Seto Kaiba

Really? I didn't get the same "stripperific" vibe from her that I got from Ariel and most of the other girls in Shadow Chronicles and Prelude. To me, the uniform looks more like an attempt to hide his usual stripperific drawing style under something that almost looks military-like.

Yes, that would be my recommendation... there are some good-quality fansubs out there for that one, and it was once released in the US too, so it shouldn't be that hard to find. I would recommend watching the shows in rough production order, so you get a good feel for the timeline of Gundam's Universal Century. Some of the OVAs later come back and fill in the gaps between shows. (And the OVAs are where I personally feel the franchise shines... and many number among my favorite Gundam titles... there and only there will you find a giant robot pilot laid low by something as mundane as a plate of carrots) Above all else, just make sure to pace yourself... two, maybe three episodes a day tops will get you through it at a decent enough pace, and you'll be able to take everything in without it becoming overwhelming or frustrating. You can find a summary of the production order here, along with their availability outside Japan, but it mixes all of the AUs in with the UC continuity shows: http://www.mahq.net/animation/gundam/gundam.htm A reasonably succinct list of which ones belong to the UC can be obtained here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Century#Universal_Century_Gundam_series_and_films

Indeed... but this thread still needs more Ishtar... I'll have to set up my scanner and post some of those great watercolors of her Mikimoto did as promo art for Macross II and for the novels.

Sounds interesting... didn't like Sheryl very much during the first few episodes, but she really grew on me later in the series. I'll probably pick up the collected edition of the manga when it comes out. I was hoping they'd get around to expanding on Sheryl's history, didn't expect they'd actually do it, so I'm kind of looking forward to this.

If you look at the early concept art, it's pretty clear that's really a function of his complete inability to comprehend fiddly anatomical matters like the way spinal columns work and that wrists really shouldn't be as thick or thicker than the person's biceps. His early drafts of Vince Grant look like The Incredible Hulk, and there's still something wrong about how most of his female sketches have them standing ramrod straight, with their chests thrown out in a posture scientifically designed to cause intense lower back pain.

Speaking of obnoxious things that don't mix it up, would you kindly come up with a new ad hominem attack? That one lost all its bite a loooooooong time ago. Seriously... even though Macross II was, by all accounts, a sequel that played it safe and didn't try to mix it up as much as subsequent efforts did, it still had a hell of a lot more originality than most of the later UC Gundam shows. There comes a time when, even if you have a winning formula, you still need to mix it up a little to keep things from getting stale. Gundam doesn't exactly do that a lot, and on the rare occasion it does, it's usually an alternate universe story. As a result, the whole UC timeline is a parade of samey conflicts against space fascists (and usually the same bunch of space fascists at that) who usually want to drop some kind of large stellar mass on Earth's surface and/or commit genocide, broken up by the occasional rebellion against the corrupt Earth Federation when they get too heavy-handed trying to keep the space fascists in line. Like I said (and you apparently ignored), it's a winning formula and they're smart enough not to screw with it just because they can... but it's best to take it in small doses to keep the conflicts from running together and the standard-issue whiny protagonist from driving the viewer up a tree. It's the same problem Evangelion has... it's a classic show, but the average viewer can only take so much whining per day, so it's best to pace yourself when you're watching it. This is actually what I suggest for Macross 7 as well... it's not a BAD show, it's just not a show most people should try watching all in one sitting. Eh... Quirky? Yes. Awesome? No. To be entirely fair to ZZ Gundam, if you prefer the somewhat grimmer tone of the rest of Gundam then you'll find the second half of ZZ Gundam much more enjoyable. The first half is, as you said, similar to the Macross 7 TV series. In particular, it has that lightness of tone and silliness that occasionally crosses the line into what some might consider full-blown stupidity, and others might consider highly amusing anarchic comedy. It's all down to taste, but I'll be surprised if anyone seriously attempts to defend the Moon-Moon episodes as anything but a clandestine attempt to weaponize bad writing. The "better mechanical designs" thing is really down to taste too... Gundam 00's got a lot less recycled footage. I don't deny that the second season was a steady slide towards a train wreck ending, but the first half was an extremely well-executed show. I can't really say the same for Wing, which never really bothers to explain why the protagonists are wrecking Earth's poo and killing everybody until the wrap-up OVA, and tosses new factions in and has characters make knee-jerk faction changes whenever they run out of ideas. If you'd read my whole post, you'd realize it's not a double standard at all. Both shows have a formula that works for them. The difference is that Macross makes a concerted effort to mix it up a bit with each iteration, trying new things with the characters, the mechanical designs, the love triangle, etc. They take their concept to new and interesting places. Gundam doesn't make as much of an effort to try new things, which can leave some of the shows feeling like the only thing that changed were the names of the characters, and sometimes not even that much (like the jump from Mobile Suit Gundam to Zeta Gundam and from Zeta Gundam to the latter half of ZZ Gunadm).

Okay... for a completest, Gundam is probably a really bad franchise to attempt to get into. It's just too massive for anyone to try tackling all at once. I guarantee that if you attempt to marathon your way through any Gundam show more than 13 episodes long or, god forbid, attempt to watch multiple Gundam shows back-to-back, you'll quickly find yourself heartily sick of protagonist du jour's whining and the way the franchise treats endlessly recycling the same handful of plots and set pieces as an appropriate substitute for innovation. In practice, I suppose it's really more the protagonists who ruin attempts to marathon the Gundam shows than it is the recycled plot devices. After all, if you've got yourself a winning formula, why screw with it? The problem is that, with very VERY few exceptions, the Gundam protagonists are basically cast from the same three basic molds. You've got your whining, naive, immature pubescent boys with daddy issues who'll fall into the cockpit of a super prototype and then whine about how tough their life is afterward (basically a proto-Shinji, ex.: Amuro Ray, Camille Bidan); personality-less, gun-toting, stoic child soldiers (Setsuna F. Seiei, Heero Yuy); and pointlessly badass robot action heros who do six impossible things before breakfast just because, and who really just underline how depressing everyone else is (Domon Kasshu, Tobia Arronax). To be frank, what I'd recommend is that you go in production order (start with the 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam or the compilation movies), and watch at most two episodes a day. That way the grimdark, the whining, and everything else won't have a chance to get to the threshold where watching the show feels more like a chore than a leisure time activity. While I'm sure the completest in you will rebel against this idea, I would say that you could probably skip several shows as superfluous or just plain not worth watching. For starters, if you didn't like Macross 7, you'll probably want to skip Mobile Suit ZZ Gundam, the first half of which is painfully dull and kinda stupid. You'll probably also do yourself a favor by skipping the whole Cosmic Era (Gundam SEED), since it's basically "Universal Century for Dummies" brimming with implied bromance for the yaoi crowd. You can skip Gundam Wing for similar reasons... LOTS of implied bromance and you can get the same basic story without most of the suck by watching the Gundam 00 TV series instead. If you're down on super robots, you might wanna give Mobile Fighter G Gundam a wide berth too... since it's the domain of manly men with long sideburns who shout a lot and wear spandex to pilot their giant robots. (If that's your bag, or you just have an anarchic sense of humor, you may find Mobile Fighter G Gundam weirdly compelling) To paraphrase Gioacchino Rossini, Gundam has some good moments... and some bad halves of an hour.

Actually, lots of the characters who are supposed to be getting up there in years were designed fairly young for RTSC. Tommy Yune credits this to some wisdom from Tatsunoko, which was something to the effect of "write old, design young". Vince Grant is supposed to be like 54, but he doesn't look a day over 25.

Isn't that old news? I remember seeing some of Kawamori's early sketches of the VF-25 Armored Packs where they said it was inspired by the Stampede Valkyrie. The Tornado Packs look more like a mix of design aesthetics from the Valkyrie II's Super Armed Pack and the VF-0's Ghost Booster.

Oh ho... I see what they did there... Of all the Macross shows, Macross II is the one that draws most heavily on its Gundam roots, and its lead mechanical designer was fresh from his work on the Char's Counterattack movie when he started working on it... so this appears to be an extremely unsubtle Gundam reference. Under that silly "New Era" calendar they had for a while and then ignored, 2091 corresponds to year 0079 of the New Era. The original/correct date of 2092 was a reference to its status as an anniversary OVA. It was for the 10th anniversary, and was set 100 (10^2) years in the future (from the modern day), making it 2092. The last Zentradi attack that the U.N. defeated was ten years ago, in 2082 (2082 - 100 = 1982, the year SDF:M TV aired). I know, I know (Just teasing about how stuff from Macross II keeps cropping up as though it was new and original material in later Macross shows)

Indeed... Macross II is a sequel to DYRL, not SDF:M TV, but the rest are sequels to the SDF:M TV series. I'll second that motion... Nah, they were just sort of quietly deleted from the end of Mospeada as though they'd never been present... which is probably even less dignified.

Does that thing even HAVE armaments? I mean, it's basically the Meltrandi equivalent of Basara's VF-19 Kai. Emilia probably replaced the forearm guns with some theatrical glitter dispensers or something. Okay, I know I'm probably going to regret asking this later... what year(s) does the timeline sheet allege the events of the Macross II OVA took place in? If they really did their research this time, it should be 2092. What, no mention of the VF-2SS? Now that's a damn shame, since the VF-2SS was the first VF in Macross to have that ability... Damn... no mention of Macross 2036 or Macross: Eternal Love Song? Weird that they'd remember the Wonderswan games though.

Okay, I'm lost... I've been staring at this for like five minutes and I still can't be certain what you're talking about. Are you saying you'd rather see a live-action DYRL? Something else? What? I wouldn't be too concerned about Tommy Yune's "pen hand" in the Robotech-in-name-only live action movie, since Harmony Gold's creative team are pretty much just bystanders in the whole process. They're sitting on their hands and waiting for Warner to make someone care about Robotech. Given what little has been said on that matter by the likes of Yune and McKeever, the decision to omit any pre-existing characters who weren't plot-critical was probably a cost-saving measure during the production of the film. The voice actors who worked on Robotech back in the 80s are members of the Screen Actor's Guild now, and as a result their rates have gone up. With such a small budget, having a more than a few of the original VAs reprise their roles would've been impossible. On the other hand, the decision to redesign the plot-critical Macross cast member (Rick Hunter), and either kill off or otherwise remove the rest of the cast was, though Harmony Gold will never admit it, done because they can't use Macross characters in animated or live-action works. Even though they used the Sentinels redesigns, they probably didn't want to take any chances, since the whole Big West v Tatsunoko legal tiff had only recently started to wind down.

Odds are they'll axe the singing part anyway... remember, one of the areas where Macek asserted that he "improved" Macross was by reducing the importance of, and the emphasis on, the singing aspect of the series. The "Robotech-in-name-only" live action movie will almost certainly be a mindless summer sci-fi/action flick positively brimming with Robotech's usual pro-war, pro-military, xenophobic "message". Has anyone confirmed that the re-release of Prelude actually contains new content? From the sound of the marketing blurb it's just a condensation of the garbage printed in the original per-issue release. In any competently-run franchise, wasting a good three years faffing about and then trying to pass off a compilation of stuff from eight years ago as new and exciting content would get you sentenced to be trampled by the company brontosaurus... but not in Robotech. Robotech fans are so inured to having nothing new or interesting to talk about that they honestly believe that this it the way a franchise should be run, and that this behavior is a recipe for success.

Quality is, was, and always will be more a function of the show's budget than any other factor in the production process. Was the original 1982 Macross series animated somewhat haphazardly? You bet. Are shows today animated just as badly? ABSOLUTELY. I've actually got a graphic somewhere that shows side-by side comparisons between old and new high and low quality/budget productions.

*sigh* I suppose she'd need something with less personality to make her stand out as something other than wank material, so sticking her next to whatever ugly redesign of Macross's VF-1 they come up with should work... I'd still prefer to keep her as far removed from anything even tangentially Macross-related as humanly possible...

Huh... looks like an interesting issue after all... Technology sheets for "Variable Fighter Genealogy", and "Macross-class ships and successors". Mechanic sheets for Mk.I Monster destroid, SDF-1 Macross (DYRL?), Az-130A, VF-25S, VF-2JA, and Meltrandi military vessels. A timeline sheet called "Milestones in the history of mankind", character sheets for Minmay and Global, an Operation Minmay history sheet (M2?!), and a Protoculture worldguide...

Well, yeah... now that they've licensed the merchandising rights to DYRL they're in no danger of having some other company license DYRL and its merchandising rights and trying to undermine Robotech with content and merchandise that doesn't suck. So now they can profit from their own malfeasance by importing and selling Macross toys from SDF:M and DYRL to Robotech fans, who'll eagerly snap them up because the only part of Robotech 99% of the fandom cares about is Macross... so anything VF-1-related is practically guaranteed to sell.

If you're talking about the extent of their actual contributions to the Robotech fandom, then that sounds about right. Tommy Yune's sole contributions have been a lousy direct-to-DVD movie, trying to broaden the show's appeal by eroding the differences that set it apart from its Macross origins, and trying to pretend that things are going great. Bendo, well... he's Bendo. That's all that needs to be said, and all the evidence necessary to rank his contribution to the fandom as slightly less than an inanimate object.

Okay yeah... that almost does sound like a dig at Harmony Gold and Carl Macek... Really, that's proved to be a bit of a pattern with the more belligerent and/or ignorant members of the Robotech fandom. Whenever things aren't going their way, they drag out the tired old "Macross purist troll" straw man as a convenient blame figure so they can carry on believing that the reason nobody wants to be around them is that the Macross purists are conspiring against the "true Robotech fans". No surprise, the idiot responsible for calling said side "MacrossWorld 2.0" was banned a good six months ago, and has since attempted to come back under four or five different alts, only to be outed and banned before he can make even a dozen posts, despite his frequent protests that trying to sneak back on under alts is beneath his dignity. Macross Frontier... I think Grace's version of Aimo first appears in episode 16 (and can be found on Macross Frontier OST 2 and OST 3. I believe the redone DYRL song is also on OST 2 and 3, and appears in episodes 24/25 of the series.

Oh, that was us? Seriously... the evil cabal that guy says I'm the overlord of must be working overtime to pull something like THAT off. All this time I thought putting all of the deleted gore, innuendo, and nudity back into Robotech was Mr. Tommy Yune's handiwork, and that Harmony Gold and the majority of Robotech fans considered it a rousing success. I know they don't sell the non-remastered version anymore... the RT.com store doesn't carry anything except the Protoculture Collection and Robotech Remastered. If all that was our doing, and my army of sinister Macross purist infiltrators have replaced THAT much of the Robotech fanbase, why the hell are we still having them pretend to be Robotech fans? Honestly... I need to have WORDS with my Evil Human Resources people (haha, department of redundancy department) about their recent staffing decisions. I bet it really burns his ass that Tommy Yune has been trying to make Robotech conform more closely to Macross since 2001... even going so far as to try changing the VF-1's fuel from the assumed protoculture powerplant to thermonuclear fusion.

I know... it's wicked scary how well this works. Oh please, Queen's Blade is barely a half-step above the late night softcore porn on Cinemax. Oh noes... a handful of cack-handed twits have taken the place of a halfway-competent spin doctor in promoting Harmony Gold's increasingly knee-jerk attempts to maintain interest in the festering pile of poo that is the Robotech franchise... whatever shall we do to stop this dynamic duo (trio?) from heralding the explosive return to the Robotech glory days of 1999, when even Robotech fans found what Harmony Gold was doing with the franchise disgusting. Oh, I don't deny that the man has some degree of artistic talent... it's just that the man's experience is in a genre largely incompatible with the one in which he now works, and the man seems to have no work ethic. His art for the MPC line has some seriously Liefeldesque posture issues (particularly Miriya). Really, my beef with his art is that the man has no experience or talent as a mechanical designer, and that he lets his inexperience get in tune with his massive ego and produces cop-outs like his "sudden mechanical failure" in the YF-4 (RT ver. of Macross's VF-X-4) so he wouldn't have to design a transformation for it, or the transforming Combat he'd tried to pass off as the "Gamma Fighter". Well, we all know Tommy can't stand to be criticized, so it's only natural he'd do whatever he could to deflect the discontent over his turning every man into Gaston with better hair and every woman into Shay Laren onto the heads of someone who probably can't understand the complaints in the first place. I know, it was a very tongue-in-cheek joke... you'd think having someone like me talk of a "Robotech Code" might send up big red flags that say "this is humor". Grief might be the wrong word for it, unless you've had recent dealings with the mooks in charge of it all... but the point remains that Macek's inability to see the consequences of his actions (or that the industry changed and that his methods were considered bad practice) was the genesis of a lot of the misconceptions and idiot behavior fans of Macross (and indeed, BattleTech too) have to put up with from Robotech fans. I won't vilify Mr. Macek for the way he used Macross when he put together Robotech in 1984-1985, but I WILL give him the scorn he so richly deserves after 15+ years of habitual lying, exaggerating, and taking credit for the work of others in hopes of making Robotech fans believe he was a visionary. To be blunt, where Robotech was concerned the man was little more than a sanctioned con artist. You could call what little work he actually did on Robotech the artistic equivalent of buying a bunch of random sci-fi novels, using a bottle of white-out to change all the character- and place-names, taping a new logo over the title of each one, and selling them as installments in a new, original series while loudly asking "WHO?" every time someone asks about the original author. You could potentially have gotten away with it back in the day... but it was questionable back then, and trying to defend it as legitimate now is something approaching insanity.

Yeah, I know what you mean... between their bizarre pronunciations of half the character names and their odd insistence on pronouncing "Macross" as "Muck-ross" and their generally lackluster voice acting, I couldn't hit the "change audio" button on my DVD player's remote fast enough. I didn't even make it through one episode, though I caught bits and pieces here and there, just long enough to note that the guy voicing Hikaru was probably the only one they'd made a good call on during casting.

No, with a mustache I'd probably look more like Weird Al Yankovic than Tom Selleck. Y'know, they keep trying to excuse that by saying Tommy was having fun at his own expense... certainly possible given that he is Korean himself and was responsible for the original concepts (which did still have the stonking huge tits) and some of their evolutions. It's certainly indisputable that he's the man to blame for the whole of the OVA's cast looking like a collection of Mr. Universe contestants and porn stars. Then again, he did used to work for DC as an inker, and he did do a Danger Girl miniseries too, so there's a very real possibility that he just never learned how to draw people any other way than as buff, square-jawed manly men and women who are proportioned like a pencil that's been stuck through two grapes. (Of course, there's the even more horrifying prospect that since Tommy Yune claims to be a long-time fan of the Robotech franchise, that he decided to subject the world to his personal masturbation material) Not just Harmony Gold... Tommy Yune signed off on them personally, and many of the early concepts are marked with "Studio Yune". Let's remember, Tommy is completely unable to cope with criticism of any kind. If he was going to catch flak for turning Robotech into the something nearly as shameless as Queen's Blade, of course he'd try to shift the blame elsewhere. From a business standpoint, I'm sure the stripperific female designs got the go-ahead from Harmony Gold's powers-that-be on the grounds that, if nothing else, the teenage male audience they were aiming for with Shadow Chronicles would be drawn to the film by the promise of gorgeous women with sprayed-on catsuits and cleavage that could hold up a Christmas tree who all find nerdy, introverted boys irresistible. It's little more than fantasy wish-fulfillment for the immature, antisocial die-hards who've kept Robotech alive all these years. Now, if you want something truly screwed up, try this on for size: In a frankly unsettling way, you could argue that Marcus Rush is a metaphor for the average Robotech fan rather than an author self-insertion fantasy persona. The parallels between the two are truly disturbing. Marcus is a naive, socially awkward, staggeringly ignorant young man who has anger management problems and no luck with attractive single women. He's avidly pro-military, violently xenophobic, and hates a group of people he's never even attempted to interact with peacefully because his superiors told him he should. As the result of all of the morally and ethically bankrupt behavior of supposed visionary who assembled the very foundations of their world by wronging that other group of people, he suffered a relatively minor injustice at the hands of that wronged party when they came back to claim what was rightfully theirs, which prompted him to blame them (and only them) for it and blow it wildly out of proportion into a crime worthy of genocide. He then encounters one of the enemy who isn't the evil monster hell-bent on ruining his life that he's convinced himself all of them are, and only comes to tolerate (not accept) that person after she looks the other way on all of his hate speech, his hostile behavior, and his openly-stated desire to murder her entire family. Even then, he only grudgingly accepts her after she goes well out of her way to save his stupid ass from his own idiocy, comes over to support his side too, AND pretends that the brain-dead jackass he and all his friends think is a visionary genius wasn't the real reason for the problem. Holy hell, I think I cracked the Robotech code... the show is a metaphor for its own creative process and history! Zor is Carl Macek... a man totally oblivious to the consequences of his actions, who caused everyone a lot of grief by "borrowing" something important from a bunch of people who were minding their own business and perverting it into a badly-explained atrocity that ruins every world it comes into contact with. He provoked a zealot mindset in his followers (Harmony Gold), created a small army of mindless militant drones to defend his mess (Robotech fans). For his crimes, he was hailed as a visionary by his followers, whom he stuck with the unenviable task of trying to salvage the rapidly deteriorating mess he created. His abomination struck the Macross world and caused a lot of hostility, and after being ousted from there moved on to two different worlds (Southern Cross and Mospeada) that nobody on either side really gave a toss about. The few followers he had left attempted to replace him with an imitator (Tommy Yune) to salvage what they no doubt felt was a situation that'd gone way beyond their ability to deal with. He created an even bigger mess (Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles), which caused even more fighting and hostility (this time among his own followers), and then gave up. While the remnants of his followers attacked the people his predecessor wronged and made fools of themselves time and time again, he tried to strike out on his own with something original (Sentinels/RTSC) and nobody on either side remembered anything about it except the supposed (and decidedly peripheral) involvement of someone who actually mattered (Mark Hamill). The fighting between the factions of his followers and the enemy who'd come to claim what was theirs continued until the original owners of the contested property gave up on trying to reason with the fanatics, took their stuff, and left the fanatics to be destroyed by their own uncontrolled hostility. It makes so much sense... mind=blown.

Why am I suddenly reminded of that scene in Star Trek: Nemesis where Data pops up out of the lake and calmly announces "In the event of a water landing, I have been designed to act as a flotation device"? Moreover, why can I easily imagine Tommy Yune doing the exact same scene and line with Janice? Nah, I look horrible with a mustache... but by sheer coincidence I'm almost the exact same height as Bruno Global. 'kay, we know Ghost Train doesn't pull any punches...