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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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.
  2. 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?"
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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?"
  6. 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)
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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?
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Someone already ran through the facts there in a fairly concise and logical way... the problem is the idjuts don't listen.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, the general tone of his post was more "it's their fault, but be the bigger man and don't hassle them for it". Still, if Harmony Gold was going to admit fault here, that'd complete the parallel to Robotech 3000... a heavily CG project where the fans hated the whole concept and rebelled against it so vocally that the project was canned and Harmony Gold had to admit that the fault lay with them for a terrible idea being terribly executed. If Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles was Tommy's Sentinels (a "movie" that was really an aborted project) then I guess that would make Robotech Academy Tommy's Robotech 3000. Now if only Frank would repeat what HG did after 3000 went under and fire the lot of them... I love the replies from the fans... it seems that the only one he's fooling is himself, and that's only a maybe. There's gonna be a lot of recrimination next year when they'll have effectively gone for eight years without releasing anything of consequence. The 30th Anniversary's gonna be an even bigger letdown than the 25th was for them.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    It's surprisingly easy to get used to... I'm even shopping around for a volcano doom fortress to complete their mental image of us. To be fair, that's true for pretty much every "original" Robotech production... this is simply a new low point in their already dismal production art history. The CG in Shadow Chronicles was horrifically amateurish, from the way they forgot to antialias all of their textures so every fighter and ship was surrounded by a semitransparent haze of white pixels from the Photoshop background, or the way they tried to cheat on animation costs by only drawing half the texture and then copying the layer and hitting "flip vertical", resulting in backwards text on one side of every "Alpha" fighter. Before that, their best effort was the SDF-3 Pioneer from Robotech II: the Sentinels... which even Robotech fans refer to as "the red deuce".
  20. Seto Kaiba
    MechaCon may have a direct focus on mecha anime, but that also means that a greater percentage of the smaller total number of attendees are going to be aware of Harmony Gold's abuse of Macross and treatment of other mecha franchises like MechWarrior. This is a dry well they're trying to get water from. Yep... though it seems to be Kevin's idea of good PR to snark at anyone who questions anything. He's so used to fans just meekly accepting whatever he has to say that being challenged on it must've come as a real shock. Lazy design may be lazier than we think... there's a Robotech fan art group that had designed something very similar (albeit with none of the exterior kibble on the first version we saw) a while before this Kickstarter started, who are now somewhat amused at Harmony Gold having apparently copied their idea without even bothering to credit them.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Because sometimes reality is too big a pill for the self-deluded to swallow.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, I'm sure that Harmony Gold at least demonstrated the basic level of due diligence in letting Maguire Entertainment know it couldn't authorize the use of the iconic Macross designs. If they hadn't, and Maguire Entertainment and/or Warner Bros found that out later, Harmony Gold would likely have found itself facing a lawsuit for having committed intrinsic fraud during the actual contract negotiations. I think the reason it hasn't been made is that Warner Bros never seriously intended to make it, and that they bought the rights just so nobody else could.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It wouldn't surprise me, but I think it's occurring on a higher level than that. I suspect that, by this point, the only reason Harmony Gold is keeping the Robotech franchise limping along is the forlorn hope that a third party will get involved and rescue it. They're either hoping that Big West will cave and offer them royalties to obtain clearance to release Macross in the west, or that Warner Bros will finally move ahead with making a live-action Robotech so all Harmony Gold has to do is either sell the franchise to Warner Bros for a king's ransom or sit back and collect royalty checks by doing no work whatsoever. Neither is a viable strategy, but they don't seem to have realized that yet.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Let's not beat around the bush. Robotech is dead... and it has been for a very long time. When Cannon Films pulled the Robotech movie and Robotech II: the Sentinels fell apart in early production, that was the end. The magic had ended. The clock struck midnight, and the coach had turned back into a pumpkin. Their fifteen minutes of fame were over. Everything else has just been Harmony Gold jumping up and down on Robotech's slowly decaying corpse, occasionally eliciting a squirt of something truly unwholesome from one of the more unpleasant orifices... a succession of abject failures that served only to underline that their initial "success" was purely an accident and throwing their incompetence into sharp relief. This latest mess shows how far they've fallen... the property's owners have so little confidence in the property that they insisted that the fans should fund it instead, and the fans balked at it because what Harmony Gold brought to the table was nothing but misplaced confidence and scorn for the people they were begging for money. This is going to be the elephant in the room for years to come. This is Robotech's Jar-Jar Binks. The fans will likely neither forget nor forgive this particular waste of their time and money. They won't let Harmony Gold forget either. Still... in a way, this is a victory. Robotech fans sent a message that they think Harmony Gold is doing a crap job. They voted with their wallets and said that they'd rather have nothing at all than a half-assed project sold on nostalgia alone. They haven't been this united in a long time. Let's hope against hope that this is inspiration for Harmony Gold to reconsider their approach to Macross and Robotech.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It's not really subtle... Brera's standing there, holding his bleeding face, and looks over and there's one of those massive birdhuman totem pole things dominating the background. As far as Shadow Chronicles... I could list the reasons it has a bad rap, but there are just SO GODDAMN MANY. Almost all of the non-fanatical Robotech fans found the film offensively awful for a variety of reasons. It really was a film where they did just about everything wrong. The fans who expressed that view (most of them) ended up banned from Robotech.com for doing so, which is why it's a ghost town now. For many Robotech fans, the Shadow Chronicles movie was the straw that broke the camel's back. The tampering with the end from "Symphony of Light", the reinvention of "shadow" technology as an alien development, crowbarring in a Sentinels race as a completely random antagonist, the shoddy animation, the shoddy writing... all of these things drove people away from Robotech and Harmony Gold ended up with a lot of egg on its face because of it. Their hilarious knee-jerk effort to cover up the discontent was to BAN EVERYONE. They had to repackage it with a "new" feature (LLA) to artificially boost the sales numbers. Personally, I'm not sure why anyone would actually want to buy Robotech on DVD anymore. Why buy a new box set when their latest offering is literally the exact same goddamn thing you could buy fourteen years ago, just in a different box. The Complete Collection sets are less than $20 a pop on eBay, though nothing Robotech has much resale value anymore. $20 to get the very same product that they'll ask hundreds for. Who knows? Maybe MEMO wrote it for them. He's borderline illiterate even on a good day.
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