Seto Kaiba
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Hm... if I were you, I'd hold off a little longer before I started taking bets on how the Legion of Dim (Tommy, Steve, Kevin) and their cheering section (Maverick, MEMO) will react when Harmony Gold either tires of their BS and fires them, or comes to their senses and decides to stop wasting time and money on Robotech when most of the world stopped caring about in 1987. So long as the prospect of a live-action Robotech movie by Warner Bros isn't a completely impossible prospect, Harmony Gold is going to keep clinging to the idea that Robotech isn't dead and that they can make it relevant again. Oh, I expect that most of them will probably remain hardcore even after Robotech has finally fallen apart. Steve might actually get to stay on after Harmony Gold axes the Robotech team, since he's apparently also involved with managing their licenses somehow. Tommy and Kevin will almost certainly do exactly what Carl Macek did after the collapse of Robotech: the Untold Story and Robotech II: the Sentinels, and hit the convention circuit to exaggerate their involvement in the creative process, to try to convince people that all of their mistakes were really part of some greater artistic vision, and to tell a couple of extravagant lies about how influential their work is in the Americas and how well-regarded it is in Japan. The Legion of Dim's cheering section will probably continue to "keep the faith" by running RTX (into the ground), censoring anyone who criticizes any aspect of Robotech and promoting the show as being the single greatest cinematic achievement in all of human history. It's a safe bet they'll probably also string the most hardcore fans along with self-made rumors and false anecdotes about how other companies are eyeing Robotech as a highly successful property and intend to pick it up and resume the story. I'm inclined to say it's a little from column A, a little from column B... he doesn't seem to be all that aware of what's going on, and he probably doesn't like having to come in and try to cover up the occasional bouts of honesty from people who outrank him. Nah, if you take Tommy's original remarks on the note at face value (which IIRC were later "Clarified" by McKeever as being just a rough estimate), RTSR should've been out in '09 or thereabouts. Frank Agrama's still CEO, as far as I can tell... Tommy's just the creative director for the Robotech franchise. I'd assume that Kevin's kept his job despite his tantrums because Tommy's even worse at lying than Kevin is, and nobody in senior management gives a flip about Robotech... (especially since their perpetually low budgets seem to reflect a distinct lack of confidence in Robotech on the part of senior management).
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Nah, it's not that remarkable... after all, there are innumerable people in marketing and middle management who've all managed to hold onto their phony-baloney jobs through this recession. Harmony Gold clearly doesn't hire people for the Robotech franchise on the basis of their qualifications, but rather on who they're related to (Steve) and who sucks up the most (Kevin). I can't imagine they would have much chance to hire qualified people anyway, since who wants to have an albatross like that dangling from his resume when applying for a job? I've never really been the convention-going type, but to me this policy of only showing promotional materials on the convention tour smacks of an attempt to get someone, anyone, to actually give a flip about the convention tour. Almost every photo I've seen of the panel audience on their little tour has been of a mostly-empty room with a handful of bored-looking 30-somethings, hardly the big, vibrant following McKeever keeps saying Robotech has. Making their promotional materials convention-exclusive is a somewhat underhanded way to get more of an audience than just the people trying to grab a good seat for the panel after theirs; and with the future of the live-action movie looking grimmer by the day, Harmony Gold needs all the help they can get to make it look like going forward with the LAM isn't a massive waste of time. Y'see... it doesn't seem like McKeever has had any kind of formal education in marketing. He doesn't seem to grasp the idea that lying to your customers only works if you take the time to come up with a believable lie. McKeever's approach to marketing is more along the lines of trying to sell seats on a ship that sank years ago. Trying to spin the facts to make the company look good is just typical PR, but fibs like that only work when it isn't painfully obvious that you're lying through your teeth and your default response to being questioned isn't "WHO TOLD YOU THAT? THEY LIE!". According to Kevin McKeever's staff bio on robotech.com, his official title is "Marketing Coordinator". Yes, it is true that he used to try to troll MacrossWorld... IIRC he got the boot when he started in with some unpleasant race-based remarks.
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So, it's just business as usual then? It's not like it's anything new or unusual to have the saner Robotech fans voicing doubts and questioning the veracity of McKeever's claims. That's been happening on a fairly regular basis since at least 2004, and there's no sign of that situation changing anytime soon. The fans have long since learned that nothing McKeever says can be trusted, as his usual response to anything that shows Harmony Gold or Robotech in a negative light is a reflex denial. By the look of things, fairly nine-tenths of his job is trying to cover the "indiscretions" of more important staffers when they accidentally tell the truth to the fans during a convention panel. He's annoying not just because he's a spin doctor... but because he's an inept spin doctor. Oh yes, that old chestnut... I guess I should brace myself for another spate of podcasts telling all five Robotech fans who listen how I'm secretly making all these rumors. Oh, that's easy! It's a lot more cost-effective to claim that you're working on a new series and then piss away a couple of years while your low-rent creative team puts together another B-movie effort by calling everyone who questions the company line a liar and then banning them. So, they're competing against themselves then? Admittedly, that would explain a LOT. Yeah, it was Tommy who said that the higher-ups put the brakes on Shadow Rising while they waited for WB to raise RT's brand awareness and improve its reputation so they could get better sponsorship deals. Essentially, he's calling Tommy a liar to cover something that doesn't look good for Robotech.
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Wait... what? Is the so-called "creative" team at Harmony Gold so intellectually bankrupt that the best they can do for new material is recapping a story they did as a comic miniseries just a couple of years ago? Hell, when Robotech's creativity is concerned the bar's set so low it's a serious trip hazard in Satan's wine cellar, and somehow they still find ways to disappoint. It's things like this which leave me wondering if Tommy starts every workday by asking himself how he can be more like the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert.
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No, I don't believe they are... but then, it's not like Amway's the only company out there that relies on dishonest and dubiously legal practices to keep itself in business. Harmony Gold's questionable business practices and tenuous grasp of ethics makes perfect sense when you remember that its CEO, Frank Agrama, has ties to wonderful role models like Silvio Berlusconi. Hm... given Harmony Gold's track record, what makes you think they'd give a damn if a Macekre of Macross 7 came out looking like crap? Robotech's creative process has never been about making a product that looks good. If that was what they cared about, we would never have seen Robotech: the Untold Story, Robotech II: the Sentinels, Robotech 3000, Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, etc. The one strategy Harmony Gold has stuck with through most of Robotech's long and sordid history is to make new shows as cheaply as possible and with as little original material as they think they can get away with. It's much easier for the show to turn a profit that way, and it doesn't require actual creative talent. Oh, it's easy enough to understand... some people are optimistic or naive enough to believe that a well-reasoned, evidence-driven argument will make the fanatics stop acting like complete idiots. It ends in one of three ways: they get frustrated enough to call the idiots some unflattering names and get banned, they give up and go do something else, or they grow out of their naivete and leave the Robotech fandom on the grounds that it's a lost cause.
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Uh... your wording's a little vague, but what you're asking is "Did the UN Spacy ever build more than one Grand Cannon?", right? In the original Macross, the UN Spacy broke ground on no less than five Grand Cannon systems between 2001 and 2007... though they only managed to finish one of them in time. Construction started on Grand Cannon I only two months after the theory behind the weapon was finished in 2002, and was followed in short order by Australia's Grand Cannon II and Africa's Grand Cannon III in 2004, the moon's Grand Cannon IV in 2006, and South America's Grand Cannon V in 2007. Grand Cannon I was finished in January 2010, only a month before the destruction of Earth's surface, while Grand Cannon II was destroyed by Anti-UN forces in 2005, and Grand Cannons III thru V were left incomplete when the Zentradi attacked. (If we take the ~8yr construction time into account, the Zentradi might've taken one hell of a beating if they'd attacked in 2015 and gone up against four completed Grand Cannons and a somewhat larger space fleet.)
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Italian.
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Ah, my mistake... thank you for the timely correction. Eh... that's from the video game adaptation of Macross: Do You Remember Love? for the Sega Saturn and Sony Playstation. It was the mail-in gift for the game that originated the whole "black hole" thing, though it's pretty much guaranteed not to be canon to either official Macross continuity. Macross's main continuity regards DYRL? as being an in-universe historical drama/propaganda film that debuted in 2031, and Macross II's parallel world continuity doesn't recognize that game as a part of its continuity. Uh, there's a problem with that theory. Specifically, the problem is that the game doesn't belong to Macross II's parallel world continuity, and that the Mardook (correct spelling) don't exist in Macross's main continuity. Also a problem is that Ishtar believing the Macross was the Alus had nothing to do with its appearance (and mind you, it looks NOTHING like the Alus that appears in her "visions" or the Megaroad-01) but rather what Hibiki and his friend Mash told her about the ship's history after she saw the ship's early warning systems triggering its main gun to fire. Another slight problem is that the Macross wasn't unique in Macross II's timeline either, except in the obvious historical capacity. The UN Spacy built several Macross-class ships for its colonization program, as outlined in the continuity materials from Macross II's creators, and were launching them as late as the 2050s. That premise is ENTIRELY Robotech's and has nothing to do with Macross... ... and to be honest, it doesn't have a whole hell of a lot to do with the official Robotech continuity either. The business of having Robotech's "SDF-3" go back in time was a plot device concocted for the finale of the non-canon Robotech novel series by James Luceno and Brian Daley. It was never part of the canon Robotech continuity.
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Eh... there are in-universe explanations for some of the most obvious changes, like the DYRL VF-1 being a newer production block of the VF-1 (the TV series version being Block 5, the movie version being Block 6+), and having Exsedol return to his former size and realter his body makeup because he was afraid of losing his memories. In Macross Frontier we also see material from the TV series and DYRL being used side-by-side... the Zentradi in the 33rd Marines use a mixture of TV series and DYRL uniforms. By the opposite token, we see Milia using the same type of pilot suit from the original series in Macross 7, and in that same series seeing an actor playing the DYRL version of Britai standing next to a TV series version of Quamzin, and IIRC there's a TV series ARMD that shows up in Macross VF-X as well. On the whole, they just seem to like the DYRL designs better... and so use them instead of the TV series ones when they come up.
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Macross Chronicle's timeline sheets do consistently favor the series/OVA version of events over those of a movie version for continuity purposes.
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But isn't that in keeping with Harmony Gold USA's core values? Something along the lines of "Never tell the truth when a lie will do." or "Dishonesty is the best policy." sounds about right. I'd try... but I can't shake the feeling that envisioning yourself as a clueless prat with no common sense and no pattern recognition skills to speak of is the kind of thing that lands you a seat on the short bus. If it weren't for those clueless fanboys who'll buy anything with the Robotech name on it and breathlessly wait years for a weak Mospeada knockoff, there would be very few Robotech fans in the world. Harmony Gold deliberately cultivated a fanatic mindset in what remains of the Robotech fanbase specifically because that way they have a loyal repeat customer base that will cheerfully buy anything they make, regardless of quality. It keeps the franchise alive, if you can call it "alive", and it ensures that Tommy and friends still have their phony-baloney do-nothing jobs at the end of the day.
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Didn't realize what game you meant at first... but yes, the Playstation 2 version of the Macross: Do You Remember Love? video game was developed by Sega AM2 (Sega Amusement Machine Research and Development Department 2), the same developer that did Virtua Fighter and Shenmue.
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Tricky question... y'see, it was originally assumed that the change from "UN" to "New UN" was the result of the 2051 coup attempt depicted in Macross VF-X2. Kawamori then kind of torpedoed that idea in an interview when he said that the change from the UN Government to the New UN Government was more of a gradual affair that resulted from the UN Gov't's inability to effectively govern the increasingly spread-out masses of humanity, and the growing discontent with the centralized government... making the coup attempt more a symptom than the cause. So, at some point in the early 2050s, a combination of factors including the attempted coup and having the government reorganize itself somewhat resulted in the military reorganizing and changing its name too. Mind you, there's a little confusion as to when the names changed, for two reasons. 1.) Macross Frontier sources slip a few times and refer to the "New UN Spacy" or "New UN Government" in the early 2040s, even though neither term was used in the shows from that period. 2.) The original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series referred to the re-established UN Gov't as being the new UN Gov't (with a little 'n'), though the "new" got dropped fairly swiftly and the UN Spacy never picked the "new" up in its name either, so they just kept calling themselves the UN Spacy and UN Government. The official bio information for Isamu, Gamlin, et. al. as belonging to the "UN Spacy", not the "New UN Spacy".
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More on the "have become" side... but yes. It originally just meant the thermonuclear kind, but the "modern" usage of the term in Macross also covers pair-annihilation weaponry.
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Nope... reaction weapons started out with the full name of thermonuclear reaction weapon and antimatter ones were developed later on, as per the Compendium and later Macross sources. It's a broadening of the term as technology advanced and new forms of reaction weapon were developed.
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The PSP games aren't canon... so there's part of your problem right there. It's not the first time a Macross game accidentally identified reaction weapons as "nuclear" weapons, it happened in Macross VF-X2 as well. There's a definition of reaction weapons available on the Macross Compendium, and Macross Chronicle describes them as being pure fusion bombs that use charged particles to initiate the fusion reaction, thus eliminating the residual radioactive material left behind by conventional nuclear weapons... though some forms of reaction weaponry in later years (2040s+) also used antimatter warheads.
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Having thrust-vectoring main nozzles doesn't eliminate the need for verniers, since the nozzles can move only so far in any given direction... especially since most VFs only have two-dimensional thrust vectoring nozzles (they only move in one axis). All VFs have vernier thrusters scattered across the airframe for attitude control in space, and the vernier slit approach to attitude control appears to be something that's advantageous for space-optimized VFs, as it keeps cropping up on VFs that've been optimized for maximum performance in space. Master File's explanation of diverting exhaust would indicate that their advantage is partly maneuverability in space and partly a fuel savings, since they offer full-360 degree coverage and draw on engine exhaust rather than having a dedicated fuel supply or tapping the main engine tanks, leaving that much more fuel to run the reaction engines and extending its range in space. IIRC, that's the thrust reverser mentioned in the stats.
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Character Art Appreciation Thread III
Seto Kaiba replied to Vepariga's topic in Movies and TV Series
Just imagine how much fun he must have had fulfilling his fatherly obligation of terrorizing their boyfriends... most dads can't use the threat of a standing army, unlimited access to heavily-armed giant robots, and a huge stockpile of thermonuclear weapons to make sure nobody tries anything funny with their daughters. -
Vernier slits... well, they're basically just a cluster of vernier thrusters arranged around the fighter's exhaust nozzles. It appears that they were a relatively late development in VF design, as they first appear (chronologically) on the VF-14 Vampire (either ver.) and then it appears to have been adopted by several other space-oriented VF designs (VF-17 Nightmare, VF-19F/S Excalibur, VF-5000G Star Mirage, VF-171 Nightmare Plus). Earlier designs wouldn't have them, and later designs meant for all-regime or atmospheric service (VF-11, VF-19A, VF-25) likely wouldn't use them either. The (non-canon) Variable Fighter Master File VF-19 Excalibur book describes them as diverting exhaust from the main exhaust nozzles to operate, eliminating the need for a separate fuel source for those verniers.
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Macross Official Setting and the Expanded Universe
Seto Kaiba replied to sketchley's topic in Movies and TV Series
Figured it was... To be honest, I couldn't tell ya. Audio dramas aren't really my thing, so I've never really bothered to go looking for a copy or a translation thereof. What little I know about the show is gleaned from print sources. -
Honestly, you kinda are... you did say that you don't consider being unable to read the book a valid excuse from fans who are asking/looking for scanalations. Only the most die-hard Macross fans would buy a book they can't even read just to to look at the pictures, and like as not Macross the First has changed a bit from the TV series it was based on. What I'm saying, and what you seem to have missed, is this attitude is counterproductive to the growth of the fandom and the franchise. If we didn't have the helpful fans translating Macross stuff for the fans who ordinarily wouldn't be able to read or understand it, we wouldn't have the fandom at all. The only choices you're positing here are buying it only to look at the pictures, which isn't going to sell many copies, or buying it and teaching yourself the language so you know what's going on. Tell me, which is more likely to cause Macross's owners to say "Gee, there's a big market out here we're missing out on, maybe we should try to exploit it instead"? The ten people who don't speak Japanese buying Macross the First just to look at the pretty pictures, or ten thousand people reading an unofficial scanalation of Macross the First in English and discussing it energetically on forums and chatrooms?
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Okay, since Talos is too nice to say it... I'll say it. You're not going to like what I say, but hey, that's your hard boo-hoo. Telling someone who's interested in Macross the First to go buy a copy and then go teach himself the Japanese language is beyond asinine. You know as well as I do that with Harmony Gold actively preventing Macross fans outside Japan from gaining access to Macross shows, there would be no way for the people who don't have the time, the money, or the ability to learn a second language to enjoy Macross at all. Were it not for fansubs, most of the people on this site would've never been able to see DYRL, FB2012, 7, Zero, or Frontier. Hell, even you've done fansubs before... 'cept what you're doing is infinitely worse (and far less legal) than what you're griping about since you're fansubbing one of the few shows that IS available outside Japan. Were it not for scans and fan translators, we wouldn't have resources like the Macross Compendium or the Macross Mecha Manual, which sketchley hotlinks rather a lot of images for his own site from, and most fans would never have seen or read a single page of Macross 7 Trash or Macross Dynamite 7: Mylene Beat... Macross's fandom outside Japan is built on the idea that the fans who can read and speak Japanese making the shows and manga and magazine articles accessible to the fans who can't. Without that, most of us wouldn't be here. Without that, this site almost certainly wouldn't exist. Would these people support the franchise and buy a copy if they had any legitimate way to get it in a language they can understand? You bet they would. Saying that you don't want to distribute scans or translations while a publication is in progress is one thing, and I can say that I support that to a certain extent... but when you start using it as an excuse to justify a condescending attitude, I think you've crossed a line. If someone asks you for scans, then just say "I'm sorry, but I don't do scans" and leave it at that.
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Macross Official Setting and the Expanded Universe
Seto Kaiba replied to sketchley's topic in Movies and TV Series
Generic would suffice... their titles are just Macross II: Lovers Again and then a volume number, five volumes in all. I haven't had a chance to go through them all, since I'm not that fast a translator and that's well over a thousand pages, so I can't speak to how far they go past the events of the OVA, but they definitely do go past it, so they kinda straddle the line between Official Setting and Expanded Universe. -
Macross Official Setting and the Expanded Universe
Seto Kaiba replied to sketchley's topic in Movies and TV Series
One other title comes to mind that we should consider... Kawamori's "VF-Experiment" stuff printed in Character Model magazine back in '02. I'd be inclined to classify them as "Other" even though they're Macross mechanical designs by Kawamori himself and have in-universe design histories, because Kawamori-sensei has said they're not part of the official Macross continuity for the time being. Let's not forget the Macross II novels, of which there are five... they're somewhere between official setting and expanded universe, since they retell the OVA and go beyond it as well. -
Macross Official Setting and the Expanded Universe
Seto Kaiba replied to sketchley's topic in Movies and TV Series
Personally, I would guess that he means Macross Generation, the radio show/audio drama from 1997. It's set on Macross-9, and events from it are mentioned in the timeline posted over on the Macross Compendium... possibly the Macross Frontier drama CDs as well, tho I've heard nothing about the canonicity of those either way. Incidentally, in terms of the "articles in:" part under Official Setting, you might want to include B-Club Magazine, Animage magazine, and possibly also the Monthly Bandai Making Journal, since all three were used to publish official setting materials (production art, concept art, creator interviews, stats, setting descriptions, continuity information, etc.) for Macross II: Lovers Again. You should probably also add the "Entertainment Bible" series under Official Setting publications too for much the same reason. The official manga adaptation of Macross II: Lovers Again could probably go under Official Setting, if that's where you're lumping Macross 7 Trash and Mylene Beat too.