Seto Kaiba

For one... as far as I've seen, all but the most devoted Robotech fans sincerely doubt that Tommy will actually have something ready to deliver next year. Even if they do manage to deliver it on time, it's not like it'll be all that relevant to the ongoing story, and it definitely won't change the fact that the only people interest in the project are the die-hard Robotech fans. The rest are asking "why aren't you finishing Shadow Rising?". On the subject of the live action movie, I doubt they'll announce it if it gets canceled. Past performance would seem to indicate that they'll sit on the news until someone else leaks it, then they'll grudgingly own up to it or claim that it's not really dead and say they're shopping around for another studio. Either way, they're going to do whatever they can to give the illusion that it isn't a lost cause for as long as they can

To be precise... the thing that's slowly killing the Robotech franchise is Harmony Gold's entirely-justifiable lack of confidence in the brand. If we can say one positive thing about senior management at Harmony Gold, it would be that they're not so far gone that they've started to believe their own hype. Despite all the noise from Kevin and Tommy about how Robotech is a big hit, their superiors haven't forgotten Robotech's long and proud history of f*cking up royally. So, unsurprisingly, they're unwilling to spend much of anything on keeping their Robotech franchise afloat. Unless it turns a profit, it's not even on their radar. That's why the discussion boards over on robotech.com are such a mess... senior management doesn't care how they're run because they don't turn any kind of a profit, and the luckless employees tasked with its maintenance have long since ceased to care. Steve got sick of fanboy drama and doesn't want to deal with it anymore, Tommy only visits it to make sure nobody is saying anything bad about him and to sustain his undeserved feeling of accomplishment, and Kevin uses it as a venue to live out his "big name fan" power fantasies. Nah... step 1 is "Don't make anything, but tell everyone how awesome the stuff you're not making is." That is the very essence of the Harmony Gold convention tour.

True! In point of fact, that key difference between Macross and Robotech is one of the things Carl Macek claimed (after the fact) was an intentional change he'd made to "improve" Macross... specifically, by trivializing the music aspect of the series and by making Minmay a horrible person. Of course, in that same interview he also claimed that Macross had hastened to imitate Robotech's elimination of music as an important part of the story in various sequels. (Bear ye in mind that at the time, the most recent Macross sequel was Macross Dynamite 7) Nope, the initial Robotech series was aimed squarely at young children. Later titles, like the Waltrip bros. comic adaptation/continuation of Robotech II: the Sentinels and Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles clearly were aimed at older demographics. The dramatic swing towards PG-13 sex scenes and the like in Sentinels and the hilariously awful character designs in Shadow Chronicles leave no doubt about that...

IIRC, wasn't it given to him by his mother?

No kidding... and it doesn't help that both Kevin and Tommy appear to be quietly encouraging the asinine behavior of certain moderators by playing on their desire for "big name fan" status and/or employment at Harmony Gold. In one case, we know for a fact that that's exactly what's going on. Eh... in my experience, the core of the problem isn't really the terminal idiocy of Harmony Gold's so-called "creative team". What's really killing the Robotech fandom is Harmony Gold's crippling fear of risk and the poor choices they've made in volunteer forum moderators. Exactly... if you still care about Robotech, then robotech.com is the last place you should be going for news about Robotech. In a case of breathtaking idiocy, the official website of the Robotech franchise is often the last site to have news about Robotech. On the few times that Harmony Gold's staff have talked about why it's like that, they point the finger at a ridiculously slow and restrictive approvals process that leaves them waiting weeks or months to announce things they've already said at conventions on the front page of the website. Between the absence of news about new Robotech productions and the general lack of content thanks to past failures, the Robotech fandom has nothing to do but endlessly rehash those what-ifs until Harmony Gold (possibly) gets their act together. It doesn't just sound like that... that's exactly what it is.

Heh... but as a Macross 7 fan, doesn't that mean you'll only know that one song for at least your next ten posts? Really? All this time I've been thinking it's because he's the only halfway-likable main character in Robotech and they keep dangling him in front of the fans like a donut in front of a fat kid on a treadmill. Okay, I give up... was misspelling "crowd" an unintentional gaffe or deliberate homage to Tom's illiterate "fanclub"?

Yeah, the subject of the Supervision Army gets dragged up in the Macross 7 TV series during Exsedol's discussion about the history of the Protoculture and the Protodeviln on Rax/Lux. Also, isn't "Inspection Forces" just a bad translation of "Supervision Army"? Obviously not, since the creation of the Supervision Army is touched on in a show that came out ten years after DYRL?, and the timelines in Macross Chronicle and on the Macross Compendium still use them. The Zentradi vs Meltrandi thing is, IIRC, part of the propaganda aspect of the in-universe DYRL. Either way, it sounds rather anticlimactic and it takes all the mystery out of them...

Uh-huh... of course, if you take the implications Kenichi Yatagai was dropping in his B-Club interview at face value, they might have already done that. Mind you, I think it's still a bad idea given our more recent picture of what the Protoculture stand for... it'd take away all their mystique by making them a known quantity.

Interesting observation... here are my thoughts on it. It's been a while since I last watched those episodes, but I can think of two possible explanations. Alto's VF-25 lost engine power as a result of the d-pulse burst. This might mean that the loss of the other controls was just collateral damage as their powerplant went offline. If the d-pulse burst is targeted to disable a thermonuclear reaction powerplant, then that would explain why Brera's cybernetics and Alto's EX-Gear weren't affected. One would assume Brera isn't carrying a tiny fusion powerplant in his gut, which means his cybernetics are probably battery operated. We know for certain that Alto's EX-Gear is powered by fuel cells and uses chemical rockets to achieve flight, which would explain why he wasn't affected. It's doubtful that the burst was intermittent enough for them to do what they did without realizing their fighters still worked, but it is reasonably likely that the VF-27 was hardened against such things as part of its design process since they knew they were going to be encountering Vajra.

Had to think there for a second, didn'tcha? lol... if you actually watch them once in a while, then you're made of sterner stuff than I am. I don't even keep the DVDs on my DVD rack with all my other movies. They're buried in a box in my basement along with all of my other Robotech stuff.

I'll agree that Mylene was hardly a background character... but she wasn't the focus of Macross 7's story, and her links to her holdover character parents were tenuous enough that you could remove them from the equation and change her surname without affecting her characterization at all. Remember, I didn't say background character, I said "not the main character". As a secondary lead, Mylene is technically a supporting cast member, but that's splitting hairs... The point I was trying to get across is thus... the last thing we should want is new characters that rely on being a relative of a preexisting character as a significant part of their appeal. Having every significant character in a long running franchise like that be related or close friends is just bad (and unimaginative) writing. Macross has stayed away from that particular pitfall thus far. It's a bad practice we often associate with Robotech because Robotech's writers used those bad practices frequently to give new characters some appeal (like Marcus Rush, Maia Sterling, Vince Grant, and Janice Em) and give the fans incentive to tolerate the more annoying ones (Dana Sterling, Bowie Grant).

Personally, I think Kawamori will probably stick with his established pattern of leaving a finished story well enough alone and tell the story of a different cast of characters somewhere else in the Macross universe. He could go forward and tell more about Macross's future, or go back and tell stories of what other people were doing during past events (e.g. Mobile Suit Gundam: 08th MS Team). I would very much prefer to see Macross avoid imitating Robotech's bad practice of basing everything around the same handful of old characters and requiring that anyone new be their children, an unmentioned sibling, a close friend, or some combination of the three. On the rare occasions that Macross features the children of an established character, there's usually little in the way of connection to their famous antecedents (Komilia and Sheryl) or they're not the show's main character (Mylene and Emilia).

Damn... that does work better. It's cliche as hell, but that just makes it funnier. Y'know, I'd always suspected you were a masochist on account of the whole Macross 7 thing... this confirms it. Odds are if (not when) Harmony Gold's "creative" team gets off their collective asses and actually makes Robotech: Shadow Rising, I'll end up seeing it for free when this town's sole remaining Robotech fan starts brandishing his copy at me as "proof" that being a Robotech fan isn't a complete waste of time. If it pans out the way Shadow Chronicles did, he'll insist that I watch it right away and after about five minutes I'll give him a sad look and tell him he's a goddamn idiot.

Nah, the unsettling part of that is that his skull appears to be lopsided... but yeah, the quality of the art is one of the major turn-offs to most prospective readers of the Robotech comics. It's like the artists didn't have a clue how to ape the artistic stylings of Haruhiko Mikimoto (Macross), Tomonori Kogawa (Southern Cross), and Yoshitaka Amano (Mospeada) and decided that the way to go was to draw their own style (badly) and try to make it look vaguely like the original designs in the hair and details of their clothing...

Fortunately for me, the amount of money I wasted on exploring the 31 flavors of godawful that are the old Robotech comics wouldn't be enough to buy a sandwich at any decent eatery. Not a bad philosophy, IMO... the only reason I paid actual money for the Robotech stuff that I have is because it was SO cheap that it'd be far more expensive in terms of my time and effort to find and download scans of the comics instead.

Prior to this, I don't think I've ever had anything I could honestly call a technical problem with Norton. I've had a few beefs with the UI over the years, and have stuck to using Norton Antivirus after being completely put off by what a paranoid nagging nursemaid Norton Internet Security was back around '06, but other than that I've never really had cause for complaint... especially not with the newer, less resource-heavy versions of NAV. This recent spate of problems caused by Microsoft Office Automatic Scan is annoying and inconvenient, but not enough to put me off using it entirely. IMO, it's still better than McAfee and don't even get me started on TrendMicro and AVG.

It's pretty much cosmetically identical to the VF-19A.

'kay... thanks to a bit of recent sleuthing on the part of some other Firefox users, the culprit behind the slow on-download virus scans and files vanishing after closing the browser window has been identified. It's actually not Firefox, but some weird interaction between Firefox 3.x and Norton. The specific culprit appears to be the Microsoft Office Automatic Scan setting in the Norton options. It causes no problems on Windows XP machines, but if enabled on Windows Vista or Windows 7, it slows down virus scanning during file downloads in Firefox dramatically and can cause downloaded files to vanish once the Firefox window is closed. Prior to figuring this out, the only fix was going into about:config and setting the scanwhendone parameter to false manually.

'kay... it seems safe to say that my rather less favorable assessment of the quality of the art and writing is in line with general public opinion of the Robotech comics. Unlike many of the people on robotech.com who like to have a go at the older Robotech comics, I actually ended up reading most of them after some enterprising Robotech fan turned my "don't knock it 'till you've tried it" policy around on me and insisted I give the comics a fair chance. Personally, I had a difficult time taking anything in the old comics seriously because the art and writing were almost uniformly amateurish, and the frequent and obvious occurrences of tracing from Macross line art and even contemporary sci-fi movies gave it the feel of some community college art student's D- term project. One of two reasons... either the artist(s) responsible for that mess was basing his art on this or something similar from a Macross artbook, or they just didn't know what a VF-1/F-14 was supposed to look like from the front and decided to wing it. It's also possible they traced an F-14 from someone else who didn't know how to draw one... there are plenty of idiots at Marvel and DC who have no idea how simple firearms work, let alone something complex like a jet aircraft.

Like I said... about the only people for whom the old Robotech comics have any value are old Robotech fans. Newer fans have little or no interest in them, because they're non-canon and almost universally reviled in the online fanbase. Impressive ASCII art, but an image macro would've worked just as well. You have to admit I have a point... if he stopped trying to come off like an angry right-wing columnist all the time, he might stop to do his research first and partially alleviate his terminal case of foot-in-mouth.

Huh... well, that's good news! Trigun was one of the first two anime series I bought on DVD, and after all these years the discs are starting to get a bit battered. I was hoping we'd see a re-release of the show around the time the movie came out so I could replace it. I'd been hoping for a remastered version, but a straight-up re-release won't hurt my feelings any.

Okay, yeah... the first issue of Comico's Macross adaptation might be worth something, if only as something esoteric that reflects what Robotech almost was. Uh-huh... y'know, if you stopped trying to emulate angry right-wing political commentators in your posts, it might go a LONG way toward changing people's attitudes towards you. When you get to ranting or trying to post trenchant remarks about various subjects, it makes it a lot easier for you to make the kind of mistakes Gubaba and taksraven keep ridin' your ass for.

Uh... she's done a bit, but it looks like most of the voice work she's done since Macross 7 is either background or one-shot character sort of stuff. Her most recent voice role appears to be in Kami Nomi zo Shiru Sekai, which has been slated to start its 12 episode run this coming October. The other stuff she's done since Macross Dynamite 7 includes: "Noel-sensei" in Itsudatte My Santa (2005), Azusa Miura in Idolmasters: Xenoglossia (2007), a one-shot part in Hatenko Yugi, minor voice work and theme song performance in My-Otome (2005-6), a minor recurring bit part in Pocket Monsters: Diamond and Pearl as "Shirona", Chigusa Sakai in various Shakugan no Shana media (in 2005-2009), and a few other things.

Hell, that's not the only thing that was wasted... the whole bloody show was a catastrophe of bad writing and worse design. Of course, you can't really say much for any of the attempts to build on the story and setting of Bubblegum Crisis. Bubblegum Crash wasn't exactly fantastic, and both AD Police Files and AD Police: To Serve and Protect were pretty awful. I haven't seen Parasite Dolls yet, but I can't imagine it's much better. They've got a track record almost as bad as Robotech's...

Nah... it ended long before it could begin, because our would-be negotiator doesn't understand the problem and seems to have a rather tenuous grip on reality. Actually... there is, she's just missing part of the show's full title. It was a pretty weak reimagining of the original Bubblegum Crisis OVA put together as a 26-episode TV series by AIC back in 1998. I actually have a copy of that wretched abortion on DVD. The updated character designs and futuristic aesthetic of the city aren't bad, but the rest of the show is downright dreadful. The last half of the show is basically just the Knight Sabers beating up a parade of identical-looking robot zombies that devolves into what is almost a classic zombie movie plot near the end, when they're holed up in Sylia's basement.