There was blood when Obi Wan cut off Ponda Baba's arm in the cantina in A New Hope, so they're probably drawing from that.
I nominate The Last Shot from Planetary (and StormWatch, apparently). It's a bar in Kazakhstan where people have a final drink before heading underground, where they're strapped to a nuclear bomb and detonated as a way of obliterating the electromagnetic field that constitutes the soul.
The idea that Rachael doesn't have an end-date makes a lot of sense, given that she was a special experiment by Tyrell. The idea that Deckard doesn't have one (if he's a replicant) is a much harder sell, as there's nothing to indicate that he's particularly special, unless the idea is that his prior life up until retirement is implanted memories and his incept date was just a little while before we meet him in the movie. In that scenario, he could have been created specifically to deal with the escaped Nexus 6 models, and maybe Tyrell even intended for him to meet Rachael as part of some grand experiment. I don't know, it seems like continuing the Deckard-as-replicant line in a sequel is mining a dry hole, and even the idea I mentioned above (he's a special replicant for some reason) feels really weak if it's explicitly stated. It seems much better to take the Prometheus route in terms of using the same universe, but not the exact same story. The replicants should be a bigger part of it than the xenomorphs seem to be in Prometheus - they should still be the driving force of the story - but Deckard and Rachael should probably be left alone.
Of course, Harrison Ford could still be in it in the same way that Lance Henriksen showed up in later Alien movies, either as another version of the same "model" or as the non-synthetic on whom Deckard was based.
Yeah, I was really disappointed that those didn't return in Revelations. They actually required a decent amount of thought, which was nice.
I was genuinely shocked by how much I cared about the characters in the Assassin's Creed series. While Altair was kind of bland and unpleasant in the first one (the new voice actor in Revelations is much better), it generally fit with his story, so it was okay. With the arrival of Ezio, though, the goings-on became much more charming, and it seems as though all of the characters became much richer from AC2 on.
Agreed. Even Half-Life, the ultimate silent-protagonist-as-empty-vessel-for-the-player that is Gordon Freeman eventually began to take on elements of story that are entirely beyond the player's projection of him- or herself onto him. Even though I decide almost everything that Gordon does, he is still Gordon - he is not me. I think the author's central conceit holds true in games that have pretty much abandoned character development, like the Call of Duty series, but anything that pays more attention to character than, say, a fighting game is trying (though not necessarily succeeding) to make us feel something for that character. The author mentions Master Chief as an example of a character we don't care about - I cared about him, and the relationship between him and Cortana is one of the most effective and enjoyable sidekick scenarios in games.
Are the Elder Gods the new zombies? They seem to be popping up everywhere these days.
I definitely understand where you're coming from, but I think there's a lot of stuff that went unexplored that could be fleshed out considerably. A lot more time could be spent on Rick's distress over becoming a fighter pilot, having something he loved (flying) marred by violence. His mourning over Roy could be drawn out some, and Ben's death could be made into more than a pale echo of Roy's loss. Max and Miriya's courtship could be done as more than "I hate you! I try to stab you!" "You failed! I love you! Let's get married!" The interstitial stuff that was left to the expanded universe, particularly the details of the Reconstruction period and the difficulties integrating the Zentraedi into human society seem like particularly rich veins.
I readily admit that I have no idea what to do with the Masters. In the Malcontent Uprisings comics, Field Marshal Leonard, who was in command during Masters, was presented as a largely amoral despot - developing that alongside a heavy-handed authoritarian and militaristic United Earth Government might go somewhere, I don't know.
With New Generation, you get to deal with the complexities and moral compromises of a guerrilla rebellion and a presentation of life under occupation, which BSG did really well with the New Caprica arc - that could be cool too.
As for the special effects, it really depends on who does them. Zoic's stuff on Firefly and BSG looks amazing, while other recent TV sci-fi doesn't. It would have everything to do with the budget, of course, but I think it could be done well.
Harmony Gold hasn't handled the situation well, but they secured the rights in good faith from Tatsunoko and created a brand. That they've mishandled that brand for a long time is tough to disagree with, but the fact that they held out hope of rekindling it (and largely have at this point) makes it entirely reasonable that they work to protect the brand. The argument that we don't need Robotech anymore is moot - you obviously don't, as you're a Macross fan. Fine, good. I am a Robotech fan, and I want more of it. I can look at the same legal battles and say that it was Tatsunoko's screw-up or misrepresentation or miscommunication on all fronts that has removed one of the strongest elements from Robotech - its threads of connection between the chapters that made the story seem more real and grand in scope. While the author of the article focuses on the Macross chapter, I'd wager that she would count the presentation of phases in an ongoing war as one of the things that made the show special. For Rick Hunter to have begun as a brash but uncertain and uneasy participant in the war and ended up as the near-mythical admiral to whom Scott Bernard all but prayed felt very real to me, and that is uniquely Robotech. That's the story that I love, and that's the story I want to see fleshed out further.
I'm courting a lot of flames with this, I'm sure, but I'm really *really* tired of the "Macross is better, Carl Macek is the great Satan!" line. You like Macross, I get it. Others prefer Robotech. I've watched both, I still prefer Robotech. No, I haven't suffered any head injuries. I just prefer it. HG's litigiousness aside, they (and Robotech) were instrumental in helping to expand the popularity of anime in America. Cobbling together Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada allowed them to be aired in syndication in the US, and for many people (myself included), Robotech was the first modern anime they saw that retained most of its maturity and seriousness. I acknowledge that Macek made a lot of mistakes (the "dunpeal" thing in Vampire Hunter D is just embarrassing), but he also helped open the West to anime in general.
I really don't see the problem. They needed a thread to run between the series, they had a word in the source material that sounded appropriately weighty and would fit the lip-sync, off to the races. The idea of a plant-based energy source never bugged me, and I liked the idea of the Invid and Masters fighting over the same thing for vastly different reasons (not to mention the internal conflict between the Invid leaders, the Regent seeking revenge and unconsciously mimicking the Masters' militarism and singularity of purpose, the Regiss wanting to reclaim the Flower of Life to return to idyllic existence while purposefully imitating the physical form of the Masters). I'm sure it helped that I had no knowledge of what the Protoculture was in Macross, but the Protoculture/Flower of Life thing made perfect sense to me.
Thank you for standing up for the Robotech faithful. I shouldn't have been surprised to see all the "Robotech sux! Macross FTW!" comments, but I still was. I already said it farther down the comment thread, but everyone loves Macross 7 and Frontier so much, but the Valkyries have *faces* and rock-band weapons. I can't get past that. I may be missing something great, but so are the Macross purists who can't see beyond the really bad Minmei songs.
Shadow Chronicles wasn't bad, and if/when they put out more, I'll be first in line to hand them my money, but it wasn't as good as it should have been, either. Part of it is dealing with the licensing issues and having to create a brand new IP-conflict-free set of characters and enemies, but it just didn't feel as strong as the original stuff. It also went to the well of standard sci-fi tropes a couple of times too many for me. Specifically, one time too many with the whole Zorayba (sp?) thing. I'm sick to death of the ol' alien/homemade booze that's good for getting drunk or removing paint schtick. A tiny gripe overall, but it stuck with me.
I just can't get behind the later Macross projects (other than Plus, and I've heard Zero is very good). As soon as the Valkyries got faces and rock band weapons, it lost me.
I see where you're coming from, but I think the opportunity with a remake would be to take the maturity and ratchet it up, tamping down a lot of the more silly stuff from the original for a more serious, BSG-like take. The Zentraedi would be hard to pull off and Minmei would have to be retooled considerably, but in the right hands, the core ideas could come through beautifully.
I hate Minmei with the best of them, but music is woven through all of the Robotech stories and serves an important role - in Macross, it's basically the secret weapon that saves the day. That said, it needs to be a *lot* better in any remake that happens. Get some real pop songwriters in there.
Amen and amen and amen. A friend who knows of my love for/obsession with Robotech recently tried to give it a go on Netflix. He did not share my enthusiasm. Thing is, my introduction to and inculcation into the world of Robotech was flavored by technical difficulties and parental restrictions, and I think it made all the difference.
I remember being at my friend Nic's house some long-ago day in 1985. We were watching TV, probably G.I. Joe or Transformers or something similar, and we saw an ad that absolutely blew us away. I'm not exaggerating in the least when I say that the scenes of what I would soon learn were Veritech fighters left our jaws hanging open. I literally gasped out "What is that?!" just before the announcer let us know that it was Robotech, and that we should tune in weekdays at 4:30. I was intrigued, but my parents had a rule - the only TV that could be viewed during the week was PBS. After the premiere date, I asked Nic "So how was that Robotech thing?"
"It was AMAZING."
We lived in Northern Virginia, and when the wind was just right, we could kind of catch the signal from channel 45 out of Baltimore, and they ran Robotech on weekends, but it was touch and go. Given the fact that Robotech was (wonder of wonders) serial storytelling, missing an episode or two was a big deal. Still, that ad gave me a glimpse of something that looked mind-blowing, and my best friend gave it his enthusiastic seal of approval. I needed to be in on this thing. Luckily, on a run to the comic shop to get G.I. Joe and Transformers, I saw that Robotech had its own comic, and that it was the exact same story as the show. Same story, but being a comic made all the difference. No longer did lines have to match the mouth movements of preexisting animation, and the rough edges of the show's dialogue could be smoothed over. Most of the dialogue was very close to the show, but in some places, ideas were fleshed out further and just generally polished a bit more. I'm not saying it was Shakespeare, but it took the complex characters and situations and really made them shine. Plus, I didn't have to hear Minmei's utterly execrable oeuvre - just read it.
Since then, I've always believed that Robotech had the seeds of utter brilliance. It could easily be the subject of a gritty, utterly serious remake akin to Ron Moore's Galactica. In fact, the full Robotech storyline deals with a lot of the same issues that Moore's Galactica did. The Macross Saga gave us the vastly outgunned human ship on the run, its inhabitants living messy human lives against a backdrop of near-constant peril, with the civilian government sometimes clashing with their semi-willing military protectors. When a human pilot falls in love with one of the alien enemies, things get even more wacky. The third chapter, The New Generation, gives us human rebels fighting a guerrilla war against an alien occupation, complete with struggles against collaborators, opportunist criminals, and other humans who have become apathetic after decades of ceaseless war. The second (and probably least popular) chapter, The Masters, deals even more with inter-species love and follows the exploits of the first human-alien offspring. The extended universe goes even further, including a great exploration of life on a devastated Earth in the wake of the first war, as the militaristic and sexually segregated Zentraedi struggle to integrate with the human population, with sometimes disastrous results. Many become anti-human terrorists, allowing the story to get into some decidedly mature fare about internment camps and indefinite detention.
Plus, giant robots.
Handed to the right team, this could be thrilling, challenging science fiction. Unfortunately, for reasons beyond my ken, it languishes as an '80s also-ran. To the dedicated Robotech fan, it seems like every other (markedly inferior) '80s property has been re-upped, for better or for worse - when will this oft-overlooked rough diamond be given its chance to shine?
I don't think adoption on its own (like the Kents) makes a family alternative. Yeah, yeah, he's an alien, whatever, but other than that, the family is achingly traditional.
Maybe I'm a prude (I don't think I am), but I wouldn't hire a company that showed me that ad as an example of what they do when left to their own devices.
No wordplay - I was thinking more that the bees could get there on their own. One flies in and gets stuck in a drawer or something. It's not particularly deep. I just noticed that both "N" and "B" sound like words.
