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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    I stand corrected on the topic of cancellation for Covert Ops, at least. That said, knowing what we know about the duration of the Antarctic Press license and Harmony Gold's reasons for revoking it, being among the best print runs that the most hated publisher with the shortest-ever tenure as a licensee had for that license feels like it was probably a low bar to clear. It sounds like you dodged a bullet, then. Especially given how the fans had the torches and pitchforks out for Rubicon. Was there any kind of oversight going on regarding the usage of copyrighted material? I know the '90s were a lot less lawsuit happy on that front, but some of the titles that were published under Academy Comics and Antarctic Press feel like the artists were actively trying to get sued for copyright infringement. So much so that, these days, the new comic licensee handling reprints won't touch those titles. (And yes, it absolutely objectively was copyright infringement... HG didn't have any rights to DYRL? until 2001, years after these comics were published, so 100% of the use of DYRL material was unauthorized.) Come to that, was there any guidance being given on character and story arc development at all? I know the Robotech fans were really up in arms about Antarctic Press's comics because of how out of character everyone was all the time. Was this operation just a free-for-all?
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Kind of an autopsy on the company too... Academy Comics only held on to the Robotech license for about 2 years and folded shortly after Harmony Golden revoked it. Like most of Robotech's licensee pool, they were a real amateur hour outfit. If you feel so inclined, go ahead and share your tale of disaster and woe. IIRC, those two titles have a combined issue count of just three and were both canceled basically immediately.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I'm sure announcements of streaming licenses will follow as the home video releases are prepared. After all, you don't want to completely destroy the market for the home video physical media by leading with streaming. They'll probably release them around the same time so they can market the home video release in ads on the streaming release for the folks who are using streaming with ads.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    If only... But no, the Sentinels aliens were no licensee fever dream. They were created by Harmony Gold itself for the failed Robotech II: the Sentinels series and their representation in those terrible old comics, novels, etc. was based on unused animation model sheets, backstory, and other concept materials from the aborted TV series. HG even kept them around after the reboot. Revised designs for all six of the alien races show up in the Prelude comic HG used to set up the story for Shadow Chronicles, and one of the six are the villains for the aborted OVA series. They weren't particularly original designs, for sure... off-brand wookies, coneheads, rock men, cat men, and sentient robots from an artificial planet. It's like they picked every cliche they could from contemporary pop culture and just hoped no one would notice. Of course, when your creative team has such bad taste that they name one of the major characters in honor of L Ron Hubbard, incompetence is probably about the best you can hope for.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    I did say it was a low rent knockoff... but yes. It's more apparent in the Fighter mode, where it has the delta-esque profile with forward-swept winglets. One of the reasons HG has avoided reprinting so many of its old Robotech comics is because of just how much copyright infringement was going on. Their licensees "borrowed" from whatever the flavor of the month was.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It smells like an open septic tank. Oh, I remember this one... this one had two, maybe three, different cases of blatant copyright infringement in it. The low rent knockoff versions of the VF-19F and Ghost X-9 seen there on the cover, and the character who developed them in that story was super-blatantly traced from a freeze frame of Brent Spiner's character in Independence Day. So much so that he's not even in the same art style as the other characters.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Shonen anime isn't for everyone. Mainly, it's for kids as the name would imply. I don't blame anyone for struggling with One Piece though. Its art style and writing style is... pretty out there even by shonen anime standards. I have a feeling that's probably a big part of why it's so popular and has lasted so long. It's so incredibly distinctive. Probably also gonna be a significant part of why the live action series will bomb. Gotta admit, I did get a chuckle out of this part in "Do you have any idea how little that narrows it down?" terms... Tony Tony Chopper's been a recurring character since chapter 134 of the manga and episode 81 of the anime. 954 chapters and 990 episodes ago. I could feel my hair greying writing that... that was twenty-three years ago!
  8. Seto Kaiba
    The names of the culprits are right there on the cover for the world to see. It says a lot that, despite the Robotech franchise's famously low standards for quality and consistency, those comics were considered garbage even when they were new and that they stand as examples of one of the very few times* that a licensee did such a sh*tty job that Harmony Gold revoked their license. Never mind that they were condemned as low quality trash AGAIN when Harmony Gold summarily tossed every licensee-produced work between 1987 and 2001 when they relaunched Robotech. All that's really changed over the years is that these third and fourth-rate comic companies have better (digital) tools now. Their work still looks like arse, but it doesn't look like a middle schooler's DeviantArt work anymore. That's Robotech Quality (TM)! * The only other members of that especially exclusive fraternity of "Too sh*tty for even Harmony Gold" are Academy Comics's successor Antarctic Press and RPG and tabletop game licensee Palladium Books.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Valkyries designed or outfitted for electronic warfare, AWACS, and reconnaissance roles are no less heavily armored than any variant intended for direct combat. Granted, most are less heavily armed than the front-line variants and a few are totally unarmed... but they also don't typically go anywhere without an armed escort. Typically, that armed escort seems to be 3+ other Valkyries or Ghosts. If we take the RVF-25 as an exemplar, it could control up to six unmanned fighters as an escort... which, considering what current-generation Ghosts can do, is pretty formidable against anything short of an unmanned 5th or 6th Generation VF. Chuck Mustang's VF-31E is a somewhat unusual case in that it's not a dedicated ELINT/AWACS/Recon variant as such. It's a general-purpose machine like all VF-31s and it's just outfitted with a collapsible fold wave radome container instead of a multidrone charger like the other Siegfried customs.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    This, right here, is pretty much an encapsulation of my thoughts on the series so far. I can hardly wait for this beautiful disaster.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    ... what critics? I assume Yonny Tune, Mevin KcMeever, and Yeve Stune from the review site Garmony Hold ASU? Or are we in full on Sue Donym and Alan Smithee territory for this alleged acclaim?
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Kill it with fire.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Or in slightly more honest terms... "Gather 'round gather 'round... Step right up to see the freak show." They gave up and are starting over with a more traditional Robotech comic.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Sorry, I am screwing up in... *checks notes*... four different languages today.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    As an interesting side note, the History of Everything Podcast's YouTube channel recently did a video explaining the historical context behind the Barbie movie being banned in Vietnam and the Philippenes.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    TBH, this sounds like pretty sound unisex life advice... it's a bad idea to define yourself by your relationship(s), and if you're not happy on your own you're not going to be happy in a relationship. FWIW, what I've seen about this film has been overwhelmingly positive. My family and I are gonna go do the Barbenheimer double-feature this weekend.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Looking forward to the musical episode... it kind of reminds me of an old novel from the TOS era How Much for Just The Planet?. Of course, that story had the planet of the week putting on impromptu musical numbers just to mess with the visiting Federation and Klingon delegations.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Go back and read the previous posts, it means the opposite of what you thought.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    This. So very much this. Macross is going to continue to move forward. It's going to develop its stories in new and interesting ways to adapt to the changing times like it's been doing for decades already. Even the misplaced outrage over this latest announcement from HG is just silly because almost all of the characters and designs in question have been irrelevant to on a galactic stage for half a century of in-universe time and even the ones that haven't are headed that way now that they're pushing 80. OK, yeah the original's a classic but there's so MUCH more to Macross than just that.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    That's not about animation, it's about the proposed live action Robotech movie allegedly (but not actually) in development (at WB 2007-2014, at Sony 2015-present). They bought a handful of story treatments from WGA writers over the years in order to make it look like the project wasn't DOA, and that's what they're referencing when they claim that the WGA strike (and now the SAG-AFTRA strike) halted work on the project. It's all BS, but it's all they have to try to convince Robotech's remaining fans that the franchise isn't at death's door since HG stopped funding new animation development itself in '07 and fans refused to crowdfund it in '14.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    More important than wanting to avoid a macho "guns blazing" sort of approach to the horror, I'd like to see this Alien series go back to not having the entire cast be standard issue slasher movie morons. Part of what made Alien work as well as it did as a horror movie is that, with the sole exception of Ash and Dallas breaking quarantine, the Nostromo crew were nevertheless professionals who did everything right and it still wasn't enough to save their lives. The same is broadly true for the Marines in Aliens, whose mission ended up sabotaged by Burke and his superiors at WY but otherwise took the job seriously and their best still wasn't enough. It got worse after that point, with the characters becoming the standard monster/slasher movie too-dumb-to-live idiots who deliberately do unsafe things for no clear reasons. Recent installments - Prometheus and Alien: Covenant - contained so much egregious idiocy on the part of the protagonists that it almost seemed like they were trying to die. The dumbass expedition leader in Prometheus taking off his helmet on a planet they only just landed on and have no idea if it's safe, the geologist who gets lost in a cave system that he'd only just mapped, the biologist who can't recognize a threat display, or... y'know... the Prometheus School of Running Away from Things: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/06/13/ouroboros-or-whatever Or how the crew of the Covenant in Alien: Covenant land on an unsurveyed planet and go for a nature hike without any safety gear at all... and the captain who decides to take a good, long, up-close look at the suspicious alien egg that the massively creepy android is assuring him is totally safe. It's hard to get invested in the fates of a bunch of characters who are seemingly doing everything possible to become a xenomorph's lunch.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Kind of the reverse, actually... it was always about license protection, but they were mistaken about the scope of their license so it started as "all of Macross worldwide" and very rapidly de-escalated to "just the original series" after Big West, Studio Nue, and Tatsunoko fact-checked them. Partially. HG sought the license for the DYRL? merchandising rights after they got fact-checked by Tatsunoko but before the actual court filings in Japan were resolved. It was to close a loophole in their attempts to protect the Toynami license, since the DYRL? VF-1s are legally distinct from the TV versions and they would not otherwise have been able to prevent the importation of certain Japanese VF-1 toys. (Yeah, with one exception the court filings ended with the confirmation that everyone owned what they thought they owned. The only area where there was an actual dispute was Tatsunoko took the opportunity to file a separate claim in a bid to claim royalties from Macross sequels on account of its role in producing the original... a claim that was rejected because they only funded production, not development.) Oh, they absolutely use the SDF merch to maintain those trademarks. It's why most of their recent merch is now carrying the Macross logo alongside the Robotech one.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Mind you, I wouldn't put it past them to be taking directions from a Oujia board or something... Long term? Basically nothing. They did pull off a reasonably competent reboot and relaunch of the franchise but couldn't sustain the momentum for various reasons... many of which could be traced back to the reputational damage the brand suffered under Macek. Not exactly, no... you see, they have an exclusive license to the distribution and merchandising rights for Super Dimension Fortress Macross. They literaly paid for that exclusivity, and they acquired the merchandising rights to Macross: Do You Remember Love? in order to preserve that exclusivity from a technical loophole. It's inconvenient for fans, but it's not really bad business from an objective standpoint. They not-unreasonably want to protect that exclusivity because their adaptation of SDF Macross is their primary source of merchandising revenue and they have to produce merchandise in order to hang onto the trademarks that are the only reason Big West hasn't run their franchise out of business. They don't really have an incentive to improve because, in the absence of new material, their customer base has shrunk to just a few thousand fanatical fans who'll buy anything and the low expected volumes make for a poor ROI so the quantity and quality of licensees has diminished as well. Macross fans can, and do, just buy direct from Japan to get that higher quality merchandise regardless of HG's opinion... so nobody really has a reason to care. Macross is gonna keep doing its own thing. The aged-up designs for the legacy characters are legally distinct from the ones HG has a license for, so there's nothing that's really stopping Big West from having those legacy characters appear as they do in Macross 7, Macross Delta, etc.. All it really means for Macross is that the Macross the First anime which Big West wasn't making anyway is still not happening... it's not happening slightly harder than it was before... who cares?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    HG did release a couple of shorts and one episode of what was supposed to be a four-part OVA before it got canceled due to a combination of being poorly received in general and a lack of investors to fund subsequent episodes. They tried again with a Kickstarter about 9 years ago, but it missed its funding goal by a pretty significant amount. Their beef with Macross has always been about merchandising. The overwhelming majority of Robotech's merchandise is based on Super Dimension Fortress Macross. Without it, they don't really have much of a merchandise line. So they're very keen on protecting what they have from having to compete with the higher quality toys coming out of Japan. It was that desire to avoid competition that prompted the whole licensing embargo in the first place back in 1999-2001 because their partner Toynami was launching a line of VF-1 toys as a part of their effort to reboot the franchise. It's also why they picked up the merchandising rights to DYRL?, so that nobody could do an end run around their rights under license by importing DYRL? toys based on the same designs as the SDF toys they were making. Carl Macek isn't doing much in HG's boardroom anymore... on account of having passed away 13 years ago from a heart attack. (Not to mention that he hadn't been in charge of Robotech for about nine years at that point.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    OK, looking at it from that perspective makes way more sense. Rather than being a badly-worded attempt to appear to be in control after bending the knee two years back, it's a badly-worded attempt to dissuade Robotech fans from looking into the new Macross series by awkwardly pointing out that it won't be Robotech II: the Sentinels by another name. I guess that's on brand for them, though it hardly seems necessary since what's left of the Robotech fandom seems deeply offended by the Japanese-ness of Macross's sequels on principle.
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