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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    You're still distorting things rather heavily, TBH. No, nobody things Harmony Gold is the owner, de facto or otherwise, of all of Macross outside Japan. Everyone knows they don't own squat. Harmony Gold has no power to grant licenses to the rest of Macross, and they never have. The only power they wield is the power to, in certain key markets, make the act of obtaining a license from Big West a wasted investment by threatening to sue for infringement of their trademarks. That's it. Harmony Gold didn't even have anything to do with us not seeing Macross 7 outside Japan. It was simply priced outside what anyone was willing to spend when it was new due to the cost of the music rights. If the demand for Macross in the west were huge, this would be the kind of problem where someone would force a solution. But it's not. It's a popular anime series, but anime is a niche entertainment market. There's not enough money in this for a distributor to be willing to bludgeon an extortionist Harmony Gold into submission with fat stacks of cash, nor even to convince Tatsunoko to abandon the revenue stream they currently collect on shows nobody would otherwise care about. You might not care about the legal facts, but the legal facts are why this is the way it is. Those are the facts that matter to the businesses involved. And it's not a question of Big West "allowing" Harmony Gold to do what they're doing. The way the law is written, they literally do not have a legal recourse to challenge it here in the US. It's a question of scale. Anime is a niche market outside of Japan, and not exactly one that's hugely profitable. If Harmony Gold were not an obstacle, this wouldn't be an issue. The problem is that there's not enough money in it in the industry's current state for any interested party to want to go to the expense of having to fight that fight with Harmony Gold or to bribe them to go away. That's what Harmony Gold was originally counting on to protect Robotech from having to compete against the original Macross on an even footing. Now it seems to be what they're counting on while they hold out to inflate the value of the Macross rights that they have under license in the hopes of a big payday. Oh, absolutely it would. But remember, translation costs money. Printing costs money. Distribution costs money. Do you remember when I was talking about how much it actually costs to professionally translate a book? On a lark, I had three different professional firms quote me for a strictly text-only translation of Variable Fighter Master File: VF-1 Valkyrie. The average was over $25,000 to translate that 128 page book. To print and bind a book like that, based on my research, costs around $22 US per copy from a professional printer. If you want to print 5,000 copies, you need to make $135,000 on sales BEFORE you turn any profit. To break even, you'd have to mark each copy up by $25 to $47... and that's to break even on selling 5,000 copies. You'd need either a greater markup or more volume to actually turn any kind of a profit. And that's not counting distribution, or royalties to the original publisher, IP owner, license fees, etc. It's easy to sell five thousand copies. But selling enough to make a significant profit? That's harder. But it's not DIRECT income. Big West is collecting royalties on licenses. The financial picture has to work for the licensees and their sublicensees to get anything done. Macross is an "old" property, but so's Gundam. So's Yamato. It's old, but it's had new stuff coming out all the time... so it's not like it only has appeal to the over-40's the way that the Robotech franchise does. Who knows? Robotech's gotten out of the animation game, so maybe it'd just get ignored.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    I hasten to add... there is an important distinction here in what Harmony Gold's trademarks actually accomplish. Harmony Gold cannot, in any way, prevent a distributor from going to Big West and saying "hey, sell me a license to the Macross sequels for <market>". They have no approvals or involvement in licensing decisions made by Big West. All Harmony Gold's trademarks do is make it effectively impossible to use those licenses in a commercial context in markets where they hold trademarks. It enables them to use the threat of trademark infringement lawsuits to make those licenses effectively worthless. If you can't sell the series on streaming, broadcast, or home video, or release merch for it without being slapped with a lawsuit, you've spent a lot of money for nothing.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    No, everyone knows Harmony Gold CAN'T act as a gateway/licensor for all Macross because they have no access to Macross beyond what Tatsunoko does. All they can do is squat on those trademarks and wait for it to become enough of an embuggerance for someone to offer to buy out their trademarks. What they're perceived as is exactly what they are: a roadblock. No distributor is going to enter into negotiations with Harmony Gold vis a vis the rest of Macross because they know Harmony Gold has no power to grant licenses to that material, and they know that Harmony Gold's goal is to prevent the release of that material by all legal means available to drive up the value of the rights they're squatting on. That's why no distributor has tried... and the market here ain't big enough to be bothered going to the expense of a long legal battle over.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Quick, we need stats for the elite Spiral Cut Spetsnaz. Not quite... they actually say over 70% of the Earth's surface was destroyed. It's worth noting that only 29% of Earth's surface is land. (They also refer to the bombardment as "total destruction".) Sentinels increased the total official survivor count on Earth's surface by 100% in a retcon. It increased from 1 to 2. Just like in Southern Cross, there was nowhere for rival nations to come from.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    To be honest, I think I did a pretty good job of explaining why anyone could've walked away with the rights but only Harmony Gold did in the post you quoted from. Tatsunoko's hands aren't tied. They could've taken their ball and gone home, or gone to play with someone else. The reason they stuck around is that they don't stand to actually gain much of anything from cutting Harmony Gold off. When it comes to Macross, Tatsunoko collects a share of the profits from domestic exploitation of the original series and also collects royalties on distribution and merchandising for that series outside Japan and merchandising for DYRL? outside Japan. The Macross license is, for them, a small but steady earner. If they were to pass on Harmony Gold's bid in the name of shopping the license around to someone else they're not likely to see a significant increase in revenues from that license because the show is so old. It'd free up Macross in the west, but at the same time they're not going to reap any additional benefits from it because they're not entitled to royalties on other parts of the franchise. It might drive a tiny spike in home video and merchandise sales at best. But that comes at a cost. Everybody knows that Macross is the only part of Robotech that actually makes money for its licensee Harmony Gold. Harmony Gold has no reason to want to keep its license to Southern Cross or MOSPEADA without Macross. Robotech is distributed as a single series, so Tatsunoko's collecting royalties on home video, streaming, and broadcast use of all three component shows. Essentially, if Tatsunoko cuts off Harmony Gold's license to Macross, they also lose the revenue stream from the Southern Cross and MOSPEADA royalties because HG almost certainly won't try to keep the franchise going without Macross. At best, the gains made from increased interest in Macross offset the similarly small losses from Southern Cross and MOSPEADA no longer producing royalties outside Japan. There's no obligation to renew on Tatsunoko's side. It's all about money and how much of it Tatsunoko stands to make from either approach. The way to lure Tatsunoko away from Harmony Gold would be to offer them some way to profit from the success of the greater Macross franchise beyond just collecting royalties from the original series. That's what they want, badly enough to have sued for it least once. The copyright/contract review in the Tokyo courts wasn't a hostile event... it was due diligence essentially required by both parties after Harmony Gold idiotically shot off its mouth in '99 claiming its license from Tatsunoko gave it exclusive rights to all things Macross rather than just the original TV series. Was it expensive? Yes. Time consuming? Yes. Totally obnoxious? Yes. Hostile? Not really, no. The closest it ever got to "hurt feelings" was a separate, but technically related, filing in which Tatsunoko argued that it ought to be entitled to a share of the profit from subsequent exploitation of the Macross IP due to their role in production of the original. The Tokyo court shot that claim down on the grounds that Tatsunoko had only bankrolled its animation production and not the development of the underlying IP itself. Tatsunoko would very much like supplemental revenue from a steady earner like Macross, because what production house wouldn't? They run on razor thin margins all the time. Even then, Tatsunoko has behaved utterly professionally about it. They've sent hearty congratulations to Big West and its partners on the success of various Macross properties, and so on. You're also forgetting one very important thing. We have a substantial body of concrete evidence that relations between Tatsunoko and Harmony Gold are poor. It was only a few years ago that Tatsunoko Production took Harmony Gold to arbitration on accusations that Harmony Gold was skimming from royalties owed to Tatsunoko for the use of the three shows in broadcast, streaming, and home video contexts. That proceeding was definitely acrimonious for both parties since it amounted to an accusation of theft, but also offered several inane sidebar discussions where Harmony Gold essentially attempted to assert it could now use Tatsunoko's IP without their consent even if the license was terminated... a truly asinine turn of events that would've had any competent lawyer fighting the temptation to vault the table and strangle opposing counsel. It's not really entrenched at all... it's all about making a dollars-and-sense case to Tatsunoko and give the "leave" side an actual monetary advantage. All HG really has going for it is that, while they hold the license, Tatsunoko is also collecting royalties on two other shows that it wouldn't otherwise be collecting anything on. You might be able to interest RightStuf in licensing MOSPEADA, but NOBODY wants Southern Cross.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Re:Zero just will NOT take off that cactus condom... I'm about seven episodes in, and Subaru has died an unreasonable number of times. This boy's spirit animal must be a lemming. He's been disemboweled what, three or four times now? He's been stabbed to death in an alley. He's died in his sleep (cause unknown). Most recently, he started to spontaneously vomit (poisoned?) and then got hit so hard by something that it not only apparently disemboweled him it took off one of his arms and seems to have split his skull too. As it is, this show is giving me a really weird vibe. It's like Death Note, except instead of examining a murder mystery from the perspective of the (supernaturally empowered) murderer pretending to be a detective, Subaru is basically a supernaturally-empowered murder victim trying to solve his own murder before it happens and being sent back to the start when he inevitably fails until he acquires enough out-of-context knowledge to succeed. It reminds me a lot of Kotaro Uchikoshi's writing for the Zero Escape series of escape room games1, both in terms of how death is the catalyst for time looping and how the solution always seems to be impossible without dying several times first to acquire out-of-context knowledge. Admittedly, Re:Zero hasn't become quite as dark as the Zero Escape trilogy yet... though I can't shake the feeling we're headed in that direction given that Puck has indicated that he'll destroy the world if Emilia dies. Thus far, my favorite character is definitely Roswaal. He's obviously evil, but it only seems to express itself as a desire to troll Subaru. 1. Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, I Want to be a Good Person/Good People Die (localized as Virtue's Last Reward) and Zero Time Dilemma.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, I see. That's fair... especially since that one was kind of meant to be over-the-top in the game it was created for. In all fairness, absolutely everything in the 2nd Edition Robotech RPG's Masters Saga sourcebook was a kludge-y mess. It's terribly difficult to build an official setting on existing OSM material when you could fit most of it on a paper napkin with room left over for some rude caricatures of Southern Cross's creators. One of the weirdest things about Southern Cross isn't just how stupidly large Glorie's totally unnecessary standing army is... it's how ridiculously inefficient the whole thing is. Each of the eight branches of service1 and each of the eight types of infantry squad operating under the auspices of the Tactics Corps2 (the ground infantry) is equipped differently. The Southern Cross Army has basically no two units sharing any equipment in common. Each has its own variant of the Arming Doublet, its own small arms, its own robot design, and duty uniform. Even the designation system used for the mecha is based on what branch of service they were intended for use by.3 The Auroran was developed exclusively for the Tactics Armored Space Corps, which does admittedly give a little legitimacy to the folks dragging it for being a space helicopter. Things didn't magically turn out for the best in Macross either... there was a whole story arc about that beginning at episode 28. The whole idea of EBSIS was a terrible attempt by Kevin to shoehorn in generic evil Russians to pad his page count. In Macross, Southern Cross, and Robotech, there's effectively a world government. There's not enough people to have nation-states springing up... especially not Evil Russian™ ones. There were about 9 million people on Earth after the war in the original Macross, but in Robotech the Zentradi were all wiped out and the human population was just what was on the SDF-1. How d'you have multiple nation-states when the total population of the planet could fit comfortably in Michigan Stadium with seating to spare?4 Moreover, how did nobody on the SDF-1 notice there were so many Evil Russian™ agents aboard, talking in stereotypically exaggerated Russian accents, calling everyone "Comrade", and trying to order borscht and vodka at the ship's Japanese restaurants while telling everyone how much better things are "in Soviet Russia"? (It's all so hammily done by Kevin that this is the only way I picture EBSIS and its various spinoffs in the later parts of the Robotech RPG... so hammy they might as well rename themselves the Honey Glaze Union.) As a character, Jeanne never really made a ton of sense... Marie mentions Jeanne is 17 years old while teasing her after discovering she'd been reading a fashion magazine during an important briefing instead of paying attention. Jeanne's rank, pre-promotion, is 曹長 (Sōchō, translated as Sergeant Major.) She's just 17, and she holds the highest possible rank for enlisted personnel. A rank that, in a real military, you'd only achieve if you had a decade of service under your belt with a near-spotless disciplinary record.5 Jeanne's a frequent flyer to the stockade on disciplinary matters, and a repeat AWOL case. Somehow, AWOL, brawling in public, etc. is less severe of an offense than hitting on a superior officer's wife? The latter got Charles busted all the way down from 1st Lieutenant to Private, They even promote her to 2nd Lieutenant after Charles gets demoted. It's enough to make you wonder what General she's secretly related to. Probably. It must've been something they developed before plans to colonize Glorie got underway... otherwise it's kind of weird that the Zor coincidentally have giant robots at exactly the same size after being thrown back in time. They must be confident to give everyone on their side a handicap of wearing what looks like a colossal metal diaper. The last thing you want to do in a unit that's meant for actual combat is wear a nice big sign that says "Shoot me, I'm an officer". 1. The Tactics Corps (ground infantry), Alpha Tactics Armored Corps (armored cavalry), Cities Defense Unit (militia?), Tactics Air Force, Cities Defense Flying Corps (Air National Guard?), Tactics Space Corps (the fleet), Tactics Armored Space Corps (space mecha pilots only?), and Glorie Military Police. 2. The Tactics Squads, Reconnoitering Party, Cold Squad, Desert Squad, Mountains Squad, Forest Squad, Marsh Squad, and Navy Squad (a slightly misleading name, they're basically the SEALs) 3. The Spartas being ATAC/01-SCA, the Logan being TASC/01-SCF, and the Auroran being TASC/02-SCF. 4. Robotech sources typically put the population of the SDF-1 at about 70,000. The official rated capacity for Michigan Stadium in its current form is 107,601. 5. The minimum time-in-service requirement for promotion to Sergeant Major in the US Armed Forces is 9 years.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    More like saying their thirst for war left them trapped on a dying planet. Having a standing army doesn't make sense when the only enemy humanity faces is the environmental consequences of its past folly. There are no rival nations left to face, nobody who is "other" left to demonize and take up arms against. There's not even any dangerous wildlife. Even if you wanted to argue that the infantry could supplement the police in an emergency like a natural disaster or a riot, that doesn't explain the heavy weapons, the surface to air missiles, the fighter planes, the armored fighting vehicles, and the giant robots. ESPECIALLY the giant robots... what are those even FOR? Normally, the story of a mecha anime includes some kind of justification for the giant robots becoming an accepted military technology. In Gundam, they were a high-performance derivative of the construction equipment used to build and maintain space colonies. In Macross, it was because Earth was preparing for a possible conflict with alien giants. Genesis Climber MOSPEADA justified them via the Inbit's own bio-technological mecha that overpowered conventional weapons. But Southern Cross never offered any justification for there being giant robots... never mind such a profusion of them in the armed forces or the existence of multiple transforming models. A lot of their gear is definitely impractical enough to give off the vibe that it was meant to look impressive more than being actually useful. The Arming Doublet is a clunky and impractical form of body armor that's effectively forcing every infantryman to wear a spacesuit... but only the space forces models are actually a sealed system, so it can't even function as an environmental suit. I can't think of any practical benefit to wearing a big metal swan on one's head either, come to that. The designers just really didn't want to let go of that Ō-yoroi they designed for the series when it was a space fantasy retelling of the Sengoku period.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Shin: There are more airplanes in the ocean than ships in the sky. The Birdhuman: Was that a challenge?
  10. Seto Kaiba
    All things considered, Glorie having a significant military space fleet and a sizable standing army despite being recently colonized and essentially barren makes even less sense in the context of the threadbare backstory to Southern Cross. It was the accumulated environmental damage from wars and reckless pollution that forced humanity to abandon Earth in the first place. You'd think after all that they'd be strongly opposed to the idea of maintaining a large military force like the ones whose cumulative recklessness imperiled the entire human race by rendering its homeworld unlivable. They'd found no indication of intelligent life in the universe besides themselves. Their spaceflight technology isn't much more advanced than our own, barring the introduction of stuff like artificial gravity and the somewhat unreliable and dangerous warp drive technology that seems limited exclusively to government ships, so there's no indication of space pirates or a hostile space-based power. Liberte was backing the colonization effort on Glorie, so they wouldn't have attacked it either. There's no clear reason for Glorie to maintain a force like the Southern Cross Army... especially not a force with so many terrain-specialized units given that Glorie is presented like it's a single-biome planet consisting entirely of tundra. Frankly, the only justification I can think of for the Southern Cross Army's existence is that it was established as a chocolate box regiment writ large... a way for the well-to-do to keep their bored kids out of trouble and hopefully teach them some discipline.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes... but that's not exactly an achievement. The Albanian State Washing Machine Company could make the same boast. Why? Well, Harmony Gold were the only ones interested in licensing Macross, Southern Cross, and MOSPEADA back in '84. Western audiences didn't really become properly aware of the Macross franchise's existence until the newly minted crop of anime hobby magazines like Animerica started publishing the hype for a hotly anticipated new OVA coming for one of the biggest names in mecha: Macross II: Lovers Again. It was those articles that first clued most of their readers into stuff like the existence of Macross: Do You Remember Love?, Macross: Flash Back 2012, and the differences between Macross and its Robotech adaptation. Those publications also hyped a different sequel a few years later called Macross Plus. Unfortunately, Harmony Gold's license from Tatsunoko was still quite valid at the time and there was nothing they could do to back out of it and shop the series around to someone else now that there was greater interest in it. Macross 7 came and went, but because the series was too expensive to license because of the significant additional cost of licensing all of the music, so interest in Macross faded in the west. That loss of interest in the property meant Harmony Gold was able to renew its license in preparation for attempting to relaunch the Robotech franchise with no issues or competition. Macross Zero definitely made people sit up and take notice of Macross again, but by that point Harmony Gold had already long since secured the license renewal and locked in their exclusive hold on the original series. It was Macross Frontier becoming one of the most downloaded shows of 2008 that really got people talking about Macross licensing again, but again because Harmony Gold had already locked in a long term renewal of their license there was nothing to be done and their trademarks on the Macross name and logos meant licensees that would've been interested in acquiring the distribution rights to Macross Frontier and other shows wouldn't bother because of the risk of a trademark infringement suit. This most recent license renewal was probably the result of some legal leverage Harmony Gold gained over Tatsunoko due a few years earlier. Tatsunoko had taken Harmony Gold to arbitration on accusations that Harmony Gold had been skimming off the top of the royalties they owed Tatsunoko for home video, streaming, etc. sales of the animation. Their case didn't hold up, and Tatsunoko was ordered to pay Harmony Gold's court costs and attorney's fees. Tatsunoko dragged their heels on payment, and Harmony Gold did what it does best and filed a lawsuit against them for violating the arbitration order. That Tatsunoko renewed their license was a surprise, given that they'd been upset-enough with HG as a licensee to go to court against them, but it seems that Harmony Gold may have used that outstanding debt as leverage to secure a renewal. Bandai might have a vested interest in seeing Macross go global, but there wasn't anything they could do about it when they got out of the distribution business back in 2013 after deciding to switch to a strictly licensing-based business model and shuttering the US-based distributor Bandai Entertainment and its European counterpart Beez Entertainment. Tatsunoko, for their part, probably wouldn't see much difference in the bottom line between licensing to Harmony Gold or someone else. They aren't entitled to royalties from the various Macross sequels and spinoffs, so in terms of the Macross license they don't stand to make any significant gains or losses one way or the other. The minimal gains that they might make on the original Macross series by partnering with Big West to clear the way for Macross distribution would likely be mostly or entirely cancelled out by the loss of their very modest revenue stream from the royalties paid on Southern Cross and MOSPEADA. A niche operator like RightStuf might license MOSPEADA, but NOBODY wants Southern Cross except Harmony Gold. That's... not correct. Tatsunoko's hands were never tied, really. Big West and Tatsunoko petitioned the courts together to review their contracts to be sure of who owned what in the wake of Harmony Gold's asinine claims to own all of Macross, but the only thing that was properly contested was Tatsunoko's eligibility to collect royalties from sequels. The courts, of course, found that they were not eligible to collect royalties on the sequels because they were only involved in the production of the original series not the development of its IP. It's mostly that there really weren't any other takers most of the time, and on this most recent occasion Harmony Gold had some legal leverage leftover from the arbitration as described above.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    So I'm a Spider, So What? is finally starting to do something resembling advancing the plot, which is nice. This week's episode finally had the main character actually have a conversation with the mysterious Administrator D, introduced the Demon Lord during preparations for a war, and killed the hero offscreen. Another few episodes and we might actually get to the main plot.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    I'm mildly curious which ones you mean. The only FAST Pack designs I'd really consider ludicrous would be unofficial ones like the Wyvern Pack from Macross Ace that turns the VF-25 into a propeller-driven biplane. Of course, none of those will ever get dragged quite as hard as the Auroran does for being a "space helicopter"... even though it technically isn't one. That wasn't even because of misidentified material. Evil Russians were just the ultimate low-hanging fruit in the 80's, and Kevin used them liberally throughout multiple Palladium game lines incl. Robotech in order to add variety. Various flavors were added to add an antagonist to the otherwise substantial stretches of time where precisely bugger-all was happening. Southern Cross itself wasn't exactly RPG-friendly... Glorie is a barren wasteland being dragged kicking and screaming out of a nuclear winter by terraforming, it has a one world gov't and only a few actual cities, and is sparsely populated. It's not even clear why Glorie has a standing army at all since humanity hadn't encountered any aliens at all and there weren't any rival nations to fight with either. There's no catalyst for drama there until the Zor show up... and the same is true of the Robotech adaptation.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Aren't they? I thought Toynami was making their retro/knockoff Takatoku VF-1s? (I'm not really a toy collector, so if that line got discontinued the news missed me completely.)
  15. Seto Kaiba
    To the best of my knowledge, there have been no indications of anything untoward with their rental property business turned up by any of several investigations into the finances of Harmony Gold's owners. ... so they're a completely normal corporation in that respect, yes? Seriously though, to a corporation the word "ethics" has nothing whatsoever to do with morality. When they talk about "ethical" behavior, what they mean is "legal" behavior. Any corporate ethics training boils down to nothing more than "don't do anything that might get us in legal trouble". (In my day job, I swear we get a new "ethics" web training module every time someone successfully sues the company...) Unlikely, I suspect... Frank avoided serving his prison term because of his age and an amnesty law meant to reduce prison overcrowding, and his daughter got a substantial fine but that's about it. If they do decide to bail on Robotech in exchange for a payday, they'll likely continue to live quite comfortably on the stream of income from their investments and rental property business. Even these legal battles aren't a death by a thousand cuts... it's more like the annoyance of a thousand mosquito bites since their license allowed them to deduct their legal costs from royalties owed to Tatsunoko under certain circumstances. EDIT: It should be noted that the ability to deduct legal costs from the royalties owed led to an arbitration between Tatsunoko and Harmony Gold in which Tatsunoko alleged Harmony Gold was skimming... but failed to make a sound case for it. I suspect the outcome of that arbitration played a significant role in securing Harmony Gold's license renewal. Like HG waiving the order for payment of HG's court costs and attorney's fees that Tatsunoko had previously been refusing to pony up on. To be entirely fair, you could characterize almost any development in the Robotech franchise's history as some form or other of shooting themselves in the foot.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    That's part of it, for sure... but I think the lion's share of the blame definitely belongs to other parties. Mostly, I think you could lay the blame on Tatsunoko Production and its Ammonite design group for so completely half-assing the development of Southern Cross. If they'd put in the same kind of effort other studios were putting in they'd have left more for the parties downstream to work with. Most of the Southern Cross misinformation comes from Robotech fans who got their information from the Palladium Books Robotech RPG that based itself on what information it could glean from the Japanese publications it could find. There was nothing for them to find, information-wise, for Southern Cross so they had to BS their way through it and that BS lives on as misinformation.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yeah... naturally. Harmony Gold takes excruciating care to stay within the bounds of what its license permits it to use in merchandising to avoid provoking any kind of litigation from Big West, so their options are much more limited. They're also working with a much shallower pool of prospective licensees given that Robotech's relative obscurity and small fanbase make for a much lower expected sales volume and smaller return on investment. That means fewer prospective licensees, smaller or less skilled companies, and either a lower quality product because corners get cut to reduce development and manufacturing costs or an outrageous price tag to justify the quality in small batch production. It's just the realities of merchandising. If you've got a hit property with virtually guaranteed sales you can attract the big fish. If you're small time, you get fellow small time operators or lesser effort from the few larger outfits willing to give you the time of day. Harmony Gold's licensees can't compete with Big West's licensees on an even footing in quality or diversity, so they're aiming to compete on cost with the advantage of not having to compete directly. Not wanting to have to compete directly is what started all this... when they filed for those trademarks to keep the Macross franchise out of the west.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Sword Art Online is more of a standard shounen series, albeit on the darker side of the genre thanks to the whole "if you die in the game you die in real life" aspect. .hack//SIGN is more of a philosophical character drama about the nature of escapism and mental illness. It's definitely not as accessible to casual viewers, and it can be kind of abtruse at times. Re:Zero... well... I'm a few episodes into it now and it feels like the previous couple episodes would have benefitted from more exposition. I almost get the feeling the author's one of the rare and strange individuals who thought Haruhi's Endless Eight was a good idea, because that's kind of what the first three episodes started to feel like. Does Subaru ever get... less stupid? It's already pretty contextually clear he's some kind of Chosen One, but he's so wrong genre-savvy that he only ever seems to create more problems and piss people off. I'm also getting the distinct feeling that this story is a lot darker than it's pretending to be. Puck has made at least one leading remark suggesting he'll destroy the entire world if his master ever perishes, the King and royal family are missing and presumed dead or permanently incapacitated, and Subaru and Emilia are lodging at the home of Margrave Roswaal who might as well be wearing a sandwich board that says "I will die or turn out to be evil all along".
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, it's not a bad looking little aircraft. I know there were originally some plans for a model kit of it, though I don't know if anything ever came of it before the series was canned. It accumulated a number of crackpot fan theories over the years because the animators working on the series did such a poor job drawing it that it was off-model at least as often as it was on. That led to some bizarre assumptions among western fans familiar with it from Robotech, like that there were multiple variants of it or that it had a variable-sweep wing which could switch between straight, swept, and forward-swept. (All three are technically wrong, it has a compound delta wing with "dogtooth" leading edge extensions.) The fan theories about the Sylphid being transformable were inspired by a throwaway line in the Robotech dub and the position of its gunmount making it look like it had a VF-1-esque ventral "head".
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I'd still be prepared to bet money it was pure coincidence. Even Robotech's die-hard Masters Saga fans know virtually nothing about the original Southern Cross beyond what was in the animation itself. Most of what they "know" beyond that is pure fanon or stuff Palladium came up with for the old Robotech RPG. The staff managing the Robotech brand know even less, because Southern Cross-based merch doesn't sell, so they've never had a reason to consider it beyond rejecting a few obviously out-there theories like the one claiming the Sylphid is a VF.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    For the record, just as the Late Period Bioroid Type I and II would have replaced the Middle Period models, the MS-09B Dom was basically the third main enemy mecha used by the Principality of Zeon in the original 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam series. Eh... it goes the other way as often as not. For instance, in Super Dimension Century Orguss the mecha developed by the Emaan who the protagonist is allied with have more of a rounded and streamlined aesthetic where the mecha developed by the hostile Chiram have very jagged, angular mecha designs and the genocidal Mu are quite angular as well. The way it usually shakes out is that the more rounded and streamlined a design is the more advanced it is. Sleek just seems to equal advancement and chunky equals primitive. The technology of the Southern Cross Army is all square edges and angles, while the technology of the vastly more advanced Zor is more rounded and streamlined by design. The same goes for my earlier example. The Chiram are the least advanced, technologically, of the factions in Orguss and all their stuff is hard edged. The Emaan's more advanced tech is more streamlined, and the very advanced Mu are very streamlined but with lots of sharp angles in the streamlined plates. Reconguista in G is another good example, where the mecha that are used by the Amerians and the G-Self are more rounded and streamlined and the more hostile the Capital Army gets the more angular its mecha become.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Antitrust laws apply when a company is engaging in anti-consumer and anti-competitive behaviors like price-fixing or [having/attempting to have] a monopoly on a particular market or industry. The beef between Macross's owners and Harmony Gold is a matter of intellectual property law. Specifically, trademark law. When Harmony Gold was preparing to relaunch the Robotech franchise c.1999, they realized that they were facing the prospect of Robotech having to compete against Macross's own sequels and the higher-quality merchandise that was being imported from Japan. They initially (and mistakenly, according to them) claimed that their license gave them the exclusive rights to ALL of Macross rather than just the original series and sent a bunch of Cease and Desists to toy importers. Because their claim was groundless, that ultimately kicked off the copyright review filings in the Japanese courts so all parties could be assured of who owned what. Their fallback was filing for trademark registration on the word Macross, the series title card, and various other distinctive odds and ends as a means of ensuring they AND ONLY THEY could legally use those specific marks in the United States. Trademarks offer the owner/registrant of the trademark legal protection of a sign, design, name, or expression that distinctively identifies a particular product or service. The reason that Big West can't just go and challenge Harmony Gold's trademarks on Macross's name and logos in the US the way they could in China, the United Kingdom, and the European Union is that trademark law here is written somewhat differently. US trademark law gives precedence to the first party to use the trademark in actual commerce in the US when disputes arise. Other countries, like the ones where Big West successfully challenged HG's trademarks, have provisions that cover corner cases like the first user not being the actual owner and give precedence to the actual owner of the brand/product/property. The other thing about trademarks is that, in order to register them, you have to actually be using the mark in commerce. You can file for registration of a trademark before you first use it in commerce, but you have to actually be using it in order for registration to be granted and you have to keep using it for periodic renewal of the trademark registration. That is why Harmony Gold keeps producing what little merch it does even it doesn't sell well... they need to be able to demonstrate they're using the trademarks to renew them. Harmony Gold's main business is rental property management in SoCal, so they're in no risk of going out of business if Robotech goes belly-up. Film production and licensing is, for practical intents and purposes, more a hobby for them than anything. People who know about Frank Agrama's criminal history, of course, have very good reason to suspect that the "hobby" is more for the purposes of money laundering to facilitate tax evasion. At the end of the day, as long as Harmony Gold is gone from the picture and Robotech is finally laid to rest I'll be happy. Even if they have to buy out Harmony Gold's license and so on to do it.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It wasn't always... you could fairly say they fell back into bad old habits once animated Robotech kicked up its heels and died for a second time. They first fell into the bad habit of letting any rando willing to cut them a check license Robotech a few years after Macek's brilliant direction steered Robotech II: the Sentinels and the Robotech: the Untold Story movie into their early and shallow graves. Nobody gave a toss about the property anymore, so they started licensing it to all comers in the name of making a quick buck and the only oversight they ever exercised was to cut licensees off when sales slipped to the point that they were no longer collecting a decent amount from royalties. When they tried to reinvent and relaunch the series as a serious anime property c.2000, they actually made a commendable effort to exercise proper oversight and quality control over what their licensees were putting out. They even went to the trouble of keeping previously-problematic licensees who'd once again obtained licenses (Palladium Books) on a short leash for a while there. It lasted about eleven years. Right around the time the trademark registration for the Shadow Chronicles sequel lapsed in late 2011, they gave up on overseeing licensees and the quality tanked. Past that point is when we started seeing pure garbage being churned out again like the Robotech/Voltron crossover comic, the RPG putting out a glorified monster manual and then a bad adaptation of the Imai Files, the totally-unmanaged Robotech RPG Tactics fiasco, etc. etc. Five'll get you twenty that they're the ones who insisted on having cameos by all the animated Robotech titles in the finale... to counter fan complaints that the comic was taking the piss out of "real" Robotech. Nobody VOLUNTARILY references Robotech 3000 unless it's to apologize for it. Even Carl Macek. So yeah, with the Robotech merchandising situation being what it is and the animated Robotech series and Robotech comics being dead in the water, this move to negotiate definitely feels like Harmony Gold is looking for the exit.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I'm reliably informed they mainly use a legal document preparation service for that kind of thing.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    I love that they kept the Dom's big 80's shoulderpads.
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