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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

This, right here, is pretty much an encapsulation of my thoughts on the series so far. I can hardly wait for this beautiful disaster.

... 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?

Kill it with fire.

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.

Sorry, I am screwing up in... *checks notes*... four different languages today.

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.

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.

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.

Go back and read the previous posts, it means the opposite of what you thought.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.)

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.

I'm just completely thrown by how he looks less than half his actual age. I've seen freshmen on the HS football team my brother coaches that look older than he does. Yeah, I'd hope so... they did an OK series of shorts on YouTube a while back, but even those were more focused on spectacle than horror. As long as they avoid trying to tie it into Prometheus and Alien: Covenant I think it'll be OK-ish. My main suspicion is that, since Alien: Covenant ended up being a narrative dead end due to poor reception, they'll try and use that as a springboard for this story since that ended with David, a ship of colonists, and his xenomorph embryos on their way to colonize a new world and that would be a pretty easy jumping-off point. I'd love to see more subtle, claustrophobic horror like Alien and Alien: Isolation. I suspect what we'll get is another cliche outing of the Too Dumb To Live squad exercising every slasher movie cliche as they become WY-brand xenomorph chow.

Yeah... I am heavily leaning towards predicting a one-season-and-done beautiful disaster of a series. I feel like Netflix's One Piece will land in "so bad it's good" territory because One Piece is inherently comedic and silly and they're trying to grim it up. Where they screwed up with the adaptation of Cowboy Bebop was that they tried to make a normally serious noir story lighter by injecting unneeded and unwanted comedy. Trying to grim up One Piece and make it into a serious action/adventure series should provide lots of fodder for unintentional hilarity. My one real complaint with the trailer is that... well... Luffy feels too articulate in this trailer. The Luffy of the manga and anime is the quintessential dumbass protagonist. He's got a dream he's chasing, but outside of that he's kind of a morally gray agent of chaos and idiot savant driven by an enormous appetite and severe ADHD. He runs on cartoon logic at most times, and his whims are frequently nonsensical even to the people who know him best. Manga and anime Luffy is a heroic cryptid who pops out of the woodwork to do the most incomprehensible or illogical things, befriend people seemingly at random, and then disappear after beating up anyone who threatens the people he decided were friends or are just stronger than him and dumb enough to flex about it in front of him. Live action Luffy feels more like a slightly exciteable standard action/adventure protagonist than the Leeroy Jenkins dumbass that Luffy is supposed to be. That said, they're clearly getting a bit ambitious with this one. If this trailer is to be believed, they're compressing all six story arcs from the East Blue Saga into just eight episodes if we assume Wikipedia lists the right episode count. We see snippets of at least five of those story arcs in this trailer alone: Romance Dawn Arc - we see Shanks give Luffy the hat and the Sea King that bites his arm off, Alvida and Coby, and Zoro joining the crew. Orange Town Arc - we see the first encounter with Buggy the Clown and Nami. Syrup Village Arc - we see Kaya's butler and the claws belonging to Captain Kuro and Usopp joins the crew. Baratie Arc - we see multiple shots of Baratie and someone who is presumably meant to be Don Krieg. Arlong Park Arc - we see the final fight between Luffy and Arlong and the destroyed Arlong Park headquarters of Arlong's pirates. The only one we don't see anything from is the Loguetown Arc, unless the detailed depiction of Roger's execution is from that. That's one hundred chapters of material that they're squeezing into eight episodes, with six separate major battles (Alvida, Axe-Hand Morgan, Buggy, Kuro, Don Krieg, and Arlong).

At this point, it's kind of a non-issue... not just because this alleged prohibition probably only applies to the original Haruhiko Mikimoto character designs from SDFM and DYRL? and not the aged-up redesigns from later titles, but because every single character in SDF Macross except Max and Milia's oldest daughter is on the wrong side of retirement age by the time of Absolute Live!!!!!!. There's 56 years of in-universe time separating the events of SDF Macross's final episode and Macross Delta's second movie. Komilia, the youngest character in the original series, would be 57. Max, Milia, and Minmay would be 75. Bruno J. Global would be 95. Claudia would be 83, Vanessa 80, Kim 78, and Shammy 77. At this point, the only way to have those characters be meaningfully involved in... anything... is to go backwards or do a time travel story like they did in Macross 30 and Macross Shooting Insight. Even Max's appearance in Absolute Live!!!!!! stretches credibility quite a bit as a septuagenarian super-ace. The VF-1 was 59 years and 4 generations old by the time it appeared in Macross Delta's TV series too. They haven't been honest about it since it was announced, why start now? (Though in all fairness, with the WGA on strike they probably can't get any more bargain basement story treatments to pretend that the project isn't dead on arrival.)