>There's apparently going to be two mini-series, one that's a
>"retelling" of the original series with magical girls, and another
>that's a "spiritual successor" set during the Post-Contact Wars.
>Seems the success of the original series with alien audiences,
>particularly the Klingons, has convinced the studio to tackle a more
>"recent" war.

The magical girl thing is clearly profit-taking; I mean, don't get me wrong, I will buy that figuring of 109 dressed up like a German witch, because yes please, but retelling the original series is clearly them just wanting to make some quick cash, like Evangelion 1.11 or the first of the two Arpeggio movies.

Avalon 17 is not happy about that, by the way; it technically fulfills TV Tomodachi's contract to provide them with original Fly Girls programming, but New Avalon's audience is a lot less accepting of that sort of retreaded materiel than they are in the Co-Prosperity Sphere, where those sorts of things are an accepted part of the production process.

On the plus side, it is clearly funding the post-Contact wars project and possibly other things as well.

>Predictably, the purists are raising a fit over this, but after The
>Jet Age, I think their whining is sort of baseless. Not that I
>don't love Zero and P-40's antics or Me-109's fits of melancholy, but
>it's time to move on and let those characters rest. We're only moving
>ahead half a century, it's not like the new series is set during the
>Corporate Wars.

The War of Corporate Occupation would actually make an excellent Fly Girls series, but the wounds there are a bit fresh, you know? The original series only got away with a lot of what it pulled because it was dealing with an antique conflict whose specifics are largely forgotten by or irrelevant to much of the galactic populace. Largo's various attempted genocides are much more recent than that.

This isn't to say we won't eventually get there, of course. The War of Corporate Occupation is already acceptable to satirize, at least in certain ways; in 2409 Springtime for Largo won two Tony awards.

>Plus, have you seen the character art for F-14? Yowza.

F-14, F-16, and A-10 have of course appeared briefly already in Jet Age, but the updated designs do indeed look hot. They're holding back F-22 as long as they can, as well, and rumors abound there are going to be some space superiority fighters as well; Z-95 Headhunters, being cheap and available in bulk, were used extensively for orbital interdiction during the Contact Wars, and I for one would love to see her show up.

-Merc
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