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Seto Kaiba

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  1. 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).
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, I think you're crediting me with more than my fair share of it... but there is a certain pleasure in noting that the Robotech fans have proven to be much more discerning folks than we usually give them credit for being. I suppose it could be argued that I've got an indirect interest in the success or failure of the Robotech Academy Kickstarter, due to the way the negative press that it's generated across the net will affect efforts to build store-level interest in Robotech RPG Tactics. (I've got a bit of a soft spot for Palladium Books, both because they're local and because they helped foster my interest in Macross II.) Speaking of, I've been having a bit of a discussion about the impact that the controversy over Robotech RPG Tactics have had upon the Robotech Academy Kickstarter. Quite a few of the RRT backers I've talked to have suggested that the problems that Kickstarter has had put them off the idea of backing Academy... Reception of that stealth recon drone seems to be pretty lukewarm too... the recurring theme they keep coming back to is "Why wouldn't they have done something more traditionally AWACs looking?".
  3. Seto Kaiba
    http://www.macross2.net/m3/macross7/vab-2.htm Hmm indeed... Kinda reminds me of the MQ-90 Quox from Ace Combat.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Really? I thought that was something that even Robotech fans had long since started taking as read. Mind you, they single out specific people at Harmony Gold, but the meaning's the same. Most of the Robotech fans that I talk to on a regular basis have been resigned to this thing being a flop from the word "go", but they'll probably announce another box set two years down the road with the Robotech Academy trailers and concept art on an Extras disc the way the original DVD collection did for Sentinels. Please take me at my word when I say there's no malice in what I'm about to say... You're mistaking me for someone who cares. Not about your personal stance on anything, mind you, but about Robotech in general and this Kickstarter in particular. I know that my dry, somewhat blunt way of putting things may give you the mistaken impression that I care, but the simple truth is that I honestly haven't had any strong feelings on Robotech either way for at least five or six years now. If Harmony Gold were to put out something Robotech that was actually, truly original and not just another half-assed attempt to cash in on the nostalgia that their fans have for Macross's characters, I would watch it. I look at this unholy mess they're calling Robotech Academy and all I can really muster emotionally is a vague feeling of pity for my friends in the Robotech fandom who are the ones getting sold the bill of goods here, some amusement at how Kevin's attempt to build a campaign on a web of lies is blowing up in his face, and a little irritation at how half-assed this all is and how they're trying to surf the coffin of a dead man to success. That's all. Had Harmony Gold actually bothered to put in the effort to develop an original idea, to fully invest their time and their energy into realizing a vision for a new story that wasn't clinging helplessly to the OSM as a crutch, there's a decent chance that I would have thrown them a few hundred bucks. At the end of the day, the problem with Robotech Academy is that it's half-assed from start to finish. It really is that simple. The pitch was half-hearted at best, amounting to little more than "It's Robotech, give us your money!" and "Do it for Carl!". Their story concept is an atypically obvious half-assed effort to build a Robotech story out of existing parts... it's pretty much Robotech-by-numbers, and one that depends very heavily (almost exclusively) on Macross nostalgia. The effort to pitch is as the pilot for a new series showed that they'd half-assed their planning, since it depends almost entirely on references to portions of the original series that any new audience wouldn't have seen, and that's not counting the references to a show that was never even made. I'm dismissive of Robotech Academy not because it is Robotech, or because Harmony Gold is involved, but because the people making this clearly don't care about it any more than we do. They're just going through the motions, and have zero intention of this actually becoming something. Literally and figuratively, there is no investment on their part in this. Quite a few of the fans I know have seen this too, and that's why they're not backing it. There's supposedly going to be a new Robotech comic series coming out... maybe.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Because no peer-reviewed study has ever been biased or presented inaccurate information, of course. Seriously now, while torrenting is in common use there are still plenty of folks who would prefer to have a legitimate release that they can buy from a store and thus support the show. Heck, plenty of people who download fan subs also seek out and buy the legitimate releases when they become available. Just because piracy satisfies all your wants doesn't mean that everyone is OK with having fan subs be the ONLY option for getting Macross in the west in a language they can understand. Would you and your straw man like a moment alone to get better acquainted? I wouldn't say that I hate Harmony Gold. I do find their perpetual incompetence annoying and the occasionally trollish behavior of their staff obnoxious, but at the end of the day I'm buying my Macross stuff directly from Japan, so their jackassery's impact on me is minimal... unless you'd like to count the many Robotech fans who continue to bring their OSM-related questions to me by e-mail and Skype, but I'm just glad to help them find the information they're looking for. Yeah, they did... but the only people who saw it at any tolerable resolution were the ones at SDCC, only one of which has since been posted on the Kickstarter... today, in fact. The Robotech fans don't seem to find them terribly thrilling either. That's "legitimate channels", buddy.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Studies which are of questionable integrity at best, since in order to reliably measure behavior of questionable legality you have to get people to own up to actually doing it first, and with torrents often using multiple trackers, the numbers of clients downloading a given title is skewed upwards. Yes, torrenting is increasingly common, though it is by no means universally accepted. The point is that these people DO exist, and that there are people who would much rather have (or dearly hope for) the ability to support the franchise through legitimate releases instead of having to pirate the shows. Some of those people are making those wishes known on the Kickstarter, as unlikely as it is that Harmony Gold will actually listen. I don't doubt for a minute that there are no shortage of people on MacrossWorld who would be overjoyed if Macross shows and goods were suddenly available outside of Japan in their local language and through legitimate channels. Just because you're happy with your fansubs doesn't mean everybody is, my friend.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    A dozen people in one place, in a short span of time. I've run into plenty more besides. MacrossWorld is probably not a good representative sample, all things considered... but I've even run into it here in the past. It seems to be an especially common reason why Robotech fans haven't explored more Macross. Not because they don't want to, but because they can't get it by normal channels.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    For as long as fan subs have been a thing, is that so surprising to you? There are plenty of anime fans who don't feel comfortable with the idea of downloading something dubiously legal like fan subs, or are uneasy about using methods like torrents to get them. Just from my own experience, while I was helping out on a Macross MUSH late last year, I ran into upwards of a dozen people who really WANTED to see more Macross, but were hesitant or unwilling to get it by questionable means like downloading a torrented fan sub. Some were concerned about the safety of torrenting, while others were leery about downloading shows at all. I'd have a hard time naming a fan community I was involved with where I hadn't run into one or more people who were uneasy about DLing a fan sub. I've even run into it here on MacrossWorld. It would be unwise to assume that just because you or I are comfortable with it, that everyone is. (The trend I've been seeing has been that reluctance to download fan subs have gone up as the number of streaming sites that carry current anime increases... but that's far from scientific, since it's just my own observations.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    True, though as uncomfortable as some fans are with the idea of downloading (pseudo-illegally) fansubs or paying a premium for material in a language they can't understand, you can hardly blame them for hoping that if Robotech fails hard enough, someone somewhere in authority at Harmony Gold is going to realize that one or more of those unrealistic (in the current situation) ideas is actually not a bad idea business-wise. Again, even those hopes are not necessarily mutually exclusive either... though many are profoundly unlikely for various reasons. People are going to hope, even if those hopes are unrealistic. (Of course, as often as they're being lied to by Harmony Gold, is it that surprising that their hopes are often a poor fit for the objective reality?) On the designs front, there are people calling Harmony Gold on the similarity over on Robotech.com...
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I've seen flimsier cases end up in front of the courts in my day job... unlikely isn't the same as impossible.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    I dunno man, Tom Bateman seemed to think that whoever pitched the idea of a Kickstarter to Frank Agrama is going to be in a bad place if it fails... and Harmony Gold has "dismissed" and replaced staff in the past when they ran projects into the ground in the past. They replaced Carl Macek himself when Macek finally managed to produce this same kind of non-starter in Robotech 3000. We don't know how severe the consequences will be for whoever proposed this at Harmony Gold, but to say that it's out and out impossible would not be accurate. As far as Macross products making their way into the west... not as a direct consequence anyway, but if management is paying attention to the Kickstarter comments they'll probably spot the recurring theme of "stop squatting on the Macross rights and DO SOMETHING". To me, this situation is too similar to Robotech 3000's crash-and-burn failure to think that there won't be consequences... and there's historical precedent for consequences in situations like this shaking up the status quo for Robotech. Since this kind of failure has happened before, the question is "What will the consequences be the second time around?". Will Harmony Gold's senior management, who have progressively lost faith in Robotech over the last fourteen years start exploring what they could do with Macross? Will they can the whole thing? Will they try to fall back on Shadow Rising and refuse to acknowledge that this ever happened for the next ten years? There are a bunch of possibilities, not all of which are mutually exclusive. Not a lawsuit, surely... but I wouldn't rule out a cease-and-desist. Harmony Gold's gotten so fond of sending them, and they are treading close to Hasbro's designs, and you can bet Hasbro is going to defend a cash cow like Transformers vigilantly. Of course, even if Harmony Gold DID receive a cease-and-desist, they'd comply without letting the viewers know that they'd even received one... they'd claim not using the design was a creative decision on their part.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Don't forget Big West and Studio Nue! My dad knows that there's a limit to how retro I'm willing to go... I'm not audiophile enough to shell out for a quality turntable, so vinyl is right out. 'course, he's still got a reel-to-reel player... But hey, if Kevin gets fired over this (and most folks seem to hope he will be), maybe they'll actually hire someone qualified to do his job. His degree is in theatrical lighting, after all, not business management or marketing. He's only job he's really qualified to do is ask "Would you like fries with that, sir?". Of course, if they were clearing out people who were horribly unqualified to do the jobs they do, they'd have to let Steve go too.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    As a fun side note, the Robotech Academy Kickstarter would now need to collect $24,500 in pledges EVERY DAY for the remainder of the funding period in order to meet its goal. They're currently averaging about $1,300 a day. At this rate, they will likely miss the funding target by 43% ($215k) or potentially by as much as 56.5% ($282k). The number of backers per day is now hovering consistently under 20. This has given me the inexplicable urge to dig out the Harry Chapin CDs my dad gave me and listen to the song "Dance Band on the Titanic".
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Let's hope Hasbro sees that and gets in on what might turn out to be a lawsuit conga line, since they're already ripping off designs from Macross and Space Battleship Yamato too. Hi Zen, long time no see. Tommy does actually have a good reason for not using that one... it's outside the time period for the proposed series. Robotech Academy's events supposedly occur at some point between 2022 and 2029 - between the departure of the Expeditionary Forces in Sentinels and the start of the "2nd Robotech War" - but in-universe the "VM-9 Silverback" that appeared in Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles wasn't developed until 2034. In short, it won't appear because it doesn't exist yet. The bigger problem should be "Why is there something that looks exactly like a modern Predator drone in 2020s Robotech?", to say nothing of "Why is there now ANOTHER VF-X-7 besides the Beta prototype?".
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Not wishing to be unduly rude to a bunch of blokes who are trying their best in spite of everything, what Harmony Gold has here is a CG animation team who are borderline-amateur and simply lack the manpower, the skills, and the equipment to do this pilot at a level on par with an average professional animation job in the anime industry this decade. Because they're unwilling to spend the money to do a quality job, Robotech's CG still looks like an artifact of the early 00's... this isn't any more impressive than video game cinematics from ten years ago, though at least it doesn't have the Shadow Chronicles problem of every fighter and ship being surrounded by a haze of white pixels because somebody didn't antialias the textures. I think Merijeek might be on to something. Kevin's consistently failing the Turing test. He's convinced me he's one of those automated support chatbots, not a human being.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Me, I think that says more about Creavision's staff than it does Harmony Gold. We already knew Harmony Gold's Robotech staff is a pack of sleazebags and creatively bankrupt borderline trolls, so that behavior's no surprise coming from them. But it's kinda telling (in a bad way) that Creavision would so readily compromise the dignity of its members/staff by agreeing to work under the same company that had, mere months before, brutally stabbed Creavision in the back by threatening to sue them over a fan film Creavision had been developing with their public blessing and endorsement. A friend of mine who's a long-time Star Trek fan pointed out to me that the Ferengi have a saying "Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack". I didn't have Cesar picked as a follower of Ferengi philosophy. They've about reached the point where it's impossible to tell whether they're actually serious, or if their entire Robotech franchise is some kind of satirical performance art that we're just not getting. There's still a few hours left in today, but if they don't pick up a few hundred more bucks before midnight then the day after SDCC will turn out to be the very worst day the Kickstarter has had.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    *shrug* Believe you me, I'd love to forget most of this useless trivia about Robotech... most of which I've ended up knowing thanks to people from various forums relentlessly pestering me for answers about "how did this go in the OSM?". Still, I'm pretty sure that making it look Macross-esque was the entire point. The Shadow Chronicles showed that fans have little enough love for the MOSPEADA designs as-is, and that trying to Macross-ize them by sticking Super Packs on the Legioss and so on was a real non-starter. Robotech Academy is basically the same idea as all the other Robotech sequel attempts (with the sole exception of Robotech 3000) but without most of the pretense of trying to be something other than a shameless attempt to cash in on Macross's popularity the same way that Space Gandam V and Astro Plan did. Someone pointed this out to me a minute ago... but it seems that Robotech Academy contains a greater percentage of post-consumer recycled material than previously indicated: http://g.cdn.mersap.com/anime/files/2014/02/Proyecto-Valkyria.jpg This "VF-X-7" suddenly looks a lot more familiar, doesn't it?
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Nope, because they'd already established that the Beta prototype looked more or less exactly like a production model Beta... so this is something else and somebody screwed the pooch on the number. It's kind of funny in a way, since Robotech has a lot of gaps in its numbering system, but they still screwed up. This thing looks like a mixture of the frigging Logan from Southern Cross and one of the grunt-type Sylphs from the first episode or two of Yukikaze. What a mess. That this won't be animated is a MERCY.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    I lol'd... these idiots can't even keep their own continuity straight. Robotech's VF-X-7 is the original designation of the frigging "Beta fighter"... but the best part is even that shabby crap didn't get the attention of the Robotech fans on the Kickstarter.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    So... you want exactly what I just described in the post you quoted? The sequel Harmony Gold can never make... in which they've got the Macross characters as the focus of the story, out in space doing Macross-y things like establishing colonies and teaching new aliens about humanity's culture, just without the word "Macross" in the title. Sentinels is what a lot of Robotech fans want, for reasons that are fairly obvious... it's basically Carl Macek's Macross-MOSPEADA crossover fic, and it's far more Macross than it is MOSPEADA. There are so many problems with the very idea of producing it that you're pretty much hosed even if you DO become rich enough to independently finance a new animated series.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Won't work. They'll still piss and moan about the evil "Macross purists", simply because it's easier than admitting to themselves that they've wasted thirty-odd years hoping for a clueless but (originally) well-meaning company (Harmony Gold) to produce the impossible sequel of their dreams... something that is all about the Macross characters, doing Macross-y things, but without the word Macross in the title. They're still going to blame us for the bad press the project has gotten, the various reviewers over on YouTube who encouraged people to boycott the Kickstarter, and all the acrimony on the comments page. This late in the game, and with the Kickstarter's chances of success being virtually zero, it'd be no different from taunting them about the project's impending failure.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    This just in... invisible, incorporeal beings turned out in record numbers for the SDCC Robotech panel! Backing for their Robotech Academy project climbed to... wait... whaddya mean they've had less than a grand in pledges the day after such a world shattering multimedia event? What do you mean they've only had five new pledges today?
  23. Seto Kaiba
    The ultimate "do not need" box set for practically everybody anyway... almost every Robotech fan already owns two or three different releases of the series, usually one pre-remaster and at least one post-remaster, and most aren't all that interested in the originals, since being interested in the originals makes you an evil baby-eating Macross purist troll as far as the most vocal fans are concerned.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    It's sad, but the Kickstarter's now devolved into the fans hoping that the whole thing is a sham and Harmony Gold secretly has some other agency in the wings who'll chip in the missing $300,000.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Give or take one or two people who may have backed it ironically, probably. Look on the bright side... at least your gesture won't end up costing you money. No updates, and a lot of recrimination on the comments page. You've got the few blind faithful profusely thanking Harmony Gold for "getting the word out" at SDCC and suggesting that because of this it'll hit a million bucks, and the sane men saying that they accomplished the square root of bugger all in the internet age, and that everyone who was going to pledge probably knew about the Kickstarter long before the panel thanks to the internet publicity. Definitely a smart move on Harmony Gold's part to make the Q&A as short as possible... with the backers giving Kevin flack over his circular non-answers and question-dodging on the comments page, and some going so far as to suggest that he's failed the Turing test, the best thing would've been to avoid a queue of what would have been mostly questions about what they're gonna do if/when the Kickstarter fails, questions about why they've not released Macross stuff in the west if their claims of having all of the distribution rights to the franchise are true, why they're doing this instead of Shadow Chronicles, and why they're relying on "Do it for Carl!" so much instead of posting actual news people care about. A long Q&A session would've been slow and public suicide for the project and the staff.
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