Seto Kaiba

Given that the Supervision Army was made up of spiritia-drained and brainwashed Protoculture and Zentradi - and from an advanced arsenal world no less - it seems likely that the Supervision Army is using brainwashing broadly similar to the Zentradi Army's brainwashing/indoctrination. Losing their highest tier in the chain of command wouldn't mean much, since only the most senior commanders would have had any interaction with them at all and standard strategy would've seen them regroup after retreating from the loss of their leaders. Once they finished falling back and regrouping, they would have gone back to business as usual without a thought for the fact that their mission was an incredibly pointless one. It's not clear how the Supervision Army keeps its numbers up... whether it's cloning troops or it's "recruiting" from worlds it finds and from captured Zentradi.

Basara is really a poorly written character... he's basically what you'd get if you combined the characters of Minmay and Kaifun into one person. An arrogant, self-absorbed, total hypocrite who doesn't mean any harm but is so totally focused on his music career that he forgets to consider the consequences his behavior has on others. It doesn't help that, unlike Minmay, he never grows out of it and unlike Kaifun he never gets ditched by the more sensible people around him for being an asshat. Despite Macross's anti-war message, the actual pacifists in the metaseries never seem to cause anything but problems for everyone around them. The least problematic ones are the Zolans, whose insistence on non-lethal responses only basically turned them into extreme doormats for the whale poachers, and the only member who got sh*t done was the one who thought that philosophy was a load. Kaifun and Basara both used pacifism as an excuse for their irrational hatred of authority, and in both cases it cost a lot of lives. In the case of the ones like Serge Glass, who go full Relina Peacecraft, it always ends badly... he ruined his fleet's economy by being an extreme doormat in negotiations with other emigrant fleets to the point where the previously-violent anti-government protesters came across as far more rational and sensible than him. The beauty of blasting off agaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaain? Just as well, Docker is a prat. They can... just, only when you get Gamlin or Kinryu in the cockpit. Considering the Protodeviln's biotechnology is modeled on Vajra biotechnology... I'd guess advantage Vajra on pure numbers.

Big West is probably willing to settle for less than 100% of the profits, since anime distribution in the west is largely driven by local distributors even today. The big nagging question is if Tatsunoko will be foolish enough to re-up Harmony Gold's license or not. Relations on that front seem to be a bit sour now. The trademark proceedings in Europe aren't viable as precedent in the US, because trademark law isn't a universal right like copyright is under treaty... and US copyright law is written to favor a first use in market condition over actual ownership of the property. The one most likely to do that is Tatsunoko itself, amusingly... they very badly want a share of the profits from Macross's sequels. So badly, in fact, that they not only went to court in a bid to get a cut, they appealed the ruling against them twice (with the appellate court affirming the previous ruling and the high court refusing to hear it). I'm not sure if they just want to be a part of the Macross phenomenon because they feel that they helped create it, or what... but whatever it is, they were willing to spend a big chunk of change to try to get it and have made a point to show they're still invested in the franchise by trying to be represented at Macross events in even a little way, like sending flowers to the recent Macross anniversary concert.

Well, sort of... Japanese business culture emphasizes politeness, which does not always take the form of a constructive politeness. They'll just as likely politely listen to your view and nod along, then with equal politeness either refuse to proceed further or dismantle your position bit by bit at a later date or time in a carefully-worded rebuttal. They can be very obstinate when they don't feel a decision is in their best interests... but, in my experience, they'll be obstinate with impeccable politeness and express their sympathies for the inconvenience.

That'd be an odd call, but not unheard-of... it probably depends on how the terms of the license are drawn up. Yeah, that definitely makes it sound like Tatsunoko will gain ownership of the trademarks that HG has filed for should the license expire. It certainly reinforces my point... even if Tatsunoko throws HG to the wolves like they deserve, they still have the means (at least in the short term) to insist Big West play on their terms outside Japan.

Eh, to hell with it. Regardless of whether the kit transforms or not. Count me in for one.

Granted, but the point was that we know Tatsunoko badly wants a share of the profits from all of the Macross sequels... and we know they have a VERY effective means of blocking Big West from distributing Macross's sequels outside Japan. Since US trademark law favors first use over actual ownership of the property, all Tatsunoko has to do is renew HG's license or shack up with another distributor and resume the trademark shenanigans. If Tatsunoko was willing to go to court and appeal the decision against them multiple times in an effort to get a share of the Macross sequel profits, you can bet they wouldn't just let Big West go wild outside Japan. They'll insist upon a piece of the action.

Unfortunately, if I did exaggerate it was only slightly. At the behest of 1st Border Red Devil and other Southern Cross fans, I've done a fair amount of digging into Southern Cross's mecha via the show's one artbook and a double handful of magazine articles, color inserts, and leaflets for the series. Virtually everything in those publications is in the series proper, even if some of them only appear in the massed charge in the OP, but only a couple designs in the series actually have names. Basically it's just the three main robots, the GMP Garm, the Flash Clapper hoverbike, Arming Doublet, Bioroid, and Biover. Everything else is nameless, as far as official publications go... which for a translator used to excesses of detail, is beyond frustrating. (The Japanese Wikipedia page for the series is, unfortunately, extremely misleading because it has been extensively vandalized with Robotech RPG content by Yui Yuasa.) I do have a soft spot for the Auroran tho. The Sikorsky S-72 "X-Wing" was a neat little concept aircraft, so it was nice to see a fully-realized version as a transforming robot. I might be interested in a kit if one became available, just because it's such an atypical design for the period. I feel like there was a lot more passion in the earlier concept for Science Fiction Sengoku Saga.

Pretentious literary buffoonery knows no bounds among sentient, cultured species. To be fair, Robotech already kinda shattered that effect... the thing that threw the Zentradi was love songs, emotions they had no frame of reference to process on an intellectual or social level, hence a massive "DOES NOT COMPUTE!". In Robotech, the song they use for the Minmay Attack is basically one long rambling declaration of "we're going to win this fight no matter what", a sentiment the Zentradi should have no trouble processing. *fifteen minutes of continuous atonal shrieking*

Oh yes, the Robotech DVDs will skyrocket all the way from "almost completely worthless" to "nearly worthless". Remember, most Robotech fans already have three or four editions. That's the beauty of the secondhand Robotech merch market, almost everything can be had for a fraction of the price it was new because the net direction of the fandom's size is negative. You can get their RPG Tactics game for a fraction of what Kickstarter backers and retailers paid from people looking to get it out of their homes. Considering the one thing Tatsunoko covets most of all with respect to Macross is a share of the profits from the sequels, I'd expect they would want to hang onto the original TV series rights and offer to act as intermediary to release all of Macross worldwide for a percentage.

Even after Macross 7 and Frontier happened they were still miles ahead of anything Southern Cross's designers came up with... Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross was phoned in so hard that over ninety percent of the mecha in it don't even have NAMES.

Now that you mention him, it really bothers me that I can't tell which row of teeth that's supposed to be... it looks like he has a wicked underbite.

Berger Stone's claim that the fold bacteria that cause Var syndrome migrated into humanoids from the Vajra doesn't hold water for a couple different reasons... then again, most of what he says has similar problems. His claim that the Vajra left the universe doesn't hold water because we know that the Vajra hives were still present in multiple regions of the galaxy even after the events of Macross Frontier, as seen in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy and the Macross Delta gaiden manga Macross E. It also doesn't work on the level of what we know regarding the effects of the V-type bacterium the Vajra carry. Macross Delta tells the audience that everyone has fold bacteria living in their brains and that they're not dangerous in and of themselves. But in Macross Frontier it's a major plot point that a V-type bacteria infection in the brain is an incurable lethal illness that'll end you in a matter of at most a few years without treatment and treatment just delays the inevitable. Given that the Vajra are still around and even present on several New UN Government-settled worlds in the 2060s, and that the galaxy's population rather visibly hasn't been wiped out by an incurable fatal disease or even incurred the V-type bacteria's signature Incurable Cough of Doom, it seems fairly safe to say Berger Stone is either spinning a yarn or he's suffering from author-induced stupidity.

I was literally just watching Alien a few hours ago. He had a good long run, checking out at 91. Still, he'll be missed.

Totally... and that's why Harmony Gold is so determined to make a mountain of every molehill in the "news" about the proposed Robotech movie. If they can get the ball rolling on that movie then they would have a potentially viable property to exploit and keep the brand alive with even if they lost all their rights obtained under license from Tatsunoko.

My secret insider sources tell me the Robotech movie is going to come out on February 32nd, 2021. So, the short version... The above-linked page on PacerMonitor describes a petition, accompanying documentation, a couple requests to keep certain disclosed contract and settlement details secret, and the judge's final ruling on Harmony Gold's request for the California Central District Court to enforce the binding settlement from a previous legal dispute with Tatsunoko Production that was resolved in arbitration. That prior settlement was about money owed to Harmony Gold as recompense for court costs and legal fees it incurred while pursuing legal action against various entities violating its (and Tatsunoko's) rights to the original Japanese shows. HG requested to keep some bits of the contracts and settlements from publication in the court record where anyone could see it, some of which was granted and some wasn't (which is how we know what was in the previous settlement). Simpler version... a not-so-long time ago in a galaxy pretty much right frigging here, Harmony Gold went to Tatsunoko and said "dude, you owe me money for protecting our sh*t outside Japan", and Tatsunoko said "No way, plus you still owe ME money". Some legal posturing ensued and it ended up in arbitration instead of in court (WAY cheaper). Tatsunoko couldn't prove Harmony Gold owed them money, so Tatsunoko got stuck with the bill for the previous legal matters AND the arbitration. Skip forward a bit, they still haven't paid, so HG is asking the courts to please make them pay what they owe. The bits about Harmony Gold's license expiring are pretty tangential to the whole thing... Harmony Gold apparently believed that the license was drawn up in such a way that, even if it expired, they had permission to continue using the stuff they'd created based on the original shows forever. An examination of the license proved that was bullsh*t, and the courts told HG so. So now everyone knows Harmony Gold's license is basically a ticking time bomb. If they lose their license from Tatsunoko, Robotech is effectively 100% dead because they will not only lose all their rights to Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, they'll lose the ability to exploit all the material they've made based on those shows too... like Sentinels, Untold Story, Shadow Chronicles, Love Live Alive, Robotech Academy, and all the novelizations, comic books, video games, and so on. Robotech 3000 will be all they've got left. It'll kill all their merchandising too, so they'll be left with mountains of unsellable crappy merchandise they'll have to either surrender or destroy, and so will their licensees. (Palladium Books might go under if they lose the license before they deliver Wave 2 of Robotech RPG Tactics... they're in hock like half a mil to backers on that one due to undelivered rewards to Kickstarter backers, and if they lose their license in the dustup they won't be able to deliver those rewards and could potentially be forced to issue refunds.)

But did you do the little dance first? You think it's bad just having to witness it, imagine how frustrating it is to be "Macross answer guy" and have to explain it on a dozen different sites and groups. I'd give years off my life for the bloody news websites to actually get the details completely correct just once... ANN opened their mouths to quash the rumor and made things WORSE.

Yeah, AnimeNewsNetwork and a few other sites have picked it up too, and attempted to quash the rumor that Harmony Gold lost the Macross license already.

That's a more recent development. Robotech's fans were giving each other hell over preferences in media long before the internet, but the flame wars they had over it on Usenet were what drove lots of Robotech fans away from the franchise. The whole "Macross purist" thing came along in the 2000s, when the Robotech fandom was looking for something to distract itself from the way Robotech's second coming turned out to be something of a damp squib. It was fueled by the "Macross Saga" dominating Robotech merchandising and by some Macross fans observing that Robotech was pretty much just coasting on Macross's popularity even in its new developments. Once Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles and Macross Frontier came out less than a year apart, it turned into a full blown witch hunt over the obvious disparity in talent, skill, and quality between the two. Even in the Macross Saga novels they took a LOT of liberties... like the "thinking caps" and the VFs having energy shields, or Dr. Lang becoming a genius-level technological savant and having visions of the Invid after coming into contact with the SDF-1's main computer. The Sentinels novels were just where it abandoned all pretense and didn't so much jump the shark as ramp off a stack of burning sharks in a tutu while on fire and singing Asia's "The Lie is Over". I still maintain they were just replacing terms and names in drafts of Star Wars novels that Lucasfilm decided to pass on. The books lost the plot so hard that making a movie based on them would be sheer, gun-eating insanity that would make Plan 9 from Outer Space look like Academy Award material. As seen on several occasions in Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Macross Frontier, pilots can also take direct, manual control of a limb or multiple limbs if a particularly delicate task is required. The TV version of the VF-1 had dedicated joysticks just for the arms. What I'm given to understand WRT hand/arm maneuvers is that they're sort of "flying" the hand through three-dimensional space and using the buttons in the grip on the joystick or throttle lever to control the position of the fingers and palm. Slinging a rifle, I would imagine is probably an automated routine for "stow gunpod" in battroid mode without returning it to the hardpoint.

Based on the renewals I can see in TESS, at least two years. The trademark that's up for renewal first is 76385551, which would come eligible for renewal around mid-December 2021 (~9 months after the license expires) and would expire 26 December 2022. On the others, we're looking at actual trademark expiration on 30 November 2023. (Unless challenged in court on the basis that HG can no longer use the mark in commerce legally.)

Well... sort of. This is phrased in a way that is practically guaranteed to mislead and it's from a source that's known for having a poor command of the facts, but there is a tiny nugget of truth at its core. The reason you won't find any official announcements about this is that it's not news, we've known for a long time now. It's also not really about copyrights, it's about the expiration date on Harmony Gold's license agreement with Tatsunoko Production and nothing more. The license that Tatsunoko sold Harmony Gold has an expiration date in 2021, and Harmony Gold will lose the distribution and merchandising rights to the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series that it obtained via that license unless it is renewed. This has no direct implications for Macross, really, since those rights will simply revert back to their owner Tatsunoko Production if the license is not renewed. It would still take several years for HG's trademarks on the Macross name, logos, and key terms to expire, and those are the key obstacles for Macross's licensing outside of Japan. (The Japanese companies have ALWAYS held the copyrights on Macross... Big West and Studio Nue on the IP, and Tatsunoko on the footage of the original series.)

Trelane was more powerful than usual when she did it too... Maybe the Borg assimilated the silverware drawer first?

Tracing happened.

Partly, the sheer number of times helmetless people are shown operating mecha... but a favorite counter-argument to the "thinking cap" is Roy's dialog to [Hikaru/Rick] when he's patching up the VF-1D, which establishes pretty well that the controls are thoroughly conventional and that it isn't any more difficult to operate a battroid than it is to fly a jet. OK, you're crazy. You're also completely correct, though. An awful lot of Robotech fans dislike, if not outright hate, a lot of what's come out under the Robotech brand. You could swap some terms around in the Tom Lehrer song "National Brotherhood Week" and it'd be a fair description of the Robotech fandom and its various mutually hostile factions. (That's a project for later, I think.) As I used to be in the thick of it, I'll explain. The dominant viewpoint was the "Purists", the fans who saw the animated Robotech as the one true series and dismissed the comics and novels on the grounds of their poor quality and their deviations from the animated Robotech's setting. Fans of the Luceno/Daley novelization ("McKinneyists") held the novels up as a superior version of Robotech, on the grounds that it wasn't limited by the show's secondhand animation - a contention that caused a lot of fights, since the original ideas most of the fandom thought were paint-drinking stupidity were what they saw as its virtues. The comics kinda got marginalized, but the fans of the comics Bill Spangler worked on (sometimes self-described as "Spanglerists") were often at loggerheads with fans of the Sentinels comics by the Waltrips. They were the fandom of "They changed it, now it sucks" even before Tommy Yune took over and rebooted things. The purists were basically the last group standing by that point, but they were a split constituency over whether Tommy Yune's reboot and establishment of an official canon was a good thing. Some fans supported it on the grounds that it would make for more consistent work in the future. Others were against it, partly because it was a change and partly because they did not like Tommy disposing of so many cherished fan theories. (A rare few saw Tommy's work as some kind of Macross favoritism, since he did kind of kick the Southern Cross dog.) After over three decades of failures, I would be prepared to say that it is EXACTLY like they couldn't make something decent out of the franchise. Yeah, the system had a hard time distinguishing between intention and imagination, and shock could disable the system entirely. Nope, the closest they got was the new "United Earth Expeditionary Forces" emblem looking vaguely like a kaleidoscope rendering of the UN Spacy logo. Despite having a new daughter of Max and "Miriya", her background was only described as "half-alien" and they didn't use the term "Zentradi", "UN Spacy", or anything like that. They did have a Skull squadron, but that's generic, and a ship designated "SDF-#", but that's all. Tommy Yune and co. had a comic book prequel to the "movie" (really the first episode of a failed OVA project) that was entirely for the purpose of putting every non-essential Macross-derived character on a bus or in the ground. "Rick" got redesigned so that he looks like Hideo Kuze from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig, "Lisa" retired to become a diplomat, Minmei was taken prisoner and tortured then sent off somewhere for treatment, "Breetai" and all of the remaining Zentradi except "Exedore" were killed in an (un)friendly fire incident by a traitor, "Exedore" was killed testing the neutron star matter warheads, and both Max and his wife were Sir- and Lady-Not-Appearing-in-this-Film. The only ones who came out of it with their jobs and lives intact were "Rick" and "Dr. Lang". (Some of the other character reworking they did was funny by accident... [Louis Ducasse/Louie Nichols] is a white version of Geordi LaForge now.) The control responses are standardized, like on AMBAC systems in Gundam. They can be custom-tuned to a particular pilot, however, and the VFs in Macross Frontier and beyond have additional onboard systems to aid in personalizing the control responses to a given individual (tied to their EX-Gear). As someone with a bit of a background in robotics via embedded control systems, master-slave motion trace is a PAIN IN THE ASS to work with. For a four-limb trace system, they'd need to either make the cockpit prohibitively large to enable a 1:1 trace using motion capture (think G Gundam) or the controls would be incredibly sensitive because the motion trace would have to magnify the amount of movement by the pilot by a scale factor to enable the cockpit to remain small (as in Full Metal Panic!) which makes the controls incredibly finicky and a sneeze or cramp can throw the whole system for a loop (like Tessa did in "A Cat and Kitten's Rock & Roll"). There's also a fair bit of lag-time in most motion trace setups. ... so, a scaled-down version of Shredder's Technodrome?

Initially, yeah... it all went a bit loopy in the Sentinels arc of the novels, where what we sarcastically call magic flower fuel started taking the "magic" part increasingly literally. By the end of that arc, protoculture had graduated from being an exotic fuel to being somewhere between Dune's spice and Star Wars's midichlorians... it was self-aware, semi-mystical stuff that gave people exposed to it ESP and was somehow enacting a greater destiny by manipulating its users. Where a Jedi or Sith might've said "the will of the Force", they would say "the shapings of the protoculture". This very bad idea returned briefly for the failed Robotech 3000 series concept, in which the antagonist was protoculture itself having apparently gotten sick of humanity's sh*t in the nine hundred and fifty years or so since the Robotech TV series ended and turning robotechnology against its users. There was an empathic link between the machine and pilot, which combined with the "thinking cap" helmets was what permitted the mecha to respond and maneuver with all of the fluid balance of an organic lifeform. Essentially, the mecha in the novels were semi-living when they were actively drawing power. Robotech fans loathed the idea, to the extent that it was one of the most-often mocked parts of the novels. Mostly, it was because it was a blatant contradiction of what was said and shown in the animated series. Yeah, the whole Sentinels arc, and particularly The End of the Circle, is probably the single most reviled Robotech title in the eyes of most of its fans. End of the Circle made the whole Robotech story into an incredibly stupid stable causality loop in which the SDF-3 is responsible for the disappearance of the SDF-1's fold system, they end up getting sent back in time and settling on Tirol where their children became the first Robotech Masters, with Minmei's son Zor (re)inventing robotechnology, which the first-generation Masters would then become the basis for their oppressive interstellar empire, followed by Zor sending his personal ship with the last of their protoculture to Earth and starting the whole damned thing over.