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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    It's... it's not bad, I guess? The production values are pretty iffy even for the period but its main issue was it had a lot of seriously iffy screenplays like "The Infinite Vulcan" (the one with Giant Spock), "BEM" (the one with a colony-alien who's built like a LEGO man), or "The Practical Joker" (the one where the Enterprise's computer goes mad and becomes a 3rd grade troll handing out dribble glasses and screenprinting insults on people's uniforms). IIRC Amazon Prime has the license for streaming right now if you feel like giving it a whirl. It has some moments, my favorite being "How Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth?". It was non-canon, or at best apocryphal, basically from its release until the early 2000s when Paramount suddenly reversed its position on the series and made it canon. There is debated theory that the decision was motivated by Enterprise's showrunners wanting to introduce the Kzinti to ENT Season 5. (Which, considering the Kzinti were established to have been epic failures in basically everything, would probably have landed them a spot below the Ferengi on the "ineffectual comedy antagonist" spectrum.) As to recasting... well... usually when you're recasting an existing character you try to cast someone who looks like the previous appearances of the character. The elephant in the room being that, from his conception in Star Trek's earliest drafts to his one canonical appearance and many non-canonical appearances, he has always been depicted as a white man. When a character is recast/reimagined as a different ethnicity from their previous appearances, the audience usually expects an explanation of some sort. Like the way the live action Ghost in the Shell felt compelled to add a massive subplot to explain why the explicitly-Japanese main character was being played by a white actress, or how Star Trek: Into Darkness had to come up with a lame excuse for Khan (an Indian Sikh previously played by Mexican actor Ricardo Montalban) being played by the very white and painfully British Benedict Cumberbatch. (I don't want to get into a debate of the identity politics side of it, so let's please avoid that and simply note the narrative confusion.) Fans are, innocently or otherwise, going to ask that rather awful question of how and why Robert April changed ethnicities between 2258 and 2270 and point to that as evidence that the series is an AU, or non-canon, or whatever. I have a feeling it's going to be a very contentious casting decision in the short term, at least. Of course, if you're not invested in TAS it's all gravy... so I have no dog in that fight myself.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    He had a starring role in the Star Trek: the Animated Series episode "The Counter-Clock Incident". https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Robert_April?so=search Memory Alpha has a number of screenshots from that episode in his bio. Other than that, the file photo used for him in the Star Trek Encyclopedia is a photoshop that put Gene Roddenberry's head on Bill Shatner's body in one of the screen test photos from when they were (re)casting TOS after "The Cage". Since Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is tangentially topical, I can use this scene from the original Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as a metaphor for the casting discussions. (I happen to find this bit hilarious, mainly because I've been the... tall... man in the discussion on a few occasions myself.) That said, I have basically zero attachment to TAS and found a lot of it kind of cringeworthy so I'm not at all bothered by this casting decision. If it means TAS gets the boot again, well, in my mind that's a feature not a bug.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    He Ghost in the Shell'd himself prior to his death fighting the VF-X Ravens in the Macross Frontier novelization... his disembodied consciousness is one of the "Cyber Nobles" pulling the Galaxy fleet's strings. EDIT: I should stress the digital lifeform "MANFRED" is a copy of his consciousness, not the original... We don't actually know when they entered service... just that they're human-made models. 2067 is the first we see them, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily new. The Queadluun-Rhea was pushing twenty years old when we saw in for the first time in Frontier, with the specific model used being a 2056 update to the spec. The New UN Government was manufacturing Regults for its forces shortly after capturing the first factory satellite in 2011, but without knowing exactly how long it took them to arrive at the ZBP-104 spec, we don't know how long it took to develop it. It's been indicated that the miclone systems are capable of a bit of genetic plug-and-play when it comes to adding or removing genetic modifications specific to Zentran/Meltran battlefield roles... presumably when he sized up, his cloned giant body was grown with the necessary bio-fiber optics.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Part of me wants to make a news post about the casting of Adrian Holmes as Robert April for the series... but I'm really hesitant to because the main newsworthy point is that it's going to be a contentious casting decision for continuity reasons that may be mildly politically-charged.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Delta didn't give the designation ZBP-104 to the stock Esbeliben Regult... the ZBP-104 and the other Zentradi mecha in Macross Delta are new models developed and manufactured by humans using captured factory satellites similar to the Queadluun-Rhea. The VBP-1's other designation, VA-110, is a nod to the CONSTANT PEG designations used for captured Soviet MiGs, informally denoting it as a captured or reproduction captured aircraft. Eh... a contrast in aesthetic is all it really is. The Nousjadeul-Ger in the movie uses a similar setup, except instead of bio-fiber optics the Nousjadeul-Ger connects directly to the pilot's organic nervous system. Yup. It's definitely not something you see in a lot of sci-fi. The scale's just too big to be easily captured onscreen.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    I believe they're used in one shot in the low altitude city dogfight between Isamu and Guld in Macross Plus.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, they're not Supervision Army... but the more detailed and distinctive DYRL? designs have essentially retroactively replaced the SDFM TV versions throughout most sequels in the Macross franchise. It's one of those things that's best not to think too hard about, because it's basically not explained AT ALL in most cases. A plausible hypothetical would be that the less organic design aesthetic belonged to the faction opposed to the Stellar Republic during the Stellar Republic dissolution conflict and were simply rolled back into the regular Zentradi forces when both sides united against the surprise attack on both sides by the Protodeviln and their Supervision Army. If you work backwards from the published total population of the Boddole Zer main fleet and the number of ships in the SDFM TV series, you get an average crew size of 1,470. That's probably slightly misleading, since a large percentage of the ships are very small 500m-class fleet radar picket ships and there's that massive mothership the size of Japan to account for, but it's a ballpark figure for the crew of an average-sized (~2km) Zentradi warship.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    It wouldn't be the only example of a duplicate name. The first Haruna was ARMD-10. If it left and was presumed lost with the Megaroad-01, they may have recycled the name. There are also known to be two ships named for Bruno J. Global: a Macross-class SDFN and a Uraga-class escort battle carrier.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Presumably the 1st Large Scale Long Distance Emigrant Fleet. Originally, the Minsk and Haruna were going to be attached, physically, to the Macross-class SDF-2.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I'm kind of wondering what the hell they can actually put in the book, since a lot of the material from the VF-31 Siegfried book was reprints of material from the VF-25 Messiah book, and the Kairos Plus has even more in common with both.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Started Trapped in a Dating Sim: the World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs. Honestly, this has one of the worst starts I've seen from an isekai title outside of zero-effort isekai shovelware shows like Isekai Cheat Magician. It's surprisingly straightforward on the topic of its own setting being an unholy melange of genres that do not go together, but the opening setup feels more like it belongs to a parody than the played-straight story of this series. (I would not have been at all surprised if the protagonist, instead of dying by falling down his apartment's staircase, had done a handspring back to his feet, landed in the street, and been creamed by a truck or had a forced-perspective shot make him look like he was about to only to be hit in the ankle by an RC car.) ... ... ... I have kind of a really REALLY bad feeling about this show. Like, the uncomfortable vibe at a large family gathering right before some slightly-drunk distant relative launches into a racist and/or sexist tirade.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It's usually assumed that ARMD-09 Minsk was the first postwar fold-capable ship.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I'll order my customary two copies once it's listed on CDJapan or HLJ. My hopes aren't high for the actual content, but the art should be pretty good as usual.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    I get more of a kick out of Igarashi and Takeda... but then, that has some personal resonance since I'm like 2m tall and short girls are disproportionately overrepresented among my direct reports at work. Ascendance of a Bookworm is getting a bit dark. I kind of miss the happy-go-lucky adventures of Myne the bookworm before it got all political intrigue-y.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    ... I can't get past the tagline. "They'll die when they're dead". ... I mean, to be dead you kind of have to have already died. Should've workshopped that one a bit more before going to print.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Well, if nothing else, it'll be interesting to see how they screw this one up. I want to be optimistic and hope this series will succeed and convince the others to course-correct back towards Star Trek's core themes of a better, brighter future... but I have a nasty suspicion this'll devolve into another wannabe space action movie.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Only a handful of Earth UN Forces warships survived the First Space War, as a result of being attached to either the UN Forces moon base or the L5 Manufacturing Station. None of them were outfitted with fold systems at the time. The ARMD-class had been designed to be fold-capable but the first eight or so ships of the class were completed before the fold systems meant for them could be delivered. The SDF-2 was still incomplete and under construction on the moon when things went pear-shaped, though it too was designed with a fold system. When construction resumed after the war, fold-capable ships were being built in large numbers to support the emigrant fleets. So, for at least a year or so immediately following the First Space War's nominal end in 2010 the newly established New UN Forces were dependent on the hundred Zentradi ships sailing under their banner for interstellar capability. (Not that fold capability was considered a priority for Earth's defense in that period, it was all about the emigrant fleets initially.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    The actor who voiced K.I.T.T.. Also well known for playing Mr. Feeny in the sitcom Boy Meets World.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    If the book is specifically for the Kairos Plus, I kinda doubt it.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    The VF-31 Siegfried book was... well... it basically all but ignored the production VF-31.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... "man" used without an article is a gender-neutral term. It's derived from mann, proto-Germanic for "person" and passed into Old English with the same meaning.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    To boldly split infinitives no man has split before?
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Well that's the weirdest thing I've seen in a while. Kaguya-sama: Love is War always does weird, arsty stuff for its ED that has no real connection to the main show... and for season three it's an extended reference to Starship Troopers. Not the Studio Nue one either, the terrible live-action movie complete with a totally unmodified Roger Young appearing.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I didn't take it as such. I just felt clarifying my own position was merited, since I am known to be a rather cantankerous bloke at times... This is about the most pathetic thing I've seen from this show, and that is SAYING SOMETHING at this point. The show's property master claiming coming up with the new tricorder was one of the hardest things he's had to do... when all he did was build a bulky case with some white LEDs for an otherwise totally-unmodified Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3 5G smartphone. If that's as far as your professional creativity can take you while you're working on a series like Star Trek, it is well past time for a career change. He couldn't even be arsed to change the default lock screen image. Bragging about putting some LEDs and a custom grip on an airsoft pistol isn't much better, come to that. 's your surname "van Winkle" by any chance? You're going to be napping for a while at this rate. If I could get a laugh out of it I probably wouldn't be as disgusted with it as I am. Somehow, Picard feels even less dignified than when you see an aging rocker who's really let themselves go after a life of hard partying and harder drugs try to perform like they're still young. At least those washed-up rockers aren't deliberately sh*tting on their past selves the way Patrick Stewart is on one of his most iconic screen roles.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Oh yeah, that's a good one. I enjoyed the hell out of it. Kinda wish that one had been longer, TBH. It had a good vibe going.
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