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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Just my two cents, but since it's literally McKeever's job to be the most vocal supporter as their marketing man and their de facto public relations schmuck, that might not be the best indicator that he's the originator of the idea. It would make a certain amount of sense if he was, since he was the one who (repeatedly) aired the "Harmony Gold won't fund development of a new series until they get an episode commitment from a network" thing on the Robotech.com forums a few years ago. Whoever the "guilty party" is, they must be sweating bullets right now. 17 days to go, and they only just achieved 1/3 of the total pledge amount they need to get this off the ground. Unless their panel at SDCC lights the world on fire, this will most likely meet with a premature end. To be honest, I think the industry figured that one out 'round about 1992... when articles in American anime magazines covering new Macross releases started to use phrases like "Forget Robotech" or only mentioned the Robotech portions of a side-by-side release of Robotech and the original shows as an afterthought. It'll definitely make Frank and Harmony Gold look bad... well... worse than they already do, anyway. Frank's reputation isn't what you'd call spotless and saintly ("acquittal! acquittal!", said the Harmony Gold parrot), but the Robotech staff have been doing an amazing job of making Harmony Gold look bad since at least 1999 thanks to some legendarily poor judgement. In all likelihood, it was the overwhelming runaway success of the Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter that convinced them that the fans would be throwing fat stacks of cash at Harmony Gold over Robotech Academy. They probably should've looked at details other than the total take, since the RRT Kickstarter turned into an ongoing public relations disaster for Palladium Books that has reportedly deteriorated to the point of backers threatening legal action against Palladium and even exchanging death threats on the comments pages. Water from a poisoned well, as they say...
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Sir, I salute you. Sure they did, how else do you think they came up with Janice Em... or as many Robotech fans know her, Commander 36DData? That depends on a few different factors, as of PB's last update... namely, the speed with which the goods actually reach Palladium Books' offices in Westland, the amount of time they can spare to prepare the stuff for shipment, etc. So, thanks to the vagaries of international maritime shipping and overland shipping, and the serial laziness of Palladium, there's a possibility that no backers for RRT will get anything prior to Palladium selling their limited stock of airmailed material at GenCon. MOSPEADA probably would've done better, IMO, if it had kept the planned original emphasis on the titular mecha instead of going for a piece of the Macross transforming fighter toy profits with both hands and fumbling the original concept in the process. SDCC's looking like it's going to have to be one hell of a Hail Mary save if they want to pull this off... the 3% a day loss continues, with today's projected final total of just 63% ($316,302) and a high-low projection cone that is now entirely below $270k ($205,552 to $266,126). If this keeps up, they'll never make it to 50%, let alone 100%.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I... kinda do. It must have been one truly hilarious, sleep-deprived, 3:00 AM brainstorming session that led to someone on the staff saying "Y'know what this show needs? Sentient lemur fairy people." That must have been one hell of a trip. Hm... now there's another weird thought. Matchbox (Mattel) was bankrolling the development and production of the Robotech II: the Sentinels animated series. Wouldn't it be a kick if it turned out the reason Harmony Gold so consistently refuses to continue the Robotech II: the Sentinels series is because their contract with Matchbox is still valid? Wow... it's... a summation of the most pessimistic musings the Robotech fans have been talking over. Class of raw recruits who are expies of/rivals to existing characters (Sentinels) including the seemingly-mandatory generic prodigy and spunky action girl, lost in deep space on a ship the don't understand and unable to use their fold drive to get home (Macross Saga, Sentinels), and beset by aliens who just want their sh*t back (all of it). This makes Astro Plan and Space Gandam V look like masterpieces of original thought. As Robotech plots go, this is practically paint-by-numbers.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Er... forgive me for saying so, especially since I am probably the last person who should be correcting anyone about anything that appears in Star Wars, but that craft in the video has four cannons and only two intakes (or four semicircular intakes). The art I've found for the Z-95 on the Star Wars wiki "Wookiepedia" shows the stock Z-95 as having two cannons and four circular intakes like the stock X-Wing from the original trilogy. It looks a fair bit like this thing, which is apparently a very heavily modified custom Z-95, which seems to be derived from the same Ralph McQuarrie sketch as the craft in that YouTube video... the sketch in question was posted a few posts previous in that same Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/starwars/status/491274058323877888
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe, maybe not... or perhaps the winged fairy lemurs will be something important to them the way the original Sentinels had that Tirolian scientist obsessing over miniature purple shih tzus.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Duly noted. Like I said, I haven't really been paying attention to anything related to the new Star Wars flick... but that design's got my attention. Looks like a neat design, and I kinda like that "used future" look it's got going on. A little more streamlined than the old X-Wing, but not so much so that it ends up in "Raygun gothic" territory like the various Naboo craft out of the prequel trilogy. It still looks utilitarian and serviceable though, which is good. I didn't like how some of the prequel trilogy stuff looked like it had put looking cool ahead of being workable in a fight. (Of course, I know the square root of bloody nothing about Star Wars, for the most part... my exposure to it consisting entirely of the six movies, the Thrawn trilogy of novels, and the old X-Wing vs TIE Fighter PC game, so my experience with SW designs is very limited.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I dunno, tribbles were always pretty passive trouble... and the flying monkeys were a good deal bigger. That thing puts me more in the mind of something that might've been exotic background fauna in something like Dunbine or Escaflowne, or at least on the cover of some progressive rock band's album. That's not to say it wouldn't be a real hoot if those adorable little things have been picking on the Robotech Masters... that'd be one step worse, humiliation-wise, than the Galactic Empire losing out to the frigging Ewoks.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe this'll mark me out as some kind of heretic, maybe it won't... but I think that design on the Twitter page is kinda cool lookin'. I've been ignoring the news about the new Star Wars movie(s) until now, but this actually has me vaguely curious to see what they're doing. Well played, Mr. Abrams... well played indeed. Also, I kinda liked the "weathered" look the Rebel aircraft had... having them look a little roughed-up made them feel more like something used by an outfit that wasn't overblessed with resources.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it's hard to believe these things are supposed to be antagonists now... there are more menacing-looking Beanie Babies.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Behold, the Children of Zor... (Image source is the Robotech "Legacy Collection" DVD set by ADV Films, Extras disc No.3 "Elements of Robotechnology III" character animation model sheet gallery.)
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Because, shortly after the Shadow Chronicles was released on DVD they landed that live-action license agreement with Maguire Entertainment and apparently believed that Robotech was going to be receiving a fast-tracked big-budget live-action movie, and their management put Shadow Rising on indefinite hiatus in the hopes that if they waited to cross-promote it with their live-action movie they'd land much better investment deals and be able to make a higher quality film. (They were actually shockingly candid about this, apart from McKeever's desperate backpedaling over what the actual meaning behind "indefinite hiatus" is.) The generally-held theory behind Robotech: Love Live Alive is that it was something rushed out to capitalize on the death of Carl Macek (it was marketed as his last project) and to distract fans from the general lack of anything resembling forward motion from both the Robotech live-action movie and Shadow Rising. The fans on Robotech.com and elsewhere repeatedly called Harmony Gold on the way their decisions were eroding away what momentum had been gained by Shadow Chronicles, though that seems to have largely fallen on deaf ears. As far as turning to Kickstarter, I think that's prompted by the attitude Harmony Gold's management had/has towards investing in development of a new series. For the past few years, even Kevin McKeever could be caught admitting on the forums that senior management would not approve the development of a new series unless a network offered them an episode commitment before development began. As that's the very picture of a self-defeating position, they may well have turned to Kickstarter to fund their development as a way of circumventing their management's unwillingness to fund development of a pilot. It's worth remembering that Harmony Gold sets a much lower bound for "successful" than the industry normally does... so what THEY consider to be doing well enough for a sequel is, in all likelihood, what a more competent company would consider a bad situation. Funny story... the "Children of Zor" were/are actually a concept that didn't make it into the aborted Robotech II: the Sentinels project... there's supposedly some concept art of them on the Sentinels extras disc in various Robotech DVD releases. I'll try to find my copy.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It certainly seems that way... several of the Robotech-related websites that I'm aware of have actually outright banned discussions and/or news posts about the Kickstarter because none of the Robotech fans present had anything even remotely nice to say about it. With Tommy's actual behavior stuck in Schrodinger's Cat territory, Tom has always come across as being the "one sane man" from Harmony Gold. I must confess I'm a little floored at the complete absence of a frothing fanboy denunciation of Tom's mild response to the Kickstarter. Normally the mere mention of his name has the Harmony Gold volunteer thought police bouncing off the walls with barely restrained impotent fury. I'll say this though. The attitude I've seen from a lot of people who I've known for a good long time, and who usually could count themselves among Robotech's most ardent and rational defenders, is not much different from Tom's. Their objections are most commonly threefold: "It's not Carl's idea, it's Tommy's", "It's a bad idea", and "That it's a Kickstarter is a very public and obvious vote of no confidence in Robotech on the part of Harmony Gold". Most of those doing the backing, except for the 200 or so that the Kickstarter backers have pointed to as the "Take my money!" crowd, seem to be operating out of cautious optimism and not the unabashed blind enthusiasm Tommy's trying to attribute to them. Yep, McKeever's been making some leading remarks that there'll be some kind of "big reveal" about the involvement of Rick and the others at the SDCC panel... so I think it's safe to say they're praying for the SDCC panel to save their bacon, otherwise this's going down.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    While I know that it's kind of a YMMV thing, there's a pretty big gulf between interacting with Tommy Yune in his official capacity as the "creative director" for Robotech and interacting with him "off the books". On the occasions I've run into him when he's giving a public speech or something about Robotech, I definitely see shades of the preening egotist and a little bit of the natural troll mode that seems to piss people off by his choice of words alone. The few times I've managed to have a candid, off-the-clock discussion with him I've found him to be no more or less irritating than pretty much anyone I run into in the course of a normal day. At the end of the day, I'm stuck in the same position on him that I am with Carl Macek. I honestly can't tell whether the guy who's able to piss people off just by talking is his actual behavior as a professional, or if it's some kind of silent protest he's indulging in while his job forces him to echo the lies and distortions that are the Harmony Gold company line. 's like Macek's interview shortly after Robotech.com went online. Did he really have so little respect for the intelligence of the average Robotech fan that he was convinced the obvious lies would pass without inspection, or was he grinding his teeth silently while he dutifully copied out a HG-sanctioned official answer? Wow, they're really doing a full court press with this one... though this is one of his less offensively idiotic interviews, IMO. It does confirm one thing for us, this is absolutely an attempt to salvage Robotech II: the Sentinels (again) and cash in on that sweet, sweet wellspring of Macross nostalgia. Starting at the end of the 2nd Robotech War, is it? McKeever's doing the usual "dangle-Rick Hunter in front of the fans to get attention" thing on Robotech.com too, though this time it doesn't seem to be working. They're trying the same sell as they did in Robotech II... the descendants and pupils of the Macross Saga cast. I'm a bit baffled by this idea of mecha that are going to be transitional designs between the 2nd and 3rd Generations, because their established continuity actually has the mecha of the Masters Saga developed AFTER those of the New Generation. They might be doing something awful to the timeline again... unless this is their way of referring to the Convert and the Condor out of MOSPEADA's backstory.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    The footage is included, IIRC, in the Super Dimension Fortress Macross release on blu-ray... so it's available on home video, at the very least.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    ... isn't Shadow Rising already dead? I know they said they were going to resume work on it since the LAM was all kinds of not happening, but they've done nothing with it as far as anyone (VAs included, AFAIK) knows. The LAM was a goner the moment they started publicizing that even Sylvain White had passed on it. Obviously I can't say for certain, but their sudden all-or-nothing focus on the Robotech Academy Kickstarter says to me that the LAM's dead in the water and that Shadow Rising is either on the back burner or canceled (again). Updating the aesthetic to appeal to a more modern audience... and to be more in line with the Shadow Chronicles uniforms and so on. Harmony Gold doesn't consider the footage of the Sentinels "movie" to be canon, so technically they're free and clear here in that the Prelude comic didn't use them either. It's just as well, since the Masters Saga is the fandom's un-favorite (according to HG and Toynami, anyway) and the old Sentinels uniforms are Southern Cross-based and VERY 80s. To me, from a practical view, it's actually a sensible decision. As far as "why not set it 20 years after the 3rd Robotech War", the answer is the same as for Robotech 3000... because the big draw is "the continuing adventures of Admiral Rick Hunter and friends", and without that they really don't have an audience that would be big enough to justify doing anything at all. (I'm sorry to keep harping on that, but that's the reality behind every "why didn't they do something new" story question.) You'd be wrong there, friend... I'm told there are some real nasty ones on certain Robotech facebook groups. A buddy of mine admins one, and he's had to roll out the banhammer for a few unpleasant lads who seem to have nothing better to do than bait Macross fans. (I won't get into the details, but what's been shown to me via that friend is profoundly unpleasant.) I don't really count the ones on Robotech.com, because the mods there are actually spurring them on, and without their agitation most are actually decent enough folks. The ones I'm aware of are mostly die-hard Southern Cross/Masters Saga fans who are embittered by the way Harmony Gold focuses on Macross and the Macross Saga above all else.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    I fear you may have missed the thrust of my thought, though I guess that's on me for not being my usual blunt self about it. You look at what the vague synopsis of Robotech Academy they've been circulating to their backers says and it's clear that they've bowed to the fans' insistent requests for something analogous to a continuation of Robotech II: the Sentinels. The fans have been very vocal, both on Robotech.com and elsewhere, about how what they want is the continuation of the Macross Saga cast's story. Harmony Gold has stuck with the line that a revisit of Sentinels is off the table, so this Robotech Academy project seems to be their attempt at a "next best thing" solution. Perhaps that's why Harmony Gold itself didn't want to fund this... it's a stealth continuation/side story of Robotech II: the Sentinels, a story the management doesn't seem to think is worth revisiting. They're clearly making an effort to try and recapture both those distinctive Sentinels designs and the Macross-y flavor that Sentinels did actually manage to have on some levels... though that, oddly enough, doesn't seem to be enough to sell the idea to a lot of the fans. Actually, reflecting on that, the fans grumbled a fair bit about how Shadow Chronicles went snooker loopy after branching off from the comic book conclusion to the Sentinels story arc (Prelude Vol.1's first half was basically a panel-for-panel revisit of the comic's last issue). This looks to be a lot closer, so why do so many of them seem unhappy with it? (Apart from the ugly ship that was the first "big reveal", anyway.) EDIT: I suppose, in that light, one could almost say that this was following the spirit, rather than the letter, of Carl's general "wish" for the series... revisiting the Sentinels period in a roundabout way.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Your guess is as good as mine, but if Frank Agrama is now unwilling to finance further Robotech development the way we (and now Tom) have speculated in this thread then it certainly bodes ill for Robotech's future. Perhaps they'll put the franchise into another ten-year coma while they sh*t out feeble comics the way they did in the 90s. Perhaps they'll just throw in the towel and either seek out Big West hat-in-hand over Macross licensing or sell the rights. It's impossible to say, because their actions are often at odds with what most of us would consider good business sense. It's harsh, but for the vast majority of Robotech fans it's also absolutely true. If you ask most of them what part of Robotech was what drew them in and captured their imaginations, they'll tell you "the Macross Saga". That's why Robotech Academy is really playing up the Macross connection in its pitch and its iconography. Most of them could care less about the Masters Saga or New Generation, they want a Star Wars EU-style continuation of the story of Macross's original cast. From Tom's account up there, it seems like they were in good company... that apparently being Carl's own wish as well.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Just remember, there has historically been a pretty big gulf between Tommy Yune's "early concept" art the final product. What he did for Shadow Chronicles started out looking like a credible imitation of MOSPEADA, and mutated into something that looked like American superhero comics. It would be a bad idea to assume this art has more than a remote, tangential connection to what it'd look like in the finished work. What do you mean resemble? That IS the SDF-3 in their video... the "red turd" Sentinels version, no less... since Prelude did keep that design before the Invid Regent shot the bow off and they rebuilt it into something MOSPEADA-esque. EDIT: Looks like this might be the worst day yet for the Kickstarter, with just two hours left in the day and the net take being just $1,547 spread across 10 backers.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    *impressed whistle* The trend-line predictions on Kicktraq just keep getting grimmer for Robotech Academy... the estimated likely pledge total is now at 69% ($345,651), and the estimated high-low projection cone now sits at 49-74% ($246,189 to $370,970). They're losing about 3% off the top every day, and there's still 19 days to go and they're almost to single digits in terms of the number of new backers being added daily. If the current downward trend is arrested where it sits now (about $3,400 a day), they'll reach approximately $228,000 (45.6%) of their goal at the end of the 35 day funding period. The natives appear to be restless, as well, and some of them are brave enough to call a spade a spade: (emphasis mine, but the quote belongs to user david lacina on Kickstarter, from his post approximately 12 hours ago at time of writing) It doesn't come as any surprise that, even thought Academy logo is already a tissue-paper thin ripoff of the UN Spacy roundel from pre-Frontier Macross, their main draw is unashamedly Macross-derived material for, you guessed it, Skull squadron. Why it bears "UN Spacy" is questionable at best, since even if we put aside that this a clear attempt to play the Robotech fandom's nostalgia for Macross, in Robotech Skull squadron's not attached to the Defense Forces anymore by this point (it's part of the Expeditionary Forces). With a tiny input of extra effort this could almost have been something that could masquerade as original in bad light at fifty paces... something blatantly UEEF would've gone a ways towards giving the illusion that this isn't just the latest attempt to shake the closet Macross fans in Robotech's fanbase down for some dough.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    That makes two of us... as I'm a ten-thumbed artistic cripple whose stickmen come out malformed. I was thinking more along the lines of the difference between cinematography for documentary/educational purposes and cinematography intended for use as entertainment. It's a whole different school of thought, though you make an excellent point that compositing CG with animation is going to be quite a different working environment than CG alone or CG and live-action. It's gonna be a real tall order for them to produce something satisfactory after all the criticism leveled at Shadow Chronicles for its conspicuous and lazily-done CG (I think most of the folks I knew harped on the antialiasing failures, which led to every vehicle being surrounded by a slight haze of white pixels because they screwed up the textures). Probably not. The Harmony Gold of thirty years ago might have been on board with an idea like that, but ever since 2001 they've been indulging heavily in revisionist history to make themselves look better. Carl Macek went from being "that guy with that show" to, in their eyes, a science fiction innovator/visionary on par with Niven, Heinlein, Roddenberry, or Lucas. Unless the third party was basically parroting the company line and only allowed to print the borderline hagiography that is HG's press packet, they wouldn't allow it. There'd be too much chance that third-party reportage would make them look incompetent (which they generally are). Most of that nonsense is Cafepress press level easy, and the art book will probably be the same amateur-hour bull as The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles (if it gets made). This is minimum-effort quick-burn garbage, for the most part. (AotSC was, in large part, just a bunch of grainy, low-def screen captures dominating two-page spreads with a few scattered pieces of production color sheets or untextured CG models.) I dunno, Macek was supposedly a consultant on RTSC, and that mess was made on a budget of under $1 million, most of which Harmony Gold claimed went to animation and voice actors. (Mark Hamill doesn't come cheap, apparently, though they claimed it was because the original VAs are now SAG members, and thus commanded higher pay.) The more they talk about it like that, the more I think this is going to be a retread of the Star Trek: Deep Space 9 episode "Valiant", where a ship of cadets tries (unsuccessfully) to take the fight to the enemy after the supervising officers are killed on their training flight.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Wow, slow room. Still, I imagine the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will still be a bigger draw than Robotech, so a lot of the room's population for Harmony Gold's presentation will probably be TMNT fans looking to grab a good seat. Remember, I'm not wondering who will ACTUALLY be at fault... just who Harmony Gold will blame and what their accusation will turn out to be. Creavision has shown that they're reasonably competent in producing animation when they're working with known quantities like familiar IP or real-world military hardware. Producing stock combat footage for documentaries is considerably different from the skillset necessary to produce compelling and exciting action sequences for entertainment purposes. What they've shown us on the Kickstarter page thus far would've been impressive fifteen years ago, but now is honestly no better than what we'd see from cinematics in a video game with a fairly modest budget. It's certainly nowhere close to the standard we've come to expect in the anime industry in the past eight or so years. Would Harmony Gold blame Creavision if Robotech Academy fails? I don't think they're the most likely target, but they're not the least. If they don't want to blame Macek posthumously, the next logical port of call for the blame (assuming they won't just break character and blame themselves for once) would be Creavision for "failing to execute Carl's glorious vision". (Crap, the more I think about it, the more Harmony Gold's efforts to find a guilty party sound like something we'd get from North Korean government officials.) Dark, but likely. I'm not trying to be humorous, I'm seriously musing on who the scapegoat will be once this fails. They might well blame Carl Macek, since this whole project is allegedly his idea and being executed in a manner faithful to his artistic vision for a new Robotech series. They won't want to blame themselves, and unless Tommy and co. are actually on thin ice the way Macek was with Robotech 3000, they own't accept the blame themselves. The last time they admitted the idea was bad was Robotech 3000, and if this spins in so hard that they have to admit the concept itself was bad, then it's all on Carl's head because they've pushed this as being Carl's visionary concept. I don't think for a second that this was actually Carl Macek's idea... except on the most basic, conceptual level. Yeah, at the most basic level, the explanation we're going to get when they don't reach $500,000 is "the stars were not right". The same explanation they've been giving for almost thirty years now. The fans will likely get some of the blame too, for not ponying up enough scratch to make this work.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Whether they'll keep using those designs is another matter entirely... since they were not well-received by the fans. I'm definitely curious to learn why they felt it necessary to radically redesign Emerson to the point of jettisoning any visible references to those ugly Southern Cross Army uniforms. After all, Harmony Gold established that the Southern Cross Army was a thing even before the destruction of Earth in their reboot comics and that the uniform or something very similar was in use by their brass circa '08. Copyright law can be a pretty f'ed up field sometimes... and doubly so where derivative works are concerned. As Harmony Gold's sequel development basically amounts to unauthorized derivative works, they have to be extraordinarily careful. It might feel like they're making a mountain out of a molehill, but the law and common sense don't overlap as often as they should. Harmony Gold has to be especially careful because they're working with IP they don't own, and so these extreme measures might be considered "playing it safe", since they seem to believe that almost anything could provoke a lawsuit from Japan. *impressed whistle* They're losing about 3-4% a day off their projected endpoint... and the projected upper bound is now below $400,000. I wonder if the record low from yesterday is, in part, due to the entirely-predictable "Rick might appear in this" update. By now, I think a lot of folks who would attend the convention panel are pretty well conditioned to think that Harmony Gold won't be bringing anything new or interesting to the convention. They're not exactly known for being great or entertaining presenters... but there is always the chance that it might catch the attention of the people using their panel to cadge the good seats for whatever's got the room next. There might be a brief uptick, but I very much doubt SDCC will arrest the slow plunge toward oblivion. They pointed the finger at the Tatsunoko-supplied writers working for them in Sentinels via the Robotech Art books (their original official account of what went wrong), and sort of pointed the finger at The Idol Co. (though I don't think they've ever indicated who hired 'em, HG or Cannon) over Robotech: the Movie. There's a fun little admission of guilt from them when they blamed all of the bad female character design from Shadow Chronicles on Tommy via a terrible joke at one of the small early screenings that most people misinterpreted as a racist condemnation of DR Movie. Since it's looking like Robotech: Academy is potentially going to miss its funding target by as much as 50%, I have to wonder who they're going to blame. Will it be: Creavision, either for preemptively poisoning the well by publicizing the fact that they'd received a cease and desist notice from Harmony Gold over their fan-film or for not doing a "good enough" job of the animation in the trailer to get attention. Palladium Books, for the ill will they've stirred up with their unapologetic mishandling of the Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter, which is an ongoing mess with all the bitterness over broken promises to backers about receiving goods before they went on sale to the public. Carl Macek, because he's too busy being dead to defend himself, and they've pushed this as being his brainchild. Tommy Yune, because he supervised the execution of Carl's alleged vision, and he seems to be the man who can do no right where many of the long-time fans are concerned. The fans themselves, for not digging deeply enough into their pockets to fund this.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Where that matters for projects like Robotech Academy is that it can't be chalked up to simple coincidence... because there IS a demonstrable link to the original designs. Copyright law with respect to derivative works is a bit of a mess when it comes to there being provable violations, but it's not something a company in Harmony Gold's situation wants to take chances with. It's actually something Carl Macek identified as a significant problem with Robotech sequel development in an interview he did for Robocon 10 that was published in the Summer '95 run of Robotech comics. Trying to make the characters separate and distinct from the copyrighted source material while also preserving some semblance of connection to who they're supposed to be isn't an easy balancing act for properties built on someone else's IP. Harmony Gold's non-answer as to why they totally redesigned all of their returning characters that weren't from MOSPEADA made no sense, but it makes perfect sense if you look to Macek's candid explanation from '95, and factor in the souring of relations between Harmony Gold and Big West. If it wasn't an issue, why did they even give a facelift and new uniform to Emerson when the ASC is still a thing and he doesn't survive the 2nd war?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... my read of it was essentially a (brief) acknowledgement of what Macross II's prequels suggested. Namely, that the Zentradi (and Meltrandi) military hardware isn't necessarily uniform across the entire galaxy. Some fleets have slightly different variants of the same designs (like the Nousjadeul-Ger and Queadluun-Rau), or even whole families of mecha other fleets don't get. In short, that both versions exist and are in service at the same time, and what version a fleet has depends on what factory they're getting them from.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Copyright-wise, it's all a question of how close his appearance is to the original Macross designs by Mikimoto. They redesigned him once for Robotech II: the Sentinels, but there were still some visible cues to who it was supposed to be (his crestlike hairdo), even though his wardrobe was different. Ever since their legal slip-up in the early 00's, they don't seem to think even that major redesign from Robotech II is far enough from the original to be "safe", hence the use of Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles to go dispose of anyone too familiar to use and present totally new, nothing-in-common redesigns of the ones who were too important for them to dispose of. The familiar-but-distinct thing is ALWAYS a legal minefield. The problem is that, given the overwhelmingly negative reaction to those redesigns on Robotech.com and elsewhere, their new look didn't go over well. It left them in a pretty awkward place, so they have a choice between taking a risk and making him look more like his Mikimoto origins or keeping his Hideo Kuze-clone look and alienating the long-time fans who are the ones doing all the funding of the project. Looking at what they've done with Emerson, their attempt to Macross-ize the design (or at least his uniform), it definitely makes me think that "Rick" won't put in much of an appearance. All to the better, the fans'll feel less betrayed if Harmony Gold doesn't go for bait-and-switch again and focuses mainly on the new cast. They tend to miss the characterization when it comes to the holdovers from the show. EDIT: On a related front, why aren't they trying to create an original ship design based on the Southern Cross aesthetic the way they did for the Shadow Chronicles movie with a MOSPEADA-esque ship? That seems like a no-brainer, but instead they made that ugly mess...
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