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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Update 23... Tony Oliver reminisces, more harping on "Do it for Carl", and a reminder that they've only got a fraction of the way to their goal. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1381502542/robotech-academy/posts
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Who knows? With a little luck, and if today's presentation fails to arrest the steady downward trend of the Kickstarter, this might actually end up being the last Robotech project... or at least the last one under Yune, Yun, and McKeever. Maybe that picture of Steve being escorted out by security that was put up as an April Fool's joke a few years back will turn out to be very prophetic indeed. Fat chance of that happening, the live-action movie's so doomed that they'd be lucky if it got a direct-to-video release at a level of quality equaling Starship Troopers 3: Marauder. Their big announcement will probably be another bait-and-switch like they did in their promotion of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles... "we're finally gonna reveal the fate of Admiral Rick Hunter, guys!", followed by a solid year of fans grumbling about how he showed up on a viewscreen for thirty seconds and promptly disappeared again. It's kinda sad that even the guys attempting to defend Robotech Academy are starting to admit that this is basically turning into a more blatant than usual attempt to rip off Macross. The general feeling I'm getting from them is one of weary resignation, and of their defense of it being more for form's sake than because they actually believe something will come of this. The fanatics would defend this to the death, naturally, but even the comments section on the Kickstarter has started to talk about how all this "Do it for Carl" stuff is in profoundly awful taste. SDCC's been open for about three hours now, and so far the Kickstarter's take for the day is only $673, from a mere 9 people, and most of that gain is existing backers upping their contribution.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Nothing buzzworthy thus far, the only piece of news that's come out of SDCC and reached my ears so far is that Harmony Gold has chosen a printing company to print the Robotech Academy art book backer reward. I've got some friends attending SDCC, and I'd say they were not amused or impressed by how little Harmony Gold brought to whet the appetites of their audience who might attend today's panel discussion. The Kickstarter comments section is still a seething ocean of recrimination and hostility, and they've finally noticed the commentary here on MacrossWorld about the Harmony Gold apologists trying their hand at (and having a conspicuous lack of success in) keeping the vocal critics of Harmony Gold's business practices and "give us your cash and we'll make something, honest" pitch at bay. Tonight's the night... sink or swim, do or die, and all that rot. Going into it, it's not looking good. There was about a 28% increase in the dollar amount pledged yesterday, but that's 28% over the five or six day average of about $2,413.60, so $3,101. I was predicting a lot more response from SDCC than that, something more on the order of a 400% jump for a few days (~$10k+ per day) until it petered out. Since we know Harmony Gold didn't keep the Robotech Academy Kickstarter under wraps there, that indicates a strong possibility that most of the people they're hoping to pitch this to tonight are already aware of it and have already contributed... so there's a decent chance we won't see a significant spike in pledges tonight or tomorrow either. That underwhelming response from SDCC was enough to push SideKick's success prediction for Robotech Academy down to 6% and aggressively resume the downward 3% dip in Kicktraq's prediction, which now sits at 61% of total (~$308k), with a projected min/max of between $225k and $296k. I think we'll continue to see those fall in the coming days, since they were only momentarily arrested in their drop by that one guy who upped his pledge to $10,000 two days back. As often as Robotech has ended in abject and hilarious failure, I'm amazed everyone's friend Mr. Alan Smithee hasn't ended up involved at some point.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Don't go giving them ideas... some of them are just nuts enough to try, and the ones that are are old enough to buy power tools and dumb enough to try it at home. Still, tomorrow's the do-or-die day. The SDCC attendees who bothered to stop by Harmony Gold's booth are reporting that they didn't have anything newsworthy except that they'd picked a vanity press printer to do the backer reward art book, so unless the announcement they're going to make at tomorrow's 7pm panel really sets the world on fire they're hosed.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    That's weird... it looks like someone pulled their money out. It went down by $30 over the last hour... I wonder if they're starting to try to kick the critics out. You could almost understand them doing it, since today's "big reveal" at SDCC was (reportedly) that they went and found some vanity press company to print the Robotech Academy artbook backer reward. Not a lot of ways to polish that turd. Kicktraq's prediction actually went up 1% thanks to that guy who chipped in a few grand to get to the $10k tier yesterday, though it's still sitting at a mere 64% and looks like it'll start trending back down unless there's a surge day tomorrow. SideKick's hit an all-time low for its prediction of this getting funded, a whopping 7% chance of success.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    They'll probably run into more problems than just Robotech's lack of name recognition and terrible reputation... everything in the story concept for Robotech Academy requires prior knowledge of not just Robotech's original series, but also of Robotech II: the Sentinels, an aborted project whose sole pseudocanon depiction has been out of print for decades. It's no ambassador, and the only thing it'll do for its audience is leave them more lost than... well... Lost.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yeah... but according to McKeever, The Powers That Be at Harmony Gold don't give a damn about any part of the site that doesn't directly bring in a profit. Essentially, the store is all they care about and the rest is a massive blind spot. THERE! ARE! FOUR! LIGHTS! The funny part is, the other half of the Robotech.com Two Stooges routine (Maverick_LSC) once expressed to me that that was actually his motivation for deleting posts and banning people for speaking critically of the Shadow Chronicles or asking questions about Harmony Gold's (in)ability to use Macross in future works. The exact moon logic he gave was that those touchy topics had the potential to directly hurt Robotech if prospective fans or someone from Warner Bros were to see it. Put simply, his stance on those matters was that anything other than slavish, unquestioning praise for Robotech was hurting the franchise. That attitude - that questioning even the most obvious lies told by Harmony Gold - was an unforgivable sin did so much damage... and the Kickstarter comments REALLY show it. There are a lot of people snapping back at the Harmony Gold volunteer thought police now, and a fair amount of snide commentary about their unthinking devotion. There are a lot of people who would almost certainly be pledging who are not, or who would pledge more than they have, had Harmony Gold not done that. Well, when you put it like that it sounds completely reasonable... I don't think they can preemptively ban people from the panel... you have to actually do something at the convention to earn your forcible ejection, like pie Tommy Yune in front of an audience. I'm sure there will be some backers who show up and attempt to ask the hard questions. I'm equally sure that Harmony Gold will have some memorized form answer rebuttals that rely on obfuscating weasel words and unclear language to counter them. That is, after all, how they've been dodging the Macross rights thing every time it comes up.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Funnily enough, several folks on the Kickstarter called him on it, saying pretty much exactly that... "If you had the distribution rights to the rest of Macross, you wouldn't be f'ing around with this Kickstarter nonsense". It's kind of a pathetic knee-jerk effort to silence the increasingly vocal protests against Harmony Gold forcing no-export-for-you status on Macross when they can't do anything useful with Robotech. I guess tomorrow we'll see what the wages of sin are. Not the first time someone in this thread has drawn a parallel to North Korean propaganda... it seems like, just as in North Korea, the ones writing and disseminating the propaganda have an unrealistically low opinion of everyone else's intelligence. Unlike the North Koreans, it seems Harmony Gold isn't clear on how this "internet" thing they keep hearing about lets just about any idiot off the street find enough information to poke their claims full of holes.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    They're pretty committed to the lie too... McKeever's still trying to sell the people protesting that Harmony Gold needs to get out of the way of Macross licensing on the old lie that they own the distribution rights to ALL of Macross's sequels and derivatives. That alone reeks of a certain kind of desperation.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Update it for who? They've banned almost everyone who ever had an account on there, and most of the people who didn't get the banhammer got sick of their sh*t and left of their own accord. (It's so bad there that even Harmony Gold's high propagandist Kevin McKeever had to admit the only part of the site the higher-ups care about is the store, the rest is not worth spending money on, as their view reportedly goes.) Absolutely. We made, ironically enough, the exact same assumption about Robotech fans that Harmony Gold did... that they're no better than magpies with wallets, and live with a compulsion to collect anything with the word "Robotech" on it. Many of 'em bucked that particular stereotype when Robotech Academy was announced, though even the people on the Kickstarter have pointed some fingers at the "200 fans who'll buy anything". Some of them have lived down to our expectations, however. To me, there's nothing sad about Harmony Gold's persistent failure to accept reality. It was sad the first time they got carried away with their enthusiasm and misguided belief that they were clever and ran full-tilt into the brick wall of their own incompetence. Four or five further encounters with the exact same brick wall at top speed have robbed the situation of anything that might evoke a pity response. Their incompetence and refusal to believe that the anime industry doesn't work the same way it did back in 1985 have reduced their antics to the level of Wile E. Coyote... we watch them execute their absurd little plans knowing for a certainty that no matter what they do they'll never succeed. The only thing in question is how badly they're going to be hurt when it's all over. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, Harmony Gold is barking mad. Even if this gets made, it's guaranteed to end the same way as Shadow Chronicles. Why? Robotech Academy is supposed to be able to bring in a new generation of fans if it goes to air, but Robotech Academy is no ambassador. Every faction, plot point, and character has SOME contextually-vital connection to the original series... the original series that 99.9% of their target audience is not going to have any knowledge of. It's set as a side story to a series that was never animated, full of characters whose defining character trait is a tangential relationship to an absentee character or someone who was never characterized to begin with, and it relies on the audience having foreknowledge of the least popular saga of Robotech to know about or care who the antagonists in the series even are or why they think they can find what they're looking for on Earth. This isn't like Frontier, where having seen a lot of what came before was merely a bonus... for this mess, you need to have seen Robotech's original series AND seen or read some version of Robotech II: the Sentinels to have any idea who these people are or why you should care. This is the exact same problem they ran into with Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, where the "sibling nobody ever mentioned" main character was lambasted as an author-insert fantasy persona of Tommy Yune, and a cast full of expies did nothing at all to endear themselves to the audience.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Well, Harmony Gold's sunk a lot of time and energy over the last fourteen years into trying to condition Robotech fans to blindly and obediently buy anything and everything they arbitrarily slap the word "Robotech" on. They spent a bunch of time telling an assortment of hilariously transparent lies about Macross and the other original shows, and quietly endorsed the jackassery that their volunteer moderators and the stooges of those moderators were perpetrating by podcast. They worked damn hard to put the Robotech fans in an adversarial relationship with anime hobbyists in general and Macross fans in particular to maintain that captive audience of theirs. From the last mass-banning of their critics after Shadow Chronicles came out to the start of the Robotech Academy Kickstarter, things were looking like they'd actually succeeded. It seemed like Robotech fans were so desperate for something, ANYTHING with the Robotech name on it, that they'd buy garbage like Robotech: Love Live Alive or the crossover with Voltron and praise it like it was something with actual artistic integrity. That's why the large-scale mutinous muttering and widespread acrimony over the Robotech Academy Kickstarter came as such a profound shock. We're so used to Robotech fans desperately grasping at straws to find something praiseworthy about whatever laughably feeble mess Harmony Gold kicked out the door last that having them suddenly announce "No, this is rubbish and we're not going to support it or even pretend otherwise" was about the last thing anyone would've expected... never mind how the KS's comments section has devolved into a borderline flame war over the Macross embargo issue.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    I'm straight-up nauseated by the way Harmony Gold is honestly hoping they'll be able to surf Carl's coffin to success. I didn't have much use for the man when he was alive, and I'm not a big believer in a due to the dead, but the way they're expecting the fans to empty their bank accounts "for Carl" is crossing the line twice. The old saying goes that when one finds oneself in a hole, the first thing one should do is to stop digging. Harmony Gold seems to be of the opinion that, upon finding themselves in a VERY deep hole, digging to China is easier than putting the shovel down and climbing out.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Hey, some nutter tossed in ten grand for the privilege of making "pew pew" laser noises into a microphone that Harmony Gold may or may not use... that alone is more backing than they've had in the last five days or so.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Because it's the Yamato from Space Battleship Yamato that's had the bow replaced with the main gun of the Macross from DYRL?. Real original, Creavision... I know I mocked the first ship design as blatant fanwankery, but they didn't have to live down to my expectations.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1381502542/robotech-academy/posts/923789 I think the comments section might be right when they suggested this is a desperation update.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Problem is, that "proposal" is basically the exact same completely unworkable idea that every Robotech fan has at some point... it's "what if we just remade the original series to be more like Macross?", though they usually don't put it in those exact terms. In reality, it's no more complete and even less workable than Robotech Academy. Academy may be a mess, but at least it's a technically non-infringing mess.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... it could pass on a technicality, since Robotech III: the Odyssey was Carl Macek's master plan for Robotech after Robotech II: the Sentinels was finished. It never formally entered development, but it's worth mentioning as a failure because it ending up as a non-starter basically signified the death of Carl Macek's grand ambitions for the animated Robotech series*. Thanks to a combination of factors torpedoing Macek's plans for Robotech II and beyond, we ended up stuck with crimes against animation like Robotech 3000 and the hopefully similarly-truncated Robotech Academy. * For once, I'm not being sarcastic here... even though the vast majority of Macek's ideas were absolutely terrible, the sheer scale of what he'd planned to do was nothing short of audacious. When you intend to make a series so vast every calendar day has its own episode, you're planning on a grand scale even if it is rubbish.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Just my two cents, but since it's literally McKeever's job to be the most vocal supporter as their marketing man and their de facto public relations schmuck, that might not be the best indicator that he's the originator of the idea. It would make a certain amount of sense if he was, since he was the one who (repeatedly) aired the "Harmony Gold won't fund development of a new series until they get an episode commitment from a network" thing on the Robotech.com forums a few years ago. Whoever the "guilty party" is, they must be sweating bullets right now. 17 days to go, and they only just achieved 1/3 of the total pledge amount they need to get this off the ground. Unless their panel at SDCC lights the world on fire, this will most likely meet with a premature end. To be honest, I think the industry figured that one out 'round about 1992... when articles in American anime magazines covering new Macross releases started to use phrases like "Forget Robotech" or only mentioned the Robotech portions of a side-by-side release of Robotech and the original shows as an afterthought. It'll definitely make Frank and Harmony Gold look bad... well... worse than they already do, anyway. Frank's reputation isn't what you'd call spotless and saintly ("acquittal! acquittal!", said the Harmony Gold parrot), but the Robotech staff have been doing an amazing job of making Harmony Gold look bad since at least 1999 thanks to some legendarily poor judgement. In all likelihood, it was the overwhelming runaway success of the Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter that convinced them that the fans would be throwing fat stacks of cash at Harmony Gold over Robotech Academy. They probably should've looked at details other than the total take, since the RRT Kickstarter turned into an ongoing public relations disaster for Palladium Books that has reportedly deteriorated to the point of backers threatening legal action against Palladium and even exchanging death threats on the comments pages. Water from a poisoned well, as they say...
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Sir, I salute you. Sure they did, how else do you think they came up with Janice Em... or as many Robotech fans know her, Commander 36DData? That depends on a few different factors, as of PB's last update... namely, the speed with which the goods actually reach Palladium Books' offices in Westland, the amount of time they can spare to prepare the stuff for shipment, etc. So, thanks to the vagaries of international maritime shipping and overland shipping, and the serial laziness of Palladium, there's a possibility that no backers for RRT will get anything prior to Palladium selling their limited stock of airmailed material at GenCon. MOSPEADA probably would've done better, IMO, if it had kept the planned original emphasis on the titular mecha instead of going for a piece of the Macross transforming fighter toy profits with both hands and fumbling the original concept in the process. SDCC's looking like it's going to have to be one hell of a Hail Mary save if they want to pull this off... the 3% a day loss continues, with today's projected final total of just 63% ($316,302) and a high-low projection cone that is now entirely below $270k ($205,552 to $266,126). If this keeps up, they'll never make it to 50%, let alone 100%.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I... kinda do. It must have been one truly hilarious, sleep-deprived, 3:00 AM brainstorming session that led to someone on the staff saying "Y'know what this show needs? Sentient lemur fairy people." That must have been one hell of a trip. Hm... now there's another weird thought. Matchbox (Mattel) was bankrolling the development and production of the Robotech II: the Sentinels animated series. Wouldn't it be a kick if it turned out the reason Harmony Gold so consistently refuses to continue the Robotech II: the Sentinels series is because their contract with Matchbox is still valid? Wow... it's... a summation of the most pessimistic musings the Robotech fans have been talking over. Class of raw recruits who are expies of/rivals to existing characters (Sentinels) including the seemingly-mandatory generic prodigy and spunky action girl, lost in deep space on a ship the don't understand and unable to use their fold drive to get home (Macross Saga, Sentinels), and beset by aliens who just want their sh*t back (all of it). This makes Astro Plan and Space Gandam V look like masterpieces of original thought. As Robotech plots go, this is practically paint-by-numbers.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Er... forgive me for saying so, especially since I am probably the last person who should be correcting anyone about anything that appears in Star Wars, but that craft in the video has four cannons and only two intakes (or four semicircular intakes). The art I've found for the Z-95 on the Star Wars wiki "Wookiepedia" shows the stock Z-95 as having two cannons and four circular intakes like the stock X-Wing from the original trilogy. It looks a fair bit like this thing, which is apparently a very heavily modified custom Z-95, which seems to be derived from the same Ralph McQuarrie sketch as the craft in that YouTube video... the sketch in question was posted a few posts previous in that same Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/starwars/status/491274058323877888
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe, maybe not... or perhaps the winged fairy lemurs will be something important to them the way the original Sentinels had that Tirolian scientist obsessing over miniature purple shih tzus.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Duly noted. Like I said, I haven't really been paying attention to anything related to the new Star Wars flick... but that design's got my attention. Looks like a neat design, and I kinda like that "used future" look it's got going on. A little more streamlined than the old X-Wing, but not so much so that it ends up in "Raygun gothic" territory like the various Naboo craft out of the prequel trilogy. It still looks utilitarian and serviceable though, which is good. I didn't like how some of the prequel trilogy stuff looked like it had put looking cool ahead of being workable in a fight. (Of course, I know the square root of bloody nothing about Star Wars, for the most part... my exposure to it consisting entirely of the six movies, the Thrawn trilogy of novels, and the old X-Wing vs TIE Fighter PC game, so my experience with SW designs is very limited.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I dunno, tribbles were always pretty passive trouble... and the flying monkeys were a good deal bigger. That thing puts me more in the mind of something that might've been exotic background fauna in something like Dunbine or Escaflowne, or at least on the cover of some progressive rock band's album. That's not to say it wouldn't be a real hoot if those adorable little things have been picking on the Robotech Masters... that'd be one step worse, humiliation-wise, than the Galactic Empire losing out to the frigging Ewoks.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe this'll mark me out as some kind of heretic, maybe it won't... but I think that design on the Twitter page is kinda cool lookin'. I've been ignoring the news about the new Star Wars movie(s) until now, but this actually has me vaguely curious to see what they're doing. Well played, Mr. Abrams... well played indeed. Also, I kinda liked the "weathered" look the Rebel aircraft had... having them look a little roughed-up made them feel more like something used by an outfit that wasn't overblessed with resources.
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