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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Wait... wait... wait... THIS gives you the impression that Harmony Gold wasn't serious about this project? I thought most folks came to that realization around the time they realized this Kickstarter was not, in fact, an out-of-season April Fool's joke. Also, expecting professionalism from a Harmony Gold isn't just trying to draw water from a dry well... it's trying to draw water from a well that only exists in unverified anecdotes.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    What it shows, more than anything, is that they're entirely keen to perpetuate the extreme animosity their most fanatical fans have for Macross fans. They assume anyone who's a Macross fan would have no interest in their Kickstarter except to tell them they're idiots... which just shows they don't understand the people who don't watch their garbage any better than the people who do, since, as I said before, nothing any Macross fan could say to a Robotech fan could do nearly as much damage as what the fans of Robotech do to themselves every time they get their hopes up. There's no need for a troll tier, because they're practically self-trolling at this point.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe they know, and it's actually a metaphor for the Robotech franchise as a whole? Y'know... stuck in an untenable position, a single wrong move away from plunging into the infinite abyss, and with ultimate failure being an inescapable matter of time even if they didn't screw up. It's deep, man... it's real deep. Under ordinary circumstances, I'd probably find that to be detestable behavior. But, since it's Harmony Gold...
  4. Seto Kaiba
    As terrible as the design and CG are, the best that could come of this is a fan-fiction crossover with Doom. If they produce this mess, Phobos might at least feel like the gateway to hell for Robotech fans.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    That's why so many Robotech fans have refused to fund it or offered only minimal contributions. Yeah, but I doubt that other Kickstarter was operating under the air of general suspicion, dismissal, and disgust that the Robotech Academy Kickstarter is. This one's a base breaker before it's even started development. Truly... we certainly don't stand to gain anything by trolling them. Nothing any Macross fan could say could ever inflict worse harm to Robotech fans than what the Robotech fans routinely inflict on themselves by continuing the cycle of getting their hopes up and then suffering disappointment after embarrassing disappointment.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Considering how rapidly the number of donations per day is dropping off, I think we're drawing close to that point... the gain is now less large numbers of people pledging modest amounts of money, and more a small number of people pledging increasingly large amounts of money. They'll run out of people sooner rather than later, and they've already started petering out with twenty-seven days to go and only 1/5th of the way to their goal.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not so sure... the number of donors is decaying pretty significantly with each passing day. Today's take is just 43. I think they'll run out of people willing to give them money before they hit 500k. How many more folks are going to be willing to throw THOUSANDS at this, because that's how they racked up that total. Some nut threw five grand in. Take out those outlyers, and the average donor's still only giving fifty bucks. At that rate, they'd need to get 7,620 new backers to make quota. If their rate of donation stays steady, they'll be short by about 6/7ths that total.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The most likely candidates would be Mav and MEMO... they're both in the kool-aid-drinking fanatic set, and would do anything in the hopes of being hired by Harmony Gold. MEMO even has an alleged history of spending well above his means on Robotech. Odds are there are a couple reasonably well-off fans who are dense enough to think this has a chance, or some that likely can't actually afford it but are fanatic enough to pledge anyway.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Heh... they'll probably sucker me into buying it, at least until someone decides to criminalize cruel treatment of bookshelves. Between the two editions, mine are ready to give up the ghost. I've always been more about the artbooks than the toys.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Harmony Gold's reaction to the vocal, and surprisingly common, criticisms being leveled at the Robotech Academy Kickstarter by their own fans amounts to one big invocation of "What do you mean it's not awesome?". Also, I'm not so sure that Harmony Gold actually needs to bring more to the table than nostalgia and some half-baked concept art... their fans are famous for being not-terribly-discerning folks.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Well, you have to remember... even though Harmony Gold initially endorsed the project and then lied to everyone about whether they had sent the Cease and Desist notice, they claim the cease and desist was the brainchild of some outside agency that they decline to name. More of Harmony Gold's classic "it's someone else's fault, honest!". Eh, if Creavision's thick enough to take them up on it, who's more foolish... the fool or the fool who follows him?
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... while I don't doubt for a second that Warner Bros would do that IF they considered Robotech to have considerable potential for success. As if's go, that's an if so massive that light can't escape its surface. Now, that this Kickstarter is happening at all seems like a pretty reliable indicator that Harmony Gold's in good company in having no faith in Robotech. If Warner Bros thought that Robotech had the potential to be a legitimate commercial success, we wouldn't be having this discussion. They would've green-lit the Robotech live action movie instead of sitting on the rights for seven years and counting, and they would've brought it to someone higher profile than a fifth-stringer like Sylvain White or that virtual nobody who they took it to after he passed. Harmony Gold wouldn't have needed to bastardize Love Live Alive or put up a public plea for cash like the Robotech Academy Kickstarter, because Warner Bros would be pushing this as a high profile title. But we had Love Live Alive, and now we have the Robotech Academy Kickstarter... which proves beyond a reasonable doubt the higher-ups at Harmony Gold and Warner Bros don't see Robotech as something with legitimate commercial potential. This is, as so many have pointed out, a pretty transparent cash grab thinly disguised as the development of a pilot for a new series.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yep... that could, with the right lawyer, be turned into grounds for a lawsuit on Big West's part since Harmony Gold is fraudulently claiming that they own the rights to all of Macross to drum up business. Under the right circumstances, it could also be used as a piece of evidence to support claims that Harmony Gold was willfully disingenuous when they were soliciting business if it came to legal action by the backers against Harmony Gold. Either way, they oughta check themselves before they wreck themselves... making claims like that is DANGEROUS.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Seems that way, yes... though they were, until this Kickstarter was announced, proclaiming to the fans that they wouldn't even get into development until a network gave them an episode commitment. It seems that they've finally bowed to reality on that, but that doesn't seem to have deflated their unrealistic opinion of the franchise's prospects any. They seem to think this is going to be on some major network, competing against big-name titles on an even footing. At best, this mess might end up in an infomercial time slot the way Robotech did when Canada's answer to SyFy They pulled most of their stuff from all of those already, so it doesn't seem their current distributor has any ties to those... unless they intend to find a new distributor, this might be a direct-to-video if a network doesn't pick it up. That's about the letter of it, yeah... though I doubt Harmony Gold itself has hundreds of millions of dollars. They're a fairly smallish company, and while Frankie-boy has a lot of dough from sources both legit and dubious floating around, we should confuse what he has for personal assets with what the small real estate company in California has to work with when all they have are a couple sets of apartment buildings in SoCal. If $500,000 for the development of a new Robotech series is a bridge too far, I doubt they're rolling in dough.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    's probably better than a more honest answer. "We're planning on a two year-long pub crawl of truly epic proportions... we might do a show with what's left over".
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Shadow Chronicles might've used characters from those, but remember that Sentinels was almost entirely Macross-driven anyway, and there was a concerted effort on Harmony Gold's part to Macross-ize the MOSPEADA designs (e.g. the Legioss w/ FAST pack). Even Harmony Gold doesn't really make much of an effort to disguise that the only part of Robotech that actually matters, narratively or commercially, is Macross. Get down to the leaked outline of what the "shadow saga" was supposed to be, and it's someone's terrible DYRL? and Battlestar Galactica crossover played out with MOSPEADA action figures.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    But Robotech fans are kind of iffy when it comes to anything that isn't Macross or directly tied to same. That's why every take on making a Robotech sequel tries to tie into the "Macross Saga" as directly and frequently as possible. Macross is the only part of Robotech that 99% of Robotech fans actually care about. By way of example, look at the Shadow Chronicles... every major character except for one has some direct tie to the Macross Saga cast. Agent ONE has the right of it, I think. Just look at the logo for Robotech Academy... a bastardization of the distinctive Macross UN Spacy roundel, not something that looks like MOSPEADA's Mars forces insignia even though the titular academy appears to be on either Phobos or Deimos.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I don't recall them ever trying that one for Shadow Chronicles. There, they made no secret of the fact that it was written by the current creative staff, and their reaction to it once the fans proclaimed that it was rubbish was to conclude that dismissing the movie as garbage was tantamount to a personal attack on Harmony Gold staffers (mostly Tommy), over which they proceeded to wear out many banhammers, stopping only when they realized they were in danger of completely running out of people. At some points, they tried to justify this with the claim that they didn't want Warner Bros to see the official Robotech web site full of people openly criticizing Robotech, but I don't think they ever tried the "poor dead Carl" trick for that, since the backlash happened when he was still alive. It wasn't until Carl snuffed it and they announced Love Live Alive as Carl's vision for Robotech that they started really to use "No, this wasn't us... this is all Carl's idea" as a shield from criticism. This is just doubly appalling because Academy is the second time they've fielded a laughable project with Tommy's fingerprints all over it and said "No sir, this is Carl's work" to get the fans to shell out for it.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    No, the REALLY disgusting part is that this isn't the first time they've tried that. That was also the heart of their pitch for their bastardized version of MOSPEADA's wrap-up OVA, Love Live Alive... about how it had been part of Carl's creative vision for Robotech for ages and they were doing it for him, dammit, because he wasn't around anymore to do it himself. In a way, it's even more shameless and disgusting if you're aware that, right up until Carl passed away, Harmony Gold's "creative staff" was cheerfully disposing of vast swathes of Carl's vision for Robotech because, in their terms, of its poor quality, its internal inconsistency problems, etc. They were only too happy to get condemn Carl's vision as a tangled, amateurish mess until he died and there was money to be made in attributing everything to him once he wasn't around to confirm or deny it.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    The part you bolded is legally actionable misrepresentation, should Big West wish to challenge them in court...
  21. Seto Kaiba
    All told, Harmony Gold's track record with missing release targets suggests that if everything proceeds according to their plan and they'd actually get the Kickstarter money they want, the Robotech Academy pilot would be 2-3 years late... so, probably mid-2018. Somehow, I suspect that things will NOT go smoothly. Creavision are rank amateurs, and will probably suffer considerable culture shock from having to 1. work on someone else's terms, 2. cede all rights to their work to someone else, and 3. deal with the MANY idiocies of Harmony Gold corporate culture including a torturously long and unnecessarily convoluted approvals process for each and every fiddly little thing that goes into the work, and Harmony Gold's insistence on having absolute control over the release of promotional information. That's not counting the inevitable issues they'll have hashing out a distribution contract when the time to release the home video edition comes, since previous distributors have suggested their approach might be best summarized with the term "Demands above their station", never mind all the time that'll be wasted pitching that no-sell mess to networks that'll likely be sorely pressed not to laugh in their faces and invite them to slam their heads in the door a few times on the way out. Realistically, we're looking at 2020... IF they get the money.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    My guess would be that we're probably getting close to the saturation point... Robotech's fanbase is very small, and has relatively few convention-goers. One of the recurring themes you'll hear if you talk to people who AREN'T drinking Harmony Gold's kool-aid about their convention panels is that the single largest group of attendees is usually people trying to get a good seat for whatever presentation has the room next. I doubt that'll contribute much towards their quota. Either way, the resounding lack of enthusiasm many Robotech fan groups have expressed for the project is, in its own way, being felt by the Kickstarter. The KS comments page is halfway to a full-blown flame war, and there are a small number of fans who are supportive of the project trying to get various forums to lock the threads full of criticism for the idea, asserting (perhaps correctly) that the overwhelmingly negative reaction is dissuading people who are on the fence from backing it.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    What's really telling is that over the past few days, the size of the average contribution has been steadily trending downward. Two days ago, when computed without the three significant outlying values, the mean donation was approximately $49.98. Last night, it was $46.32. That tells us that, while they are bringing in new backers at a trickle, those new backers aren't giving nearly as generously to the project as the first-ins did. To date, I've only seen one person seriously attempt to defend the Kickstarter or the ideas therein... and that's one of those nuts who's a frothy-mouthed fanatic who's likely just responding to the surprising and welcome hope expressed by some Robotech fans that this failure will convince Harmony Gold to either sell the franchise to someone who can actually develop it better or at least relinquish their stranglehold on Macross. My good chum, what makes you think that hasn't already happened? The Robotech live-action movie has every appearance of a license that was only taken out so Warner Bros could sit on it and do nothing.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    That might be true for the older fans among us, but the younger ones were introduced to anime and/or mecha through other, less obnoxious shows. Gundam Wing and Gundam SEED are cited a lot among younger fans as their gateway to mecha anime, which they typically encountered on cable television. For me, it was arguably a mixture of Macross II and Escaflowne. You wouldn't be alone in not liking Southern Cross... even Robotech fans can't stomach it, which is hilariously tragic considering that its Robotech adaptation is the centerpiece of the Robotech story. But hey, it was bad enough to get canned in Japan when barely half done, so...
  25. Seto Kaiba
    It's more linear in the sense that each "saga" theoretically follows directly on from the previous one, with recurring characters and so on. You boil down the Robotech fanbase's wishlist as far as future stories go and you'll find the overwhelming majority of them don't give a tinker's damn about the characters that Robotech inherited from Southern Cross or MOSPEADA. What they're really after isn't a new generation of characters or any of that bull... what they want is the continuing adventures of "Rick Hunter" and all the other Macross Saga characters. That's why they keep coming back to wanting the Sentinels to be revisited... because that's exactly what that was, the continuing adventures of the Macross Saga cast with some original characters who were largely just watered down copies of the cast of the Macross Saga (something the "movie" hangs a lampshade on in one of its very first scenes). Quite a few Robotech fans have trouble migrating to Macross because they've spent so long having Harmony Gold dangle that particular carrot over their heads... so when they find out that Macross's sequels feature new casts and leave the characters of the original series alone after they earn their ending, they're a little disappointed. Then, of course, you've got the few fans who suffer from a case of reactionary-butthurt, where they hate Macross and everything associated with it because they're Masters Saga fans who are bitter about that saga's status as the un-favorite and distant third place to Macross even in Harmony Gold's eyes.
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