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JB0

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Everything posted by JB0

  1. JB0
    BEST. THRUST. EVER.
  2. JB0
    That's funny, because I was skimming the last couple pages, saw the part about "the books are all about the main characters doing everything and everyone being connected to someone from before" and thinking "Not Corps of Engineers! Aside from Scotty, the cast was all-new!". I guess if you grab a small enough bit part, people won't realize you grabbed anything at all. I still liked Corps of Engineers, though. It was very different from the usual Trek book, and the lack of main characters combined with unusual premise let them mess around in interesting ways.* Darn shame the series didn't sell very well(being sold as eBooks in a pre-Kindle world didn't help). I think I dropped out of Trek books around the time they did a 4-book interseries crossover about... demons banished to the far corners of the galaxy, I think? That sounds completely insane, but I am pretty sure it is a thing they did and not a fever-dream. I mostly just remember it was REALLY bad, even by the standards of the market. Voyager and then Enterprise were giving me all the bad Trek stories I could handle, I didn't need print to fill that void in my life. (The real problem: Janeway Binks darn near killed Trek for me.) I ALMOST came back to the books after Enterprise, when I saw the first post-Enterprise book to come out was dedicated solely to undoing the entire final episode. Because that was a beautiful thing, and I loved how FAST it happened. But no. I read very few Voyager novels(possibly only the one), and no Enterprise novels. Had to move on to unlicensed science-fiction. *Similarly, on the other side of the Trek/Wars fence, I always loved the X-Wing books. No one more important to the franchise than Wedge Antilles on the main cast, and screw jedi power creep. Instead of the Han, Luke, and Leia Power Hour, it was a bunch of franchise-nobodies doing all these things that the regular cast can't get away with. There was also a tension that's absent from most of the stories because they can and do write some of them out. I'd also argue they were more Star Wars-y than the mainline books, but opinions may vary.
  3. JB0
    Welcome to the (space) fold, brother.
  4. JB0
    Kinda what I was thinking. It is sexy, but not SKANKY. WELL NEVER MIND, THEN. I never even considered that possibility. I've clearly watched too much anime, I just assumed the girl had a tail. I mean, she DOES have a tail, but... not one that's ATTACHED to ... you know what I mean.
  5. JB0
    Makes sense to me. A battleship girl without huge freaking guns(and I don't mean that euphemistically) is just WRONG.
  6. JB0
    My heart, it is broken!
  7. JB0
    That is pretty hot. And I like that they've done a new version of the original show's song instead of a new song. Not that the other adaptations haven't had good songs, I just like the nod.
  8. JB0
    Honestly, I can't blame 7 too much for the music=magic thing. It is easy to blame Basara and Doctor Chiba, but it needs to be remembered that DYRL was the entry that elevated music's role from "an aspect of culture that is very easy to share" and on to something with actual special powers. 7 just made it explicit. Really, the way music is handled, and the Minmay hero worship, makes most of the animation since then a sequel to DYRL. The original TV series standing at this point is basically "what if Macross took place in a weird parallel universe where music DOESN'T have supernatural properties and Minmay was just a pop star?". Also, I will never forgive Gamlin for blowing up Millia's VF-1. I'm kind of surprised she did.
  9. JB0
    Oh, I'm not saying it is an implausible outcome. Just that it is not a foregone conclusion, though it really ought to be. (I believe Jim Davis DID get a trademark on Garfield Orange, incidentally. And UPS has a trademark on poop brown. Both limited to within their respective markets, of course. )
  10. JB0
    I remember Memo, vaguely. What possessed him to blame you, other than sheer madness?
  11. JB0
    You'd think so, but in a world where you can trademark ordinary english words like Jazz and Word and Scrolls and Saga, it is not much of a stretch to trademarking made-up words that weren't made up by you.
  12. JB0
    Did someone ask for the Stampede Valkyrie? (No joke, I really do want to see this guy rendered in plastic)
  13. JB0
    Trademark. Big West still holds the copyright. Trademarks can definitely be challenged, but how successfully is up in the air. Particularly as US law designates "intent to use" as a valid reason to hold a trademark, and they have enough historical usage of it to make a believable case that they intend to do so again. And, well, they DO still use some of the Macross trademarks. The UN Spacy kite appears on all their VF-1 toys, as well as the singing Minmay doll toy. That they seem to be backing off of the phrase "Macross Saga" on their newer merchandise comes as a surprise to me, admittedly, but it still appears on some of their older merchandise that's currently available .
  14. JB0
    Pretty sure the answer is a big "nope". I think they're just in a "sue everyone for everything" phase. It happens every few years.
  15. JB0
    Good. Very good.
  16. JB0
    I believe World Event Productions actually bought Golion outright a few years back. My understanding is after one too many times in court over the issue of sequels and remakes, they decided enough was enough. Edit: Easy confirmation. Grabbed the Soul of Chogokin Golion/Voltron box. The legalese line on the front of the japanese box says Golion is copyright World Event Productions. They own it now. It was probably a cheap purchase, given how little it was making Toei outside of Voltron licensing.
  17. JB0
    I think that if HG loses the licenses to the Robotech shows, Robotech as we know it is dead. No one can do anything with it. The closest example I can think of is the video game Pac-Man Jr. Midway created it while they had the Pac-Man distribution license, which has since reverted to Namco. Right now Midway owns the game, Namco owns the name, and no one can do anything with it.
  18. JB0
    Wet blanket time! Even if HG loses the license and Robotech dies, we still have to wait for their trademark on the Macross name to fizzle out, because that is independent of licensing(and was filed out of spite; but that's irrelevant).
  19. JB0
    Pretty sure that black strip is supposed to be the track that the van door slides on. Odd place to start caring about detail, since he doesn't much look like he HAS a sliding door through all those panel lines.
  20. JB0
    I believe the kids these days say "quoted for truth"? I honestly thought someone had bumped a fifteen-year-old thread at first. This is an entirely different, and MUCH more entertaining, spectacle.
  21. JB0
    I enjoyed Robotech too. Used to have a complete set of the novels. Even enjoyed The Sentinels. But End of the Circle was, ummm, kind of awful.
  22. JB0
    I had successfully forgotten End of the Circle until just now. THANKS A LOT.
  23. JB0
    That was what I was afraid of. The market just won't tolerate a Prime that isn't "anime accurate".
  24. JB0
    So I had a thought kicking around in my head, and I'mma bounce it off you guys. Basically, every Optimus Prime toy suffers from one of two problems: 1. There's no trailer. Truck mode is lonely and incomplete without the iconic box trailer. 2. There IS a trailer. There's a big chunk of plastic just sitting there wasting space in robot mode. So here's the thing.... OTHER characters have large superfluous parts that origami down to become a part of the robot. Why doesn't anyone take a cue from some of these OTHER robot semis and do a Motormaster, Ultra Magnus, or God Ginrai-style transformation for Prime? Particularly as Ultra Magnus has already made the transition from separate trailer to Motormaster-style. Is it just because "if he combines with the trailer he's not Optimus", or is there some really good reason not to do it?
  25. JB0
    Quite possible. He's definitely made an attempt to be a real shuttle. I generally prefer that when they are supposed to have real-world forms, they look like the real thing. The original Blitzwing toy always struck me as a really janky plane, though I admit there's a certain bit of nostalgia for that chunky bijet, just because it was so far away from what it should be that it sort of became its own thing, more like a proto-cybertronian mode than a real F-15*. Astrotrain, though, always landed in that "wants to be a shuttle, can't quite pull it off" zone, so there's not a lot of nostalgia for his specific shortcomings in my heart. *I'm a lot more forgiving of the sci-fi cybertronian modes, as long as they don't just look like robot parts slapped together into a new arrangement. But even then, for some of them to be viewed as functional vehicles beggars imagination.
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