Seto Kaiba

Well, if any of our friends on the US east coast start talking about some bloke named "Dagon" or vacationing in R'lyeh, you'll know it's time to pack it in and find a new planet.

Your definition of victory is too narrow, my friend. Harmony Gold abandoned the field. They've signed the instrument of surrender. It just wasn't a completely unconditional surrender. Instead, true to the company's quasi-Italian roots, once they'd exhausted their bluster and their elaborate aggressive posturing failed to impress... they switched sides. They decided to knuckle under and learn to love the taste of Big West's boot leather rather than lose the farm on a slow and fundamentally unwinnable battle of attrition. Yeah, Harmony Gold will collect some small percentage of the take from Macross licensing... but that's all. Big West gave up NOTHING in this. NOTHING. And they got everything they wanted. Harmony Gold, on the other hand, effectively gave up almost everything it had for a few crumbs from Big West's table. They withdrew their opposition to Macross's global licensing. They'd already effectively abandoned Robotech and now apparently are giving Big West partial control over it as well. The only thing they can cling to is the hope that Sony will green-light a Robotech movie... which, from the outset, was never going to use Big West's IP anyway and is all but guaranteed to be a failure because failing is what American anime adaptations DO. It's not quite the complete annihilation that folks who utterly loathe Harmony Gold were hoping for, but it's INCREDIBLY close in the final analysis. Robotech is, for all practical intents and purposes, dead. Harmony Gold has bent the knee to Macross's owners without any significant concessions from Big West's side. That's a win by any standard. No, it's nothing like that. The statement about Harmony Gold's rights is basically just affirming that Harmony Gold's license agreement with Tatsunoko Production is still valid and in force... the one which only grants Harmony Gold the distribution and merchandising rights to the Super Dimension Fortress Macross animation outside Japan. They've never been able to use Big West's intellectual property in the proposed live action movie. (Indeed, they had announced the film with the intention of it being a "reimagining" with all-original design works.)

Pretty sure its just short... all of those extra games were pretty short. It'd be nice if they ported them alongside a sub/dub of the movies they originally came with. That's probably asking a bit much tho. Not in the city proper, but yeah I'm in the metropolitan area there. I'm not aware of too many Macross fans out our way, but for some reason the hobby shops always seemed to have a few Macross kits banging around. There's at least one or two other MWers in my area, I know... mainly because I've bought DX Chogokins from 'em. Considering how much time Macek and co. spend alternately badmouthing him and blocking his work from broader distribution, he must be feeling a real sense of vindication right now.

I know the Frontier movies had games on 'em. They were those weird "PS3 Combo Pack" editions.

Must be a local thing then. Here in the greater Detroit area, a lot of the shops near where I lived as a kid stocked Macross models without any indication that it was anything other than perfectly normal. I'll be headed back that way in a couple days on family business, I'll check and see if the usual suspects still stock 'em.

... and all I can think of is "so why aren't they bringing back Neelix, the patron saint of substances of questionable origin"? "Get that cheese to sickbay!"

TBH, I really doubt it. I've spoken one-on-one to every member of the HG Robotech staff over the years, and the only "true believer" among them is McKeever. I think Tommy and Steve will be thrilled to be off the hook for creating new Robotech IP and able to just do the convention circuit to talk about what exciting new Macross goods are coming out instead. Harmony Gold is probably thrilled that they can give up on Robotech and just focus on collecting a percentage on Macross. It's a lot less work for probably about the same money.

It might be fairer to say she got the Kirk treatment. Isamu Dyson only got set on a gradual course towards a supervisory desk job that took the better part of a decade. Kathryn Janeway, on the other hand, was booted from the center seat and reassigned to fly a desk at Starfleet Headquarters less than a year after returning to the Alpha Quadrant. The series finale of Voyager is set at some point after 5 April 2378 since one of the episodes set before it is set on the 315th anniversary of First Contact (5 April 2063). By Nemesis in 2379, Janeway had been an admiral working a desk job for long enough that Picard is not surprised to receive new orders from her. (Which actually raises the odd question why this Janeway hologram is a Captain not a Vice Admiral and wearing an outdated uniform for the period?)

Not sure if it's just a regional taste in my area or what, but out where I live there have been plenty of retailers carrying Hasegawa Macross kids since I was a kid... I never really thought to question it until nearly a decade later.

It'd be nice. I suspect our best bet are probably the Bandai plamodels, since various retailers here in the states like GameStop and Barnes & Noble already carry gunpla.

That must be quite a show. It's weird that anyone ever attempted to argue TCI ever had rights to the Macross designs in the first place. Twentieth Century Imports (TCI) was a import hobby retailer buying Macross and other anime kits at wholesale in Japan to sell via their catalog service in the states. It's like arguing that Best Buy owns the rights to the Tachikomas because they sell Ghost in the Shell DVDs.

The same limit applies to merchandise... not just distribution of the animation. Japan has always been off-limits to HG and Robotech because the rights Tatsunoko received from Big West were limited to outside of Japan.

Eh, it's worth remembering that the publisher got busted on at least one prior occasion for "borrowing" from works he didn't have permission to use. Mind you, I'm A-OK if they wanna Star Blazers 2199 this nonsense. As long as Macross proper gets into the hands of western audiences an artifact title is a tiny price to pay.

From the information given, it doesn't look like they can do that. They're just becoming a distribution partner for Macross outside Japan, since their license specifically prohibits them from distributing anything to do with the Robotech TV series or its sequels in Japan.

SAME. If DYRL? got a theatrical release in the US, I'd be downright giddy.

My apologies, too caught up in sharing the good news with our fellow fans I suppose.

As far as we know, they have a story treatment and that's it. No director, no script, no producers, no budget, nothing. Every piece of news alleging progress on the film has been later revealed to be (false) rumor reported as fact. This just means, I guess, that if Sony does decide to make a movie Big West won't lock them out of the Japanese market.

Sorry mate, but Kawamori's grubby fingerprints are all over Delta too. I know the head of Animeigo indicated some years back that it was unclear who owned the western distribution rights to DYRL?, but it's entirely possible that this breakthrough could lead to a proper US high-def release of either or both of those works. What a time to be alive.

This raises an interesting quandry... they're going to have to figure out who the hell actually has the distribution rights to DYRL? now.

Probably not... but then, he likely didn't have any input in this decision. Big West owns Macross, after all, not Kawamori.

Potentially? It's down to distribution licenses at this point, I suppose. You could very well see Macross plamodels cheek by jowl with gunpla in Barnes and Noble in the near future.

That's not a concession of any kind from Big West. The validity of that license was never disputed by Big West... only by third parties like FASA, Catalyst Game Labs, etc.

TBH, I kind of expected this was the direction things were heading. Harmony Gold had already lost the fight for the Macross trademarks in almost every key market in the world. Big West had obtained all the leverage it needed to effectively shut down the Robotech franchise outside of the Americas. With the Robotech franchise devoid of any realistic future prospects, it was more or less inevitable that Harmony Gold would look for a way out either by bending the knee to Big West in order to obtain a percentage of the profits from Macross releases worldwide or sell their stake to someone else who would. Harmony Gold bent the knee, brothers. We have won.

For the record, the US term "season" and its UK equivalent "series" do not imply any particular length. It only actually means "a new annual or semi-annual set of episodes" usually as an unbroken production run. I'll do you one better. Red Dwarf series/season IX. It's got a whopping THREE episodes. But that's British brevity for you. Still, it's more telling that Star Trek: Discovery's per-season episode count continues to decrease WITHOUT a corresponding increase in per-episode production spending. That's Star Trek: Discovery's showrunners feeling the sting of performance-based budget cuts without being able to compromise on quality in the cutthroat, VFX-heavy direct-to-streaming TV market. When you see a successful series losing episode count it's usually because per-episode spending has increased dramatically, as it did on Game of Thrones starting in its 7th season. If Discovery's fourth season continues the pattern, it'll have 12 episodes or fewer... indicating yet another major budget cut from Netflix.