become so complacent by the time the Mardook showed up. I think a main continuity emigrant fleet encountering a main fleet wouldn't be much of a fight, regardless. If they were armed with 5th Generation VFs the Zentradi don't have anything that can really rival that, and the fleet would get wiped out if it tried to go head-to-head with anything much larger than a branch fleet. (This is why, in Master File's accounts, the military will sacrifice and even self-destruct ships to avoid having main fleets discover the location of emigrant fleets.)
  2. Seto Kaiba
    If you were to ask Kawamori, he'd tell you flat out that the focus has never been on mecha and battles. As he would, and has, put it the focus of Macross has always been on the love story. All that stuff with space battles and transforming fighters is just an expansive backdrop for the all-important romance to play out on.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    The annoying thing about that is the fact that the obligation to have a Jenius in every Macross series combined with the apparent limit of one Token Girl Teammate means that if you want the gals in the cast to actually DO something besides sing from the sidelines your only option is the Jenius du jour. I appreciate that the damsel in distress is a classic storytelling technique, and Japan loves its barrier maiden trope, but I'd personally like to see this setting, in which the Zentradi have all-female elite forces, cough up a few more female pilots. The (New) UN Forces doesn't bar women from frontline combat service, so where are they? The Macross II: Lovers Again OVA and its prequels didn't seem to have a problem with it, and the light novels, manga, and video games that've been made for Kawamori's chronology have cheerfully included loads of 'em, but the animation seems reluctant to include them.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... y'know how artists are sometimes embarrassed of their early works? That's how I feel about those early translations of mine from ~2002. My grasp of the language was still pretty basic, I'd only managed to lay hands on a few Japanese publications, and the effort was mainly a bid to correct the more obvious errors in the Macross II RPG series published by Palladium Books. It made for great practice, though, since the more I learned the more the errors became obvious ones, necessitating more research. By the time I was done I'd moved on to my first self-run site, the ratio of red ink to original text in those books was probably four or five to one, and my players were about ready to wring my neck for constantly fiddling with the stats to make them more accurate. Most of the questions that I spent weeks working on answers for back then would barely merit asking in this thread these days.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's why I wasn't willing to commit to that one as still viable... some bits of Star Trek: the Animated Series fit pretty well without any finessing like the Constitution-class pre-refit USS Enterprise having a sort of proto-holodeck, while others fit rather less well like the life support/personal forcefield belts, automatic bridge defense system, or that 1:1 scale inflatable USS Enterprise decoy deployed from the shuttlebay. I know Star Trek Online isn't canon, so its use of them isn't exactly a fair indicator. (Still, the automatic bridge defense system would've made Starfleet security's job SO. MUCH. EASIER. if it hadn't been abandoned. Aliens beam in and take over the bridge? Let a huge automated phaser turret sort 'em out.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Hong Kong dollars... so it's not as ruinous as it looks, but it's still pretty steep at about $770 US plus shipping (with a $320 deposit).
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not so sure it wasn't a planar field... if you look at the areas where the Enterprise-B suffered damage in Generations the area Kirk was suffered a hull breach across a large, almost perfectly flat stretch of hull right along the edge of the portside engineering section "fin". (The most complicated force field seen to date would have to be TAS's life support belt... but who knows if that still counts?) Nope, your memory is quite accurate... and it appears we've found our first genuine non-aesthetic anachronism. The USS Shenzhou and USS Discovery are about fifteen years too early to have the kind of force field technology we see in the Star Trek: Discovery trailer. The show's set in 2255, when the Federation's most advanced starships were still dependent on emergency bulkheads to seal hull breaches and had to depressurize their shuttlebays in order to launch or recover shuttles. It's a set of advancements in force field technology made in the 2270s and 2280s, with the refit Constitution-class receiving just the shuttlebay containment field, and the emergency force fields not showing up until the Excelsior-class circa 2287-2293. The first chronological appearance of an emergency force field was on the Enterprise-B in 2293.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    No, I hadn't heard that they'd restored the old content... I'll wade into that wretched hive of scum and villainy later in search of those old topics. Edit: Ave deus mechanicus... this means all my old Macross II translations are back in the wild again. Here's hoping nobody digs them up, or I'll be back to getting ten e-mails a week asking how Macross's sequels all fit together.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, so it is. It's hard to see through the VFX of the forcefield but the corridor's mostly gone just past it. Still, isn't this a period in time when they were still struggling with planar forcefields? Even later shows had a hard time doing anything more than simple flat field surfaces or cylinders.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Not anymore, I'm afraid. The conversation I had about it with members of The Show That Must Not Be Named's creative staff was on their old official forums, and has probably been lost as a consequence. (It was one of several discussions I wish I'd thought to save before the site went down.) The intention they had expressed - and this was back when the license was still held by WB - was to have the proposed film be a reboot/reimagining that drew only on those aspects of their show which were not covered by copyrights held by other parties. In short, the intention for that new property's development was to be free and clear of potential litigious entanglements that naturally occur as the result of building a franchise on secondhand source material. (At the time, the man who is now the company's VP of Marketing had expressed considerable frustration that the chain of approvals which ran through their legal counsel made it all but impossible to respond in a timely fashion to proposals for new products or even news posts for the official site's front page.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Based on the available information (some of which comes from Harmony Gold's staff), Tatsunoko is not involved... it's set to be a reimagined version of the R-word plot that ditches all but the broadest strokes unique to the R-word version. (The goal being to separate itself from all of the Macross legal problems.) (Of course, the info from HG is like five or six years old by now...)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, close only counts in horseshoes and tactical thermonuclear devices... she's the first time a Jenius has failed to deliver on the family's promise of awesomeness. Darn cute tho, but I'm more interested in having the gals in the cockpit kick ass. Never heard of it, but then my job keeps me so damned busy it's been several months since I actually turned my living room TV on...
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Can't say I recall the boy band part... We've had some permutations similar to that in the manga and light novels... not quite there, but close. Like Macross R, where most of the cast (soldiers and civilians alike) is female. It didn't get what you'd call a love triangle, though, and the only singer was a retired one who was also one of the pilots. I'd rather enjoy another Macross show like II where we get some asskicking women in uniform instead of just the Token Girl Teammate. 7 did briefly tease a truly triangular love triangle with Basara-Gamlin, shame it turned out to be a gag. He noticed Gamlin way before he noticed Mylene was a girl. A tall order, to be sure... most of the film industry is still struggling with that one. Even the more progressive shows, like Star Trek, have outright bailed on that one multiple times for fear that the writers wouldn't do it justice or it wouldn't sell. (I guess Ouran High School Host Club hit pretty close to the mark with Ranka/Ryouji, who was an okama and openly bi in a comedy series that somehow managed to treat his orientation completely respectfully, so it CAN be done... it's just really tricky.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, I dunno... I don't think having a group with multiple singers worked all that well in the Macross Delta series, and I don't think gender-flipping it would really help the underlying problem any. Macross Delta's cast was HUGE for a Macross series, because each singer needed to have a pilot to protect them, and each pilot had to have an opposite number on the enemy side. As a result, even leaving most of the Aerial Knights out in the cold left them with so many main characters that there was no choice but to leave most of them undeveloped. In Walkure, it was so bad that the only one to get properly characterized was Freyja. Kaname's whole character was built around her being the broken bird, Mikumo was more macguffin than person, and the other two were so irrelevant to the show that their bios on the official website give more than their appearances in the show do. I think we need to get back to a smaller cast, or double the run length of the show like 7 did.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Not sure if she's got a brother complex or if she's just really, REALLY into androgynous guys... she did go for Alto after all. "Females"? What are we, Ferengi? (I mean, yeah I do work with FCA... but not that FCA.) Of the women I know well who count anime and/or manga among their hobbies, most of them are perfectly fine with a little fanservice now and then. I'd doubt most of them would actively seek out a given title specifically for fanservice as some of my guy friends are occasionally wont to do, but I do know a few who would (and do). ... dare to dream. Many are the titles that cater to an audience of women and teenage girls with precisely that manner of fanservice. The aforementioned Ouran High School Host Club has quite a number of shirtless scenes for the benefit of the ladies in the audience, though admittedly the cast itself amounts to a fanservice dispensary in-series (being, well, a kid-friendly version of a host club) and hits a fair number of other for-ladies fanservice tropes being a reverse harem comedy that turns into a romance story. It'd be nice... though since anime tends to play things either up or down for laughs most of the time, I wouldn't hold my breath. I'm still waiting to see if the new Star Trek will back down from what will be its third attempt to have an openly gay character via Star Trek: Discovery. (Just defining what constitutes "respectful" would be a real trick. I mean, on the one hand there's screaming caricatures like Emporio Ivankov from One Piece who is a transvestite based on Frank N. Furter from Rocky Horror but is treated as a respected national leader and leader in a revolutionary army fighting an oppressive world government. On the other, there's your Bobby Margots and your Gaurons, who are generally respected characters in-series and nobody gives them crap for their orientation, but their orientation itself is sometimes the source of humor or horror... e.g. Bobby's camp gay side dialog in Frontier, or Gauron's more than slightly creepy interest in young men in Full Metal Panic!.)
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, I'm sure the fangirls and the doujinshi artists were meant to get a very specific idea about their relationship... ... I kind of want another Macross Delta gaiden manga now, with this as its premise. I can see it now: Darwent Commandery Host Club. Still, how does Hermann fit into the picture? Is he Kasanoda? Renge? ... Ranka? (I don't think he has the legs for that). Keith's already Well Done, Son guy so his dad Grammier's obviously Yuzuru. Frontier went the extra mile too... admittedly more for the fujoshi than anyone else, given that the main character was not only downright traptastic to the point that the SMS Macross Quarter's main bridge crew express some dismay that he's prettier than they are, the movies found time to work a fetish outfit into his repertoire during Sheryl's jailbreak. (At least one version of Alto and Michel's shared backstory and origin of the "princess" nickname is pure ho yay, with Michel meeting an in-costume Alto in Mihoshi Academy's performing arts department and believing him to be an actual and very attractive woman, with the predictable result.) 'course, the Frontier manga and novelization turns the for-girls (well, for fujoshi) fanservice up to 12 and breaks the freaking knob off with Alto being more than slightly too into the girl's role. (I could have lived quite happily without an adaptation that made it clear on no uncertain terms that Alto is an Uke.) Hey, it's a show set in the arbitrary spacefuture... what's wrong with a little Equal Opportunity Ogling?
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Yes, 2022... that is allegedly the expiration date on their Macross license from Tatsunoko per their comments from their last renewal. No idea what the odds are on Tatsunoko potentially declining to offer them a renewal. I can't imagine what Tatsunoko's reasons are for having bothered to renew it the last time. The tiny trickle of royalty revenue for the other two titles on the license can't possibly be enough to justify a call like that, even if they are essentially worthless monetarily otherwise. It hardly seems worth it just to spite Big West for not giving them the percentage of the profits from Macross sequels the courts ruled they weren't entitled to anyway. There has to be a reason, but whatever it is it isn't a business case that's clear from observation alone. From what we know of the legalities involved in what parts of the R-word are legally separate and distinct from Macross, losing the Tatsunoko license for Macross's original series shouldn't actually be any impediment to their plans with Sony. The copyright they have on the R-word is on a derivative work (adaptation/dub), meaning they only own the stuff that wasn't already part of the original. The parts that are their property amounts to little more than some names, some miscellaneous biographical and chronological factoids, their version's macguffin, and some badly-recorded audio tracks. Story-wise, Sony would only be able to use the broadest of the broad strokes and everything else, from the details to the designs, would have to be created from scratch to avoid a copyright infringement lawsuit. The title would be about the only thing left over from the (secondhand) source material.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    As promised, I went through the Blu-ray liner notes... the spec section in Volume 9's booklet doesn't talk about ordnance container variations. The VF-31A writeup in Volume 3's has a good, clear screen capture that shows the ones used by Alpha Flight in the series were outfitted with the same ordnance container that Delta Flight used, with the multidrone charger and gunpod rack. Variable Fighter Master File doesn't show the configuration from the model kits, it shows a couple that are more in line with the YF-30's with the round vs. triangular missile thing that the Master File artists are so fond of. Still a gorgeous plane tho... same with the white-and-gold Sv-262Hs. That's what I was doing... who was honestly going to count the unmentionable franchise's coma when life was good because even they'd stopped caring?
  19. Seto Kaiba
    ... thought Delta was pretty fair on that score, personally. The Aerial Knights were a card-carrying Prettyboy Platoon, and they hit an awful lot of the standard reverse-harem tropes. If they had a short kid, they'd almost be the cast of Ouran High School Host Club IN SPACE. You had the Prince (Keith), the glasses-wearing cold man (Roid), the stoic (Qasim), the twins-who-do-everything-together (Theo and Xao), and the naive rookie (Bogue). Technically I guess they DO have the shota-type in Heinz, so it is the full range if you don't count Hermann. Sure, they're not a walking shirtless scene, but Keith and Roid's interactions were definitely leaning towards "more than just a warm friendship" when they weren't being adversarial. That's fanservice of a kind, right?
  20. Seto Kaiba
    You might want to re-read what I wrote. You'll notice that the scope of the statement in question was not limited to just filed lawsuits... it also included threats of legal action (e.g. cease and desist notices). The situation was Catalyst's artbook first came to light over a cease and desist they received from Harmony Gold, which prompted the discussion that led to Catalyst learning about FASA's out-of-court settlement and scrubbing their plans. (Catalyst, to their credit, handled it with genuine class and professionalism. They seem like an alright bunch, so I'm hoping they come out on top in this latest legal scuffle with HG.)
  21. Seto Kaiba
    An excellent question... I wish I had a solid, reliable answer. We don't often see the VF-31As at all in the Macross Delta series, and even less often in a mode other than Fighter. The one time that I recall seeing Alpha One in GERWALK mode (IIRC in Episode 6) it appeared to have the same set of gear in its ordinance container as the Delta Flight Siegfrieds, though it was very hard to tell since a lot of the container was hidden behind the body. The official art of the VF-31A doesn't have the container deployed, and Arad's VF-31A didn't have the container deployed either in the flashback episode. Master File ignores the VF-31A for much of its content. The only semi-reliable source I've seen are model kits, which appear to show some manner of micro-missile launcher/sensor combo unit opposite the gunpod on the container of the VF-31A. I'll check in the Blu-ray liner notes once I get home.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Pretty sure, yes. This is, IIRC, the third time BattleTech and MechWarrior have been targeted by them in the last eight years. Once for Catalyst's plans to include "Unseen" designs in an artbook being developed for some anniversary, once for the video game trailer you mentioned, and their current beef with the replacement designs ("Reseen"). They've had at least one against Transformers over the Jetfire toy, but IIRC that case is officially listed as dismissed with prejudice by the court.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Yep... though, to be fair, decent writing has been terribly thin on the ground in Star Trek since the end of Deep Space Nine. Voyager's premise lost them a lot of ground when it was hijacked by the network and twisted into TNG 2.0, which even the actors weren't happy about. Enterprise tripped itself up by breaking most of the cardinal rules for writing time travel stories and prequels so badly that several episodes (most notably "Regeneration") resulted in a sort of low-level revolt amongst the production crew. The TNG movies were... well... the nicest thing that could be said is they've dismissed the fan theory that even-numbered Star Trek movies are good thanks to space zombies and then Picard getting beaten up by a clone of himself wearing a rainbow-tinted pleather onesie. The phasers in particular are nice, because they seem to be aesthetically cutting a dash between the multi-barreled laser pistols from "The Cage" and the hand phasers that were used in most of TOS. The overall effect just makes them look like a more sophisticated version of the TOS prop. I doubt it... unless they do a series finale like Enterprise had where the whole series turns out to be badly-written in-universe historical fiction or something like that.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    The short version of what would otherwise be a painfully long and tedious explanation is: "Because You-Know-Who hasn't infringed on Big West's rights (yet)." The-Company-That-Most-Not-Be-Named has, under a license agreement with Tatsunoko, an exclusive license to distribute the animation of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series and merchandise for same outside the Japanese domestic market. Tatsunoko obtained that particular set of rights from Big West as compensation for helping bankroll production of the series' animation back in '82. All this nonsense in the courts about BattleTech and MechWarrior's Unseen concerns international merchandising rights owned by Tatsunoko thanks to the original production contracts mentioned previously. FASA did a very dumb and lazy thing when they were creating BattleTech, in that they went to a model kit distributor named Twentieth Century Imports (TCI) and tried to buy the rights to a bunch of box art from Macross, Dougram, and Crusher Joe kits as a shortcut for designing robots for their game. TCI didn't have any legal authority to let them use that art, or perhaps misunderstood their intentions as wanting to publish an illustrated catalog or something, but FASA claimed they were given permission to use the art and went ahead. Naturally, when their game got to market You-Know-Who got understandably annoyed because FASA was illegally making merchandise using designs from the Macross TV series in the US in violation of their exclusive license. You-Know-Who sued, and FASA settled out of court when it became clear they were 31 different flavors of F****D, and as part of that settlement agreed to never again use those designs, which became "The Unseen". Skip a little down the timeline and they sold the brand off to Catalyst Game Labs, who they apparently forgot to tell about this confidential settlement. A very ill-advised attempt to bring back "The Unseen" later, and You-Know-Who's lawyers were on the horn threatening lawsuits. Catalyst's own lawyers reviewed the previously-confidential settlement, Catalyst apologized publicly for their gaffe, and life went on. BattleTech/MechWarrior and Transformers get a legal threat or actual lawsuit from You-Know-Who at least once every few years whenever a product they put out is felt by You-Know-Who to look too reminiscent of the SDF Macross designs they have the merchandising rights for. It mostly never goes anywhere, because it's either obviously spurious or just You-Know-Who flexing nuts to remind people they still exist. Sometimes when they do this, like with FASA, they're actually in the right. This time, seeing what they're suing over, it's pretty damn spurious and unlikely to end in their favor. I suspect You-Know-Who is doing this to show Sony their CONSTANT VIGILANCE regarding their brand. (No word yet on if their vice president of marketing has created a horcrux or not...) Not quite. Big West didn't lose the rights in court, they gave the international distribution/merchandising rights to Tatsunoko as payment for their help in animating the series back in 1982. The courts merely upheld the original contract between them when You-Know-Who goofed and forced the two companies to review their rights in court in the early 2000s. (The only new wrinkle to come out of that was that Tatsunoko tried to assert they were entitled to a share of the take from sequels because of their role in producing the original, the Tokyo district and appellate courts both said "No" because they were not involved in development... only production.) Tatsunoko licensed their rights to You-Know-Who... a license we're told will expire in 2022.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Sufficiently advanced wood.
×
×
  • Create New...