Gubaba

*sigh* You're lucky you caught me on an off day. I'll start it after dinner.

It's not a retcon, it's a completely different model. The old one couldn't transform. The old one. The new one.

I don't really mind being labelled. I am a Macross Purist...in that I love Macross and dislike Robotech. I try not to be obnoxious about it (except to people who really deserve it, like Memo), but if there really is such a thing as a "Macross Purist," I'm one of 'em.

Okay, how about this then... AD 2066. A small planet, bleak, barren, and covered with ice, which exists on the periphery of human settlement. There is only one small base here, more of a waypost than anything else. About once every few years, an emigration ship will stop nearby and deliver some supplies before moving on into the unknown. This is their home: the 297th Attack Team: Shotaro, Dietrich, Larry, Hong, Bjorn, Phuoc, and Paco. Seven men in their late 40s/early 50s. Dietrich, Hong, Bjorn, Phuoc, Paco drive destroids (Two Cheyenne IIIs, a Tomahawk Mk.XXI, a Phalanx Mk.XXXVII, and a Fürstin Monster). Shotaro and Larry each fly VF-33s. They're also "The Troopers": an Iron Maiden cover band. Since there are no women, and all the men are straight, there's no fanservice-y type stuff (although an ongoing gag involves the others constantly discovering Bjorn masturbating in his quarters). The initial character drama revolves around Phuoc: he is a free-thinking dreamer who wants to include Bruce Dickenson's solo recordings in their repetoire, but the others are not interested. Suddenly, they are surprise-attacked without warning by a mysterious enemy. Dietrich is killed in the first attack, but it's kind of okay, because everyone agreed that having TWO keyboardists was a little much. So they gird their loins to prepare for battle. The enemy lands somewhere in the frozen waste, and their high-level of ECM jamming makes it impossible for the 297th to find them. Unbeknownst to them, the enemy starts setting up an elaborate base, while launching probing attacks against the 297th. The attacks are pretty weak, though, and the 297th doesn't worry too much. But one day, during a Troopers rehearsal, soon after Phuoc has achieved triumph by finally convincing the band to at least attempt to play "Tatooed Millionaire," they are surprise attacked without warning again. by what looks like a gigantic battle fortress. They think it's an SDF-1 replica at first, but then realize to their horror that it's actually a Supervision Army ship. The long-lost foes of the Zentradi have returned to known space, and plan on conquest. In the ensuing attack, their base is destoryed and Hong is mortally wounded. With his dying breath, he murmurs his last wish: that the Troopers concentrate only on Maiden's most successful 1981-'86 material, and definitely play nothing that they recorded after 1988's Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. Bjorn angrily retorts that he loves playing "Not Afraid to Shoot Strangers," but Shotaro and Larry quiet him down, and vow to Hong that they will accede to his wishes. Hong dies with a smile on his face, but Phuoc is crushed. Now on the run from the steadily mounting Supervision Army threat, the 297th have to keep moving, and finding food and places to rehearse becomes more and more difficult. Tensions mount. One morning, after a long argument about the chord changes in "22 Acacia Avenue," Paco and his Tomahawk are missing. The 297th are getting desperate, and decide to break into the Supervision Army base and steal an escape craft so that they can warn humanity on the looming threat. The break-in is accomplished during a breathtaking concert sequence, where the Troopers reenact a note-for-note performance of Live After Death as a distraction. They steal a small ship, and escorted by Shotaro and Larry, they leave the planet. Larry, however, gets shot down during the escape. They get to space, but soon run out of fuel. Shotaro loses two guitar strings as well, and the aliens are closing in... When suddenly, they detect a defold nearby. The call for help, and amazingly, the Megaroad-01 arrives! A "Reverse Fold Fault" they encountered meant that while only fifty years passed by in the outside universe, 300 years passed on board the ship, which is now commanded by Captain Pei Hsuan Ichijo-Lynn. The Megaroad-01 unleashes it's squadrons of VF-4 Lightnings, and undergoes a transformation. They rescue the 297th, who join the battle against two Supervision Army gunships. Each of the members of the Troopers has a splendid, heroic death. Phuoc goes out singing "Shoot all the Clowns." But still, the Megaroad is outmatched, until, suddenly, Paco arrives with reinforcment: Macross Frontier. The husband/wife duo of Alto and Sheryl Saotome (Ranka had died from eating an expired carrot a few years before), come in, with Luca behind them. Luca gets killed instantly. Paco dies soon after. Finally, the Megaroad-01 crashes into the small planet itself, destroying it and the Supervision Army. The galaxy is safe once again.

I don't think Memo was ever what you would call a regular poster over here. BankOfKev was realy only on the old boards, and while he wasn't rude...he usually brought trouble with him. Most everybody who came here to troll got banned quickly. And I know RT.com members have their own stories of annoyance to share. As I said, thankfully, it's calmed down. Few people at RT.com get riled at the mention of Macross, and the days are gone here where someone would get mercilessly flamed just for using the word "Veritech." We certainly put Whamhammer through his paces, but that's mild in comparison to the way it used to be. Just ask Keith.

Man, you've been hitting the Protoculture a little too hard, wouldn't you say?

Not so strange...I used to have the Imai 1/12 Misa Hayase model kit, and I saw the Hikaru and Focker ones around. I also remember the old Bandai Saint Seiya models. None of them were Master Grade quality, but, wel...it WAS the '80s, after all.

There used to be kind of a long-standing rivalry between the two sites...members from here would join up there for the purposes of trolling and vice-versa. It's faded in recent years to a degree, but I think Macross World is still known in RT circles as "that place where they hate Robotech," and most Macross fans think of RT.com as "that Harmony Gold site." Besides, look at how many people who get banned from RT.com come here for their next stop...I believe it was Taksraven who once mentioned that Macross World sometimes seemed more like a refugee camp for former RT.com members. Not that that's a bad thing, mind you...but the RT fans shouldn't be surprised if someone gets in their face for saying things like, "I love that scene in 'Force of Arms' where Rick rescues Lisa in his Veritech." But yeah...it seems like it's mostly an issue here and (somewhat less) at RT.com. If you look at places like AnimeSuki, Robotech is barely a blip on people's radar screens.

Hmm...Kawamori directed Zero, but he didn't write it. And he neither wrote nor directed Frontier. So I'm not sure what you're getting at.

I think this thread seems to be getting fragmented into too many little conversations to be generally useful. That said... Yeah, it kind of DOES matter if you're talking about fold faults or relatively. Relatively would be constant (as long as you maintained the same speed) throughout the duration of the journey. But someone going ten lights years in a fold would theoritically make the trip instantly. A small fold fault would add maybe a few hours or a day onto the trip (from the outside...it would still be instantaneous, of course, for those inside the ship). A larger fold fault would add on more time. So the calculations you made are no very useful...we'd need to know how many fold faults there are and how big they are before being able to calculate the duration of the trip. At least, that's how I understand it. Anyway, Sketchley's translation seems to show that Gunbuster-stye time dilation doesn't occur with Macross-style folds. Ouch...a similar thing happened to me last year...I wish you good luck in putting your collection back together. Whereas I probably qualify everything more than I should, just because I've been proven wrong SO MANY times. 'Cause really...there's no one like a sci-fi fan to go in and parse sentences with almost rabbinical fervor...

The translation seems a little more...colorful than I would have done, but generally it seems accurate enough (still unsure about the "human failure" bit, though... ). I haven't gone through and tried to read the whole thing, but the entire interview is about two pages long. This is the beginning of it. Oh, and Sketchley: thanks!

No, she didn't; She DID say that ten days or so had passed since they'd been in the fold for an hour. In Frontier, though, I believe this was explained through the idea of "fold faults," which is a different phenomenon. Source, please? A week? I thought it was more like a month...Again, source please? I'm not saying that your guess is wrong, I'm just saying it's a guess. To say "Milia is the 639th Milia" is very different from "I think that Milia is 639th Milia." But my original point is that she's ONLY "Milia 639" in the movie. And she's ONLY listed as 15 years old in the TV show. Trying to conflate the two isn't necessarily wrong, but it's not a "safe" assumption, either.

Yes, thank you, I'm quite familiar with Gunbuster. I'm not sure time dilation occurs the same way in Macross, however. "Pretty sure," eh? So you made a guess about what "639" means, and then stated it as though it were a fact?

Area 88 is one of my all-time favorites...so I liked the 2004 series a little better than you did. I agree, the '80s one is the best, but after reading the entire comic, I realized why they never made an Act IV...they cut out all the necessary build-up to the climax of the comic. If they were going to make a finale that was anything like the comic, A LOT of little pieces of story needed to click into place before Shin returns to Area 88, and they left all of that out.

But...that's only in the movie, not in the series... Besides, are you sure about point #2?

No, in all the books, it actually, flatly states that she's 15. Kamujin is 23, Britai is 34, and everyone else is "unknown."

Probably shouldn't joke about that...

Hmmm...that IS useful...Thanks!

Very nice! ...but again, not enough. The book is about 130 pages, and it'll take at least a few months. I'm gonna need five or six hours of Misa music to tide me over. I wish there was some collection of "Japanese '80s Songs that Make College Girls Weep Vols. I~X" because I think something like that would be perfect...

Huh. Then it must be a short book, because it's only about 1000 yen, which is pretty cheap for something like that.

Ah, THAT'S why I missed it...I'm working with that episode today, and I haven't gotten to the Max and Milia fight yet. I haven't heard much Akina past the '80s. I ended up downloading her singles collection boxset ("The First Ten Years 1982-1991"), and I love it so much I'm going to buy it as soon as I can (Maybe next month, more likely January). I'd like to hear some of her newer stuff as well. As always, the problem with popular Japanese performers is the sheer VOLUME of material they release...in the '80s, for Seiko or Akina, it was...what, a single every other month, and three or four albums per year? Insane. And expensive. @ Bri: Glad you liked it! For myself, I'm still not entirely sure about the Frontier connections...at least, I don't see any overt homages. I think if you look for similarities, you'll find them, but I really don't think it's deliberate. Hell, the Jamis/Sheryl connection was picked up by Executive Otaku on THAT Animeblog, and he has (so far) only been watching the series, not reading any associated works. I'll admit there were one or two points where I realized that some lines could be translated into an homage to Frontier, but in these cases, after checking the Frontier episodes in question, the wording turned out to be different, so I resisted the temptation. I still would've loved to have Jamis say, "Don't you know who I am? I'm the top star of Imperial Records! Me, Jamis! Jamis Merin!"...but it would've falsified the original and misled a lot of people. And after the whole Shaloom debalce, I've become almost neurotically obsessed with making sure that my Macross work has no "agenda" behind it.

Well, to me, it was a logical progression. Minmay only has...what, ten, twelve songs? Her entire output can be put on a single 35-minute CD. Put that on endless repeat for a while, and it begins to get a little monotonous. So I switched to Mari's first few albums...but the problem is that they don't sound terribly "Minmay-esque." (They're great though, any every Macross fan should pick up at least her first two albums, "Rosé" and "Blanche"). So I went for Seiko Matsuda, who was the inspiration for Minmay...but even then I needed a little variety. Akina was not an inspiration for Minmay (her first big hit came out a week and a half after Macross started airing), but clearly she was a big enough hit with the writing staff that they named Minmay's friend after her, and, as I just found out thanks to Noriko, big enough with the animators that they threw her name into the show. My big problem is that I'm about to pick up "Misa Hayase: White Reminiscences" again, and...what music would be right for that? Misa has about three or four songs, but that won't be enough. Perhaps a playlist of all the drippy, sentimental SDFM background music would do it...

Which episode is that? I never noticed that before. And this has nothing to do with anything really, but... Since it took me a good seven months (off and on) to translate the book, I found myself cycling through a lot of music that seemed appropriate and gave me the "mood" I wanted to keep focus. I started with Minmay songs, then moved on the Mari Iijima's early solo albums, and finally ended up with early greatest hits albums by Seiko and Akina. Seiko I already knew a fair bit about, but Akina Nakamori was pretty new to me. I ended up getting a few of her early album, and her second album features this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de43i9yNF4g Which sounds a hell of a lot like "Sentimental Over the Shoulder" from Megazone 23. After I talked with Ginrai a bit about it, I checked the songwriters for both songs. Strangely, they're not the same, but the guy who wrote the Megazone song also wrote Akina's first big hit, "Shojo A," which is on the same album as the song in the youtube link above. Not an earthshaking discovery by any means, but I thought it was interesting... Oh, and I will say that for an early '80s Japanese idol singer, Akina is shockingly good. I like her a lot better than Seiko, at any rate.

That's one of my problems, too. The willing suspension of disbelief is not there for me with Robotech. Now of course Macross is fictional, and I can take A LOT of nitpicky things and talk about possible explanations or solutions...but with Robotech, I can't. Any discussion of how, say, the Southern Cross armies were wiped out so quickly when the Invid arrive, or how Dana's green hair became blonde, or where the SDF-2 is...they're non-starters for me. Because the answer is simple: They're three separate series cobbled together, and the seams show too often for me to get into discussions about it. Remove the forced connection, and the problem is solved.

Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about that...