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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Man, I thought that nutjob got banned ages ago... I guess they needed a shill now that Pizza the Hutt is an avid Macross fan. That's deep man, real deep. Who said that, if y'don't mind me asking? I agree, it's a pretty fair summation of the last twenty-eight odd years of the Robotech fandom. Ever since Untold Story and the Sentinels series went under, the fandom's been involved in a decades-long game of "What if" and finding someone else to blame so they can convince themselves Robotech isn't dead. In practical terms, Robotech is very dead. The coroner pronounced back on 25 July 1986 when Untold Story bombed at its test screening. All this nonsense that followed is just Harmony Gold attaching strings to the corpse and making one hell of an ugly marionette out of it. Nah, a decent chunk of those 2,284 people were non-fans trolling to pull their donations out at the last minute... but when you get down to it, there were about 2,000 people who either cared enough to pledge money despite knowing full well it was damned to be the next in a series of embarrassing failures, who were deep enough in denial to think that there was a chance of success, or who just wanted to find out what happened to Admiral Rickroll Hunter. There were quite a few Robotech fans who abstained from the Kickstarter out of sheer disgust... either because this was sold as Carl's dream was seen as being in breathtakingly poor taste, because they looked at the Kickstarter rewards tiers and went "Aw hell no!", or because they took one look at the designs and said "This is not what you promised". Quite a few I know personally abstained because they took one look at this and said "You're trying to rip off Macross Frontier, aren't you?" The Kickstarter was doomed from the word "go" because it was Robotech, but other factors contributed heavily to ensuring that doom was utterly inescapable rather than "almost inevitable".
  2. Seto Kaiba
    That's why I can't tell if it's either masterfully executed satire aimed at what is essentially an audience that has failed to exist, or an idiot venting his anger at an audience that has failed to exist... it has all the hallmarks of the kind of shortsighted, juvenile, utterly ignorant malarkey that the worst Robotech die-hards often indulge in, but since his posts elsewhere are him taking the piss, I'm torn between saying he's an idiot or he's someone who doesn't realize his parody is going over the heads of most of the people he's mocking.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    's par for the course, I'm afraid. If there's one thing Robotech fans have proven they're VERY good at since the bad old days of Usenet is ostracizing each other over differences of opinion. Harmony Gold's simply invested a fair amount of time into focusing that pent-up binary thinking into an "us and them" hostile mentality toward Macross fans. In the eyes of the fanatics, in order to be considered a "true Robotech fan" you basically have to adopt a mentality where Harmony Gold and Robotech are perfect, so everything that goes wrong is the fault of some outside agency... and lately, since there's nobody to rationally blame except HG's staff, that outside agency is all the people who used the Kickstarter as a soapbox to air grievances against Harmony Gold. That's the problem with satire... at a certain level, and to a certain audience, it becomes hard to tell whether the person is making fun of a group with extreme views or he's as frothingly nuts as they are. If this is satire, he's reached a level where even I have a little trouble separating ironic mockery from frothing insanity like this:
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Seems like the witch-hunt has already begun over on Robotech.com, at least informally. They've got a few fans on the Kickstarter thread over there starting in the with the "if you're speaking critically of Harmony Gold, you must be supporting those lying, baby-eating Macross purists"... unironically. It seems like the hunt is on for someone to blame for a spectacular and highly visible failure.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Quite apart from the fact that he has never demonstrated any marketing acumen, McKeever would never present a realistic failure analysis of the Kickstarter because if he did so he would be forced to identify himself as one of the principal "weak links" that were responsible for the project's failure. His failure to get news on the Kickstarter page in a timely fashion, the insulting treatment of backers over on the project's comments page, the lies, and everything else had a measurable detrimental effect on the backer pledge rate.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    lol, I got in trouble for posting that exact song as the Robotech Academy theme song on the Palladium Books forums back when the Kickstarter was first started.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not so sure... they've been getting a lot of flak, even on strictly-policed Robotech.com. It'd be fantastic if this was the last straw for a big portion of their remaining audience... so many new potential Macross fans who would be enjoying the many shows for the first time. I'm getting warm fuzzies just thinking about it. Seig Zeon! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1381502542/robotech-academy/posts New update.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Now now EXO, they're just embarrassed that things aren't working out for them... though this is gonna raise a LOT of very awkward questions for their next round of convention panels. EDIT: I wonder whose head's going to roll for this.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    This really is sounding like it's going to be this staff's Robotech 3000... a CG-heavy project trotted out to the general derision and scorn of their audience, canceled due to the overwhelmingly negative reaction it received after just the teaser, which they tried to revive in a second, slightly different incarnation before senior management stepped in and said "You suck, we're canceling your budget". We're at the "try to revive it in a slightly different second incarnation" step right now.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    The Kickstarter has crossed an important milestone... They now need over $50,000 a day for the next six days to meet their goal. At time of writing, the Robotech Academy Kickstarter stands $305,436 (61.1%) short of its goal of $500,000 with a current total of merely $194,564 (38.9%). The average daily pledge total continues to hover around $1,400, with a new all-time low projection of just $214,514 if the current trend continues (not counting backers bailing). Kicktraq's low end estimate is a hair over $200,000... mine, based on the current steady trend and the possibility of backers bailing on the KS at the end suggests they'll fall just short of $200,000. Meanwhile, the burning question on the Kickstarter's comments page is "Why so quiet, McKeever?"
  11. Seto Kaiba
    From a personal expense standpoint, yeah it looks like a lot of money. In a corporate mindset, $180,000 isn't exactly peanuts, but it's not that significant an expenditure if you're getting your money's worth. Harmony Gold definitely isn't. Collectively, their jobs at Harmony Gold could easily be done by a single person with a BA in animation design and one on-call attorney to handle the legal grimble when it comes up on a by-incident basis (~$250 a go). Since art majors have almost no marketable skills in the real world, you could probably get one who'd consider it a G.O.O.D. job (Get Out Of Debt) for about two-thirds of what they're paying Tommy Yune (so ~$40,000) and pocket the $140,000 that they've saved by not having redundant staff loafing around the office or trolling the internet on company time making things worse. Get the art major to work from home, and they could even claim a modest carbon credit. Right now, those three clowns are each drawing roughly the same pay that a reasonably skilled entry-level professional might expect working in electrical, mechanical, or computer engineering. Talk about a waste of money. They've pissed away more than they spent on Shadow Chronicles just letting these idiots sit around the office and toss cards into a hat since Shadow Chronicles came out.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Nope... as far as anyone is aware, Tommy Yune was brought in by Harmony Gold as a full-time employee whose principal job was to resuscitate Robotech after Carl Macek and their licensees succeeded in running it into the ground hard enough to make some extinction-event meteor strikes feel like they weren't trying hard enough. Steve was brought in after Tommy (some allege they're related and it was nepotism) to be Robotech.com's webmaster and somehow also found himself responsible for managing all the licensing agreements, and McKeever was hired to be Robotech's marketing director. Of the lot, McKeever's the only one with a skillset that is at least technically relevant to Harmony Gold's other area of business (real estate). If what's been said about their compensation is true, those three are collectively about $180,000 in sunk costs for Harmony Gold on an annual basis. It's a stupendous waste of the company's money on three stooges who behave so unprofessionally that the best thing to do would be to can the lot of them as a peace offering to all the customers they've mortally offended. Even Scruffy from Futurama is more productive and personable.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I'd want it to remain a Noodle Incident, something so improbable that nobody can describe it onscreen. Which is fine, because that's 99% of what they're talking about on the Kickstarter anyway... they've recently fallen back on that old awful standby of "why not incorporate another Macross show into Robotech instead?"
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Somehow I don't think that's going to happen this time... Robotech has reached a level of pathetic so dire that it's honestly hard to respond to it with anything other than exasperation at the "true believers" poor pattern recognition skills, pity for those who bet on the pallet of dog food that was a losing horse thirty years ago in the hopes of seeing something new, and the slight restoration of one's faith in humanity that so very many Robotech fans are straight-up refusing to pledge because they see what Harmony Gold is doing. Reportedly, he has genuinely shuffled off this mortal coil. (One of his friends posted that he had passed on the Palladium forums back in May)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that boy's a real character... he's renowned for what could only charitably be called terrible debate practices, often falling back on that kind of half-arsed "research" and a refusal to acknowledge objective reality when it conflicts with his opinion. That would be why he's generally unwelcome anywhere other than Robotech.com. He was actually a big cause of people ending up with temporary bans on Robotech.com back when that site had actual people on it, because he's so irritating that even people who were quite calm would lose their temper the minute he started offering his unique brand of "help". All the same... there's still no accounting for taste. Some people, like the late khyron_prime, thought Robotech 3000 was the crap (instead of just plain crap like everyone else). I know. I read it while I was in the high voltage lab at work and couldn't help but laugh out loud. Oddly enough, that's a pretty common practice whenever a Robotech fan wants to claim that they've "seen" a show for the sole purpose of belittling it to make Robotech look better (in their opinion). Several of them, including dougbendo, did exactly that with Macross Frontier... which was part of what prompted their bizarre, almost surreal series of accusations that Macross Frontier fans were pedophiles because Ranka wasn't the age the show says she is (in the name of defending Shadow Chronicles, of all the insane things). I've seen them attempt this with a few Macross shows, Full Metal Panic! the Second Raid, Gundam 00, Outlaw Star, Blue Gender, and Cowboy Bebop.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    ... ... ... and now I actually feel bad for Harmony Gold. Now, since Harmony Gold is notorious for their doublespeak and half-truths... does that actually mean that Harmony Gold won't give up on trying to produce terrible new animation that makes them look like the industry's unfunniest joke, or does it mean the company plans to carry on re-releasing the same stuff they've released a dozen times before? Survey says the latter is more likely. Can we Kickstart that? The spontaneous combustion of all of the horrid "original" Robotech material? If so, I'd pledge a few grand in a heartbeat. Most of the old comics are so awful, consigning them to a fire would be better than they deserve.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Let it never be said that poetic justice does not exist in this world. Far from making Robotech a "tentpole" franchise and "fast-tracking" the movie, the last writer associated with the project had zero experience writing for the silver screen and as a novelist exclusively specialized in writing cold war-era murder mysteries about the murder of children in Soviet Russia. The only director willing to tentatively associate himself with the project was an industry virgin whose only experience was directing commercials. Sooner or later, someone in the upper levels of Harmony Gold management has to cotton on to the fact that Robotech just does not attract competent people.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Hmm... not counting a few minutes worth of teaser trailers like the hilariously ill-timed UN trailer for Shadow Chronicles, all they've achieved in going-on thirty years is 338 minutes of animated content. They've produced an hour or two of propaganda that they marketed as documentary footage, but nobody really cared about that nonsense. They've been trying to release some kind of animated continuation for Robotech for 28 years and 7 days (since the failed test screening of Robotech: the Untold Story), and in those 10,234 days they've released 338 minutes of footage. That means the twenty-eight years or so of the Robotech franchise's sequel efforts has averaged 12 minutes, 3 3/4 seconds of footage a year. Currently, Harmony Gold's average downtime between failed attempts at a sequel is 6 years, 9 months.* * Actually 6 years, 273.75 days, but I'm rounding. You have to remember... back in 2007, when Harmony Gold licensed the rights to Robotech to Maguire Entertainment, they were utterly convinced that Warner Bros was going to make Robotech an international multimedia phenomenon to rival those Michael Bay Transformers movies. They thought Warner Bros was going to go whole hog, and throw hundreds of millions of dollars at it for developing a live-action movie, maybe a few equally high-budget sequels, a television series, a line of video games, y'know... all the trimmings. They didn't anticipate that Warner Bros and Maguire Entertainment would treat Robotech like the utterly irrelevant property that we know it is, and generally neglect the hell out of the project while focusing on literally anything and everything else, while they tried and failed to find someone competent to take the helm.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Yep, keeping the Robotech franchise limping along because a few painfully stupid people really want to believe that one day their faith will be rewarded and Robotech will make its triumphant return to... the success it never had in the first place. Hmm... Hey Harmony Gold, why not just cut out the pretense and just start a frigging cult already? You could keep all your nutty fans of the Robotech franchise and you wouldn't be in the way of Macross anymore. You could even apply for a tax exemption! That's gotta be better than you're doing living the lie that Robotech has any chance of becoming a credible mecha franchise.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Someone finally had the audacity to voice the accusations of shameless coffin-surfing with regards to Harmony Gold's Robotech Academy pitch being little more than "Do it for Carl, it's what he would've wanted" over on Robotech.com and said that it was not really Carl's project. He got a response from McKeever asking what exactly they did that was coffin-surfing, and a kool-aid drinker who had this to say: By extension, I think that makes it his failure too... which, I suppose, would make for nice continuity with the rest of Carl's work on Robotech. Still, nice to know that they're setting the stage to sh*t all over a dead man's reputation in six days.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Wouldn't it be a hoot if the $10,000+ backer was also in it for a laugh and bailed before the end?
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Someone already ran through the facts there in a fairly concise and logical way... the problem is the idjuts don't listen.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    No, I've got a lot of experience dealing with Treiz... you'd be wasting your time. Even if you stuck the facts in front of him, as plain and simple as anyone could wish, he'd still deny them and continue living in his little fantasy world. At least his asinine behavior isn't limited to Robotech... he pisses the Star Wars fans right the hell off too.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Yep... because that's all they have left to talk about now that failure is a forgone conclusion. The die-hard fanatics will say that all the fuss about the Macross licensing obstruction on Harmony Gold's part is unjustified because Harmony Gold made X misleading remark, and the sensible folks will shake their heads and try to correct the trollish fanatics. No surprise Treiz is one of the worst offenders here. I'm not sure if it's someone here, but someone DID post the facts... the problem is that certain Robotech fans have been misled fairly consistently by Harmony Gold and volunteer idiots like MEMO about the licensing situation, and don't want to accept those simple realities. It's not a question of enlightening them with the facts, it's a question of wielding a blade sharp enough to cut through a decade's worth of accumulated denial and the misleading remarks and outright lies put forward by Harmony Gold.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    I think we might be looking at different posts then: That was in response to general complaints about how Macross fans supposedly ruined this with their negativity and how mad it's making this one poster that some unspecified individual somewhere is gloating about it.
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