Seto Kaiba

It does, a bit... doesn't it? I suppose it's a fair comparison, since many of the more devoted Robotech fans seem to think that Robotech is an epic masterpiece of science fiction cinema fit to rival or surpass Star Wars. There are other parallels too, most notably the way the fans still repeatedly ask each other if there's more information on the past "adventures" of many of the one-shot and minor characters from the animated series. Harmony Gold's licensees attempted to pander to that with the comic books and novelizations back in the 90's... with generally poor results. The "reboot" comics briefly flirted with that bad habit too, attempting to establish a backstory and cause of death for Lisa's former lover Karl Riber (Macross's Riber Fruhling) by featuring him in a mini-comic called "Mars Base One", where it was established Mars Base Sara was abandoned after a Zentradi attack that never got reported to Earth, after which Karl walked off into the Martian desert to die for no clear reason. It didn't go over all that well, and was packed into the Robotech: Invasion miniseries to give Robotech fans who didn't care about the New Generation (ie "most of them") a reason to pick up the books. The shame is that Robotech fans aren't nearly as open-minded as the majority of Star Wars fans when it comes to "expanded universe" stuff, as most of the remaining Robotech fans seem to consider anything that wasn't in the "original 85" or the Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles movie to be worse than unanesthetized dental surgery.

Hey now... everyone enjoys a good witch hunt, right? In particular, Robotech's more devout fans seem to have an unhealthy enthusiasm for hunting the witches and heretics hidden among their ranks. The history of the fandom's online presence is more or less a succession of witch hunting exercises broken up by the occasional lulls while the lunatic fringe's leaders decide which remaining group of heretics needs persecuting the most. Ever since Robotech took its fandom online in the mid-90's, they've been keeping busy by pointing fingers at each other and accusing each other of not being "real" Robotech fans. They started by purging the fans of the novelizations (McKinneyists) and the fans of the old comics (Spanglerists), and then turned on the fans of failed continuations like Robotech II: the Sentinels, Robotech: the Untold Story, and even the few lunatics who really liked Robotech 3000... all done to preserve the primacy of the "original 85". In more recent years, the targets of choice for their witch hunts have been groups who are openly critical of the direction Tommy Yune has taken the universe in. Critics of the new comics and particularly Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles were the first to be targeted, accused by moderators of verbally assaulting Tommy Yune himself, and quietly banned. Once they were largely rounded up, the next (and most recent) group was Macross fans, since there's nothing more offensive to the Robotech purist mindset than someone who doesn't think the original 85 episodes of Robotech were the best anime/sci-fi show of all time, and hearing about how successful and popular Macross Frontier is does nothing to help their inferiority complex. I guess that's one way to think of it... yeah. It's more like a series of one-sided accusations from the Robotech crowd that all Macross fans are pedophiles because Kawamori and Risa Ebata didn't make every female member of the cast look like Shay Laren in charcoal body paint.

Actually, they didn't... I used screen captures of the bath scene from Mospeada (and Robotech Remastered) in my rebuttal, and Bendo threw an honest-to-goodness temper tantrum over how he thinks the remastered Robotech isn't real Robotech because it's not the version he saw in the 80's. He also got quite upset when I responded by pointing out that he'd already said he's 100% okay with the sexual objectification of Ariel/Marlene in the Shadow Chronicles movie, and then reminding him that according to the official timeline Ariel is only about fifteen months old during Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, and could be no more than thirteen years old at the absolute outside limit assuming the larva she was transmuted from was created after the Invid occupation started. He waved both off claiming it was okay because she was an alien, and then raged again when I pointed out Ranka wasn't exactly 100% human either. But yeah, their position on the Mint/Dana thing is that it never happened because it wasn't part of the original TV cut of the series they saw back in 1985.

Oh, they're STILL banging on about that? Good grief, you'd think that would've begun to pall by now... I guess it really is up to them how they cope with the knowledge that Macross is still successful and Robotech is still a show nobody remembers. Seems that way... I was actually there when they first got started accusing Macross fans of all being pedophiles and/or child molesters. What started it all was Bendover-boy's over-the-top reaction to a post by Robelwell202 that contained YouTube videos from Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles and Macross Frontier, drawing the obvious conclusion that Macross Frontier's average standard of animation was far superior to that of Shadow Chronicles. Since he couldn't refute it or the questions about why every single woman was needlessly made stripperific in RTSC, Bendover latched onto a two-second long scene in the final episode of the series as his rebuttal, asserting that it made Macross Frontier child pornography because he doesn't think Ranka looks as old as the show says she is. MEMO later picked it up because... well... he's MEMO. He can't cope with a world in which Robotech isn't the bestest thing EVAR!

Okay, I'd turn it around and ask you why the movie was in any way good. I mean, come on... the premise at the movie's core is a silly conspiracy theory that dictates that there's no way ancient Egypt could've put together an ordered society or figured out how to stack stone blocks on top of each other without the timely intervention of space aliens. Even if you can get past that, and the question of why the advanced alien technology used by Ra and his guards seems to be, on average, far less effective and practical than modern U.S. Air Force gear; you've still got the lousy writing, wooden acting, and a boatload of cliches that you're expected to take seriously. Even James Spader, the actor who played Daniel Jackson, felt the movie was awful and only accepted the role due to his outlook on acting as being a form of manual labor. They take everything that was bad about the Stargate movie and attempted to reformat it in the same vein as Star Trek, just without all that faffing about getting from place to place by starship... something they added in later with some truly ugly ship design. The writing was pretty sub-par too. I found my take on the villains that were supposedly driving the plot tended to be graduates of the Gargamel Memorial School of Villainy, armed as they were with weak motivations and weaker writing. Not an entirely bad show, IMO... it suffered from many of the same cliche problems as Stargate SG-1, though with more of an "action" slant to it. I only caught bits and pieces of it, but what I saw made me think that it could've been a lot better than it was if the studio'd been willing to spend a bit more money on it. The effects budget seems to have been particularly small. Kevin Sorbo is not a man cut out to be acting in sci-fi, that much I'm sure of.

I'll second that emotion... the Stargate movie was bad enough on its own, but the various attempts to make that particular brand of drippy brown lightning strike twice are some of the worst Sci-Fi TV ever made. I made several brave attempts to soldier my way through episodes of Stargate SG-1 at the behest of a friend who found the show enjoyable Amanda Tapping highly decorative, and it didn't end well. He seemed to take umbrage over having me describe the show's writing and general premise as "G.I. Joe meets Star Trek". My attempt to watch Stargate Atlantis never began, as my brain rebelled as soon as said friend attempted to explain the show's basic premise to me. 'course, if we're counting poor quality in terms of the sheer amount of FAN RAGE a show produces, there can be only one answer... Star Trek: Enterprise. I remember the day that same above-mentioned friend totally lost it and put his foot through his television over this episode of the show's second season. I remember this one didn't go over well with him either. It got so bad that for a while we were honestly afraid to use the word "enterprise" in a sentence around him for fear of it provoking another tirade about what a crime the series was.

Eh... I've never been much of a Star Wars fan myself, but even I thought the original trilogy was much better off before Lucas went back and tried to "fix" it with what we've come to as his characteristic hamhandedness. Back when he wasn't calling all the shots and couldn't palm all the difficult stuff off on the CG animation studio, Lucas had no choice but to think on his feet... and as a result the original trilogy felt like he was actually trying to do a reasonably interesting story. Of late, now that he's filthy rich and doesn't have a producer around to make sure he's not about to f*ck up royally and he can palm anything even remotely difficult off on the CG animation staff, there's been a sharp decline in the quality of his work. Since he's no longer being forced to think on his feet and has spent the last twenty odd years being told he's a genius, there's been a marked decline in the quality of his work... as evidenced by the retooled original trilogy and new trilogy. I might be interested in the Blu-Ray edition if there's an option to play it without all the crap he tried to add and change in the original trilogy, but unless there is I think I'll stick with my plain DVDs and rely on my up-sampling DVD player to bridge the gap.

Now, has that actually been confirmed that the VF-5000G and VF-5000T-G are Zola-made modifications to the VF-5000 platform, or are you just assuming they are? As far as I know, there's nothing to indicate that they aren't simply an export/civilian model like the VA-3C (Kai). That, IMO, is probably the most telling piece of data for placing Zola near the galactic rim... since Macross-11 was outward bound along the rim rather than through the core, and if memory serves the radio play Zomeo and Zoliet had one of the principal characters down as an emigrant from the Macross-11 fleet who decided to stay on Zola. The colony in question was Veil, but yeah... it does raise questions of how Basara got from the 37th Colony Fleet to near the galactic rim in only a few months, but that is, as we've both said, explainable by the non-existence of fold faults prior to Macross Frontier. That said, if you take the faults out of the equation it's actually somewhat on the containable side for Basara to have taken a flight to Zola and had the realtime loss be less than four months from the trip, which would screw with the continuity of Macross Dynamite 7 just a tad, but otherwise work.

Dammit... now I have this weird mental image of Maverick and MEMO doing a fusion sequence from Dragonball Z. His shameless suck-up level is OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAAAAAAAND!

I'm pretty sure the one source that talks about what they were doing right before the ship vanished is generally held to be non-canon, and puts them near a black hole somewhere in the galactic center. That aside, I think the fate of the Megaroad-01 is still very much up in the air, though we'll likely never know what happened. Your guess is as good as mine... like the Fz-109, the bulk of the Varauta military hardware was probably made up of a mixture of U.N. technology and the Protodeviln's additions to same. Considering their circumstances, I'd be inclined to say the Varauta colony would probably be reluctant to continue using the equipment they'd been forced to construct and use. It doesn't look like there was a lot left of the Varauta Army's equipment after all of the shenanigans surrounding the final battle of the war, and their fleet only consisted of about 500 ships in the first place. The surviving examples of their equipment were probably kept for study by the U.N. Spacy, and fleet assets transferred in from elsewhere to protect the system until they could rebuild their forces. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that some of the surviving ships were pressed into service as a new planetary defense fleet, but I see it as unlikely under the circumstances. No, by all accounts that practice seems to have started much earlier, with the Megaroad-13's VF-14 complement being a prime example, since the main fighter of the day was actually the VF-11 Thunderbolt.

One would assume so... though you wouldn't know it from looking at his résumé and staff profile. The only educational background listed for him is a BFA in "Lighting Design" from Emerson College, and about all that's listed that's even remotely applicable to PR is some minor production assistant credits on commercials and some minor (and uncredited) production assistant work on a pair of films in 1999 and one episode of Jackass. He reportedly brags a lot about that latter one, and thinks it's the coolest story ever. As has been pointed out once before, the man definitely doesn't know squat about customer relations. His usual gamut of behaviors reads like a list of marketing/public relations cardinal sins... so whatever his education and experience in those fields might have been before joining Harmony Gold, it seems self-evident that he wasn't the most diligent of students when the time came to study ethics. Ten bucks says it's MEMO or Maverick. People do stupid, irrational stuff... that's just the way they are. Loyal Robotech fans just seem to be particularly loathsome and gullible examples of humanity. You have to admit, for them to still BE fans requires a certain level of gleeful idiocy and poor pattern recognition skills. You'd think after 25 years and nothing of value, they might cotton on to the fact that Robotech is a waste of time.

Nope... space is BIG. Even assuming that the Megaroad-01 is somewhere in or near a solar system, the odds of running into them by accident or design are minuscule at best. If they're not in or near a solar system (or at the very least, near a star) then the chances of finding them are practically zero. Of course, that's assuming there's something left of the ship and its fleet to find... it could easily have folded out into the photoevaporation sphere of a nearby star and been destroyed, or drawn into a black hole and crushed, or even attacked by a rogue fleet of Zentradi or the remnants of the Supervision Army and wiped out. Eh... one would imagine that any surviving Varauta Army technology would've been seized by the U.N. Spacy for study and possible reverse-engineering. It's possible that some might've been pressed into service by the local defense forces, assuming the Varauta system colony wasn't abandoned after the war, but I doubt that any got made after the war ended... presumably because the U.N. Spacy had already moved onto a new generation of advanced variable fighters with the VF-19, VF-22, and VF-171. Remember, the Fz-109 series was supposedly a derivative of the VF-14 Vampire, the competing design that lost out to the VF-11 Thunderbolt.

Eh... really, for McKeever and company probably think it's a huge coup that they were able to find someone out there in China who'd actually heard of Robotech, let alone professes to enjoy it. Kev's probably just excited that he found a woman who didn't immediately shun him like the sort of guy who delivers his pickup lines in Klingon after he mentioned Robotech in conversation. Mind you, this is assuming he's actually telling the truth about his supposed airport encounter with a female Chinese Robotech fan. It's just as likely that the picture is some poor gal who consented to let him take a picture in the hopes that it would shut him up, and the story is something that he made up after he got bored on the long flight back from Beijing. Hell, there's probably a couple of very confused airport prostitutes wondering what kind of sex act "Robotech" is.

McKeever... highlights... that's a good one dude. In all seriousness, having sat through their whole China talk once before I feel it safe to say that unless you're one of those Robotech fans who spent his childhood and teenage years munching lead paint chips and shakily masturbating to the "genius" of Carl Macek, you will find nothing of interest in anything McKeever has to say. The man's so perversely proud of himself for having crossed the line from being an old and obnoxious Robotech fanboy apologist/troll to being the official apologist/troll of Harmony Gold's "Robotech team" that there's no way to interpret that bullshit as anything even halfway interesting unless you're the sort of mentally defective mutant who religiously follows their convention panels every year and thinks Robotech is the greatest sci-fi series of all time. You'd have an easier time getting the truth from a snake oil salesman than from Kevin McKeever, so it's much less infuriating to just mentally edit white noise over the man's voice whenever he opens his mouth.

Yeah... I only got mine because it was literally the lowest-end phone my wireless carrier offered, and I just didn't want to blow a bunch of money on a phone I can't even take into work half the time because the guys in charge of the design studio banned anything with a camera built in. Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes. It looks like David's kind of screwed comin' and goin', since no matter what he gets, it's odds-on they'll have their own carrier-specific firmware installed that's a hell of a lot less intuitive than what you'd get otherwise. Depending on the phone, he could possibly install cracked firmware, but that would almost certainly void his phone's warranty and/or land him in trouble with the carrier later.

Yes, albeit only briefly... it's only clearly visible in the episode's eyecatch, where they show Alto's VF-25F and then overlay the image of Shin's VF-0(D?) on top of it. It might also be partially visible in the "film" recreation of Macross Zero's final scene, where Shin's wrecked VF-0A is about to crash into the ocean. Keith... the episode where they filmed that WAS "Legend of Zero". So, yeah... as pointed out already in response to Boxer's query, there's no reason to suspect that the change of logo for the New U.N. Spacy's anything other than an aesthetic choice intended to underline the way the setting'd changed between Macross Dynamite 7 and Macross Frontier.

To start a new text message is only two button presses on my crappy old Moto Razr. Of course, that thing's a turd in almost all other areas, so it's not something I would recommend... if they're even still selling it. ^^;

Almost certainly not... for the reasons RDClip stated, and also because Robotech is a literal nonentity in Japan, thanks to the way the licensing contracts that permit its existence are drawn up. The business with having an all-new logo for the New U.N. Spacy was, in all likelihood, just Kawamori underlining the changes/evolution of Macross's setting that he elaborated on in his Otona Anime #9 interview... the change in the government and presumably also the reorganization of the military following the events depicted in Macross VF-X2. They have basically zero need to distance themselves from the original U.N. Spacy logo, since the copyright dispute court rulings did affirm that Big West/Studio Nue is copyright owner on that design.

Already ordered 'em... but I cheaped out on shipping so they won't be here 'till next week. Already done so... got Volumes 1-4 in my collection already, and eagerly awaiting 5-7 since they've finally been licensed. I felt they were all quite well done, and really do an excellent job of following Hirano's art style, which goes a long way towards maintaining the distinctly creepy vibe that I think makes Hellsing such a great title.

Of course... which is why Tommy Yune, in his infinite benevolence, decided to make T.R. Edwards look exactly like Guile from Street Fighter... so you'd be able to tell him apart from Roy. Either that or he's just another lazy thief in charge of a project with the word "Robotech" in the title. Oh yes, you do occasionally hear attempts to defend Harmony Gold despite their serial ineptitude and complete inability to continue the Robotech series... but considering the usual level of intelligence they exhibit, it might be pushing it a bit to call them "people". Trying to make them see sense is like trying to hold a conversation with a Big Mouth Billy Bass... you won't accomplish anything, and you'll be subjected to the same handful of tired lines until you're ready to scream. Unfortunately, it looks like the gleefully incompetent staff at Harmony Gold intend to hang onto Robotech until it either stops turning a profit altogether and they have no choice but to broom it (rather a tall order, considering how cheap their work usually is), or until it becomes popular (fat chance) and someone with more money than brains makes a big enough offer. Until one of those things comes to pass, the former being unlikely in the near future and the latter possibly requiring direct divine intervention, Harmony Gold will no doubt continue to squat on Robotech and the licenses that shat it into being like a large, mentally-handicapped frog for the foreseeable future. McKinney came AFTER Sentinels failed... and considering the low regard the majority of remaining Robotech fans have for the novelizations, I doubt it would've gone over well... but that's mercifully neither here nor there, as you said.

I didn't say it had to be from the last decade, now did I? ;-) The only one on that list I haven't really dug into yet is Rideback... mostly because the mechanical designs didn't really appeal. I didn't care for RahXephon either, but Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid was a little bit of terrific. So much so that it's one of the few shows I've gleefully shelled out for individual volumes instead of waiting for the box set. (I'm actually the one responsible for getting Robelwell202 into Full Metal Panic! too) If you've got some older stuff you wanna recommend, feel free. I'm certainly open to it. Had a grand time with L-Gaim, even tho it was kind of a mindf*ck having seen/read Five Star Stories first and essentially knowing how it was all going to end because Nagano reused that bit as a story arc in FSS. I've heard good things about Birdy the Mighty: Decode, so I'll probably dig into that next. Thanks. ^^ (I'm also sorely tempted to finally get off my ass and finish the last Gundam show I've never seen... ∀ Gundam)

It's certainly possible... of course, what we've seen with regard to transit times over known distances and Zola's supposed location near the galactic rim, it would've taken Gamlin quite a few fold jumps to get there with his fold booster... possibly as many as 1,250 20 light year fold jumps. If memory serves, it's been established that the 11.7ly fold jump from Eden to Earth takes something to the tune of 18-24 hours (the precise figure escapes me), which would mean that even if the distances involved were conservative he'd still be looking at about two and a half years of continuous fold travel. Even if he had the non-canon VF-19ES Mystery Ship II and the Project Phaeton fold booster (model kit customizations done for the June '02 issue of Model Graphix), which set the galaxy speed record over c by traveling from the New Edwards AFB on Eden to Edwards AF on Earth in 118 minutes, he'd still be looking at over three months in the cockpit to get from the area around the galactic core to the galactic rim. EDIT: After looking at the calendar, at the VF-19ES Mystery Ship II's speed it would actually be containable for Gamlin to fold all the way from the core to the rim where Zola is supposedly located, assuming that Mylene starts her solo act no later than mid-April. Shame Project Phaeton isn't canon, eh? EDIT #2: Assuming the 1:240 time displacement effect is consistent for that jump, Gamlin would only be in the cockpit for about 9 hours of experienced time, though he'd lose three-and-a-quarter months of objective time.

Granted, the FBF-1000A fold booster is not rated for distances greater than 20 light years. It is, however, worth noting that "rated/certified for" isn't necessarily the same thing as "limited to", and they do mention that strides had been made in improving the accuracy and overall reliability of fold boosters by the end of the 2040s. Having taken great pains to not re-watch Macross Dynamite 7, I can only operate under the (potentially flawed) assumption that RedWolf's recollection of the dialogue is accurate. If so, then this would seem to me to be nothing more than an inconsistency in the depiction of fold travel between two different generations of Macross sequel. After all, this "fold fault" malarkey was something new that was introduced in Macross Frontier, so naturally Macross Dynamite 7's writers wouldn't have factored that into their story, if they even stopped to consider all the distances involved. There is, of course, no denying that the Macross 7 fleet was in or near the galactic core, since the dialogue is quite unambiguous about Rax/Lux and Varauta 3198XE both being in/near the core. It was 10... though wasn't it that the most distant colonies (or colony fleets) would take ten years of travel to get back to Earth? If anyone wants to dig out the Otona Anime interview thread, we can double-check that. Yep, 10 years to actually travel back to Earth via fold from the colony fleets.

Some, not all... I'm pretty hit-and-miss when it comes to stuff that's only recently come out. Prior to that I was on a bit of a retro kick, catching up on old stuff I hadn't seen yet (Heavy Metal L-Gaim). My tastes are pretty broad, but I avidly dislike fanservice for fanservice's sake (like Queen's Blade, Strike Witches), and I'm not too fond of shows where the protagonist does an excessive amount of whining (e.g. Neon Genesis Evangelion, Eureka Seven). I don't really thrill to excessive moe (K-On) either. Other than that, I'll try pretty much anything. Been on kind of a comedy kick of late, what with Seitokai no Ichizon, Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou, and my buddy Talos urging me to start watching Seitokai Yakuindomo, so some more serious robot-y goodness wouldn't hurt my feelings any.

You... if your avatar is anything to go by.