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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Harmony Gold's reaction to the vocal, and surprisingly common, criticisms being leveled at the Robotech Academy Kickstarter by their own fans amounts to one big invocation of "What do you mean it's not awesome?". Also, I'm not so sure that Harmony Gold actually needs to bring more to the table than nostalgia and some half-baked concept art... their fans are famous for being not-terribly-discerning folks.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Well, you have to remember... even though Harmony Gold initially endorsed the project and then lied to everyone about whether they had sent the Cease and Desist notice, they claim the cease and desist was the brainchild of some outside agency that they decline to name. More of Harmony Gold's classic "it's someone else's fault, honest!". Eh, if Creavision's thick enough to take them up on it, who's more foolish... the fool or the fool who follows him?
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... while I don't doubt for a second that Warner Bros would do that IF they considered Robotech to have considerable potential for success. As if's go, that's an if so massive that light can't escape its surface. Now, that this Kickstarter is happening at all seems like a pretty reliable indicator that Harmony Gold's in good company in having no faith in Robotech. If Warner Bros thought that Robotech had the potential to be a legitimate commercial success, we wouldn't be having this discussion. They would've green-lit the Robotech live action movie instead of sitting on the rights for seven years and counting, and they would've brought it to someone higher profile than a fifth-stringer like Sylvain White or that virtual nobody who they took it to after he passed. Harmony Gold wouldn't have needed to bastardize Love Live Alive or put up a public plea for cash like the Robotech Academy Kickstarter, because Warner Bros would be pushing this as a high profile title. But we had Love Live Alive, and now we have the Robotech Academy Kickstarter... which proves beyond a reasonable doubt the higher-ups at Harmony Gold and Warner Bros don't see Robotech as something with legitimate commercial potential. This is, as so many have pointed out, a pretty transparent cash grab thinly disguised as the development of a pilot for a new series.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Yep... that could, with the right lawyer, be turned into grounds for a lawsuit on Big West's part since Harmony Gold is fraudulently claiming that they own the rights to all of Macross to drum up business. Under the right circumstances, it could also be used as a piece of evidence to support claims that Harmony Gold was willfully disingenuous when they were soliciting business if it came to legal action by the backers against Harmony Gold. Either way, they oughta check themselves before they wreck themselves... making claims like that is DANGEROUS.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Seems that way, yes... though they were, until this Kickstarter was announced, proclaiming to the fans that they wouldn't even get into development until a network gave them an episode commitment. It seems that they've finally bowed to reality on that, but that doesn't seem to have deflated their unrealistic opinion of the franchise's prospects any. They seem to think this is going to be on some major network, competing against big-name titles on an even footing. At best, this mess might end up in an infomercial time slot the way Robotech did when Canada's answer to SyFy They pulled most of their stuff from all of those already, so it doesn't seem their current distributor has any ties to those... unless they intend to find a new distributor, this might be a direct-to-video if a network doesn't pick it up. That's about the letter of it, yeah... though I doubt Harmony Gold itself has hundreds of millions of dollars. They're a fairly smallish company, and while Frankie-boy has a lot of dough from sources both legit and dubious floating around, we should confuse what he has for personal assets with what the small real estate company in California has to work with when all they have are a couple sets of apartment buildings in SoCal. If $500,000 for the development of a new Robotech series is a bridge too far, I doubt they're rolling in dough.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    's probably better than a more honest answer. "We're planning on a two year-long pub crawl of truly epic proportions... we might do a show with what's left over".
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Shadow Chronicles might've used characters from those, but remember that Sentinels was almost entirely Macross-driven anyway, and there was a concerted effort on Harmony Gold's part to Macross-ize the MOSPEADA designs (e.g. the Legioss w/ FAST pack). Even Harmony Gold doesn't really make much of an effort to disguise that the only part of Robotech that actually matters, narratively or commercially, is Macross. Get down to the leaked outline of what the "shadow saga" was supposed to be, and it's someone's terrible DYRL? and Battlestar Galactica crossover played out with MOSPEADA action figures.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    But Robotech fans are kind of iffy when it comes to anything that isn't Macross or directly tied to same. That's why every take on making a Robotech sequel tries to tie into the "Macross Saga" as directly and frequently as possible. Macross is the only part of Robotech that 99% of Robotech fans actually care about. By way of example, look at the Shadow Chronicles... every major character except for one has some direct tie to the Macross Saga cast. Agent ONE has the right of it, I think. Just look at the logo for Robotech Academy... a bastardization of the distinctive Macross UN Spacy roundel, not something that looks like MOSPEADA's Mars forces insignia even though the titular academy appears to be on either Phobos or Deimos.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I don't recall them ever trying that one for Shadow Chronicles. There, they made no secret of the fact that it was written by the current creative staff, and their reaction to it once the fans proclaimed that it was rubbish was to conclude that dismissing the movie as garbage was tantamount to a personal attack on Harmony Gold staffers (mostly Tommy), over which they proceeded to wear out many banhammers, stopping only when they realized they were in danger of completely running out of people. At some points, they tried to justify this with the claim that they didn't want Warner Bros to see the official Robotech web site full of people openly criticizing Robotech, but I don't think they ever tried the "poor dead Carl" trick for that, since the backlash happened when he was still alive. It wasn't until Carl snuffed it and they announced Love Live Alive as Carl's vision for Robotech that they started really to use "No, this wasn't us... this is all Carl's idea" as a shield from criticism. This is just doubly appalling because Academy is the second time they've fielded a laughable project with Tommy's fingerprints all over it and said "No sir, this is Carl's work" to get the fans to shell out for it.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    No, the REALLY disgusting part is that this isn't the first time they've tried that. That was also the heart of their pitch for their bastardized version of MOSPEADA's wrap-up OVA, Love Live Alive... about how it had been part of Carl's creative vision for Robotech for ages and they were doing it for him, dammit, because he wasn't around anymore to do it himself. In a way, it's even more shameless and disgusting if you're aware that, right up until Carl passed away, Harmony Gold's "creative staff" was cheerfully disposing of vast swathes of Carl's vision for Robotech because, in their terms, of its poor quality, its internal inconsistency problems, etc. They were only too happy to get condemn Carl's vision as a tangled, amateurish mess until he died and there was money to be made in attributing everything to him once he wasn't around to confirm or deny it.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    The part you bolded is legally actionable misrepresentation, should Big West wish to challenge them in court...
  12. Seto Kaiba
    All told, Harmony Gold's track record with missing release targets suggests that if everything proceeds according to their plan and they'd actually get the Kickstarter money they want, the Robotech Academy pilot would be 2-3 years late... so, probably mid-2018. Somehow, I suspect that things will NOT go smoothly. Creavision are rank amateurs, and will probably suffer considerable culture shock from having to 1. work on someone else's terms, 2. cede all rights to their work to someone else, and 3. deal with the MANY idiocies of Harmony Gold corporate culture including a torturously long and unnecessarily convoluted approvals process for each and every fiddly little thing that goes into the work, and Harmony Gold's insistence on having absolute control over the release of promotional information. That's not counting the inevitable issues they'll have hashing out a distribution contract when the time to release the home video edition comes, since previous distributors have suggested their approach might be best summarized with the term "Demands above their station", never mind all the time that'll be wasted pitching that no-sell mess to networks that'll likely be sorely pressed not to laugh in their faces and invite them to slam their heads in the door a few times on the way out. Realistically, we're looking at 2020... IF they get the money.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    My guess would be that we're probably getting close to the saturation point... Robotech's fanbase is very small, and has relatively few convention-goers. One of the recurring themes you'll hear if you talk to people who AREN'T drinking Harmony Gold's kool-aid about their convention panels is that the single largest group of attendees is usually people trying to get a good seat for whatever presentation has the room next. I doubt that'll contribute much towards their quota. Either way, the resounding lack of enthusiasm many Robotech fan groups have expressed for the project is, in its own way, being felt by the Kickstarter. The KS comments page is halfway to a full-blown flame war, and there are a small number of fans who are supportive of the project trying to get various forums to lock the threads full of criticism for the idea, asserting (perhaps correctly) that the overwhelmingly negative reaction is dissuading people who are on the fence from backing it.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    What's really telling is that over the past few days, the size of the average contribution has been steadily trending downward. Two days ago, when computed without the three significant outlying values, the mean donation was approximately $49.98. Last night, it was $46.32. That tells us that, while they are bringing in new backers at a trickle, those new backers aren't giving nearly as generously to the project as the first-ins did. To date, I've only seen one person seriously attempt to defend the Kickstarter or the ideas therein... and that's one of those nuts who's a frothy-mouthed fanatic who's likely just responding to the surprising and welcome hope expressed by some Robotech fans that this failure will convince Harmony Gold to either sell the franchise to someone who can actually develop it better or at least relinquish their stranglehold on Macross. My good chum, what makes you think that hasn't already happened? The Robotech live-action movie has every appearance of a license that was only taken out so Warner Bros could sit on it and do nothing.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    That might be true for the older fans among us, but the younger ones were introduced to anime and/or mecha through other, less obnoxious shows. Gundam Wing and Gundam SEED are cited a lot among younger fans as their gateway to mecha anime, which they typically encountered on cable television. For me, it was arguably a mixture of Macross II and Escaflowne. You wouldn't be alone in not liking Southern Cross... even Robotech fans can't stomach it, which is hilariously tragic considering that its Robotech adaptation is the centerpiece of the Robotech story. But hey, it was bad enough to get canned in Japan when barely half done, so...
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It's more linear in the sense that each "saga" theoretically follows directly on from the previous one, with recurring characters and so on. You boil down the Robotech fanbase's wishlist as far as future stories go and you'll find the overwhelming majority of them don't give a tinker's damn about the characters that Robotech inherited from Southern Cross or MOSPEADA. What they're really after isn't a new generation of characters or any of that bull... what they want is the continuing adventures of "Rick Hunter" and all the other Macross Saga characters. That's why they keep coming back to wanting the Sentinels to be revisited... because that's exactly what that was, the continuing adventures of the Macross Saga cast with some original characters who were largely just watered down copies of the cast of the Macross Saga (something the "movie" hangs a lampshade on in one of its very first scenes). Quite a few Robotech fans have trouble migrating to Macross because they've spent so long having Harmony Gold dangle that particular carrot over their heads... so when they find out that Macross's sequels feature new casts and leave the characters of the original series alone after they earn their ending, they're a little disappointed. Then, of course, you've got the few fans who suffer from a case of reactionary-butthurt, where they hate Macross and everything associated with it because they're Masters Saga fans who are bitter about that saga's status as the un-favorite and distant third place to Macross even in Harmony Gold's eyes.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yeah... but you have to consider that the overwhelming majority absolutely hated it. So much so, in fact, that the moderators over on Robotech.com ended up banning or otherwise driving away much of the site's member population with their efforts to suck up to Tommy Yune by banning his critics. The desperate fans who will take anything with the word "Robotech" on the box are the dregs left over from that purge... the fans who are so deep in denial you wouldn't put buying one of Tommy's turds in a box past them if they slapped the word "Robotech" onto the box and issued a limited edition certificate with it.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, since Big West has at least partial ownership of Southern Cross as well due to their role in financing it, Harmony Gold is either unable or unwilling to risk using intellectual property from that one as well. The only two Southern Cross holdovers that've appeared in new animation have received some pretty heavy makeovers and they've gone well out of their way to avoid showing any Southern Cross mecha and even stuck not!Jeanne into a MOSPEADA riding suit instead of her distinctive arming doublet in their new animation for Love Live Alive. It's just not clear how much of their reluctance to use that material is "We can't", "We don't want to risk it", and "Why would anyone want to?" respectively, since they freely admit that the "Robotech Masters" saga is far and away the least beloved of the fanbase.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Because, after over a decade of being lied to by Harmony Gold, the Robotech fans often mistakenly attribute a lot of things that had been present in the originals to the "creative vision" of Carl Macek... and because, at this point, they're so desperate for a new Robotech ANYTHING that many have discarded any pretense of having standards. That's what the Kickstarter is obviously banking on, that the fans will be SO excited at the prospect of anything new with the Robotech name on it that they'll throw huge sums of money Harmony Gold's way without thinking twice.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    EDIT: Okay, this post was entirely too maudlin originally... Let's just say that there are a lot of people in the Robotech fandom with really desperately terrible pattern recognition skills... it's too depressing to contemplate the alternative.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, I suggested that back on page 1... though I also suggested that it could spell the end for Robotech in general, since one of the few things keeping the fans around is the (false) promise of continuing the story in animation.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    You'll note that the version of the Sentinels media being released now is actually not the same as the one they were putting out years back... IINM they've excised any Macross footage that was used in it. Part of the reason they're able to get away with the Sentinels as a re-release is because it's so old and Big West didn't challenge it decades ago, but it's mostly because they actually did make more than a slight effort to redesign the characters and they never got far enough to use the potentially legally contentious designs like the ripoff destroids. It's also worth remembering that 20 years ago, Harmony Gold hadn't yet soured relations with the owners of Macross, so now they're much more cautious about what they use and how they use it to avoid a lawsuit. Comic books are legally merchandise, so that much they're allowed to do under the terms of their license from Tatsunoko. That's also why Harmony Gold used a comic to put every last potentially problematic character who was still recognizable in any way (like Britai and Minmay) into a grave or on a bus before they rolled out the Shadow Chronicles "movie". The only characters who were allowed to remain were ones who'd been redesigned such that they were completely unrecognizable.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    They tried that once, in the failed Robotech II: the Sentinels series... and that kind of minimal redesign is still straying dangerously close to a copyright infringement lawsuit. That's why, when they went to do Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, they made sure all the returning characters - even those that would only be appearing in the comic book - were all but entirely unrecognizable so the owners of the Macross IP wouldn't find cause for a lawsuit. That's why "Rick Hunter" in the Shadow Chronicles now looks rather like Hideo Kuze and has none of the distinguishing traits that the original Mikimoto character design had. "Lisa" also already got a redesign for the comic, and she's just another woman who's got the same generic pornstar body as all the women Tommy draws and couldn't be picked out of a crowd of one unless you had been told beforehand it was supposed to be her. Characters with more distinctive appearances, such as Britai, Exsedol, Max, and Milia were killed off or "put on a bus" because a redesign is still pretty risky... especially for the latter two, who are some of Macross's most-recurring characters. The "VF-4 Lightning" you think you see there is actually a AF-03 from Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, which has a similar shape, but does not transform. (If you've seen MOSPEADA, you'll remember this as the fighter Yellow Belmont crashed on Earth in.) No... the truly staggering amount of legal baggage the Robotech franchise already carries, coupled with the bad press from all of their various jackass behavior, would probably be enough to put almost any network off the series no matter how good it was. As the production staff are literal amateurs, the writers pathetically inexperienced, and the company behind it painfully out of touch in the industry, the chances of it getting green-lit are slightly worse than those of the Earth spontaneously stopping mid-spin to toss everyone into space. There's a very good reason they won't revisit the Sentinels concept... it's too risky, from a copyright perspective. They're staying well clear of anything overtly Macross wherever possible, because they know they've soured relations with Big West bigtime. The idea of doing a series set between two of the sagas derived from Big West-owned material is akin to suicide, and just trying to use the characters the fans would expect to see in that ungainly mess would be navigating a legal minefield with very little chance that they'll come out intact. Sentinels is off the table eternally because there's just too much danger of provoking a lawsuit... they'll never put it in those terms, but they're adamant that they will not be revisiting the Sentinels series come hell or high water and it doesn't take a genius to see why. As far as stories revolving around Zor and the "Robotech Masters", that runs into two problems... the first being that the fans are going to expect to see things Harmony Gold can't legally use like the Zentradi. The second is that the Masters Saga is, per what Harmony Gold's own staff and licensees have had to say, is far and away the least popular part of Robotech. A lot of fans simply loathe the whole saga on principle, to the extent that Toynami won't do Masters Saga toys because they're convinced they won't sell. If the goal is to "give the people what they want", then anything involving the Masters is demonstrably what they don't... at least, as far as any objectively measurable evidence is concerned (e.g. polling data).
  24. Seto Kaiba
    The key difference there, terry, is that while old Gene might've been a little nuts... at least his ideas were his and there were some decent people behind their execution who knew how to moderate and distill his insanity into something palatable. Neither of those has ever been true for Robotech. Especially Robotech II: the Sentinels, as that was practically paint-by-numbers in its completely generic sci-fi setting and they STILL screwed it up horribly. When your strongest story concept is something that leads to you firing experienced writers for telling you it doesn't make sense, it's time to consider a change of career.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Well, they have to budget for all the time they're going to waste "promoting" the pilot by adding a few slides to that one PowerPoint slideshow they've been working from since 2004 and flying themselves all over hell's half-acre to hold convention panels to show it to the half-dozen fans who care enough to attend each one. All that airfare, hotel accommodation, etc. costs money. Though, being serious for a moment, they'll probably end up spending a significant portion of that money on the voice cast... the old voice cast are reportedly SAG members now, so they command a much higher payscale than when they were working for HG back in the day. Oh, it has one piece... I think. it's in an update on the Kickstarter, but it's of a posthumous character (Zor). Harmony Gold is notoriously stingy when it comes to preproduction art, the whole Shadow Chronicles project only released a few pieces in one issue of Newtype USA the entire time the film was in production. Two or three other pieces of concept art were put out on the net by a Robotech.com moderator who received them in confidence from Tommy, but between those two events that's less than ten pieces total.
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