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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Well, I'm genuinely unsure which was less impressive... the opening title on its own, or the actual first episode. Considering it was supposed to sell us on the idea of paying for CBS All Access, I'd call the first episode of STD a resounding failure. It wasn't as bad as I'd feared, but it wasn't anything like good either. It has established a firm foothold in the bleak, cloying void of ambivalence by having less substance to it than Prelude to Axanar. I feel I might have been kinder to it if it didn't have Star Trek in the title, because it really doesn't feel like a Star Trek series. Put some laser swords in it and I'd be prepared to accept it as a bad Star Wars prequel flick tho...
  2. Seto Kaiba
    A lot of western fans hold Plus up as the example of the kind of Macross they want... which is odd to say the least, since that series is pretty much the un-Macross. I think the fact that the two Macross sequels to actually make it out of Japan were both more dark and serious than is typical for Macross probably did a lot to skew people's expectations of future developments in the metaseries. It's rather ironic that western fans blast Macross 7 and Macross Delta while singing Kawamori's praises, when both of those are much closer to the ideal Kawamori was talking about when he identified the love story aspect as the most important, and the space warfare part as merely a backdrop for it. Another thing a lot of western fans do is dramatically overestimate Shoji Kawamori's direct involvement in the creation of Macross stories. He's mainly confined his contributions to series concept and storyboarding in the last several titles. Macross II was a story that followed religiously in DYRL?'s footsteps, the thing that made it seem so out of place was that it was made darker and grittier, and they even hired staff from the Gundam franchise to make it so. It is, essentially, exactly what all the people who want Macross to be more of a gritty war story are asking for, but they don't realize that fact. It is, in a largely literal sense, Macross viewed through the filter of Universal Century Gundam. From a mecha standpoint, Delta definitely disappointed... but it was pretty evident that they were expecting Walkure to carry the show from a very early stage, so at least they hit the nail on the head. From what's been said on the subject, he wanted to do a series about competing flight demonstration teams... essentially a Macross series without a big space war. "In life, each man gets what he deserves!" (Admittedly, plaintext lacks a lot of the punch compared to hearing that line delivered by BRIAN BLESSED! in Blackadder.) This ain't Gundam... Macross is an expensive advertisement for MUSIC, and Delta blatantly so.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    's not exactly a new position of his... he's been maintaining for ages that the original trio will not be coming back, since their story arc is over and they've sailed off into the metaphorical sunset. Somehow, I suspect if she didn't age herself out of the role in the meantime, they'd cast her as Linn Feichun... Minmay's aunt (and Kaifun's mom), who had been an idol singer before retiring and getting married to the head of her fanclub. That's because Shakespeare was shooting for a lowest common denominator... dirty jokes, saucy situations, and depictions of the Great and Good behaving badly know no boundaries of class for entertainment value.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Dunno... there's no rational explanation for it, since the comics are legally merchandise and thus there was nothing stopping them from just using the original VF-1 design everywhere therein.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Um... very slight problem with your premise here. Macross Delta WASN'T panned. Quite the opposite, in fact. The series was very well-received in the Japanese domestic market, and Walkure in particular has done EXTREMELY well for itself as a result of the show's popularity. Its following isn't quite as strong as Frontier's was, but that was a success beyond any rational prediction. Outside of Kawamori's whimsy, if anything is going to set the tone for the next series, it'd be the audience's reception of Delta... a broadly positive one even with the show's flaws. (If you're going to build a show around the music, and the music ends up carrying the show... well, that's just "Mission Accomplished" I guess.) All told, the overwhelming majority of the discontent with Delta comes from the fans in the show's periphery demographic, who've never taken Macross's more lighthearted installations all that well, and seem to keep hoping for something similar to Macross Plus even though you could argue that one was the one that was actually panned in Japan. (The audience has shown more favor to the OVA years after the fact, but when it was new it didn't do so hot there.) So, it's basically up in the air what the next show will be like because for all Delta's success it was not quite the show Kawamori wanted to make... so his reaction is going to be less predictable, if they're still letting him call all the shots. So you're a cranky young guy instead?
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It hasn't actually changed much... you've just gotten older, and perhaps nostalgia has glossed over the goofier moments in the original series in your memory.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Arbitrary, as far as we know... though there are hints there may be some specialism-related color coding. Macross II is, AFAIK, the only Macross title thus far to make the uniform coloration explicitly meaningful with the base color denoting branch of service and the color banding denoting specialization. (They also helpfully have sew-on patches that denote the same information.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, like I said, Kawamori has acknowledged that dropping the "New" was a goof on the staff's part... it's supposed to have been New UN Forces and New UN Government since the last few episodes of the original series. Nowhere that I've seen, no. Macross Chronicle has a thing about certain iconic squadron paintjobs. ... you could've just checked the page for his VF-1J color scheme on the Macross Mecha Manual. Wherever possible, we mark the episode of first appearance and timestamp within that episode. It's after he and Hikaru both get promoted, so Max is a platoon leader and Hikaru rose to squadron leader.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Back in the day? Absolutely not... if Big West and co. had noticed (i.e. had the comics actually sold worth a damn) then it would've come down to a copyright infringement lawsuit. Part of the reason they were able to get away with ripping off so many other titles (including several Macross ones, Independence Day, Ghost in the Shell, and others) was that they sold poorly enough that they were too obscure to draw the attention of the IP owners who could've/should've sued. Less a problem now, since Harmony Gold obtained the merchandising rights to DYRL? from Tatsunoko in the early 2000s to keep Japanese VF-1 toys from summarily torching the prospects of the Toynami "Masterpiece" collection.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    While I'd like to start with "that's the stupid part" there's so much stupid it gets lost in the shuffle... but they didn't need to redesign the Valkyries for this. It's a frigging comic book, and thus legally merchandise, so there was nothing stopping them from using the original VF-1 design. The proportions are all wrong, though, it looks like an old Matchbox toy instead of the battroid from the series. Ave Deus Mechanicus... for a minute there I thought you'd posted a picture of William Dafoe in drag!
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Presumably at some point in the mid-to-late 2040s, when the New UN Government began to devolve more authority to the individual emigrant fleets and planets. I'd imagine that they'd want a different insignia than the one that had historically been exclusively Earth's.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Based on Macross Chronicle, the reorganization of the surviving UN Forces into the New UN Forces began in May 2010 and ended at an unspecified point in 2011. That's when the military's areas of responsibility expanded to include the operation and defense of emigrant fleets. Macross Chronicle supports this interpretation. Kawamori has commented briefly that the reason the "New UN Government" is mentioned in SDF Macross but doesn't appear again until Macross Frontier is a simple error on the staff's part. They essentially forgot about the "New" they'd tacked on after the timeskip when they were making the Macross Plus and Macross 7 series.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Kinda reminds me of Prometheus... in that the only expression the giant alien's face is capable of is the fabled DULL SURPRISE!
  14. Seto Kaiba
    IMO, it kinda defeats the point... the whole thing about the Zentradi in the original SDF Macross series was that they were virtually identical to humanity on a genetic level. It would make sense that most of them look essentially human, as they did in the series, and continue to do in most of the non-animated works. Giving them all an obvious "I am an alien" trait feels a bit off-message. They're working with a limited amount of airtime, so they have to prioritize... Macross Frontier did a pretty good job with its main cast's backstories, less so with the supporting cast for whom detailed backstories are less necessary. Macross Delta dropped the ball bigtime, because its main cast was several times the size of the ones from previous shows without a proportional increase in airtime. Nah, Mobile Suit Gundam: 08th MS Team is too upbeat... after all, the titular team there are operating Gundams and therefore aren't cannon fodder. (Never mind Shiro's Invinci-Ball from the first episode.) If you want to focus on something like destroids, you need the kind of soul-crushing cannon fodder experience you can get from Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO's three OVAs: The Hidden One Year War, Apocalypse 0079, and Gravity Front. That show's so serious about its death toll that by the third OVA a literal shinigami is one of the show's regulars. Gravity Front's first two episodes are probably the best facsimile of the Destroids one time to shine in the Unification Wars, when land warfare robots were actually terrifyingly OP instead of Made of Explodium.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    That's about the only plausible explanation, though it's dubious how he'd have actually known about it since the wars didn't exactly devastate Earth. For the most part it was little brushfire conflicts the local partisans started after balking at the idea of a unified world government. There are plenty of similar conflicts in this day in age, but they don't exactly provoke such an intense, seething, almost self-destructive hatred in people totally unrelated to the actual casus belli. Such an intense hatred can't have just popped up out of nowhere, and as I noted before the one really plausible-sounding theory that he picked it up while wandering the globe doesn't work because it was his reason for running away from home to begin with. Admittedly, I'd also like an explanation for why Basara is so down on the military. It's a real tough sell that he's so stupendously thick that he doesn't realize that Ray Lovelock is still working for the Macross-7 fleet's NUNS, and that he himself is serving as a test pilot for a black project run by the fleet's military brass. I mean, he can't possibly believe Ray just happened to find a custom VF-19 Excalibur set up for Minmay Attack ops. Nobody could be THAT dense and still dress themselves. Likewise, he has to know Ray's a former ace pilot from an elite combat unit, yet he doesn't give Ray any grief for his military past or his ongoing affiliation with the military. ... that'd make him an even more monstrous hypocrite than he already was, which is admittedly a hell of a trick. About half of the Anti-Unification Alliance's major military actions in the chronology are massacres of one kind or another, like nuking St. Petersburg, hijacking an Oberth-class space destroyer and using it to wipe out the Mars Return Fleet, or bombing the construction crews who were working on Grand Cannon II. (We can't count their bombing of Mayan, since that was still secret at the time.) He'd have to have been a complete psychopath to still support them at the time he was introduced in the series... the UN Government's cover story for the disappearance of the SDF-1 Macross along with South Ataria island itself was that Alliance remnants had nuked it off the map, which would've killed his entire immediate family and his cousin. We don't know a lot, I'm afraid... but the UN Government was supposedly a reasonably effective and levelheaded representative democracy for a free society. They did go too in their efforts to avoid the panic that would ensue if word got out that they were potentially at war with an alien military, but in the case of the few specific grievances we've heard the Anti-Unification Alliance lay at their door, the big ones seem to be a mix of simply not knowing what the real reason for certain actions were and a healthy dose of twisting the facts like Nora's claim the UN Gov't stole the variable system from her homeland when it was freely shared. That's why Kaifun's seething, focused rage toward the military doesn't make a ton of sense... we've never really seen them do anything to actually deserve his loathing.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Kaifun and Basara are, I think, probably not really pacifists at all... or at least they're using pacifism as an excuse for their own personal problems. Kaifun's character is, in some ways, even stranger than Basara's. Throughout the series, and even in events set before it, his whole life seems to revolve around this seemingly sourceless hatred he's nurturing toward the military. I've never found any explanation for why he has such a hate-on for the UN Forces. You'd think it was something he picked up while wandering the world after he ran away from home, but his hatred for the military was the reason he ran away in the first place... he didn't want to live near the Macross after his family decided to move to South Ataria. In hindsight, his pacifism, his belief in nonviolent conflict resolution, and even his relationship with Minmay look like reactionary behavior triggered by his inexplicable loathing for the military. He didn't seem at all troubled about compromising those principles as long as it meant sticking it to the military, like his exploiting his position as Minmay's manager to instigate borderline riots or emotionally and verbally abusing Minmay herself when she expressed support for the soldiers and government. The guy's clearly got some mental health issues, but we're never told why... which makes him really bizarre considering how often his pathological hatred of soldiers causes problems. Basara's a bit easier to understand, but it's hard to say if his issues are the result of him having an autism spectrum disorder, that Ray did a crappy job raising him, or both. He clearly doesn't relate well to other people outside of a few narrowly-focused interests, and as part of his obsession with music he seems to have created a pacifist philosophy based on an idealized, historically inaccurate version of Minmay as a singer who ended the First Space War with her songs. So he seems to be living his entire life around that ideal of songs ending conflict, and he reacts badly when reality is unable to align with his ideal. I'm sure, in his mind, using speaker pods to FORCE enemy pilots to listen to his song isn't an act of violence because the songs are supposed to end the fighting. His reaction to having to resort to violence when singing doesn't work in a street fight is similar... he's furious with himself for not being able to stop the fight with songs, and because Ray never forced him into normal social interactions he takes his frustration out on Mylene, who he sees as being in the wrong for forcing him to compromise his ideal. So, I guess I'm saying that both fall short of actual pacifism because Kaifun's just using it as an excuse for his personal damage and Basara's so wrapped up in an ideal he doesn't realize the hypocrisy. When it comes to the actual pacifists in the Macross metaseries, I think if you wanted to relate their treatment of pacifism to the show's overarching theme of communication the way we'd have to look at it would be as a refusal to participate in a meaningful dialog. Instead of engaging their opposites in a two-way exchange as equals they're taking a passive-aggressive "say whatever you want, I just won't be listening" approach to communication or a holier-than-thou attitude. Like how Serge Glass's administration on Macross-29 led the fleet to economic ruin by pursuing a non-confrontational approach to EVERYTHING. Because he wouldn't open a dialog with the other fleets on an equal footing to avoid anything resembling aggression, he couldn't even communicate that his fleet was falling apart because of its neighbors' economic policies.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    The run was reduced several times during the show's planning stages, per Macross Perfect Memory. Shoji Kawamori originally plotted Battle City Megaroad as a 52 episode series, which was reduced to 48 episodes before the sponsor went under. After obtaining a new sponsor (Big West), the episode count got pared down to 39 and then to the 27 because that was all Big West was willing to pay for. Once they saw the ratings from the first few episodes, Big West extended the run to 36 episodes. "Fleet of the Strongest Women" isn't a movie... it's an unaired episode, as it says a title card right at the beginning. Most people lump it into Macross 7 Encore as a result. That's a very recent trend that only really started in Macross Frontier. DYRL? gave the Zentradi Spock ears, but only some of them... most of them had human-looking ears, though the Macross Pachinko Fever animation retroactively gave the original series ones all Spock ears. It was only the Zolans who had the huge, Record of Lodoss War elf ears. Mylene's ears were a bit elongated, but rounded. It feels like there are a few characters screwing up the otherwise consistent application of the ear thing... some of which, I think, is post-facto assignment of species to characters. Even in Macross the Ride, they stick to the earlier ear designs... Chelsea, Angers, and Naresuan all look like your standard TV/DYRL Zentradi, and Anri looks like a Dynamite 7 Zolan. Maybe it's some artist fetish thing, since it seems to be only the Zentradi girls who are getting this elf ears thing, the men in the same shows largely don't seem to get it, and it feels like they decided that Reina and Michael are part-Zolan waaaaaaaaaay after the fact. Destroids are low-mobility cannon fodder though... and if you want to watch a ground mecha-snuff film, wouldn't it be easier to just go put on Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO 2: the Gravity Front? Because their civilization collapsed half a million years ago and they've been on the run from their own creations ever since? Mina Forte may or may not be one, at least, and Mikumo's technically a human-Protoculture bioandroid hybrid I guess. (Or if you want to be annoyingly technical, the Zentradi are based on Protoculture, so technically you've seen loads of them... just, y'know, giant clones of them.) We don't know how the Supervision Army replenishes its numbers... if they're using cloning of their original captured forces then there may still be some Protoculture left in the galaxy. If they're "recruiting" from the populations of captured planets and from captured Zentradi crews, then it's another matter...
  18. Seto Kaiba
    ... you joking? For like the first twenty odd episodes, literally all that happened when Basara went flying out to meet the enemy was the military would try to protect his dumb arse and tell him to GTFO, and get shot down while his self-absorbed quest to ineffectually sing at the enemy distracted them. How many pilots could've been saved if Diamond Force didn't perpetually have to stop and tell the guy to get out of the combat zone? Ah, the beauty of winning the internet. No idea! I want to know whose idea it was to build a Space Moped. Like hell... anyone who's played Mario Kart knows how easy it is to fall off the f@%ing Rainbow Road.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Given that the Supervision Army was made up of spiritia-drained and brainwashed Protoculture and Zentradi - and from an advanced arsenal world no less - it seems likely that the Supervision Army is using brainwashing broadly similar to the Zentradi Army's brainwashing/indoctrination. Losing their highest tier in the chain of command wouldn't mean much, since only the most senior commanders would have had any interaction with them at all and standard strategy would've seen them regroup after retreating from the loss of their leaders. Once they finished falling back and regrouping, they would have gone back to business as usual without a thought for the fact that their mission was an incredibly pointless one. It's not clear how the Supervision Army keeps its numbers up... whether it's cloning troops or it's "recruiting" from worlds it finds and from captured Zentradi.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Basara is really a poorly written character... he's basically what you'd get if you combined the characters of Minmay and Kaifun into one person. An arrogant, self-absorbed, total hypocrite who doesn't mean any harm but is so totally focused on his music career that he forgets to consider the consequences his behavior has on others. It doesn't help that, unlike Minmay, he never grows out of it and unlike Kaifun he never gets ditched by the more sensible people around him for being an asshat. Despite Macross's anti-war message, the actual pacifists in the metaseries never seem to cause anything but problems for everyone around them. The least problematic ones are the Zolans, whose insistence on non-lethal responses only basically turned them into extreme doormats for the whale poachers, and the only member who got sh*t done was the one who thought that philosophy was a load. Kaifun and Basara both used pacifism as an excuse for their irrational hatred of authority, and in both cases it cost a lot of lives. In the case of the ones like Serge Glass, who go full Relina Peacecraft, it always ends badly... he ruined his fleet's economy by being an extreme doormat in negotiations with other emigrant fleets to the point where the previously-violent anti-government protesters came across as far more rational and sensible than him. The beauty of blasting off agaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaain? Just as well, Docker is a prat. They can... just, only when you get Gamlin or Kinryu in the cockpit. Considering the Protodeviln's biotechnology is modeled on Vajra biotechnology... I'd guess advantage Vajra on pure numbers.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Big West is probably willing to settle for less than 100% of the profits, since anime distribution in the west is largely driven by local distributors even today. The big nagging question is if Tatsunoko will be foolish enough to re-up Harmony Gold's license or not. Relations on that front seem to be a bit sour now. The trademark proceedings in Europe aren't viable as precedent in the US, because trademark law isn't a universal right like copyright is under treaty... and US copyright law is written to favor a first use in market condition over actual ownership of the property. The one most likely to do that is Tatsunoko itself, amusingly... they very badly want a share of the profits from Macross's sequels. So badly, in fact, that they not only went to court in a bid to get a cut, they appealed the ruling against them twice (with the appellate court affirming the previous ruling and the high court refusing to hear it). I'm not sure if they just want to be a part of the Macross phenomenon because they feel that they helped create it, or what... but whatever it is, they were willing to spend a big chunk of change to try to get it and have made a point to show they're still invested in the franchise by trying to be represented at Macross events in even a little way, like sending flowers to the recent Macross anniversary concert.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Well, sort of... Japanese business culture emphasizes politeness, which does not always take the form of a constructive politeness. They'll just as likely politely listen to your view and nod along, then with equal politeness either refuse to proceed further or dismantle your position bit by bit at a later date or time in a carefully-worded rebuttal. They can be very obstinate when they don't feel a decision is in their best interests... but, in my experience, they'll be obstinate with impeccable politeness and express their sympathies for the inconvenience.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    That'd be an odd call, but not unheard-of... it probably depends on how the terms of the license are drawn up. Yeah, that definitely makes it sound like Tatsunoko will gain ownership of the trademarks that HG has filed for should the license expire. It certainly reinforces my point... even if Tatsunoko throws HG to the wolves like they deserve, they still have the means (at least in the short term) to insist Big West play on their terms outside Japan.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, to hell with it. Regardless of whether the kit transforms or not. Count me in for one.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, but the point was that we know Tatsunoko badly wants a share of the profits from all of the Macross sequels... and we know they have a VERY effective means of blocking Big West from distributing Macross's sequels outside Japan. Since US trademark law favors first use over actual ownership of the property, all Tatsunoko has to do is renew HG's license or shack up with another distributor and resume the trademark shenanigans. If Tatsunoko was willing to go to court and appeal the decision against them multiple times in an effort to get a share of the Macross sequel profits, you can bet they wouldn't just let Big West go wild outside Japan. They'll insist upon a piece of the action.
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