Seto Kaiba

Oh yeah, that's a tactful thing to say to someone you're asking for information... no way in hell I could possibly take offense over that. In all seriousness, I don't remember. Do you remember the brand of bread that was in the sandwich you had for lunch three months ago today? Probably not. Still, not being able to provide you with the answer you seek isn't sitting right with me, so I'm undertaking to dig through my chat logs, e-mails, and forum private messages looking for an answer for you. Eh... my guess would be around the time some public relations person at Harmony Gold decided that calling him that made him sound more impressive... as a more accurate description of his achievements and standing in the industry would make him sound singularly unimpressive and robbed the piece of much of the intended impact. It certainly wasn't the first time they stretched the truth past the point of absurdity in the name of promoting their hackneyed mess. Actually... to be fair, that isn't an original claim by any means. In fact, it looks like MEMO was paraphrasing some statements Carl Macek had made to similar effect (chiefly concerning the story) in a "fan interview" published on May 21st, 2001. You can find the pertinent quotations in part 2 of the 3-part piece... about two-thirds of the way down the page in response to a question by Robotech.com user Ein. For your convenience, here is the section MEMO was probably drawing on: Utter poppycock, of course... considering that this interview was conducted just a few years after the release of Macross Dynamite 7... and that the interim titles had been Macross II: Lovers Again, Macross Plus, and Macross 7... most of which place at least as much importance on music as the original series, and most substantially more so. ... as has been pointed out many a time before now, the vehement debates were a large part of what kept the online fandom chugging along in the period between the first major fansites popping up in the late 90's and the lukewarm reception of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles in '06-'07. The animosity is practically a fundamental part of Robotech fandom... they kept themselves entertained for a decade or more squabbling over whether the series or the irreverent novelizations was the superior version. Unless things have really turned around since I was banned from Robotech.com, it was practically an article of faith among active Robotech fans that the novels were rubbish and the people who cited them in discussion were treading a thin line between "contributor" and "troll". Lamentably, some Robotech fans (like MEMO) see such conflicts as avenues for personal advancement and do what they can to ensure they continue unabated. Until those individuals are singled out and removed, or at least lose the ability to enforce their position by abuse of moderator power, the Robotech fanbase will never get the chance to straighten out its priorities. Which is, I think, at least part of why they react to discussion of Macross with such hostility. True, they've spent the last decade or so being told that Macross is inferior garbage fit only for "correction" and inclusion in Robotech. Still, it's no stretch to picture them as finding discussions of new and exciting things happening in Macross to be irritating... to the point of seeing it as implicit bragging... because of their frustration with the lack of similar movement from Harmony Gold. (The only analogy I can really think of for this is the irration you see in guys who've just broken up with their girlfriends and have to endure a friend waxing poetic about his new girlfriend. )

Eh... there's an ulterior motive in the downgrade. Specifically, that I want to rid the machine of all the trialware, bloatware, etc. that the manufacturers inevitably load new systems down with and start from a clean install of Windows. As it transpires, while I have several dual 32/64bit anytime upgrade DVDs for Vista that I've used for that purpose in the past... the one I have for Windows 7 is 32bit only. *shrug* I guess the worst case scenario is that I pony up a C-note for a fresh OEM copy of Windows 7 32bit and use it to replace the existing 64bit version that comes with the machine.

Hey guys... I have a brief-ish question for anyone who's currently running a Windows 7 box. Long story short, I'm looking into getting a replacement for my now-5 year old HP Pavilion laptop. I'm somewhat leery about the idea of them coming, by default, with the 64bit version of Windows 7. I'm probably going to get a somewhat minimalist machine, and thus won't need the 64bit version's expanded memory addressing abilities or any of the other dubious benefits the 64bit version confers. So, I what I want to know is if it's possible for me to downgrade the system (via reformat and clean install, obviously) from the 64bit OS to the 32bit version of same using the same OEM license key. I ask because the manufacturers I've talked to are mysteriously tight-lipped on that note (I actually ended up in a chicken-and-the-egg dilemma with HP's phone rep somehow), and there's no shortage of contradictory answers on the various tech forums out there. Can I get a yea or nay from someone who's actually tried this (or the reverse?). Also, further to my earlier problem... it's a confirmed Firefox issue, not a Norton issue. Yay resolution, probably caused by the plugin container, given that manually disabling the plugin container sorts the problem right out. ^^

Eh... well, then I don't know what to tell you. It must have been something I gleaned from one of my occasional interactions with the handful of influential 85ers I keep in touch with. It had to have come from a source that I'd rate as at least reasonably reliable, otherwise my inherent scholarly distrust for anecdotal evidence would have caused me to ignore it entirely. I have an excellent memory for detail, but I'm not perfect... and to be fair, you're asking after minutae from a three-month old conversation. The odd circumstances you're citing are explained in the original anecdote though. Ah, I see... yeah, it's not at all surprising that something like that slipped past me unnoticed. I am, after all, not exactly a fan of Transformers. I've got fond childhood memories of the original Transformers Generation 1 series and Transformers: the Movie, but beyond that... nothin'. Didn't bother looking into the comics, and caught only a few episodes of later shows (incl. Beast Wars, Beast Machines, and Armada)... none of which were to my taste.

IIRC, it was in the discussion of the Robotech production process in one of the Robotech Art books that someone had brought to my attention at the time. Sorry I can't be more precise, but you are asking about a discussion we had nearly three months ago. I would consult my copies of the books for you, but I've long since crated up all of my Robotech stuff and put it in storage because nobody in what remains of the Robotech fandom talks about the show anymore.

Still... not the best decision they could've made under the circumstances. It's not like they would've found anyone objecting to it if they'd gone for something a bit more realistic and serious, since the vast majority of people who saw Speed Racer on television are in their fifties now. Who knows? Perhaps the producers of Transformers felt at least a little bit more secure in their decisions knowing that no matter what they did the majority of Transformers fans were going to hate it and spend months or even years whining themselves inside-out about it. At least the producers of the live action Robotech movie have nothing to fear either way, since any bleating about its fate on the part of the existing fanbase is at best going to be the shrilling of a handful of belligerents. Damn... lol. That's a speed cancellation fit to rival even the fastest project collapses in Robotech's history.

Okay, the feet don't really work that well... but that's still kinda badass. Eh... that's why there aren't that many incoming fans in the Robotech fanbase. There was a brief boom where a fair few new people were coming in back in ~2002-2004, but that was mostly word-of-mouth introduction and the hype from the brief uptick of interest they're praising as a revival these days... most of the people who came in during that period had an average tenure of about a year before getting sick of Robotech's lack of forward motion and seeking greener pastures.

Eh... really, I think you're both drawing a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison between the mecha designs of Macross and those of Transformers Generation 1. Just going from what I've heard about the production of the "Bayformers" movie, one of the main problems they had in adapting the familiar designs of G1 Transformers into something halfway believable for the silver screen is that almost all of them treat conservation of mass as more of a polite suggestion than a universal law. Something like the inexplicable disappearance and reappearance of Optimus Prime's trailer could be dealt with, but there's no rationalizing G1 Soundwave and Megatron's amazing and inexplicable ability to alter their body mass to such a worrying extent that they can pass for a human-scale cassette deck (which isn't that inconspicuous these days) or a pistol small and light enough to be used by other Decepticons one-handed. Sufficed to say, they have a whole host of issues that would make them unfeasible or ridiculous looking as a straight port-over from their animated counterparts. By in large, Macross's mecha designs have no such drawbacks, which would work in their favor if a straight-up adaptation were to be made... in that case, the main beef would be that we don't fly F-14s anymore. ^^; Ah, yeah... it was more or less inevitable that this year's convention tour would have the increasingly desperate die-hard Robotech fans praying for news of big things to validate their misplaced faith in the franchise. I can only guess at how stupid one would have to be to think there was a chance they'd be showing the trailer for the live action movie on this year's convention tour when the proposed movie doesn't even have a script yet. At least all the mooks who were holding their breath waiting for a Robotech: Shadow Rising trailer this year had some cause to suspect it... since they at least started making that one before putting the brakes on it while they waited for Warner to unf*ck their reputation. Still, I suppose it's to be expected... the paid trolls at Harmony Gold and their ringleaders, Carl Macek and Tommy Yune, have put decades of work into making the Robotech fandom a herd of ignorant cattle who'd make even the most inbred backwoods redneck look positively on the ball by comparison. All that's left of the Robotech fandom is the blindly faithful core demographic of 30+ year old men waiting patiently for the sequel that will never come, and the few newcomers who've just discovered anime and will, more often than not, come to their senses and drop Robotech for a show that actually has potential. EDIT: I just finished reading the "Scale" article on Teletraan 1... and just about laughed myself sick.

Oh, most any company is going to care about how it's perceived by its prospective customer base. As far as the idiots at Harmony Gold are concerned, the question of maintaining their "image" is less a matter of ensuring the rest of the industry thinks they're a competent outfit, and more about ensuring their phony baloney jobs remain safe by keeping what remains of the loyal Robotech consumer base convinced exciting things are happening and that they're the ones responsible for it all. It's no accident that so many Robotech fans mistake Harmony Gold for a company that actually produces its own content... that's how Tommy Yune, and Carl Macek before him, stayed on the payroll. Indeed... an endeavor aided in no small measure by the sad fact that many Robotech fans seem to actually want to be lied to. Plenty of loyal, long-time Robotech fans want to allay their fears that they've wasted decades on a franchise that has yet to make good on promises it made back in 1986, and as such will happily accept even the flimsiest lies about how popular and well-respected Robotech is in the anime industry.

Damn, that's sad news indeed... I really enjoyed his work on Perfect Blue. R.I.P. Satoshi Kon

You would think so... but the answer to your question is a surprising and unexpected "No". Of all the anime magazines I've collected from that period for their coverage of Macross II: Lovers Again, the ONLY one which mentions Robotech in connection with the OVA is the inaugural issue of Animerica... and generally in an extremely dismissive manner. The other articles from that period studiously ignore Macross's relation to Robotech in their coverage of the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA, and only draw on it to offer name equivalencies for the few important characters whose names changed significantly (basically, just Kamjin) in their discussions of Macross's production history. Perhaps the best, and most telling, snub directed at Robotech in those issues was the one in Animerica, where the Robotech Perfect Collection is described as "a dual Japanese/Enlish video compilation of the ever-popular 1982 science fiction TV series, Superdimensional Fortress Macross" and the Robotech half of the video release is only mentioned in a single sentence tacked onto the end of the article as an obvious afterthought. Viz briefly mentions Robotech in their translation of the Macross II: Lovers Again manga, and Palladium only mentions Robotech in the foreword of the first Macross II RPG book to explain how and why Macross II has nothing to do with Robotech and then gives a brief rundown of Macross production history in Japan. In an odd touch, while almost all of the articles gloss over or completely forget to mention Robotech, they ALL mention Macross: Do You Remember Love? at great length and almost invariably give a rundown of the movie's plot. Given the profound absence of attempts to hype Macross II: Lovers Again based on its tangential relation to the already somewhat-scorned Robotech series, one can only assume that the OVA was hyped as "the most eagerly anticipated anime sequel ever" at the time due to knowledge of the franchise's popularity in Japan. Naturally, it ended up being somewhat underwhelming after all that... DYRL's a tough act to follow even today and Macross II was not exactly the most innovative sequel of all time either. Insofar as the Robotech live action movie's writers go, there's no indication that they've retained Kasdan after rejecting his story treatment. Usually if that happens to a writer, they collect their paycheck and go on to work on something else. Harmony Gold has, as everybody here knows, a loooooooooong history of misleading news pieces, so that he's still credited on a powerpoint slideshow that hasn't seen a major update in three years is not an indication that he's still involved. That they continued to bring in new and less credible writers as time went on speaks to their increasing desperation.

No problem, I'm here to help.

Umm... while I don't own an iPad, I did get the chance to use one for a few days while I was doing on-site work with a client. Please bear in mind, I'm not anything like an impartial critic. I do not like Apple's products, for the most part, so my impressions of the iPad are no doubt colored by my less-than-good first impressions of other Apple products. I own a Zune, so take that for what you will. Your mileage may vary. Unfortunately, I only had the chance to use my borrowed iPad for 3 days before the company we were working with (an auto parts supplier) decided they were great but not suited for widespread adoption. I was using the standard Wi-Fi model w/o the 3G support, and found it to be (surprisingly) a reasonably capable tablet. I avoid using tablets whenever possible since they're usually not as durable as normal laptops, and my working laptop tends to get the crap beat out of it in the line of duty. My concerns about its durability seem to have been a bit excessive, since I didn't manage to kill the damn thing in three days hard work. The onscreen keyboard's kinda awkward to use for someone whose hands are as big as mine, but the keyboard dock sorted that well enough. The only significant beef I had with the thing was that there wasn't a conventional stylus, but it looks like there are aftermarket solutions for that if you feel like shelling out fifteen bucks. Didn't care for iOS, but that's really a pointless complaint considering the product. Functionally, the iPad is a good looking, functionally adequate tablet that doesn't really excel in any meaningful way. It's a pretty package and some visually impressive twists on run-of-the-mill functionality. If you really like Apple or want to be on the bleeding edge of tablets, it's okay I guess... I'll stick with my Lenovo ThinkPad X60.

Hmm... an interesting question to be sure. It's pretty much a given that if Harmony Gold had never tried to get the Super Dimension Fortress Macross series onto TV back in the 80's, they would never have made Robotech or a Robotech-like show. They would never have had to partner with Revell, which would've left Revell to distribute Macross, Dougram, and Orguss kits under their "Robotech Defenders" line. Likewise, Revell's aspirations for a Transformers-like series that would help advertise their kits would probably have died with the failure of the Robotech Defenders comic book miniseries. Since their attempts to get Macross on the air were what eventually culminated in a combi-show rewrite, it's likely that they would never had had a syndicated TV series at all, and would have continued peddling dubs by mail order. Since their rewritten adaptations of Southern Cross and Mospeada didn't go over well even back in the 80's, it's unlikely they would've succeeded by combining those with another lesser-known show. Harmony Gold would have, in all likelihood, never had a feeble franchise to hang onto and annoy everyone with in the first place. Southern Cross and Mospeada would have been virtual nonentities until the late 90's or early 00's, when fansub groups started digging into old shows like Armored Trooper Votoms and Heavy Metal L-Gaim. Odds are that America's first encounter with unedited Macross would've been the 1992 debut of the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA, which was hyped to all hell in the handful of anime publications of the day. If that didn't ignite interest in the rest of Macross, the Macross Plus OVA would almost certainly have done so when it came out just a few years later. There would've been little-to-no opposition to bringing the rest of Macross over (apart from all the obvious music licensing issues in Macross 7). To give you a straightforward answer... no. Apparently, virtually no progress has been made on the proposed live-action Robotech movie since the project was announced back in 2007. It seems to be stalled in the earliest phases of pre-production, after Chuck Rovin left the project for The Dark Knight. They reportedly don't even have a working draft of the script yet, let alone a director or a cast. It looks like they passed on Lawrence Kasdan's draft, and that of the idiots who did Smallville, and are now relying on virtual unknown Tom Rob Smith... a writer with no experience working on sci-fi or action titles, and specializes in cold war-era murder mysteries set in Soviet Russia. Tobey Maguire, on the other hand, seems to have put Robotech on the back burner, and is focusing on Tokyo Suckerpunch and Afterburn, both films which are slated for release in 2011 and 2012 respectively. My advice to you... don't hold your breath. The live-action Robotech movie seems to be a continuation of the fine Harmony Gold tradition of talking a big game and accomplishing nothing at all.

To be fair, many of the larger compromises weren't compromises at all... they were directives handed down from on high from senior management at Harmony Gold or at the network for one reason or other. Eh... even back in the early 90's folks were starting to see Robotech as less of a gateway show and more of a roadblock between them and "proper" anime.

Indeed... that's certainly plausible. It's also possible that the Zentradi, fixated as they were on destroying Earth's surface, completely overlooked relatively small installations like the L-5 manufacturing station, the space colonies, and Apollo Base. After all, the Zentradi are used to dealing with space stations the which could easily fall into the "small moon" category, and something as insignificant as an Island-3 colony cylinder might slip by unnoticed since it'd neither shot at them nor attempted to move under its own power.

Now, if one thing has held true with regard to the sort of fanatical Robotech fans who anoint themselves to be the chosen defenders of the Robotech fandom, it's that they usually know that much about the Robotech series itself, let alone the original shows they so frequently deride in the name of lauding Carl Macek's glorious vision. Of course, considering the idiot we're talking about was thick enough to assert that despite not understanding so much as a word of Japanese, that he fully understood the entire setting, plot, and story of Macross Frontier better than those who saw it subbed or speak Japanese despite having only watched low-quality raws of the show ONCE, that should tell you something about the quality of his arguments... It's actually kind of sad... the very people who continually laud Macek as a visionary genius are the ones who've never understood what the man was actually trying to do with Robotech and his later work, because they've all constructed an elaborate fantasy for themselves in order to convince themselves that Robotech is popular and successful, and that because they like it, it must be what Macek meant to do. This delusion, of course, was not helped by Macek's profound and frequently expressed tendency to stretch the truth to increase his own kudos. Is that what it was? F*cked if I remember that poo... the writing wasn't exactly fantastic, nor was the art... the clear intention was to appeal to the we-swear-its-not-Super Dimension Fortress Macross nostalgia factor of the Robotech fandom to get them to buy the damn book.

Hmmm... it depends on what did in the disk. If it's a failure of the disk surface then you might be boned, but if it's just a failure of the file system then you might be able to salvage it using the repair tool on the Windows Anytime Upgrade CD that came with most new Windows Vista machines (and also normal Vista install CDs).

No... you're actually working from an incorrect assumption here. True, the surface of the Earth did take one hell of a pounding at the hands of the Zentradi, but you would be wrong to assume that meant the only survivors of the war were on the Macross. The official continuity establishes that between several hundred thousand and a million humans survived the orbital bombardment. The main locations that sheltered survivors were three of the Grand Cannons (1, 3, 5), Luna's Apollo Base, and space colony clusters. There was a cloning program running to shore up the human population between 2010 and 2030 as well. The humans we see in the decades following Space War 1 are the survivors, their clones, and the descendants of either. Aboard the Macross? 'bout 44,000 civilians plus whatever was left of the ship's crew of ~20,000. The source for the Zentradi population escapes me at the moment, but I remember reading the surviving Zentradi population that settled on Earth was something to the tune of 8 million people... presumably they were not included in the mass cloning program. See the above... we've got a twenty year long mass-cloning program to shore numbers up a bit, and as we've seen courtesy of Max and Milia, rather a lot of energetic fornication on the part of the survivors.

Yeah, that sounds about right... though I'd say the three phases of the cycle the Robotech fandom's been stuck in since 1986 could best be summed up in the following terms: Stagnation - The status quo of the Robotech fanbase, wherein the remaining fans amuse themselves by repeatedly rehashing the same handful of tired debate topics which have sustained them for at least the last decade. If a new Robotech project with a distant or ambiguous release date has recently been made public knowledge, the fans will also occupy themselves with baseless speculation and obsess over every little detail released, no matter how insignificant. Persecution - As a result of the endless rounds of rehashed debate, "party lines" are drawn up over any particularly contentious subject. The more belligerent fans respond to opinions that differ from their own with overt hostility. Eventually, this develops into outright persecution of any fan who voices a dissenting opinion, frequently culminating in them being labeled a troll or accused of not being a "real Robotech fan". The dissenters get sick of being harassed and either go in search of another, more tolerant Robotech fan community or give up on the franchise altogether and seek greener pastures elsewhere. Straw Man - Having lost the convenient target the majority of the dissenters represented, the handful of truly belligerent Robotech fans who started the fighting blame the disturbance on Macross and its fans, by way of McCarthyist tactics and a number of absurd straw man arguments intended to demonize Macross fans and "prove" the superiority of Robotech... intended to reassure themselves that they made the right decision backing Robotech, and convince each other that all the problems they see in the fandom are the result of an external conspiracy by jealous or hateful Macross fans. Lather, rinse, repeat. I would guess that it's a little from column A... a little from column B. Rather a lot of the Macross hate I've witnessed from Robotech's self-appointed defenders feels a lot more like a thinly disguised attempt to convince themselves they aren't jealous that Macross's creators are doing stuff with the franchise while Robotech's creators continue to let their franchise stagnate. Pizza the Hutt seemed to be a particularly bad example of this when he was still in MEMO's camp. When he first started talking about Macross Frontier, you could tell he was impressed against his will, and was frantically trying to find something about the show to interpret as offensive and complain about. Once MEMO was no longer goading him into the defense of Robotech and he stopped taking MEMO's word for it that Macross was horrible, he began to explore the series with an open mind and found a lot to enjoy. (So much so, in fact, that he recently imported Macross Ace Frontier and was quite gleefully proclaiming that he wished he'd given it a try sooner)

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.