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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Can't be the not!Monster either, wrong number of guns, among other things. Too blurry to make much more than that out anyway... I can't believe that was the single most talked-about part of the Robotech bastardization of MOSPEADA: Love Live Alive. Pretty sure there's a little bit of litigious paranoia at work there though. Just look at the perverse effort they went to to put every last goddamn Macross Saga character they could "on a bus" or in the ground. Even ones that should have been "safe", like the not!Exsedol from Prelude (who looked more like a balding Grand Moff Tarkin). They didn't even permit Max or "Miriya" to show their faces, and all the reused scenes replaced the Macross and Southern Cross mecha that the old comics originally had with MOSPEADA ones even though it was not actually necessary to do so. I think that's a big part of why Robotech fans are doomed to be disappointed over and over again. Look at the comments over there on Robotech.com, and you'll see many of them mistakenly credit Macek and Harmony Gold with creating the iconic parts that they loved in Robotech. Problem is, Harmony Gold and Macek created very little, apart from a nonsense macguffin and a couple minor story changes... so their hopes that Harmony Gold will one day create something just as exceptional are founded upon false hope, since they never created those things in the first place. So, who's up for a bet? Will Harmony Gold or Creavision be first to "market" with a new cinematic Robotech project?
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Well, in all fairness, the lack of talent isn't something they can really do anything about... the franchise is not exactly in fantastic health, and retaining a studio for development assistance would be right out for the twin reasons of relinquishing some creative control and not being able or willing to spend that much. They got handed lemons, and can do little else besides bitch about it, because they don't have the ingredients, the tools, or the knowledge necessary to make lemonade. The lack of spine, on the other hand... well, they're not really allowed to have spines. For all Tommy's supposed obsession with retaining complete, micromanager-level creative control over Robotech, he's still only allowed to make what the higher-ups there are willing to sign for. Since they've made no secret of the fact that they're only interested in what's immediately profitable, that's naturally going to limit their focus to Macross first and foremost, and MOSPEADA as a distant second. It means they neglect 1/3 of their story, and you end up with a parade of awful, samey bullshit because Harmony Gold is trying to make themselves a non-infringing clone of Macross, with a conspicuous lack of success due to the conspicuous lack of talent or a budget. Nowadays, the appeal of the Sentinels to the majority is because of its Macross aspects... the fans are desperate to resolve the one dangling plot thread of "What ever happened to Admiral Hunter?". It wasn't even all that different from Shadow Chronicles when you get down to it, it had a lot of the same awful ideas and terrible writing and execution, but it managed to do so in a way that wasn't a huge, jarring departure from the established story. (Principally because it didn't overlap with the existing story in any meaningful way.) Have they actually confirmed that that blurry, out-of-focus mecha-bigfoot is one of the ersatz destroids? Because it's missing a few design features here and there, and looks more than a bit like one of the rejected MOSPEADA concepts too. I wouldn't go taking that as an indication that the Sentinels destroids and battlepods are in the clear. All the same, I doubt they'd revisit them out of sheer bloody-minded paranoia.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    So... is this "I need an old priest and a young priest" sort of mercy situation, or a "No ma, yeller's my dog" sort of mercy situation? Therein lies a problem... the Macross Saga is the one that really hooks a lot of fans into Robotech (and, subsequently, into the broader Japanese Macross franchise), so it's also where Harmony Gold has concentrated most of its efforts in world-building. So that's naturally going to be what they're inclined to focus on. Even the new comics, which were supposed to be the foundation of the reboot, couldn't help but leaven the New Generation's one major story with a Macross Saga mini-comic.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Huh... I haven't had a lot of interest in Trek since DS9 ended, but I have to say I am EXTREMELY impressed. I may have to pledge some money to this, just to see what they do.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    You never know... maybe if they make it surreal enough and focus on the music, someone might mistake it for an artsy, Fantasia-style anime film, like what Daft Punk and Leiji Matsumoto did in Interstella 5555.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Well, they didn't do the rabid space lemurs yet... does that count?
  7. Seto Kaiba
    They did that with Britai... I don't remember if Khyron was in there too. More sense if you factor in Palladium itself, who didn't shrink from outright stating that kids born in space had pretty much zero choice other than a lifetime of military service in the RTSC core book. That's verging on WH40K levels of grimdark... God-Emperor Hunter and his Imperial Expeditionary Forces are out there to kill the hell out of the filthy heretics (Edwards) and Xenos (everybody else). I think I favor the Macross 'verse for a lighter and softer ending for dear Yot-chan... as head of the Nyan-Nyan restaurant chain, presumably happy, healthy, and with a family. Man, I was on Robotech.com when the Shadow Chronicles dropped... and opinion of it sank like it was wearing depleted uranium shoes. People bought it, yeah, because it was the first new Robotech animated title in twenty years. That didn't stop them from being absolutely pissed about the content. The unrest over vocal criticism of the Shadow Chronicles movie was what got MEMO and company started on the bad habit of banning anyone and everyone who spoke critically of the project and Harmony Gold. The backlash against Shadow Chronicles depopulated Robotech.com and drove a lot of veteran fans away from the franchise. For quite a while, you couldn't go on any part of the boards without seeing half a dozen threads complaining about the retcons and the lack of original content. Many of the fans who hated it simply aren't fans anymore, or at least don't bother supporting the franchise. Even now, almost every time Shadow Chronicles is actually discussed, the discussion will inevitably come back to retcons and inaccuracies and the flanderization of various characters and how mad fans are about any of those topics. What people are calling for is for Harmony Gold to finish what it starts... they're mad because the Shadow Chronicles, as totally unsatisfying as many of them found it, was presented as a direct and ongoing continuation of the Robotech animated series of 1985. If you look at the Kickstarter comments and the thread on Robotech.com, you'll find that's the recurring theme... they're after Harmony Gold to finish what it starts, not so much to finish the Shadow Chronicles for love of the Shadow Chronicles. Even fanatics like dougbendo couldn't find much to love in RTSC. Harmony Gold's official, public statement about why a follow-up to Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles was not produced is that the higher-ups at Harmony Gold decided to put the brakes on the project and wait for the live-action movie to raise their profile a bit... in the name of getting better investment terms and therefore a bigger budget to make a higher-quality sequel (since even they couldn't ignore the strident complaints about the animation quality). EDIT: Though I must admit I could totally see a creative control issue being involved as well... that was one of the reasons Harmony Gold cited for doing a Kickstarter. They wanted to develop the pilot with complete creative control over it, instead of being beholden to an outside sponsor or network. With the live-action movie a non-starter, they're back to square one.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, the way that Robotech's universe has been set up, it'd actually be hard to avoid it. Y'see... Robotech's setting, especially after the 2nd Robotech War, is something not at all dissimilar from the Galactic Alliance of Humankind in Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet. As a society, it's almost completely militarized. They make no bones about it being a setting where the only real career path open to the children born in space is military service in the Expeditionary Forces, either on the front lines as a grunt or behind the lines in logistical support. The ONLY human civilian in space was Minmei, and she had to stow away to earn that distinction. (And, of course, because Robotech's many contributing licensees were as bad a bunch of writers as Harmony Gold themselves, Minmei was depicted as a DD-cup slurm who toys with the affections of a married man and Rick's homicidal pet Starscream T.R. Edwards.) Little Jason (I think his name was Jason?) wouldn't really have a hell of a lot of choice... if he was lucky, he'd have landed himself a posting in the Expeditionary Forces and died messily on the front lines against the Invid. If he was unlucky, he'd have ended up assigned to the Army of the Southern Cross or one of the first two Earth Reclamation Forces, in which case he's very dead. It certainly wouldn't be an uplifting tale.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Didn't they do that in the novels?
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Not to put too fine a point on it, but that IS their idea of wooing the fans... they've spent a long time conditioning Robotech fans to be thrilled about ANYTHING new with the word "Robotech" on it. They can't use the Macross designs, they won't revisit and finish Robotech II: the Sentinels, the fans hated Shadow Chronicles, and most fans hate Southern Cross and are indifferent towards MOSPEADA... so what can they honestly seek to woo fans with apart from "Look, it's more Robotech... maybe"? They don't have the skills to create quality original material, and even making cheap derivatives of the stuff that was actually popular is right out... so fanatical devotion to the brand name is all that they can really reliably trade on.
  11. 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".
  12. 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.
  13. 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:
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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?"
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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?"
  24. 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)
  25. 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.
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