Seto Kaiba

I think what we're doing is one part lamenting his -er- lamentable ignorance and one part wondering if he's a troll, an idiot, or if he's genuinely been taken in by Harmony Gold's misdirection. I agree that if it's simple ignorance, there's probably no legitimate excuse when even the Robotech wikipedia article makes at least a token effort to distinguish between Robotech and Macross, and the matter could've been clarified with five seconds spent on Google. If he's being willfully trollish or has been misinformed by Harmony Gold, it's a more complex issue.

Maybe "metaseries" might be a good word to use instead, since last anybody heard they still considered at least one of the comics published under the Wildstorm imprint to be an official part of the Robotech story. Come to think of it, that's probably why they're so deadset on muddying the waters between them and Macross... to make it look like they haven't spent the last thirty odd years tossing cards into a hat and giving each other piggyback rides between abysmal failures.

Whoops, my bad on the author bit. Still, one has to wonder who they think they're fooling these days... they didn't start pulling this nonsense until about 2000, when Harmony Gold decided Carl Macek had screwed the franchise up beyond recovery and tried to start fresh. Once they needed a way to reinvent Robotech as a credible SF/mecha anime franchise and created Robotech.com, they started making a concerted effort to mislead Robotech fans and the general public about Robotech and its relationship with the original shows. Anyone can check this bizarre misdirection on Wikipedia in ten seconds flat and figure out it's BS, so why are they even trying? I'm not sure if they just think that any press is good press (even press that makes them look like cretins, apparently), or if they're SO misled themselves that they've started buying into all of their own lies (instead of just "Robotech is successful and influential").

... and now I'm humming the old GI Joe theme song at work... You have to remember, EXO, Harmony Gold has historically put a LOT of effort into doing two things with regard to the Japanese originals and the greater Macross franchise: Trying to convince Robotech fans that the original Japanese shows Robotech was made from are flawed and inferior shows that were dramatically improved by Carl Macek's "vision", to such an extent that they sometimes make bizarre claims that the Japanese studios that made those shows think Robotech is the superior version. Trying to deliberately blur the line between Robotech and Macross, for the purposes of self-promotion (trying to cash in on Macross's reputation), discouraging Robotech fans from pursuing Japanese Macross titles (trying to keep them thinking that the two are interchangeable), and enabling their misleading statements about Macross rights. Long Vo, misinformed as he is, is probably a victim of... and it sounds rather over-dramatic to use this term, since any idiot can find out the truth on Wikipedia... Harmony Gold's misinformation campaign. Though it must be admitted that the Robotech fandom's bad habit of trying to "adopt" every series they think is cool (including a great deal of Macross) into Robotech on an informal basis... particularly where the RPG is concerned. Ten minutes nothing... a quick read of the Macross wikipedia article is usually enough, though whether he's defending that just because he's embarrassed or if he's actually thick enough to believe it is anybody's guess.

That's not fan art, at least... that's from Robotech #0, the comic book relaunch/Macross Zero-knockoff.

This "mixup" happens a lot where Robotech is concerned... too often for it to be believable as a coincidence, honestly.

Ach... I'm gonna miss him. I wasn't a fan of his later work, but I loved the hell out of Aladdin when I was a kid, and he was fantastic in that.

I don't recall if the ADV Films dub release of Macross had notes included on the DVDs themselves, but it didn't come with any liner notes as print media.

Yes, it actually is a helicopter... they just never seemed to find a way to work that part into the animation. 1st Border Red Devil asked me to translate a piece of Southern Cross art a while back, a leaflet with information on the TASC's Auroran, ATAC's Spartas, and a tiny bit on the Bioroid... and one of the captions there specifically refers to the Auroran's Cross-Fighter mode as a Helicopter mode. Specifically, it was the following caption between the Cross-Fighter and Crusader modes, which reads: クロス・ファイター形態は180度転回可能なヘリモード. "Cross Fighter form is a helicopter mode that can turn 180 degrees." (That it has a helicopter mode should come as no surprise, really... the Auroran's basically a transformable Sikorsky X-Wing.) EDIT: That's not a "variant" without blades, that's Crusader mode, which is the Auroran's jet fighter form... the blades are simply folded back along the fuselage near the tail.

From any of the very few official publications for the original Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross? None that I've seen, no. Part of me suspects that the reason the Spartas has the driver exposed is because they put so damned much effort into the Arming Doublets that, when they ended up having to make a fairly generic robot show, they didn't want all the work they'd put in to go to waste by having the pilot be hidden inside the mecha all the time. The many and varied Robotech works, almost all of which have been disowned by Harmony Gold, offered a plethora of excuses for the design leaving the pilot exposed. The official stats they have for it acknowledge only that having the pilot position totally open to the elements was a really bad idea and made operating the tank unpleasant in bad weather. Other than that, the only explanation Robotech currently offers that has any sanction from Harmony Gold is that the Spartas was originally developed to function as a light reconnaissance vehicle, claiming the open cockpit offered the pilot an unobstructed field of view (apparently forgetting that the Mk.I Eyeball comes in a distant second to high-grade camera systems with infrared and night vision, making having a sealed cockpit and monitors far more advantageous than trying to view everything with the naked eye).

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...