Seto Kaiba

While that is broadly true in the sense of needing to establish and maintain a market for your product, there's little point in trying to establish a market for a product that all your customers have already sampled and the majority have long since decided they find offensively awful. To you, as one of the few avid and vocal fans of Southern Cross, it looks like negligence on the part of Harmony Gold to ignore the Masters Saga. To the people who are making their decisions based on the business case, it's a simple matter of deciding not to try to draw water from a well that you've known is dry for fifteen years. In other words, simple pragmatism. You don't try to appeal to their audience with something they hate, and the vocal majority have made it pretty clear there's precious little love out there for the Masters Saga. As far as vocal Southern Cross fans in the Robotech fandom go, they're relatively few and you're pretty much the only one of them I've encountered who isn't an ass and can actually make a reasonably articulate argument. Well, duh. As far as the available evidence indicates, most Robotech fans didn't like the Masters Saga... to such an extent that, when they ran a poll about opinions of the Southern Cross Army, most voted that its negative reputation with the fans was richly deserved. If the original show was an abysmal failure in Japan, and the English adaptation has seen the audience frequently declare "these people suck", why would they throw in any more than the absolute bare minimum number of references to it they could get away with? If your product tests poorly with your target audience, you don't say "Let's ramp up the stuff those guys hate" because, unless you're insane,your goal is to produce something they'll actually enjoy. As with Shadow Chronicles, Harmony Gold is clearly trying to court success by copying popular and successful shows in or adjacent to their target genre. For the Shadow Chronicles, the shows being aped were Macross (specifically DYRL?) and the reimagined Battlestar Galactica. For the failed Robotech Academy concept, it was Macross Frontier and Lost in Space with shades of Yukikaze and Gundam SEED. Again, apart from a few folks like you who are really passionate about Southern Cross, pretty much nobody cared. Whether they're motivated by copyright issues around the Southern Cross designs or simple pragmatism in not trying to use some of the most disliked parts of Robotech, there's little incentive for people to care because most don't have a hell of a lot of use for the series or its characters. Personally, I only watched the bastardization of Love Live Alive when someone put it on YouTube (why pay for that garbage and encourage them further, right?) but I didn't really have any problem with them showing not!Jeanne in a MOSPEADA riding suit instead. I chalked the absence of Southern Cross designs up to practical reasons... there were never many of the mecha, they'd been massacred, and the fleet was in tatters. ... one of the titles from the last gasp of Robotech comics before the reboot? That isn't a ringing endorsement either, my friend. Current and former Harmony Gold staffers have made it pretty clear that they just don't feel there's enough of a market for Masters Saga merchandise to justify the costs involved in developing any. With the general fan perception of the Southern Cross Army hovering between apathy and antipathy, they're not going to go out of their way just to throw you a bone. I'm going to be a little blunt here, but please accept my assurances that I'm not trying to be condescending or snide when I say this. When you say that these aren't the actions of a creative director who actually cares about the franchise, you mean they aren't the actions of a creative director who has reason to care about the parts of the show you care about. They've gone on the record, and even former staff have torn into you over this, to say that there's simply no significant demand for material for the part of the franchise you care about. These are the actions of a pragmatic business, not wanting to take a risk because they did their cost studies and decided the potential return on investment made it a losing proposition. It shows that they care enough to not waste money that could go into the products people might want by not developing products that they know people don't want... though admittedly that's not caring a lot. We know that the one part of Robotech that brings in the money is Macross, and that's where they've always focused their attention from day one. Yeah, a few people are... but, considering it's Harmony Gold, that's a few people who are likely to find themselves on the receiving end of a legal threat once the company figures out what they're doing. Most just don't care. What's worse? A tiny amount of lost profit from a few people in the fandom who like a part of the series most of their customers loathe, or a whole lot of lost investment developing products that people won't buy? The latter, obviously. While I can understand and sympathize with your position a bit (Macross II fan, y'know), I see their general refusal to revisit the characters, designs, and themes of the Masters Saga (or Southern Cross) for the simple pragmatism it is. You don't make money by peddling products people don't want (unless you have wicked awesome insurance and an "accidental" warehouse fire.)

Honestly, I think it was "broken" a long time before that... what arguably inflicted the mortal wound on Robotech was the collapse of both the Robotech animated movie and Robotech II: the Sentinels planned series. With that, Robotech had effectively lost its modest momentum, and every effort since then has either been one of attempted resuscitation (Robotech 3000, Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, Robotech Academy) or simply putting the corpse on display like an old-timey circus freakshow (the comics, the novels, Battlecry and Invasion, the Voltron crossover). It was a lost cause long before Tommy Yune ever got involved, partly because of bad luck, and partly because Harmony Gold's understanding of its audience and the industry it was in were a lot less firm than they believed it was. Tommy's involvement is simply that of the grave robber desecrating the corpse in the hopes of finding something that'll earn his gang a quick buck, because... let's not kid ourselves... they don't seem to have seriously believed that any of their new releases were ever going to really make Robotech a big-name title. Eh... while it might be convenient to blame Tommy, it's doubtful he actually has that kind of authority. Harmony Gold staffers like Yune and McKeever have previously admitted (on Robotech.com no less) that they're forced to contend with a tedious and very unwieldy approvals process for pretty much any decision regarding the company's money or property. Tommy might be in what we could call nominal control of the franchise, but he still has to get approvals from above to actually do anything. Or is he simply operating under constraints imposed by senior management and legal that blinker and fetter everything he does? Even McKeever has made no secret of the fact that Harmony Gold's "top men" consider anything Robotech that does not have a direct and immediate ROI to be a waste of time. Pandering to the majority (or lowest common denominator if you'd prefer to think of it that way) with a lineup of mostly Macross-derived products and stories that tie into familiar designs and characters from their most popular saga is the obvious, slam-dunk choice to quick and easy profit. Robotech is, after all, a nostalgia-driven property. The question then becomes... is not utilizing the least-loved of Robotech's component series indicative of a lack of vision, or is it simple pragmatism motivated by the consistently negative reactions they've gotten from fans when the company has asked them about various aspects of the Masters Saga? I realize it upsets you, but I don't think it can genuinely be written off as "Tommy is the root of all evils", though he wasn't exactly subtle (or anything that could be mistaken for it at a hundred paces in bad light) about pandering to the majority by demonizing the Southern Cross Army. Eh... if I had to point to one thing that I honestly think could be called a flaw in your reasoning, it would be the assumption that the management at Harmony Gold actually WANTS to make Robotech successful. Much of what they've done has been indicative of minimum-effort attempts to keep the franchise limping along by pandering to the nostalgic while offering a fair amount of relatively blatant evidence that they're just waiting for someone to offer to take the mess off their hands entirely. The problem is, nobody seems to actually WANT it... at least, not badly enough to pay the absurd price they probably think it's worth.

Personally, I think the reason this thread has stayed away from the mockery is that Robotech Academy was SO bad as a concept that even poking fun at it just feels pointless. It'd be like mocking a clown. Those who weren't quietly buoyed by the way that the various Robotech fans were blunt about its lack of quality probably only felt a sense of pity and quiet embarrassment on behalf of the Robotech fandom. Harmony Gold is still tossing around vague and poorly thought-out suggestions that Robotech Academy might actually still be in the works... which hasn't inspired confidence in many fans, most of whom remember that they said the same thing for Robotech 3000 after Netter Digital went under and it still ended up dead in early development.

Yeah, I remember my kid sister loved to watch Sailor Moon's DIC/DHX release on broadcast. Yeah, between its status as an edited rewrite and its age, I just don't think Robotech has what it takes to hack it on television in the US anymore. "Unedited and uncensored" has become a fairly noteworthy selling point for big-name shonen properties like Toonami's release of Naruto Shippuden and the latest US release of One Piece. I could see there being pushbash or at least greatly diminished interest in Robotech purely on the grounds that it's such an obvious bowdlerization, never mind its age. Presenting something more modern would be the way to go... the problem being that Robotech doesn't really HAVE anything to show for the last twenty-eight years and change, and thus nothing to air. Its day has passed, I think, and I don't think there will ever be the kind of "return to grace" that Harmony Gold (and maybe Carl Macek) spent the last fifteen years or so wishing for. If Harmony Gold actually had the ability to do a Macross Frontier Kickstarter, that'd probably do far, far better than anything they slap the Robotech name on... the catch being that they have no rights to Macross Frontier.

Actually, they tried that and succeeded in getting Robotech on Toonami the year after Cartoon Network created Toonami (1998), and it didn't turn out well for them. As part of Toonami's 1998 lineup, it ran alongside Sailor Moon, Dragonball Z, Beast Wars: Transformers, and Superfriends. It didn't exactly do well. Toonami dropped Robotech from its lineup before they even managed to get through the series ONCE... they chose to end their broadcast of Robotech at episode 60, the end of the Robotech Masters saga. Now that Toonami's lineup contains a fair amount of unedited, largely uncensored anime like Attack on Titan, Space Dandy, Black Lagoon, Gurren Lagann, Blue Exorcist, the fillerless version of Dragonball Z and the uncut Naruto Shippuden, I can't see a really old, obviously rewritten show like Robotech lasting even as long as it did in 1998. Macross Frontier would probably do pretty well there though. That requires, as a prerequisite, being able to convince the company they'll get a significant ROI... not something Robotech has historically been able to do, to such an extent that Harmony Gold can't even be arsed to lie about it. So... ditching all memory of the "old RT negativity", that basically entails "scrap the entire damn thing and the website it's on, lose the URL, and put it up under a completely different name somewhere else". Robotech.com is synonymous with some of the very worst Robotech negativity to both Robotech fans and Macross fans. It's one of the few things almost everybody agrees upon, in my experience. Considering their yearly output is usually less than one toy, and they'd swiftly run out of material the way they did with the MPCs, doing a "yearly membership" thing is going to be a no-sell unless Robotech's got some extremely successful original IP coming out at regular intervals (in short, "when hell freezes", and I don't mean the town in Michigan). That approach only ensures you have a large returning customer base if you have something people want, and your reputation isn't that of a criminally inept pillock... so Harmony Gold is 0 for 2 there, i'm afraid, when higher quality Macross stuff can be had from Japan at prices that aren't completely heart attack-inducing.

Get Big West and Tatsunoko to effing well finish Irresponsible Captain Tylor... I'd pay good freaking money to see that.

Yeah, though that's not even a design original to Robotech Academy... it's actually a reuse of one of the preliminary concepts that Creavision developed once they received the cease-and-desist from Harmony Gold and started trying to redevelop their Valkyrie Project fan film into an original IP. Really, considering that they've tried to do exactly that once before and it landed them in this current mess, I don't think shaking up the staff and starting from the top is going to solve anything. The franchise's reputation is SO dire that nobody with any real qualifications would touch it with a ten light year pole (hence why the people allegedly associated with the Robotech live action project have now reached the level of industry nonentities), and with failure virtually guaranteed for any new project, having an enormously controversial and stigmatized franchise like Robotech on your resume probably own't inspire confidence in a future employer either. Also, there's the slight problem that Robotech has a very small audience who are obsessively devoted to the exact way things exist in the "original" series. The odds of drawing in a new audience are somewhere between slim and none, and they can no longer afford to alienate their existing fan base by scrapping the one thing keeping their captive audience captive... the minor, tenuous connections to the original series and Macross in particular. Barring some Pet Sematary-style shenanigans involving Ed Wood's corpse, I don't think there are worse hands... er... on hand. They've run it into the ground so hard that even Uwe Boll looks like greener pastures.

They've been doing that one for ages though... for a while, they were blaming ME for somehow orchestrating/masterminding the spate of Harmony Gold-issued Cease-and-Desists sent to fan film groups.

Maybe they're running this as a The Producers-style scam? Take in millions of investment money for the project, produce a total flop, and hope the IRS doesn't ask after the books? Crap, now I'm tempted to call Harmony Gold's HQ and see if whoever answers picked up with "Bialystock und Bloom".

You didn't get the message I sent you on Skype about it then? Pretty much S.O.P. for a failed Robotech project. They never really get past the first two stages of grief... first they deny that it could've failed because it's rubbish, then they look for someone to blame. By "someone", I mean "someone other than Harmony Gold for doing a rubbish job and themselves for THANKING THEM for the rubbish job". We've yet to see who's going to get the blame for this... will it be the corpse of Carl Macek, Creavision, Kickstarter, the evil Macross purists, or someone else? The only real option open to them... hoping for someone else to buy Robotech just isn't realistic. Nonsense... I'm as mild-mannered and diplomatic as they get.

That's... appalling. I always figured that Harmony Gold would eventually stoop to using Carl's death as an excuse for a project's delays and/or failure, but that kind of goes a little bit above and beyond. That's almost a statement of "Carl's death completely screwed us". "Everything old is new again" seems to be Harmony Gold's favorite unspoken motto.

Didn't Tom Bateman mention a while back that, last time he spoke to Carl Macek, Carl's "vision" was still basically to go back and finish Robotech II: the Sentinels? Of course, considering the demonstrated quality of Carl's writing and concept work... I'm not sure showing Macek's original notes or brainstorming material would be any better than the garbage that Harmony Gold DID show. The man was not great at coming up with original material. Ten to one, the "Robotech Academy" was meant to be something that showed up in Carl's plans for a Sentinels revisit in just one or two episodes, and Tommy simply took that one concept and turned it into the entire premise so he could technically be telling the truth when he said it was (part of) Carl's vision. They'll keep it alive until it turns into too much of a trollish, mutually-hostile flame war for them to stomach... then they'll lock the thread, on the grounds that the contributors are posting material that is "abusive" of Harmony Gold.

Pretty sure that's legit, one of the original Robotech action figures. 's one of the reasons that it's hard to classify even the "original" Robotech as a successful series, even though it lasted at least one complete broadcast run. It was trying to push toys, and due to some screwball shenanigans with Revell and the general low quality of the mostly misaimed stuff they did produce, they were completely plowed-under by Hasbro's Transformer and GI-Joe lines. Toynami was actually a pretty big step up for them in quality, but still pretty iffy.

Nah, that part was pretty entertaining... but to seriously try to present themselves as though the Robotech franchise is doing quite well for itself is bad comedy, this fiasco's the closest they've come to getting new material on television in almost three decades of trying. I honestly feel a little bad for them. They just want to recapture the magic of watching (a bad dub of) Macross back in the 80's, and they get their hopes up just to get them dashed over and over again. I wouldn't really say they MOSPEADA-ized Robotech, since the part they were trying to branch off from WAS MOSPEADA... which they tried to Macross-ize by including things like VF-1-style Super Packs for the Alpha, Macross's Skull squadron (under another daughter of Max and Miriya), Wolf squadron (from their Macross Saga video game), and the (rejected) transforming colony ship. Wow... Minmei's ripped.

Poor Rabid, that Ottselspy25 guy is probably giving him an ulcer from the sheer stupidity of it all. The tragic part is that this is actually the closest Robotech has come to having a new series in twenty-eight years... they actually had a going-nowhere concept in development before events conspired against it. I see they're back to the hopeless what-ifs, wishing that Harmony Gold could somehow pay its way into permission to use all the familiar Macross designs...

Can't be the not!Monster either, wrong number of guns, among other things. Too blurry to make much more than that out anyway... I can't believe that was the single most talked-about part of the Robotech bastardization of MOSPEADA: Love Live Alive. Pretty sure there's a little bit of litigious paranoia at work there though. Just look at the perverse effort they went to to put every last goddamn Macross Saga character they could "on a bus" or in the ground. Even ones that should have been "safe", like the not!Exsedol from Prelude (who looked more like a balding Grand Moff Tarkin). They didn't even permit Max or "Miriya" to show their faces, and all the reused scenes replaced the Macross and Southern Cross mecha that the old comics originally had with MOSPEADA ones even though it was not actually necessary to do so. I think that's a big part of why Robotech fans are doomed to be disappointed over and over again. Look at the comments over there on Robotech.com, and you'll see many of them mistakenly credit Macek and Harmony Gold with creating the iconic parts that they loved in Robotech. Problem is, Harmony Gold and Macek created very little, apart from a nonsense macguffin and a couple minor story changes... so their hopes that Harmony Gold will one day create something just as exceptional are founded upon false hope, since they never created those things in the first place. So, who's up for a bet? Will Harmony Gold or Creavision be first to "market" with a new cinematic Robotech project?

Well, in all fairness, the lack of talent isn't something they can really do anything about... the franchise is not exactly in fantastic health, and retaining a studio for development assistance would be right out for the twin reasons of relinquishing some creative control and not being able or willing to spend that much. They got handed lemons, and can do little else besides bitch about it, because they don't have the ingredients, the tools, or the knowledge necessary to make lemonade. The lack of spine, on the other hand... well, they're not really allowed to have spines. For all Tommy's supposed obsession with retaining complete, micromanager-level creative control over Robotech, he's still only allowed to make what the higher-ups there are willing to sign for. Since they've made no secret of the fact that they're only interested in what's immediately profitable, that's naturally going to limit their focus to Macross first and foremost, and MOSPEADA as a distant second. It means they neglect 1/3 of their story, and you end up with a parade of awful, samey bullshit because Harmony Gold is trying to make themselves a non-infringing clone of Macross, with a conspicuous lack of success due to the conspicuous lack of talent or a budget. Nowadays, the appeal of the Sentinels to the majority is because of its Macross aspects... the fans are desperate to resolve the one dangling plot thread of "What ever happened to Admiral Hunter?". It wasn't even all that different from Shadow Chronicles when you get down to it, it had a lot of the same awful ideas and terrible writing and execution, but it managed to do so in a way that wasn't a huge, jarring departure from the established story. (Principally because it didn't overlap with the existing story in any meaningful way.) Have they actually confirmed that that blurry, out-of-focus mecha-bigfoot is one of the ersatz destroids? Because it's missing a few design features here and there, and looks more than a bit like one of the rejected MOSPEADA concepts too. I wouldn't go taking that as an indication that the Sentinels destroids and battlepods are in the clear. All the same, I doubt they'd revisit them out of sheer bloody-minded paranoia.

So... is this "I need an old priest and a young priest" sort of mercy situation, or a "No ma, yeller's my dog" sort of mercy situation? Therein lies a problem... the Macross Saga is the one that really hooks a lot of fans into Robotech (and, subsequently, into the broader Japanese Macross franchise), so it's also where Harmony Gold has concentrated most of its efforts in world-building. So that's naturally going to be what they're inclined to focus on. Even the new comics, which were supposed to be the foundation of the reboot, couldn't help but leaven the New Generation's one major story with a Macross Saga mini-comic.

Huh... I haven't had a lot of interest in Trek since DS9 ended, but I have to say I am EXTREMELY impressed. I may have to pledge some money to this, just to see what they do.

You never know... maybe if they make it surreal enough and focus on the music, someone might mistake it for an artsy, Fantasia-style anime film, like what Daft Punk and Leiji Matsumoto did in Interstella 5555.

Well, they didn't do the rabid space lemurs yet... does that count?

They did that with Britai... I don't remember if Khyron was in there too. More sense if you factor in Palladium itself, who didn't shrink from outright stating that kids born in space had pretty much zero choice other than a lifetime of military service in the RTSC core book. That's verging on WH40K levels of grimdark... God-Emperor Hunter and his Imperial Expeditionary Forces are out there to kill the hell out of the filthy heretics (Edwards) and Xenos (everybody else). I think I favor the Macross 'verse for a lighter and softer ending for dear Yot-chan... as head of the Nyan-Nyan restaurant chain, presumably happy, healthy, and with a family. Man, I was on Robotech.com when the Shadow Chronicles dropped... and opinion of it sank like it was wearing depleted uranium shoes. People bought it, yeah, because it was the first new Robotech animated title in twenty years. That didn't stop them from being absolutely pissed about the content. The unrest over vocal criticism of the Shadow Chronicles movie was what got MEMO and company started on the bad habit of banning anyone and everyone who spoke critically of the project and Harmony Gold. The backlash against Shadow Chronicles depopulated Robotech.com and drove a lot of veteran fans away from the franchise. For quite a while, you couldn't go on any part of the boards without seeing half a dozen threads complaining about the retcons and the lack of original content. Many of the fans who hated it simply aren't fans anymore, or at least don't bother supporting the franchise. Even now, almost every time Shadow Chronicles is actually discussed, the discussion will inevitably come back to retcons and inaccuracies and the flanderization of various characters and how mad fans are about any of those topics. What people are calling for is for Harmony Gold to finish what it starts... they're mad because the Shadow Chronicles, as totally unsatisfying as many of them found it, was presented as a direct and ongoing continuation of the Robotech animated series of 1985. If you look at the Kickstarter comments and the thread on Robotech.com, you'll find that's the recurring theme... they're after Harmony Gold to finish what it starts, not so much to finish the Shadow Chronicles for love of the Shadow Chronicles. Even fanatics like dougbendo couldn't find much to love in RTSC. Harmony Gold's official, public statement about why a follow-up to Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles was not produced is that the higher-ups at Harmony Gold decided to put the brakes on the project and wait for the live-action movie to raise their profile a bit... in the name of getting better investment terms and therefore a bigger budget to make a higher-quality sequel (since even they couldn't ignore the strident complaints about the animation quality). EDIT: Though I must admit I could totally see a creative control issue being involved as well... that was one of the reasons Harmony Gold cited for doing a Kickstarter. They wanted to develop the pilot with complete creative control over it, instead of being beholden to an outside sponsor or network. With the live-action movie a non-starter, they're back to square one.

Actually, the way that Robotech's universe has been set up, it'd actually be hard to avoid it. Y'see... Robotech's setting, especially after the 2nd Robotech War, is something not at all dissimilar from the Galactic Alliance of Humankind in Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet. As a society, it's almost completely militarized. They make no bones about it being a setting where the only real career path open to the children born in space is military service in the Expeditionary Forces, either on the front lines as a grunt or behind the lines in logistical support. The ONLY human civilian in space was Minmei, and she had to stow away to earn that distinction. (And, of course, because Robotech's many contributing licensees were as bad a bunch of writers as Harmony Gold themselves, Minmei was depicted as a DD-cup slurm who toys with the affections of a married man and Rick's homicidal pet Starscream T.R. Edwards.) Little Jason (I think his name was Jason?) wouldn't really have a hell of a lot of choice... if he was lucky, he'd have landed himself a posting in the Expeditionary Forces and died messily on the front lines against the Invid. If he was unlucky, he'd have ended up assigned to the Army of the Southern Cross or one of the first two Earth Reclamation Forces, in which case he's very dead. It certainly wouldn't be an uplifting tale.

Didn't they do that in the novels?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that IS their idea of wooing the fans... they've spent a long time conditioning Robotech fans to be thrilled about ANYTHING new with the word "Robotech" on it. They can't use the Macross designs, they won't revisit and finish Robotech II: the Sentinels, the fans hated Shadow Chronicles, and most fans hate Southern Cross and are indifferent towards MOSPEADA... so what can they honestly seek to woo fans with apart from "Look, it's more Robotech... maybe"? They don't have the skills to create quality original material, and even making cheap derivatives of the stuff that was actually popular is right out... so fanatical devotion to the brand name is all that they can really reliably trade on.