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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.)
  4. 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...)
  5. 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...
  6. 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.)
  7. 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.
  8. 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!.)
  9. 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?
  10. 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.
  11. 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?
  12. 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?
  13. 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.)
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Sufficiently advanced wood.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Beats me, Macross Delta didn't really leave any plausible way to continue the plot that I can see. We saw, late in the series, that Windermere's forces didn't even have the numbers or the skill to defeat the underfunded local New UN Forces of the Brisingr Alliance without King Ketchup's fold song mind-controlling the enemy and enhancing their abilities... and that was BEFORE they got creamed by Xaos and those New UN Forces. King Ketchup's out of action, apparently permanently, and the only other wind singer in play is on the New UN Government's side. The Star Shrine is disabled. Half of the Aerial Knights top aces are dead, and of the remaining four three are closet Walkure fanboys (Theo, Xao, Bogue) and one (Hermann) opposed the war to begin with. Epsilon Foundation can no longer support the Windermerean cause thanks to Berger's defection, so since Windermere IV is an underdeveloped, economically-hobbled agri-world they have no way to obtain fresh ships and fighters to replace their losses. Since the cat's out of the bag WRT Windermere's food exports being tainted by the compounds that cause Var syndrome, they're about to have one hell of an economic recession since agriculture was pretty much their entire economy. I don't think a Macross antagonist has ever been neutered quite so comprehensively before. What manner of ongoing threat are they supposed to pose when there's a handful of ships and a maybe a few hundred Drakens at most between them and having to resort to harsh language and thrown apple pies?
  20. Seto Kaiba
    They really haven't established that the New UN Forces are corrupt... in fact, we've barely seen the REAL New UN Forces. Most of what we've gotten has been the local boys... the forces maintained by the individual emigrant worlds or fleets, who are organizationally kind of like either national guard reservists or a state militia. They're subordinate to the real New UN Forces, the federal troops who we've only had a couple of brief glimpses of because they don't intervene in inter-colony fighting, etc. The closest we've seen to corruption in the Federal New UN Forces is Latence, an Earth supremacist splinter faction that was defeated by a special forces unit back in 2051. The local troops have it worse, but the only legitimately corrupt one we've seen has been Leon Mishima... Macross Galaxy's troops are off the hook because they were being mind-controlled by the Galaxy executives rather than being corrupt, and Brisingr's 2nd staff office gets a pass because not only were they not up to no good, they tried to nip the problem in the bud before it could even start to pose a threat and ultimately failed because of Wright Immelmann's stupidity. The secret meetings Delta tries and fails to play off as ominous are, on the face of it, mostly the brass griping to themselves that they saw this crap coming, failed to prevent it, and are wishing they had their shiny new countermeasures back in the day. Not a lot of need to imagine that one, it's basically confirmed outright via Macross R... though their sooper sekret tactical espionage action actually involves modded-beyond-belief VF-1s because those things are practically invisible in plain sight now that they're a commercially-available VF. (Hakuna Aoba's VF-1X++ is an example, albeit one modded for racing.) The VF-24, I would assume, is there for situations that require the BIGGEST STICK like Zentradi rogue fleets, intervening when intercolony hostility gets out of hand, and other threats that the proles in the emigrant fleets don't get told about. The YF-19 and YF-21 were designed for a similar operation profile... going into wars with colonists and executing decapitation strikes to stop conflicts quickly, as Millard explains to Isamu when introducing him to the program in Plus. The decentralization was more a "coping with the reality of fold physics" thing... hard to micromanage a force half a galaxy away when it'd take ten years to trave there, and days or weeks to get even the simplest message there. 11.7 light years. Eden is the closest emigrant world to the Sol system, and was discovered by a short-range expedition in the time between the Megaroad-01 and Megaroad-02 launches. It's not even enough range to push the fold booster to its limits, those were rated for a one-way trip of up to 20 light years. The oldest craft we have a mention of a fold booster being used with is a VF-11, so presumably you don't even need reactors that are all that powerful for a short-range jump, just avionics capable of supporting the fold booster.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Well, if that trailer is indicative of the direction they intend to take with the series then I think my choice is clear... PASS. This barely even looks like a Star Trek series at all, let alone one that is supposed to be set just ten years before Star Trek season one. I hope they're not serious about making this a Star Trek war story, because that only ever worked once in Deep Space Nine and the only reason it did work there was because the war-centric plots were heavily broken up by more traditional plots used as breather episodes. By now, you really ought to be able to expect that Star Trek's writers knew better than to grab the conflict ball... every time they try, it turns into garbage as it did many times in the relaunch novels and anything penned by Shatner. Enterprise grabbed the conflict ball for a season and it nearly got them canceled it was so badly written. The part that really has me raising an eyebrow though is the rumor going 'round the net that this new lead is attempting to borrow appeal by way of "Remember the new guy?" as yet another undisclosed half-sibling of Spock's. If true, that punts this from fanfic territory down to bad fanfic territory. They used it when circumstances permitted, and even just mentioning it as a possibility counts... but it was almost never brought up. The phasers and transporter effect look like they're from the right time period at least... but the all-forcefield holding cell thing? That's way too advanced even for Voyager or the TNG movies. They didn't even have holding cells with forcefield doors until after Kirk's era, the cells aboard the refit Enterprise and Enterprise A still had physical obstructions in the doorway. I kind of like the dropping-out-of-warp effect, it looks like it came right from one of the old Probert sketches (and probably did). If they told me this belonged to the Abrams timeline I'd believe it. Problem is, no less than three previous Star Trek shows in that timeline affirmed that the TOS visual aesthetic does in fact come to pass totally unaltered from its 60's appearance. Star Trek: the Next Generation had Scotty call up a hologram of the TOS bridge on the holodeck, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had an episode that was a side story to "The Trouble with Tribbles" set aboard the Enterprise and space station, and the Star Trek: Enterprise series had a two-parter devoted to showing the Terran Empire's rise was down mostly to a prime continuity Constitution-class ship looking exactly as it did in TOS fall into the mirror universe in Mirror Archer's time and being captured by the NX-class Enterprise. They're going to have to do some serious mental calisthenics to explain why the Discovery and the Shenzou look more in line with the design aesthetic of the 25th thru 31st centuries than the early 23rd. Most of the displays and other hardware look right out of Daniels' 31st century temporal observatory. The Axanar fan-film did a much better job of looking appropriate to this period of time than Discovery is.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Shin's pretty straightforward as Macross characters go. Like Nora, the Unification Wars wrecked his life to the point that he defines himself by the conflict. The series is mostly him finding something else for his life to be about besides fighting. Macross Zero's plot isn't a self-contained, stand-alone story the way most Macross titles are. Its story depends on the audience being familiar with the revelations Macross 7 made about the Protoculture's civil war and collapse, and some of the related supplemental materials. All the same it doesn't really come full circle and actually mean something until Macross Frontier. The VF-0 and Sv-51 are completely different animals from the YF-19... we're talking four full generations worth of technological advancement there. They move much more like a modern fighter aircraft because they ARE much more like modern fighters. They're both using overtuned conventional jet engines, and the VF-0 is literally a derivative of the F-14. The distance between them and the YF-19, developmentally, is just about the same as the difference between the first jet prototypes in World War II and an F/A-18. No it doesn't. This is not new... this is right out of the opening narration from the very first episode of Super Dimension Fortress Macross. The alien starship crashes on South Ataria island, the formation of the Unification Government is proposed, and in response wars started breaking out as various groups opposed to a one-world government emerged and it took the better part of the next decade to restore order. Several of the characters in the original series elaborate on their exploits during the conflict during the series. Some of the details given in the official chronology make it pretty clear the Mayan Island incident in Zero was pretty tame compared to some of the other conflicts in the Unification Wars. (No major population centers get nuked, for instance.)
  23. Seto Kaiba
    The mental image I'm getting is hovering somewhere between the utter incompetence of the 21st Century Defense Security contractors in Chikyū Bōei Kigyō Dai-Guard and Shizuru instantly giving Kouji up for dead anytime his robot is shot down in Shinkon Gattai Godannar... and it is WONDERFUL. Does anyone have a mailing address for Kawamori? We need to recommend this bit of madness immediately. Maybe in Delta... but that's only to be expected when singing has been weaponized in the most stringently literal sense like it was in 7. Frontier was much more reserved about it. It has been way too long since there's been a decent fleet battle though. We know they happen, because the Federal New UN Forces are the metaphorical bigger stick for precisely that kind of a thing, but Frontier only really had the last one since the Vajra don't really do ships much outside the movies and in 7 the only real battle where two fleets squared off was the setup for an incredibly lame joke in "Fleet of the Strongest Women". Delta itself kind of makes you wonder where all the Battle-class ships went. The Brisingr Alliance can't have been founded by just one emigrant fleet, since there are over 20 inhabited worlds, and there weren't THAT many Megaroad-class ships built. They should've had a few supercarriers out and about to beat Windermere's head in.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    That's half the fun of speculating! (I've often thought it'd be really interesting and fun if they got away from having the main cast be soldiers in an elite unit and instead gave us the story of the military's incorrigible screwups. Like a version of Red Dwarf for the Macross setting, or a Tag and Bink are Dead-style self-parody. A series focused on the Kakizakis and Dockers of the world...)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Personally, after Delta's overwhelming emphasis on music I'd prefer to see some fanservice for us mechaheads... an animated version of Macross R would do nicely, and maybe result in something nice like a DX VF-19ACTIVE, a v3 YF-25 Prophecy with Paladin Pack, or a Sv-52 Oryol.
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