Seto Kaiba

Totally... hell, just a few months ago I watched my newly obtained DVD copy and noticed stuff I'd never caught before in the VHS version I've had since I was a kid. Not exactly a masterpiece of cinematography, but it's a fun movie to watch for nostalgia's sake, or just to watch some giant robots kick the sh*t out of each other in a way that you just can't get away with on TV anymore. Hm... while my memories of watching the original Transformers series as a kid are a bit on the fuzzy side after all these years, and I only ever had a handful of episodes on tape, but one thing I remember clearly from back then is that even as a kid I thought Rodimus Prime was a wuss. It would be totally believable for him to be unsure of himself after being asked to fill Optimus Prime's shoes under normal circumstances, but the kid was sharing his bonce with the collective wisdom of every Autobot leader ever. At that point, his lack of confidence in his role as leader loses any pretense of credibility. I actually remember being quite pleased when they brought Optimus Prime back from the dead and one of the first things he did was beat the snot out of Rodimus and take back the Matrix. Ah, such fun childhood memories... I was such a cynical kid.

Indeed, I do... mind you, I actually like the visual aesthetic of Google Chome. I just disagree with this philosophy that you need to hide anything that might actually affect the way the browser functions as though the end users were a pack of ten-thumbed imbeciles. That, and the lack of an ad blocker that actually works, is why I can never manage to use Google Chrome for more than a few days at a go before getting fed up with it. The familiar option menu is still there, it's just that the menu bar has been compacted into that gaudy orange thing, making the lone menu feel a lot more cluttered and disorganized. At the very least, I hope they won't try to dumb down the user accessible options menu to Google Chrome's level. Really, I suppose my objections to it are those of a power user. I would probably be intensely grateful for them having made it harder to screw up the browser's configuration if I were planning to deploy it only on my familiy's computers (you know how it is). *sigh* Maybe it's time to haul my elitist power user ass over to Opera and give it another try. Oh, yeah... first thing I did on encountering the error was send Mozilla a bug report detailing the problem. That's the whole point of beta testing. When I tried it, I found Firefox 4 Beta 5 to be a slick looking and decently stable browser. It's just that there's still some broken (perhaps by design) functionality and the user interface's menus feel a bit cluttered and disorganized. Not an overtly bad browser by any means... but definitely not ready for the big 4.0 release.

Um... actually, quite a few things have changed over the past few years. It's just that the changes didn't include the disappearance of the legal roadblocks preventing Big West from doing an end-run around Harmony Gold and distributing Macross in the US over their objections.

Eh... as waters7 pointed out, that links has been there for ages. In practice, Harmony Gold's explanation of how Robotech II: the Sentinels fits into the continuity establishes that things generally didn't happen as depicted in the aborted animation, novels, comic books, etc. Only the so-called "broad strokes" of the Sentinels story arc are considered accurate (namely, that the SDF-3 was shipped off on a mission to find the RT Masters), up to the conclusion of that particular arc in Prelude. Of course, when you take stock of Prelude and realize it's a continuation of the nominally non-canon Robotech II: the Sentinels comic books by Jason and John Waltrip... that opens up a whole new avenue of WTF.

Eh... by any rational measure, that the animation has consistently abbreviated it as "UN <Noun>" over the past twenty-plus years seems like a pretty fair indication that it is correct... or at least what the show's creators had intended, which is effectively the same thing. If the animation consistently uses "UN", I don't see any reason to second-guess the show's creators. Unity/Unified is used too... but all that's really necessary there is a note that "UN" is short-form for "Unified" or "Unity", whichever you happen to favor. Using "UN" is what most of the fanbase is familiar with... so, as we've just graphically demonstrated, going with "Unified" or "Unity" without explanation is going to inject additional confusion into something that already causes some degree of confusion on its own. Really, what this calls for, if anything, is a bloody footnote.

Eh... dragging the real United Nations into it makes it rather more complicated than it needs to be. At some point or other all the "unified" government are all referred to as some permutation on "U.N. Gov't". It's also probably a bad (and misleading) idea to treat the pre-Space War 1 U.N. Government as being the same entity as the post-Space War 1 "new U.N. Government". Using inconsistent naming conventions isn't going to help either. A less confusing and more explicit progression would go something like this: United Nations (1945 - 2001) - The real-world international organization. U.N. Government (2001 - 11 Feb 2010) - The planetary central government established as a result of the 1999 crash of an alien ship on South Ataria island. new U.N. Government (April 2010 - ~2051) - The re-established planetary central government after Space War 1. New U.N. Government (~2051 - Current) - The decentralized E.U.-style interplanetary governing body present in Macross Frontier. If you really have a hard-on for using "Unity" or "Unified" instead of "U.N." that's fine too... but be consistent, or it can get a lot more confusing than it needs to be.

Eh... really, I think the term "Harmony Gold" would translate much more readily and gracefully into something a bit simpler, like "parasitism" or "serial plagiarist". It's quite tricky to find a word or a pithy little phrase which can neatly encapsulate all the sins of twenty-five years of bad business practices and monumental ineptitude. They got lucky when they came up with a neat little term like "Macekre" to describe the creative process. At times like this, I'm reminded of an old adage attributed to P.T. Barnum: "There's a sucker born every minute." Just about anyone is going to find the level of confidence many Robotech fans seem to have in Harmony Gold's "abilities" profoundly unnatural until they take stock of what Harmony Gold has actually been doing in the past twenty-five years. Rather than devote their fullest attention to the production of new material and trying to do something original with the franchise, Harmony Gold has put a frightening amount of time, money, and energy making it appear their creative input into Robotech was far greater than it actually was. They've capitalized on the ignorance of the fans using exaggeration, deceptive wordings, and occasionally outright lies to make them appear capable and talented when all they've ever actually done (with the sole exception of Robotech 3000) is rehash someone else's work. It's gotten to the point where they're rehashing their rehashes just to keep the ball rolling. Just look at Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles... it's practically worthy of M.C. Escher. Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles is a rehash of the Robotech II: the Sentinels comic books by Jason and John Waltrip, and Robotech's "New Generation". Jason and John Waltrip's run of Robotech II: the Sentinels comic books are, in turn, rehashes of the old Robotech II: the Sentinels novelizations by James Luceno and Brian Daley, though they didn't stick to the source material. James Luceno and Brian Daley's novelizations of Robotech II: the Sentinels are, at least in theory, just a rehash of Carl Macek's planned-but-not-completed Robotech II: the Sentinels TV series. (In practice, the novels were more like a rehash that went snoop-the-loopy halfway through) Carl Macek's incomplete Robotech II: the Sentinels series was a rehash of the Robotech TV series Macross Saga and Robotech Masters Saga, and also drew on some minor elements of Robotech: the Untold Story. Robotech: the Untold Story was a rehash of Megazone 23 that borrowed from Southern Cross. The three sagas of the original 85 episode Robotech series are rehashes/rewrites of the original Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada. And there you have it... the Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles movie represents the fourth consecutive rehashing of the same old material to produce a sequel. We're still dealing with the same core cast of characters and their close relatives, with the same mecha, the same ships, the same plot devices, and we're still retreading the same damn story. I can only guess that Harmony Gold thinks that the creative process works like vodka distilling, that the more times they distill the same material, the better it gets.

Ah, I see... and if your recollection of that guy's reasoning it sound, then it makes no sense at all. I guess I misremembered which show Wanzerfan said he disliked without having actually seen it. It might have been Macross 7... but that's hardly a unique condition, eh?

Incidentally, on a lark I downloaded and installed Mozilla Firefox 4.0 beta 5. The installation process went smoothly enough, and it was kind enough to leave my previous install of Firefox 3.6.9 in place, and even absorb some of the compatible add-ons like AdBlock Plus and Norton IPS. All in all, it's definitely a step backwards, IMO. True, the new user interface looks pretty... in fact, it looks startlingly like Google Chrome. Not that I consider that a bad thing, but it doesn't seem to work very well for the Opera-style top-left all-in-one menu system. The menus are, at present, rather sparse and poorly laid out. Everything is crammed haphazardly into a half-dozen or so folders under the main menu, which makes it feel a bit scattered and disorganized. The only real issues I could find with it in terms of actual function were that it bricks when you try to open a secure connection to Firefox's add-ons update section, and it won't properly render context menus that extend beyond the boundaries of the window itself... displaying the text but not the background. All in all... it's nice looking, but thus far I don't see it as a significant or necessary improvement on Firefox 3.x.

Actually, she posted several threads over there on Robotech.com a day or so before the posted here. Last I'd heard, nobody had responded to any of the three or four threads she posted, primarily because nobody could understand what she was saying. It looks like the only person who's bothered to pay any attention at all over there is MEMO, and he's almost as unintelligible as she is. I've said it before and I'll say it again... I'd like to believe that most Robotech fans out there are decent, sensible people who have their heads screwed on straight and just want to enjoy the nostalgia of watching their favorite childhood show. Unfortunately, the ones I seem to encounter most often are the idiots and the crazies. And yet... every Robotech fan I've talked to at length about this latest project that was allegedly Carl's idea has said that they think it's just Tommy trying to put a bow on that turd in the hope that we'll overlook the stench. Oh yes, they'll claim everything is being done to honor Carl's memory... but we've seen ample proof that they have precious little respect for Carl's memory, and are quite comfortable using his death to promote projects he had nothing to do with.

Inertia Store Converter... it's the new doodad that stops the fighter from pancaking the pilot the way Guld did. No, the VF-171EX did not have an inertia store converter.

Hm... well, I'm not aware of a precise date for the repeal of the cybernetic implant ban on Macross Galaxy. Given evidence from the show and the contents of Pash! Animation File 02: Macross Frontier, I think it safe to say that it had to be sometime around 2047-2048. Grace O'Connor was already formulating her plan for her galaxy-wide implant zero-time fold network prior to the destruction of the SDFN-04 Global in 2048, and told Sheryl she'd had her deliberately infected with the v-type bacteria during the medical examination she received after Grace found her and took her in. As we see pictures of Sheryl in the Mao Nome's 2047 piece on the v-type infection, it seems reasonable enough to assume that Sheryl's mother was killed by the supporters of implant legalization at some point before November 2047. I don't recall precisely what the show's dialogue has to say about how recent the legalization is, since I don't have my Macross Frontier DVDs handy. I don't know what Kiss the Galaxy has to say about it either, so perhaps RedWolf could favor us with more from that.

Really... that was to be expected. After all, City-7 and Macross Frontier were democratic governments with elected leaders. It was established quite a while back that Macross Galaxy is not, it's a corporate operation. It's not at all unexpected that the fleet's corporation-style leadership would take pains to remove employees/citizens who are actively undermining its policies.

Eh... really, if your e-mails and paper letters are as full of the same misguided assumptions you've posted here and on your blog, they probably realized that you don't understand the situation at all and decided it would be best not to answer. No, they've met with Harmony Gold USA at least once since 2001 to discuss exporting the rest of Macross, and rejected Harmony Gold USA's terms. One can hardly blame them, since Harmony Gold USA's terms were almost extortion. Good grief, you really are clueless, aren't you? Carl Macek had nothing whatsoever to do with Robotech after the teaser trailer for Robotech 3000 was laughed out of the conventions it was shown at and he was replaced as Robotech's creative director by Tommy Yune. He basically had no say in anything Robotech related after the year 2000. Carl's death had almost no measureable effect on Robotech, except that he was no longer able to attend the disappointing and pathetic 25th anniversary convention tour. Have you ever stopped to consider that he isn't unsociable... that the problem is you and your complete failure to grasp the facts of this situation? Let me spell it out for you in very blunt terms: The company that is stopping the rest of Macross from being exported is Harmony Gold USA, not Big West. You are blaming the wrong company.

IIRC, that's not really new information... Pash! Animation File: Macross Frontier touches on that briefly, and says that Sheryl's mother was a casualty of the violence between supporters and opponents of implant technology.

Eh... really, OptimusX has it right, more or less. In practice, it seems that there have been three distinct entities bearing some permutation of the moniker "U.N. Government". Obviously, the first of these is the original U.N. Government that was drafted in 2000 and became reality in January 2001. It was this incarnation of the Earth U.N. Gov't that established the U.N. Forces and their space division... the U.N. Spacy. After the war ended, the old U.N. Government and its constituency were mostly dead, so the survivors established the little-n "new U.N. Government". One would assume, given the state that Earth's population was in and the what Kawamori had to say in the Otona Anime #9 interview, that it was more or less a re-establishment of the old U.N. Government system they'd had before... something roughly analogous to a strong central planetary (and later, interplanetary) government. In later years, humanity had spread out so far in the galaxy that it became impossible for the little-n "new U.N. Government" to unify its constituents, and it began to change into the big-n "New U.N. Government"... something more along the lines of the EU. Prior to that interview, it was generally assumed that the formation of the big-n New U.N. Government and the subsequent reorganization of the military stemmed from Wilbur Garland's 2051 coup attempt in Macross VF-X2. Now, it seems that's no longer the case... though it was probably a factor.

Um... while I don't recall precisely who it was who said that, I have a nagging feeling that it was Wanzerfan. Or, at the very least, she probably got that information from one of the more vocal Harmony Gold toadies... the only time I've ever seen a Harmony Gold employee actually directly talk about their negotiations with Big West was a brief discussion I had with Tommy Yune, and nothing was mentioned about Big West being intransigent regarding Macross licensing. That part seems to have been an additional interpretation injected onto Tommy's account by the likes of Maverick_LSC and MEMO1DOMINION, who wouldn't hesitate to embroider the story somewhat to absolve Harmony Gold of any blame and point the finger squarely at Big West. Eh... now that seems a bit farfetched. I have a hard time believing there could be a woman out there patient enough to deal with those two and not either bust out laughing at them or flee for the hills.

Uh... yeah, I'd say that's probably putting it mildly. Just given the content of the blog and website that yui1107 presented to us as part of her fan project, it would perhaps be more accurate to say that where the Macross licensing/rights issue is concerned... there's very little she does understand. Odds are, you're not half as lost as yui1107 is. She got some REAL bad information from somewhere.

Um... you do realize that almost nobody in Japan even knows what Robotech is, right? Because of the way that the rights to the original shows were drawn up, Harmony Gold can't legally distribute Robotech in Japan, except possibly Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles... though that presents unique problems since it draws heavily on the Genesis Climber Mospeada series. You won't find more than a handful of people in Japan who are even aware of Robotech, and the Robotech fans living in the rest of the world generally cannot speak or read Japanese. You've embarked on a fool's errand... even if you do get one of the maybe half-dozen Robotech fans who can speak or write fluently in Japanese, almost nobody in the Robotech fandom will be able to read what you produce. Yeah... really, you're not going to get anywhere with that. There are very few Robotech fans who can read and speak Japanese fluently, and there are even fewer Japanese Robotech fans. If you're really committed to doing this, then I suggest you start learning English and Spanish, since those are the languages of choice for most of the remaining Robotech fans. Either way, if you intend to motivate or force a settlement between Big West and Harmony Gold USA, then you're just wasting your time. If the "powers that be" at Big West haven't found sites like this one enough motivation to find a way to export the rest of Macross, the whining and protests of a very small group of Robotech fans is not even going to catch their attention. I don't think many Macross fans want to see Harmony Gold getting their hands on the any more Macross shows, and many Robotech fans are quite vocal about their desire to keep Robotech separate from the original Macross and its sequels.

Hmmmm... but where will I find a Charlton Heston mask at this time of year? No, as Robelwell202 said, there were some fairly significant and fundamental changes made to the story of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series in the process of adapting it into Robotech's "Macross Saga". All that nonsense about the ship being a one-of-a-kind personal ship of an alien super-scientist and being the only remaining source of magical flower fuel in the galaxy is a pretty significant departure from Macross, IMO, and to be blunt... that's just the tip of the iceberg. Eh... really, while there's no denying that destroying the Macross at the end of episode 36 is a reasonably large departure from the original Macross series, the tired line about it being back to back with a phantom SDF-2 in the lake is something Comico came up with for the comic books.

Nah... trademarks expire after a set period of time and have to be renewed, and you have to continue to actively use the trademark otherwise the protection'll lapse after a specific period (usually 5yr). IIRC, the usual period for trademark renewal is ten years, but an "Affidavit of Continuous Use" has to be filed about every five years too. (Bear ye in mind, this may work somewhat differently in other countries) If, for whatever reason, Harmony Gold were to simply stop actively using their Macross trademark for a period of about six years or more then the trademark protection would lapse. It's unlikely that this'll happen, as Harmony Gold seems to have fallen back on peddling Macross toys after the catastrophe of the Toynami MPC Alphas.

'kay Wanz... second piece of free advice from your ol' buddy: Just ignore it when they do stuff like that. Once you amend your posting practices to correct the issue I mentioned in my last piece of advice, they'll stop on their own and it'll be a non-issue. Rising to their bait just encourages them to keep doing it. On an unrelated note, a big thank you to Renato for taking the time to answer Yui's posts in a way that she can understand without the aid of mechanical translation. I'm sure that'll make things a lot easier on her as well. ^^ Oh, okay then... so, what you're saying here is that you feel the Robotech adaptation of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross (also known as "The Robotech Masters Saga") would be made more enjoyable for Robotech fans and more beneficial to the Robotech story as a whole if the "Robotech Masters Saga" was rewritten to make the setting for those 23 episodes a recently colonized planet rather than Earth? I do agree that making that change would make the Robotech "world" feel bigger. The problem is that it makes a lot of problems for the "New Generation Saga" story. If the war with the Robotech Masters didn't happen on the Earth and spread the Flowers of Life all over the planet, the Invid wouldn't find and invade Earth. It would make the "Robotech Masters Saga" slightly more coherent, but it would hurt the story of the "New Generation Saga" quite badly.

Oh... well, that goes a long way toward explaining why what Yui was saying didn't make a lick of sense. It was the lack of context from that discussion on RDF-HQ, plus an apparent language barrier, that rendered what Yui was trying to say almost unintelligible. Just given what I've read on the blog link she posted, it looks like she's one of those people who suffers from the common Robotech fan ailment of "Did-not-do-research-itis" and leapt quite energetically to a series of entirely incorrect conclusions regarding Big West's reasons for not distributing the rest of Macross outside Japan and, apparently, their complete lack of interest in remaking or finishing Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. Y'know... every now and again I hear that most Robotech fans out there are actually decent people who're just overly nostalgic. I would really like to believe that that's actually true... but almost all the Robotech fans I meet seem to be ignorant, crazy, or both. Of late, usually both. Huh... y'know, I wonder how Japanese law defines concepts like "torture" and "cruel and unusual punishment". It wouldn't be a stretch to classify having someone sing Reba West-as-Minmei's songs at you for hours at a go as either.

Okay... well, I guess that answers my question as to whether or not you were the clueless berk who posted all those unintelligible threads and broken links all over robotech.com in an effort to get attention. I honestly can't decide whether to label this as spam or trolling. Maybe both. In point of fact, you are completely wrong to accuse Big West of being negligent in attempting to export other Macross series. The truth of the matter is that Harmony Gold USA is preventing them from doing so by using a trademark they applied for after they accidentally started the series of lawsuits between Big West Advertising and Tatsunoko Productions. Harmony Gold USA is actively preventing companies in America from importing the other Macross series. Okay, yeah... you're implying that they're negligent for not remaking Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, a show so awful it even failed in Japan and was canceled before it could be finished. That's troll talk right there. You're saying they're negligent for not wasting their money remaking a show that the audiences hated back when it was new. Even Robotech fans hate the Robotech adaptation of Southern Cross. That they haven't tried remaking it is a sign of good business sense. No, that their attitude is like sakoku-style bigotry is based on a fundamentally false assumption. Harmony Gold USA is stopping Macross from being exported, not Big West Advertising. Harmony Gold USA wanted to establish a business relationship with Big West that was nothing less than extortion. Big West was right to say no. Okay, this makes it sound like you think you can intimidate Big West Advertising into doing what you want by fraudulently pretending to be associated with Harmony Gold USA. That crosses the line from just being a crazy fan to possibly getting you in trouble with the law.

Eh... as far as I'm aware, at no point has an official logo for Shinsei Industry or General Galaxy appeared in any unambiguously canon source or publication. That said, there is a small graphic of what a Shinsei Industry logo found on page 119 of the Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur. Considering the source, there's no real guarantee that it's official or in any way accurate, but at least it's something. The only other source of unofficial logos for fictional Macross companies I'm aware of is a model kit water-slide decal sheet for the unambiguously non-canon VF-19ES "Mystery Ship II"... an unofficial customization of the VF-19 dreamed up for an old issue of Model Graphix magazine.