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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    It's happened once before... so it could theoretically happen again. It's all down to whether or not Frank thinks that the Robotech Academy Kickstarter is as big a failure for Harmony Gold and for Robotech as the Robotech 3000 series concept was. Of course, there is the unpleasant reality of starting over. They'll reboot the continuity again, and with the franchise's reputation even deeper in the toilet than it was in 2000 they aren't exactly going to attract people who are qualified to do the job that needs doing. Anyone they got to replace Tommy and company would probably be even less qualified than the already under-qualified trio of Yune, Yun, and McKeever... though I'll admit I can't conceive of a PR guy WORSE than McKeever, unless they find a guy who's got Tourette's syndrome and a crippling fear of public speaking.* * I'm privately convinced that McKeever is the result of a scientific experiment to materialize a flesh-and-blood version of Wally from the Dilbert comic strip. He exemplifies every negative trait you could imagine in an employee. Exactly what it says on the tin... it was a remastered edition of Robotech with cleaned-up video, audio remixed to 5.1 surround and with new sound effects, and "never-before-seen" footage that was really just the footage that'd been cut from Macross, Southern Cross, and MOSPEADA due to 1980s broadcast standards. The Robotech purists hated it... because it dared to mess with "Carl's vision". Quite a few of them said that it wasn't even really Robotech anymore because of the changes. Everybody's least favorite podcaster dougbendo even accused Tommy and all the Robotech fans who bought it of being pedophiles because of the content of the "deleted scenes".
  2. Seto Kaiba
    The hypocrisy goes deeper than you know... because the Robotech fans themselves used to sub-divide their fandom into various camps depending on what version of Robotech they liked. You had the "purists" who thought the animated series was tops, other groups included the "McKinneyists" who thought the novels were the best, the "Spanglerists" who were proponents of one of their various groups of comics, and so on. The funny ironic twist is that it's Robotech's "purist" fans who were largely responsible for a lot of the shrinkage in the fanbase. They drove a lot of the fans of the other versions of the story away by behaving in a fashion not dissimilar from McKeever's antics here. Mind you, those same Robotech purists also took exception to the release of Robotech Remastered, with the footage which had been deleted from the originals to meet broadcast standards reinserted. They also pitched such a bitch-fit over the changes to the "classic" generic sound effects in the remaster, to such an extent that some of these nutters are actually celebrating that the next Robotech DVD release is going to bring back the grainy, cut-up original video and two-channel stereo sound. Madmen... the lot of them. It's the same plane, but Robotech calls it the "YF-4" instead... I'll dig out the picture of the transformation dreamed up for RRT.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    The fighter mode is, and that's why they can't use it... the exact origins of the transformation they designed for it have not been disclosed, but are probably Ninja Division's doing, since Tommy tried and failed to come up with one back in '02. I don't think it would be accurate to call it "new", since it's just a very rough and clumsy transformation of an existing design. That kind of airframe shape seems to be something Tommy's really struggled with... the abandoned VF-13 Gamma fighter was similar in shape, and Tommy had a real hard time figuring out how to make it transform. So much so that I suspect that was the as-of-yet unstated reason that it was abandoned in favor of slapping Super Packs on a Legioss. Fascinating... if only I could figure out why my brain appended "And knowing is half the battle!", followed by the old GI Joe theme to this...
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Er... I hope you weren't too attached to that $20, Mommar, because that design's actually from the original Macross series. All they did was come up with a (very) awkward transformation for Macross's VF-X-4... which is why they can't use that design in animation. They can't use Macross designs or derivatives thereof.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, I'm pretty sure they coined it... it's something they came up with as a condemnation of Macross fans, a way to dismiss an argument that's critical of Robotech, because those often came from people who wanted to see more of Macross in its unadapted form. Wanting to see the originals in their unaltered state apparently makes you a purist, and since it's the Macross fans who are most vocal about that, the Robotech fans basically turned "Macross purist" into a dismissal of anyone who speaks critically of how things are done in Robotech. If they didn't have that persecution complex Harmony Gold has worked so hard to foster, they'd realize Harmony Gold was the one screwing them. Pretty much, yes... if you look at the broadcast ratings for Robotech in almost any of its airings, you'll find that there's usually a marked drop in ratings starting at episode 37 as people tune in and go "Who the $%@* are these people? Where are Rick and Lisa and...". Historically, this drop has actually been SO severe that it's managed to get Robotech canceled in several markets, and even prompted a few overseas television stations to drop the Masters Saga entirely. That drop is also what killed the show when it made its great return to American television in the formative days of Toonami... they hit episode 37 and then the bottom fell out of the ratings. The one recurring theme in every attempt to continue Robotech and almost every Robotech fan-wish for a continuation is that they want to recapture the "magic" of the Macross Saga. They want to see Rick Hunter, Lisa Hayes, and Lynn Minmei again... those other people are all purely collateral damage.* * So much so, in fact, that Harmony Gold has actually canonized the dismissive fan position that the Southern Cross Army was a bunch of incompetent idiots led by a rabid xenophobic micromanaging a-hole. The New Generation cast only got off easy because they're Admiral Hunter's subordinates.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    From the shape, ever since Macross R I've suspected that it's one of the earlier YF-27 prototypes.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    During a conversation I had with Tommy Yune back in '08, he mentioned to me that Harmony Gold had actually made an attempt to "come to terms" with Big West and Studio Nue several years previously. He sort of danced around the actual reason that they were unsuccessful, but what I gathered from his explanation was that Harmony Gold had basically approached Big West and told them that they were perfectly at liberty to distribute Macross in the west... provided that Harmony Gold had absolute veto powers over all licensing and received a share of the profits as royalties for the use of the Macross name and related iconography. In practical terms, it wasn't so much an attempt to mend fences as an extortion attempt. Big West supposedly very politely, but firmly, declined Harmony Gold's offer and thanked them for their time.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    True... but most of them saw "Robotech" and jumped exactly like Harmony Gold was hoping they would, and only later did they sit down and realize "Hey wait, this is REALLY fecking poorly executed". They're the most optimistic fans, who hope and believe that Harmony Gold can change and one day get it right... which, when I put it that way, sounds distressingly like spousal abuse. Yeah, you have to have read Prelude to actually get any information about how the UEEF came into possession of the "Shadow technology", why they blindly armed their entire fleet with it when they knew it didn't work as advertised, and why the Haydonites want to murder the everloving hell out of them. Without those all-important plot points from the comic, the events from RTSC do end up losing some pretty vital context. This is going to be, if anything, an even bigger problem for Robotech Academy in the (profoundly) unlikely event that it ends up being produced. Almost every advertised character and plot point outright REQUIRES that you be familiar with both the original 1985 Robotech series and the failed Robotech II: the Sentinels series. That's one reason among many that no network will pick the thing up if it's made... the simple truth is that, for a proposed new series, Robotech Academy is no ambassador. Unless you happen to be a die-hard Robotech fan, the story of Robotech Academy would be a completely bewildering series of seemingly random events and unexplained motivations.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    As a point of historical relevance, Harmony Gold tried this exact same approach with Robotech 3000. One of the companies that they were reportedly in talks with over merchandising for Robotech 3000 before production began in earnest was Palladium. The version of events that Palladium's fans usually relate is that Harmony Gold tried to "entice" Palladium into purchasing the rights to develop a Robotech 3000 RPG sight-unseen by making obtaining those rights a prerequisite to renewal of their license to publish material for the existing Robotech setting. This is supposedly why Palladium's Robotech license lapsed for a few years after that project sank without a trace. After Robotech's piss-poor ratings performance on Toonami in the 90's, I doubt any network would want a rebooted Robotech. The franchise's track record of coming off a very distant second-best to Transformers or literally anything else big at the time is not something that screams "Success and money shall be yours". EDIT: Pretty sure the guy trolling Robotech.com is Kickstarter backer Rache Bartmoss.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    That'd be why they tried, with little success, to Macross-ize the MOSPEADA setting they had to work with in Shadow Chronicles. Legioss/Alpha's with Macross-style FAST packs, Skull squadron under one of Max's kids, and they even originally planned for the colony ship Ark Angel to transform into something that looked a fair piece like the original SDF-1 Macross. Fans largely blasted it for the blatantly crowbarred-in antagonist, the retcons to "Symphony of Light", the blatant sexualized presentation of every female character, the unlikable new cast, the bait-and-switch they pulled with "Rick Hunter", and the way you had to have read the comic they put out beforehand to have a complete grasp of the plot. In short... been there, didn't work. That seems to be why they're trying to move backwards in time towards more Macross-y eras with Robotech Academy. Considering their past behavior and that even this Kickstarter had as a stated reason that Harmony Gold didn't wany anyone else besides them calling the shots for their project, I can't see them willing to NOT force themselves upon a jointly produced sequel to MOSPEADA.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Kinda-sorta? The Robotech fan base has always ranked the "New Generation" saga a distant second-best to the Macross Saga, to such an extent that the toy sales actually slipped 66% once they started trying to roll out New Generation MPCs and other toys. The fans don't have a lot of love for the New Generation, because the Robotech versions of several characters either ended up more annoying (Mint) or lost something in translation and become slightly weird (Jim, Yellow). The Macross Saga is what utterly dominates the fandom's interests, which is why every effort to continue the series except for the ill-fated Robotech 3000 project focused on the Macross connection. They COULD probably do OK with a MOSPEADA sequel if it were sold in Japan... but without the connection to the Macross Saga characters, there would be precious little to hold the attention of the average Robotech fan. They actually tried that in the comics. It... well... to say that it didn't work and the fans hated it would be putting it mildly. Partly because they flanderized the rather old Scott into a General Ripper type, and partly because there was no connection to all of those familiar characters and settings that the fans care about. You have to remember, for all their noise about wanting to move the story forward, the actual requests and polling data from the Robotech.com forums shows that what they're really after is for the story to move forward, but to keep everything and everyone from the Robotech television series exactly as it was... which is stasis, not progress.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yep... the Kickstarter backers have repeatedly attempted to take Harmony Gold to task over a lack of substantial news, a lack of anything resembling a production plan, pledge tiers whose "rewards" are completely out of proportion to the amount being given, and the utter absence of stretch goals. Thus far, they've gotten nowhere and received only platitudes from McKeever about the supposed "big news" in store, which has been pretty underwhelming. If you're using your Kickstarter updates to announce products completely unrelated to the Kickstarter, like the Robotech comics and art books that Udon is supposedly publishing, then you're doing it wrong. Nah, I doubt they'll continue forward with this after such a negative reception. If they'd gotten say, to $480,000, they might have had an incentive to continue work on it on their own nickel. This is turning into Robotech 3000 Mk.II, a disaster so momentous that killing it with fire will probably be their outcome of choice. (After all, Harmony Gold management was so fond of Robotech 3000 that they'd opted to cancel it TWICE just to be sure.) I don't think there was any ulterior motive behind the Kickstarter, they just saw the frankly embarrassingly huge amount of dosh the Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter raked in and said "Man, I gotta get me some'a that!"
  13. Seto Kaiba
    My initial projection for the end total was $286,912 give or take two bucks... it's looking like it won't even get that far. Over on the Kickstarter's comments, they were speculating for a while that SDCC actually damaged the Kickstarter's chances, since the days immediately following the SDCC panel were pretty bad even by the pretty dismal standards of this Kickstarter's performance. It probably won't help matters that there are several backers at unspecified levels who have announced their intention to remove their pledges if things hadn't significantly picked up by today, as a sort of protest over Harmony Gold's handling of it. Wow... SideKick predicts a 0% chance of success.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Truly, the subtlety of their naming is masterful... my favorite one was Arroq. Yes... "A rock". Carl Macek was one hell of a writer. The downward trend has slowed a little, they're only losing about 2% off the top now instead of 3% on a daily basis... with their projected final total now sitting well below $250,000 and the projected low-end at just a hair over $204,000. Still, the odds that they'll reach their goal have always been pretty poor, though I have to admit that this performance is actually WORSE than my more dismal opening-day projections. I'm a pessimist by nature, it's not often I'm surprised like that. You forget, my friend, this project is being peddled exclusively to people who are in it for the nostalgia. Another retcon and they'd be dropping out, not piling in. There are already several people on there talking about withdrawing their pledges in protest due to what they see as Harmony Gold's chronic mismanagement... though they seem to believe that Harmony Gold might actually learn from it, which is rather doubtful considering the low esteem in which they hold their customers. Duke, buddy, speaking as someone who has actually read (and yes, owns paper copies of) the old Sentinels comics... don't go throwing stones at the Protodeviln. Macross 7's story is SERIOUS BUSINESS compared to most of the crap that went to print in those old Robotech comics. Imagine all the corny, high-camp nonsense of the old Star Trek animated series... that's about the level the Sentinels comics were at when they were being subtle. There are points where it got Plan 9 from Outer Space bad... and that's not counting horrifying nonsense like the swimsuit spectacular. Hell, there were parts where it got so awful even the most devoted Robotech fans wouldn't stand for it. (After having to recall that horrorshow, why do we not have an Exorcist-style projectile vomiting smiley?) I can't believe I was able to get through the entire thing... though it just left me feeling like this schmuck was a second Pizza the Hutt. Someone who'd been taken in by the antagonistic moderators on Robotech.com and turned into a trollish sock-puppet for their derpy behavior.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    I know Maverick_LSC got banned for trolling... thought MEMO got banned at around the same time for the same offense. Kevin got canned for racist remarks, IIRC. I don't think either of the Yunes has made an effort to come over here, though Tommy is still a self-professed Macross fan, AFAIK.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's a Robotech fan reciting the Harmony Gold company line about why they've yet to launch any kind of a successful or commercially viable continuation of Robotech. You boil it down, and with the sole exception of Robotech 3000, it comes down to "the stars were not right". Robotech 3000 stands apart, on the grounds that Macek himself actually a took a moment to admit its concept was a terrible idea that showed they were out of touch with the fans in the foreword of the Shadow Chronicles art book. Some would say that Harmony Gold is very trying. Still, I've heard... and been the subject of... crazier Robotech fan conspiracy theories. According to some of them, I have enough pull at Harmony Gold that I can have them arbitrarily kill off fan projects I don't like. According to others, I have no influence at all and manipulate Harmony Gold through falsified legal documents. The fun part is that both of those came from the same guy and were posted within a week of each other. I think he's still in two minds about how evil I am. Kinda reminds you of the sort of "You don't understand me!" generic teenage angst you get from a kid who doesn't fit in... though if he's been to any of a wide variety of anime forums where fans have tried to pitch the Robotech Kickstarters, one can't blame him for feeling a tiny bit persecuted. I've seen a few where they all but started calling to tar and feather the well-meaning but very badly misguided Robotech fan. Macrossworld just seems to be the favorite target for Robotech fans to project their persecution complex upon because it's high visibility, as websites go. 's MEMO, Mav, and banky so far, I think... though those first two are volunteer mods not actual employees.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    There aren't many Robotech fans who were all that fond of the Sentinels aliens... they had very little relevance to the plot in the old Sentinels comics, and their relatively generic-ness didn't endear them to many. The ones that seem to have been the most popular with the fans were the Garudans, wolf-people who were crazy mystics that lived on a planet where the air could get you high or (depending on the version) give you superpowers at the expense of killing you if you ever stopped breathing it. The old Palladium Books Robotech RPG did the most to sell those concepts to the fans. Throwing the reduced number of Sentinels Council ambassadors into Prelude seems to have been enough to satisfy any desire the fans might've had for the return of those hokey aliens though... and they likely would have a reduced role now that Tommy's retconned in a very WH40K-ish "Don't trust the xenos!" mentality for the Expeditionary Forces. I'll go on record and say I like Flaming Guantlet's version of the Children of Zor better.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    That, my friend, is a male Karbarran. Keeping it short and sweet, the Karbarrans were one of several new alien races created by Carl Macek for the failed Robotech II: the Sentinels project in the 80's. Yes, the name IS a pun on the Care Bears. Yes, all of the new alien designs for Sentinels were that awful, and were all pretty generic alien tropes... your rock alien, your planet-of-the-amazons alien, your conehead alien, and the obligatory sentient robot and anthropomorphic aliens (bears and wolves). That particular torrent of foulness is Karbarran ambassador L'ron... who is, yes, named for L. Ron Hubbard (gag choke puke). Tommy Yune redesigned L'ron and the other Sentinels ambassadors for their brief cameo in Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles, so now he just looks like a bear standing erect and with human-like hands. Those Sentinels aliens were all pretty stupid, honestly... so it's no wonder Tommy doesn't seem to want to revisit them if he can get away with it. He salvaged the Haydonites (robot people) to be the antagonists in Shadow Chronicles, probably because they were also your obligatory "secretive alien" bunch and also the least offensively cliche of the lot. Not since 2006, anyway...
  19. Seto Kaiba
    I dunno, most of the big donors on Kickstarter have come out in the comments section already, including the schmuck who put in ten grand. I think he's just one of those pissed off fans with a webcam and the mistaken belief that people won't immediately troll him on YouTube's comments section. Yeah... trying to make a point by YouTube video blog is pissing up a rope no matter how well-prepared you are, but the guys who go on this sort of pro-Robotech tirade are easily in their thirties. You'd think by now they'd have learned that looking like a slob... and a basement-dwelling slob at that... is not going to get you taken seriously no matter how articulate your argument is. If they'd just tidy up a bit or move their computer to a place that looks like someone other than a crazy hoarder might live there would do a lot to improve their standing. If he'd done a little basic research before embarking on his rant, he probably would've realized the smartest idea would have been to keep his mouth closed, since Macross does have plenty of novelizations and manga and other stuff like that... it's just that a lot of it hasn't been fan-translated.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Because Harmony Gold is pitching this as their way of resuming the Robotech II: the Sentinels story, and they've already more or less confirmed that, until now, the Waltrip bros. Sentinels comics were at least pseudocanon thanks to Prelude. Since this is at best a side story to the Sentinels proper, whether or not it would make any retcons that would affect the primary story is up in the air, though aesthetically they've already torpedoed what human military tech is supposed to look like for their chosen time period... though they've thrown a built-in excuse for some of that in the pitch, since these mecha and ships are apparently disused prototypes that'd been mothballed on Phobos.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    No, they did not. They were canceled before they could get that far... the last issue of the Robotech II: the Sentinels comic series was the same story that was later recycled for the first issue of Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles (quite literally copied panel-for-panel), where General Edwards betrays the Expeditionary Forces, murders Kyle (Kaifun), abducts Minmei, and flees out into space. EDIT: To clarify, the Sentniels comics were canceled before Harmony Gold gave up on comic books, it died as a title with Academy Comics in 1996. A halfhearted attempt to keep it going called Sentinels: Rubicon was tabled and subsequently canceled after two issues under Antarctic Press without the involvement of the Waltrips, who said their planned story was only about 4/5ths complete when it was canned.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Doubly ironic, since Harmony Gold officially disowned Robotech's "expanded universe" titles in 2003 and cited the overwhelmingly poor quality of that licensee-created material as their reason for doing so. They built an expanded universe all right, and then got rid of it when they realized it was rubbish and a massive liability.* Part of me can't really hold his ignorance about Macross against him, since a lot of the titles that would be considered "Expanded Universe" for Macross are not accessible to western audiences, and Harmony Gold has done a lot to encourage its fans to ignore anything related to Macross. * On this, I actually agree with them... having read many of the old comics and the McKinney novelization, saying they were no longer part of Robotech was probably less condemnation than most of them deserved. There was probably an ulterior motive there though, since many of the comics contained VERY blatant copyright infringement including tracing from TV shows and movies, and whole plots, designs, and characters lifted from other shows My favorite is the one where Brent Spiner's character from the movie Independence Day has an unauthorized main character role, though the one with the VF-4s and Captain Higgins from Macross Plus was funny too.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Probably three, if it fits the pattern of the other multi-tube micro-missile launcher pods... though that's a new one on me, since the only VF-0-issue micro-missile pack I have info on is the 8-tube GH-28A that was used on the VF-0A near the end of Macross Zero and that's got 24 (so 3 per tube). 's no problem. Just glad folks are enjoying it.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    That's not a huge change from the last week or so, actually... just on a lark (and because I need the practice building macros for Excel) I've been running my own predictions for the estimated final total and other values, and they tend to be a little more dismal than even Kicktraq's trend-line projection. As bad as it looks that the amount they need to raise per day jumped almost $2000 overnight, that's simply a function of the gap between where they are and where they need to be shrinking. Yesterday was actually better than average for them, in light of the fact that they got $1,822 in pledges. That's $385 better than the current trend-line average of $1,437 a day. (That day that they got only $1,111 dragged the average down a bit.) ... ... ... and now I feel like I need to go take a shower with bleach and steel wool. EDIT: After trying to view that YouTube video, I have to say the only thing that surprised me was that it isn't dougbendo going on another frothy-mouthed rant. I'm not sure why Robotech fans who video blog seem to think that the best place to do it is in their untidy basements. Way to fulfill a negative stereotype when this campaign has largely bucked all the other negative stereotypes of Robotech fans whoever the hell you are, video guy!
  25. Seto Kaiba
    At least the comics will be done at a higher level of quality than the stuff they did in the 90's. That's something, right? Robotech Academy's not going to get made, barring a sudden and completely unforeseen backer dumping a quarter million into the project, so that art book they're talking about is off the table. That leaves them with their supposed new line of comics, their re-release of the grainy broadcast version of Robotech (which is a real "why bother" moment, you can get the old editions off of eBay for $14 a saga), and whatever they might or might not be doing with Shadow Rising. Definitely enough to give you a very distinct feeling that they're just going through the motions. Well thanks, I'd like to think I'm useful for something besides light entertainment. The ugliness bothers me less than the fact that, both aesthetically and technologically, they just don't fit with the period that they supposedly belong to for Robotech. The Predator-thing looks out of place in Robotech as a whole, and it contradicts the canon they had in place before that established that the first variable drone fighter was the 2044-model Shadow Drone. Likewise, that stealth bomber-lookin' recon plane is way too streamlined to fit with the very chunky, blocky designs that were Earth standard in 2015-2044. That new manned VF just plain doesn't fit ANYWHERE (the 2nd Generation rival program was YF-4 vs the VF-X-6) and its designation overlaps with that of an existing design (Beta prototype No.1, VF-X-7).
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