A moment of Sentinels levity ...
From Robotech II: The Sentinels Book Three #2, by Tom Mason & John Waltrip ...
The Regent has a "This is not my beautiful house / This is not my beautiful wife" moment, which ultimately turns out to be a bad dream. But man, look at him cowering behind that sheet. While I totally understand if you don't appreciate it, it's my opinion that moments like this are what's really missing from ROBOTECH comics today -- moments of levity and character that give you room to breathe before getting down to business. Sure, this moment is a bit overbaked -- why would the Invid Regess start talking like Mary Jane from Spider-Man in the Regent's bad dream? -- but hey, it's all in good fun.
Now that I think about it, based on Janice and Ariel's Shadow Chronicles makeovers, this is probably what the Regess would look like in the Shadow Chronicles if the current Harmony Gold team thought they could get away with it.
C'mon, you know I'm right.
The Regent has a "This is not my beautiful house / This is not my beautiful wife" moment, which ultimately turns out to be a bad dream. But man, look at him cowering behind that sheet. While I totally understand if you don't appreciate it, it's my opinion that moments like this are what's really missing from ROBOTECH comics today -- moments of levity and character that give you room to breathe before getting down to business. Sure, this moment is a bit overbaked -- why would the Invid Regess start talking like Mary Jane from Spider-Man in the Regent's bad dream? -- but hey, it's all in good fun.
Now that I think about it, based on Janice and Ariel's Shadow Chronicles makeovers, this is probably what the Regess would look like in the Shadow Chronicles if the current Harmony Gold team thought they could get away with it.
C'mon, you know I'm right.
posted by Captain JLS at
16:00
6 Comments:
Robotech Alien School of Design: All races have males and females, and the females have breasts, whether they actually nurse children or not.
(dumb)
By
Anonymous, at 28 June, 2006 06:38
I agree with your comments about the necessity of moments of levity and character. I would say that Shadow Chronicles Prelude comics were so chock full of plot that there was no room for character building.
As long as its taking to actually release the Shadow Chronicles, the Prelude mini-series could have lasted several issues longer.
By
Anonymous, at 28 June, 2006 10:29
The joke is: the Regess does look something like that in Shadow Chronicles, according to the Kickstart footage (minus the hair).
But I agree about the Waltrips' humor in the comic. I mean, deep down you knew that scene had to be a dream. But for a for a split second you had a "what the . . ." moment that made you chuckle. That was part of the charm, of the Sentinels comic.
By
Anonymous, at 28 June, 2006 15:01
Bah, what, are you guys gay? You keep complaining about the chicks looking hotter in the Shadow Chronicles.
Really, it makes you all look gay.
By
Anonymous, at 28 June, 2006 16:41
I just managed to find and read all five issues of the Prelude. From the point of view of a Robotech fan already familiar with the Sentinels, it's interesting, sort of a "continuity diff file," to use a computer term. (In regard to Linux programs, and especially the kernel, a diff is a file that you can download to bring your copy of the source code up to date to the new revision without having to download the whole thing—in effect, it's a file that says "These are the differences in the latest revision; everything else remains the same.")
As a sort of shortcut to working out what's changed and what's kept, the series works decently well. But as an actual backgrounder for someone who knows Robotech, but doesn't know much about the Sentinels at all, you're going to be left thinking, "What's going on here? Who are all these people?" Perhaps watching the Sentinels video from the Robotech extras discs might help, but...
By
Chris Meadows, at 29 June, 2006 11:56
That's a good way to look at it, though based on what you see it's obvious that the entire Sentinels story as we know it, even just the bits that take place prior to the point of divergence, either has to be wildly bashed into a new shape or chucked out altogether due to bits of radical recharacterization (see T.R. Edwards) and remarks made regarding recent history (the implication that the Sentinels recieved much less, if any, assistance from the REF).
The one piece of the Sentinels puzzle that does seem to remain intact from the perspective of Prelude is the video -- why else would they go through the trouble of destroying the old-style SDF-3 and rebuilding it as the new one? Honestly, if they didn't plan on maintaining that at least that part of the story is still as it was, they could have just started with the New Gen-style SDF-3 they're using in Shadow Chronicles. By the same token, almost all of the characters from the video (Rick, Lisa, Dr. Lang, Janice, Jack, Karen, Vince, Jean, Breetai, Exedore, Edwards, the Regent) are hanging around somewhere in Prelude, though some have recieved radical makeovers (the Grants, originally redesigned for Shadow Chronicles; T.R. Edwards, originally redesigned for the first WildStorm comic book miniseries "From The Stars") that lead me to think that while the Sentinels video's story might be taken as gospel, the Sentinels video's footage cannot. Still, I suspect that when Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles was mapped out, the video was definitely taken into consideration, possibly with the thought that a certain percentage of the audience might only be familiar with the Sentinels concept as focused through that particular work due to its rerelease as part of the third Legacy Collection DVD box set and the more recent Protoculture Collection complete DVD box set.
I think the Sentinels video does provide just enough detail as to who all the characters are that someone can jump from that to Prelude and be OK. On the other hand, I'm not sure if it provides quite enough of an impetus to care about any of them. I sure as heck know that Prelude itself, teeming with plot but light on personality, didn't deliver in that regard ...
*whew* Okay, I think that's all the ROBOTECH typing I'm going to do before AX.
By
Captain JLS, at 29 June, 2006 14:46
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