Seto Kaiba

Now there's something I hadn't considered... maybe they DID license that cheap Chinese knockoff of Macross and Gundam as some of their fans were hoping.

Good grief, are they still trying to get people to buy that tired old line? It's pissing into the wind, to be sure. It's a choice between taking that at face value and being all surprised when 2011 rolls around and they have nothing to show for it, or going with the line that Tommy let slip and the VAs confirmed... that the movie's on hold while Harmony Gold waits for Warner's live-action movie to fix the franchise's poor reputation. They'd initially promised they'd release Shadow Rising in 2009, and see what happened to that. No, this is almost certainly just more noise about Shadow Rising that will likely amount to nothing. I'd rate the chances of it being another new edition of the Shadow Chronicles movie much higher than it being something actually new. Maybe Warner and Maguire Entertainment finally gave up and decided to do Robotech's live-action movie as an shoestring budget direct-to-DVD movie like Starship Troopers 2.

Now, before I begin posting my thoughts about The Last Airbender, I would like to first qualify my statements by saying that I'm not a fan of Nickelodeon's Avatar: the Last Airbender cartoon. In fact, the sum total of my exposure to the characters and setting consist of maybe three minutes of animation witnessed while channel surfing, and the revolting shipping fanart posted on /co/. As such, I'm writing from the viewpoint of the outsider, a casual viewer going into the movie knowing nothing of the mythos or the story of the fantasy universe. I can't exactly say I was an objective outsider, since I expected the movie to be over-hyped rubbish as soon as I heard our good friend Mister M. Night Alphabetsoup was involved. That said, take it away... myself. Oh god... where to begin? I'd heard some things about the movie in chatroom last night, and the impression I'd gotten was that I was in for another so-bad-it's-funny Wire-Fu action flick with pretentions to being a serious fantasy story. Since I already had a half-day at the office for various reasons, I phoned my girlfriend up and dragged her along to the cinema so we could both catch a cheap laugh and she'd stop complaining I never take her anywhere. Now, without giving away any spoilers that might offend those who actually want to see our boy M. Night's latest unintentionally hilarious train wreck, the best I can say for the story is that it's BAD. I get the feeling that M. Night sat down with a screenplay summary of the TV series and said something to the effect of "Woah, poo! There's too much stuff here to make a two hour movie!" and then, in the misguided belief that he's some kind of genius, resolved to make it all fit anyway. The fruit of his labors is something I can't help but compare to Frankenstein's monster. It's a shambling mess composed of salvaged parts from something that was once whole and wholesome. A lurching abomination that very plainly should not be. The only suitable analogy I can think of to describe the way this movie vomits huge quantities of exposition at the horrified viewer is to say that the experience is like trying to fill a teacup with a firehose. There's just SO MUCH coming SO FAST that there's just no way for the audience to take it all in. Rather than gradually build up the universe's mythos over the course of a few installments, Shamalamadingdog resolved not to gamble on a sequel being made, and crammed three movies worth of exposition into an hour and forty-five minutes. The young actors are clearly NOT up to the task of vomiting out these huge torrents of exposition, and it all comes across rather flat and emotionless, like the whole movie's being performed by the guys who shout line prompts from offstage instead of the actual actors. The screenplay itself feels like it was written by someone who'd only ever read about the show's story on Wikipedia, since scene changes occur with an almost audible "clunk", and many scenes meant to be emotional just come off as being narm. The movie's devoid of actual emotion, and as a result even the obviously crowbarred-in romance subplot feels almost we're watching aliens try to understand human behavior by imitating scenes they saw on TV. To add to the movie's woes, the CG effects used to display the "bending", the universe's magic du jour, are laughably bad... even amateurish. After about an hour or so of seemingly random crap happening in succession, I started to get the distinct impression the movie was desperately rummaging around to find something that would make it live up to its pretentious claims of being an epic fantasy story. The gleeful idiocy of the cast and seemingly arbitrary and pointless events that make up most of the story reduce M. Night Shamwow's "serious business" fantasy story to unintentional comedy in short order. The dialogue jumps back and forth between "Here, let me state the obvious" and parroting the same line over and over again, almost as though it's a cue to change scenes. If we were to take this at face value, M. Night is either a talentless berk or he bought a gradeschooler's creative writing assignment after it earned a "VERY POOR, SEE ME AFTER CLASS" from the teacher. There's a lot of stuff that I'd like to criticize about the setting itself, but I can't be sure that it wasn't that way originally and M. Night just managed to make it worse in his adaptation. Particularly the six-legged flying water buffalo or whatever the hell that thing is, Ang's (sp?) glowing blue buzz cut, and the nagging feeling that all of these white people are probably supposed to have been played by Asians to go with the faux-Chinese setting. If this wasn't a film clearly intended to be taken seriously, I would be lauding M. Night for an excellent work of ironic parody of generic fantasy fiction and wire-fu movies. In place of that, all I can say is that The Last Airbender feels like the result of an attempt to combine the impenetrable depth of Lord of the Rings with the same sort of quirky-yet-dark style of the later Harry Potter movies on a faux-Chinese backdrop right out of Disney's Mulan. It's not a good movie by any means. It's not even a so-bad-it's-funny movie. It's just all bad, all the time. The sort of movie where you leave the theater wondering why you just paid eight bucks to be confused by a strange Indian man.

It's not just you... part of the reason I decided not to renew my account when it came up for renewal a few months ago was the steady decline in the quality of their service. They seem to have been cutting back for a while now. I guess the prevalence of ad-blockers and rising bandwidth usage finally started to get to them. I can't say you'll have any better luck with their competitors, since I've heard a lot of noise about MegaUpload's pop-up ad windows and the banner ads on MediaFire being detected as malware by several antivirus programs.

Eh... while I would be interested in seeing a new animated Macross series based on Macross: the First, or at least its design aesthetic (which appears to be a merger of Mikimoto's earlier work on Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Macross: Do You Remember Love?, and the Macross 2036), I'd rather it wasn't a reboot. If they absolutely HAVE to treat it as the start of something entirely new for Macross, I would rather they used it as the basis of a new alternate universe, in much the same way Gundam has done over the years. It's not like having the show set partly (or fully) in the past is going to hurt the integrity of the narrative. Obviously the fact that the events depicted in Macross: the First are set in what is, from our perspective, last year hasn't hurt the book any. Likewise, having major plot-critical events occur in the past (from a modern-day perspective) hasn't hurt Star Trek. Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan is every bit enjoyable after 1993 as it was before, despite the fact that we didn't have world war against an army of genetically engineered supermen that year. Of course, we can always cheat like Kawamori did and view the whole thing as fictionalized versions of real events within the universe, in which case any contradictions or conflicts or any issues springing from having an oddly anachronistic future are all gravy since it's all down to dramatic license on the part of that future TV show's creators.

Indeed... and it would be better for both parties to just let it die quietly and never do business with each other again. True, their initial run of Macross Saga-based Masterpiece Collection toys sold okay during the brief resurgence of interest in Robotech that followed the opening of Robotech.com in 2001, but interest in the toy line dropped off as soon as they'd finished covering the Macross Saga. Once they'd exhausted that, most fans no longer had a reason to care. The way Toynami handled the recall of the Maia Sterling VF/A-6ZX killed what was left of the fanbase's interest in the toy by reissuing it with an entirely different set of severe defects after promising not to build the reissue in the same factory and then going back on their word.

By my estimation... low enough to by a serious tripping hazard in a lilliputian town. As long as you can keep any data that would allow someone to quantify your "success" out of the hands of your critics, you can generate empty but impressive-sounding hype by simply setting the bar so low that sales that would be mediocre or pathetic for any competently run company are grounds for declaring your product's sales wildly exceeded expectations. For a company like Harmony Gold, that depends almost exclusively on keeping their repeat customer base ignorant and blindly loyal, this sort of obvious malarkey might as well be second nature. Even though their lies and exaggerations are embarrassingly obvious, they have a consumer base that's been conditioned to want to believe their lies as a means of convincing themselves they haven't wasted 20+ years of their lives on a show that had no significant merits of its own even when it was new.

Huh... well, so much for McKeever's tired old line about how Robotech merchandise sales are "going gangbusters". That they can't even move enough of their limited edition merchandise to meet the limit they arbitrarily imposed on it really says something about the dire straits the franchise is in. I have to admit, I can see why they find it easier to continue lying to the fans. If they ever came clean about how poorly the merchandise sells, the insane little fantasy world so many of its fans occupy would collapse under its own weight. True... I think a fair few members of the Robotech fandom got carried away with the idea of new Robotech merchandise, and forgot that they didn't actually like the Beta/TREAD or the New Generation, and thus didn't actually buy it when it came out.

Eh... only so much of the blame can be laid on Toynami's doorstep. After all, the idiots running Harmony Gold continue to do business with them because quality is no object, and the idiots they're peddling this trash to are so dimwitted and ignorant that they'll buy it anyway even if it IS crap. Slapping a "limited edition" label on it is a safe way for Harmony Gold and Toynami to ensure that the nostalgia-blinded man-children that make up most of Robotech's fanbase will snap them up without hesitation to prove to each other that they're "serious" fans, while simultaneously ensuring that they won't end up stuck with a bunch of unsellable merchandise cluttering up their warehouse. Of course, that last part hasn't worked out terribly well for them since they forgot that very few members of the Robotech fanbase actually give a damn about the New Generation or Mospeada. Oh, nobody in their right mind would willingly shell out $200 or more for a cheap knockoff of legitimate Macross or Mospeada merchandise, or even the legit stuff Harmony Gold's peddling at a huge markup... the thing that lets them keep getting away with it is that the majority of Robotech fans are not only hideously stupid, but also monumentally ignorant. Their mindless, slavish devotion to the Robotech "brand" and Harmony Gold will prompt them to buy any damn thing with the name or logo on it, regardless of quality or price. Some of them simply aren't aware of the fact that they can easily get the same product at much higher quality and at comparable or lower prices by importing the OSM goods instead. Others just don't care, because they've bought into the Harmony Gold bullshit.

No idea... but if I had to guess, I'd say that there's a strong possibility that Harmony Gold decided to discontinue the New Generation masterpiece collection after the reissued Maia Sterling VF/A-6ZX came out. There's been no movement on further New Generation MPCs since the Maia MPC was recalled, and the generally poor quality of both the initial mold and the reissue of the Maia Sterling one seems to have put a lot of Robotech fans off the idea of buying into the New Generation's Masterpiece Collection. Judging by the current state of affairs on the Robotech.com store, it's safe to say that the New Generation MPCs have sold pretty poorly overall. Despite being extremely-limited edition collectibles1, the only one of the New Generation MPCs to sell out so far is the very first one... Scott Bernard's VF/A-6H. Some of the New Generation's MPCs have been in the store for four or five years now without selling out, and appear to be in no danger of selling out anytime soon. My guess would be that they decided that they shouldn't waste any more time and money stocking products that don't sell, and made the decision to fall back on peddling Macross toys, which are practically guaranteed to sell considering the average Robotech fan's Macross-centric mindset. 1. Ordinarily, a limited run of 15,000 pieces. However, the runs have been getting progressively smaller as time has gone on. The Beta fighters were limited to 10,000 units, and the Maia reissue to 5,000.

Likewise... at least Sentinels was making a conscious effort to look like it was related to at least two of the three original shows. The Shadow Chronicles movie goes from obnoxious to horrifying when you realize that not only are you watching a bad Sentinels fanfic... you're watching Tommy Yune's personal masturbation material. Damn... that's a bit harsh. I guess Battlefield Earth could be conceived as a bit less obnoxious, since at least that wretched abortion has a little bit of closure... whereas Sentinels and Shadow Chronicles are little more than glorified pilot episodes for OVAs/series that were never made.

Isn't that essentially an unwritten rule already? Of course, I don't think there are many in the Macross fanbase who would be upset if we encouraged Harmony Gold to just go ahead and quit the Sisyphean endeavor that is trying to resuscitate Robotech. Nor would they be likely to hold it against us if we encouraged Harmony Gold to stop messing around and just go out of business already. Even then, they're kind of treading a line... I'd rate the chances of the project being brought to a premature end by a cease & desist order much higher than those of it being adopted by Harmony Gold as the flagship for a fanworks video section. Either way, since it's a Robotech fan project being endorsed by the lunatic fringe, its chances of ever being completed are fairly slim, and it's pretty much a given that it'll be crap. At the end of the day, this latest hackneyed attempt at a Robotech CG fan-film is just another example of the sad truth that even Robotech fans think that the only part of Robotech that actually matters is Macross.

Am I the only one getting a distinct "Master Chief" vibe from their barely-redesigned VF-1s? For some reason the head turret optics look oddly reminiscent of the armor that idiot war in Halo. It's billed as a Robotech project, Harmony Gold could be well within their rights to say "you're not going to use our trademarked name for your shitty fan-film, so knock it the hell off". And frankly, since this is just another shitty attempt by Robotech fans to ape Macross, a cease and desist order is probably the best thing that could possibly happen to it.

Nope, it doesn't look like they ever did... it's not covered on Liza Hoyly's character sheet, and there's no mechanic sheet for it under Macross Dynamite 7 either.

Yeah, there's no way to make that NOT sound incredibly hokey... tho I went back and fixed my minor factual error about what the speakers were originally for.

Eh... a little from column A, and a little from column B. The VF-19P's supposed to be a colony market variant developed from Basara's VF-19 Custom and used by the planet Zola's patrol force. Presumably the Zola Patrol would've armed their VF-19Ps with the same type of nonlethal shock gun pod they'd equipped their VF-5000s with, rather than the standard GU-15 Gatling cannon or speaker pod launchers. The speaker packs mounted on the VF-19P's shoulders in the line art are non-standard equipment developed by a Zolan scientist named Lawrence to allow Basara to sing to the galactic whales for the purpose of attempting to communicate with the galactic whales, and were also mounted on a VF-19P that Basara "borrowed" to sing to the galactic whales. (NB: Like all VF-19s in 7, the lineart for GERWALK mode shows the fighter holding a speaker pod launcher) Exactly how widespread deployment of the VF-19P was... your guess is good as mine. Thus far, the only customer for the VF-19P identified in canon sources has been the Zola Patrol.

Oh, that one... yeah, someone brought that one to my attention the other day. It's just pathetic that even now they're trying to find hidden meaning in insignificant trash out of some misguided belief that Robotech's 25th Anniversary isn't going to be the damp squib everyone with a brain knew it would be from the start. They just can't bring themselves to accept that Harmony Gold put the brakes on all future development in favor of sitting on their collective hands and waiting for Warner to convince people that the franchise isn't a complete waste of time and money. I see Maverick_LSC is out there to help the idiot speculation along. It's highly probable he's the originator of this latest crackpot theory. The worst thing to come from Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles isn't the childishly bad story, the bargain-basement animation quality, or the nail-in-head awful voice work, it's that the only thing it actually accomplished was convincing the self-deluded in the Robotech fanbase that this was the franchise's glorious rebirth... so now they're hoping against hope that this doesn't become another Sentinels and plunge them into another releaseless 20 years.

Y'know, I'm fairly certain that there was some B&W line art of Wendy out there, but most of her reprinted line art is the colored-in line art in This is Animation Special #5: Macross II. There was a fair bit of art for her, so I can't imagine that they made a decision to omit her based on art availability. IMO, they probably just ran out of space and had to prioritize what they'd fit into the last few issues. I know they're covered, albeit briefly, on the Mardook worldguide sheet. I think they might've also shown up on the "People of the Mardook" sheet in brief too.

Not quite the same type of conversion job, since the US-3A COD Viking was a utility cargo hauler that could use some or all of its cargo space to take passengers, while the VB-25J Mitchell and the fictitious VC-19V are dedicated VIP/staff transports built for the sole purpose of shuttling around bigshots and their attendant swarm of minions. Not surprising... though I found it interesting that the VF-19's engine-mounted verniers are using diverted engine exhaust instead of propellant tanks. I wonder if that applies to the vernier ring too?

I'm pretty sure the word for your condition is "masochism", not "nostalgia". Damn, and I thought I was cruel.

And now for the part they didn't tell you... probably 75% of those are spambots. Of course, most of the die-hard Robotech fans are so dense it's virtually impossible to distinguish between a living contributor and a badly-coded Russian or Chinese spambot.

Indeed it is... though I'd say there's rather more to the complete absence of Shadow Chronicles cosplayers than the simple fact that the movie isn't even close to being the runaway hit Harmony Gold would have the fans believe it is. Part of the problem is, I think, that quite a few of the more vocal Robotech fans maintain the perplexing insistence that Robotech is not anime. I dunno if they're just idiots, or if they believed Carl Macek's lies about the show's origins, but some of the vocal Robotech fans out there genuinely believe that a show composed of three unrelated anime titles is not, itself, anime. That bizarre belief ties into the tendency to find the original shows (and often anime in general) offensively foreign that many of those fans exhibit. To that part of the fanbase, cosplay is something they see as being beneath them because it's something anime fans do. It's pretty much a given that what's causing most of the more sane Robotech fans to refrain from cosplaying is the simple fact that the average Robotech fan is a man in his early 30s. They're at the point where they see themselves as too old for that sort of thing, and probably the conventions too. Among those that would attend a con, I doubt there are many, or any, willing to wear something as cruelly unforgiving as those skintight sprayed-on jumpsuits everyone wears in Shadow Chronicles. The uniforms in the original Macross and DYRL are something you could conceivably wear without grossing people out even if you're not in the best shape. Nobody but a bodybuilder could pull off those RTSC jumpsuits without inducing nausea almost as effectively as Man-Faye, and even then it's kind of iffy. Macross fans are a bit more willing to cosplay because Macross is much more popular, and Macross Frontier has a good bit of appeal with younger viewers and/or younger event organizers/participants who are still fit enough to pull it off. It does, doesn't it? Tommy's been approaching Shadow Chronicles (or should we call it the "Shadow saga") like he would his own personal Robotech fanfic. What he's doing is a fairly transparent attempt to keep people interested in a continuation of the Shadow Chronicles garbage by teasing them with the whole "are they dead or aren't they?" bollocks that use all the time in the comic book industry. What he's doing there is trying to maintain interest in the dead-end Shadow Saga by teasing people with the idea that he MIGHT not have killed off 99% of the remaining Macross characters.

I'm not sure if anyone's actually dug into it and done a detailed translation of the bit about the VC-19V "VIP-calibur". From what I gathered while skimming the book a few hours ago while chatting with Talos, the VC-19V is derived from the either the Block 17 or the Block 20 version of the VF-19C as a dedicated (probably non-transformable) official-use light transport for high-ranking military and government personnel. It can seat five in the passenger compartment, and a crew of two in the cockpit. This is actually something that's been done before in the real world, though it was done with bombers instead of jet fighters. During WW2, the US Army was using a derivative of the B-25J Mitchell bomber (designated VB-25J) as staff and VIP transport planes. Two of the six VB-25Js produced ended up as the personal transports of General Eisenhower and General Arnold. Y'know, I haven't bothered to check... I doubt it's ELINT or ECM, given the way that the pod is mounted. Might be photo-recon. Kinda reminds me of the FFR-31MR/D Super Sylph from Yukikaze.

It's been ages since I read the novels, but I think he was murdered by his "evil" counterpart Dr. Lazlo Zand, who also incidentally shows up in Prelude.

Not necessarily a bad thing... the need for absolute realism goes out the window once you start telling a story about people using giant robots to fight spirit sucking evil magic monsters with the power of rock. If the transformation doesn't quite work out the way the series shows, that's no big deal... it's the magic of overtechnology at play. It does say rather a lot about the Master File's writers that they went to such trouble to find ways for "overtechnology magic" to be carried out by relatively mundane means. But, with the exception of what is now Macross's parallel world continuity, we DO have the one guy keeping the canon material straight and largely deciding what's what in the Macross universe... Shoji Kawamori. What started the whole discussion about a potential retcon of the VF-19's specs was sketchley noting that Kawamori was listed as a "supervisor" on the Master File and that the alleged retcon lined up with material which had been published in Macross Chronicle. Macross has had this kind of "tech manual" book before too, and just like the tech manuals for Star Trek they were always considered non-canon. True... though the reason the whole bruhaha started was because the alleged retcon/typo changed the stats of the version seen in the animation. Specifically, the VF-19F/S used by the Macross-7 fleet's Emerald Force and produced locally by the fleet's Three-Star manufacturing ship. You're spot-on that performance will be affected by whatever the local atmospheric conditions are, but that's not what the debate was about. Large image is large, scan previously posted earlier in this thread.