Seto Kaiba

You're doing it wrong... you have to say my name three times, like in Beetlejuice. Sadly, there don't appear to be any plan views of the VF-2JA out there. I assure you that if there were, I would've made sure of their inclusion in the Macross Mecha Manual's Macross II coverage. It's a minor background mecha, so it doesn't really get much in the way of coverage... whereas the Valkyrie II has plan views both with and without its Super Armed Pack. Yeah, the Valkyrie II's transformation is also set up such that it makes the battroid taller than the fighter mode is long, which is a bit unusual as well. I do think putting it next to the longest VF might do a bit to overstate its small size though. For those who care, the above-posted size comparison is from This is Animation Special #5: Macross II pg79. Admittedly, some of the toys and models don't do a great job of matching the official information... my personal (least) favorite is the 1/250 collection's VF-2SS, which lists the fighter mode length as 15.2m, a figure that doesn't match the animation materials. That size comparison shows a fighter-mode length (w/ Super Armed Pack) of 14m on the nose... which jives with the official data. The line art shows the fighter itself is slightly shorter than the length with the SAP barrel, and computes out to 13.505m when you work from the size comparison. Macross Chronicle declines to list a size for it in the stats block on its mechanic sheet, but its own size comparison shows the Valkyrie II at about the same size as a VF-1. (Admittedly, Macross Chronicle's coverage of Macross II was spotty and inaccurate to say the least...)

Isn't "audacious" a bit strong for it? If I had to pick one word to describe the Auroran, it definitely wouldn't be "audacious"... it would be "esoteric". C'mon... it's a transforming Sikorsky X-Wing with a working rotor. As aerodynamic oddities go, that's well up there. More or less... it's certainly no stretch to call Shadow Chronicles Tommy's Sentinels fan-fiction.

Good question... you'll get as many answers as there are people answering, but most of them boil down to some permutation on the theme of "because Kawamori wasn't involved" or, as VF5SS put it, "because it was only average". Macross is a series that has built itself up on a run of exceptional shows, so Macross II criticized more than a stand-alone show of the same quality because it isn't just the one average show in a run of excellence... it's an average show that's trying to follow on from DYRL, one of the most exceptional Macross titles. Nope, I believe it's Bin Shimada or Steve Blum all the way through for Nexx Gilbert. Hibiki ended up with Sylvie because, as they correspond to the original love triangle... Hibiki = Hikaru, Sylvie = Misa, Ishtar = Minmay.

Eh... maybe, maybe not. Let me qualify that remark then in the interest of fairness. Even when measured against the yardstick of "transforming jet fighter giant robots in space!", Southern Cross mechanical designs like the space helicopter and the tank that provides no protection for its driver induce bouts of "What were they thinking?" among the fans... to say nothing of the casual viewers.

Harmony Gold is "starting to" hemorrhage fans from the Robotech franchise? Now that is a generous assessment. Let's not kid ourselves here... Robotech's fanbase started hemorrhaging fans around the time "Dana's Story" first went to air way back in 1985. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that the two great constants in Robotech's failed attempts to revive itself have been a loss of fans and catastrophic failure. Each and every one of Robotech's failed attempt to "regrab" a spotlight it never had to begin with has ended up costing it fans. When the Macross Saga ended and the Masters Saga started airing, the viewers threw up their hands and said "What the heck is this?"... and then the bottom fell out of the ratings when they stopped watching. When that godawful Robotech movie had its test-showing, the viewers threw up their hands and said "This is wildly inappropriate stuff for kids, and it's tied into that Masters Saga mess!"... and then the movie was quietly shelved, leaving fans with nothing new, giving them incentive to look elsewhere. When Harmony Gold tried to salvage the forcibly-aborted Robotech II: the Sentinels series by releasing the existing footage as a "movie", some fans threw up their hands and said "This is fecking awful!"... and gave up on the show. When the comic books started coming out, plenty of the fans who looked into them said "This sh!t is awful!"... and then promptly stopped following them, leading to a high cancellation rate. When the McKinney novels first dropped, plenty of the fans who looked into them said "Whatever this is, it isn't Robotech!"... and started flame wars on the internet, driving the fans of the novels out of the fandom in droves. When Carl Macek's last, desperate gasp to revive the dead horse that is Robotech manifested itself as the squeaky wet fart we've come to know as Robotech 3000, the fans threw up their hands and said "What is this? You're betraying Robotech's roots!"... and gave up on the franchise. When Tommy Yune replaced Carl Macek and rebooted the continuity by throwing out 90% of it, the fans threw up their hands and screamed "Sacrilege! How dare you defile my childhood!"... causing many to leave the fandom in irritation. When the Shadow Chronicles movie dropped, the fans threw up their hands and said "What the hell, Tommy? Half of this movie looks like it was done by a high school animation class, and the other half by a softcore porn artist!"... and not only deserted the fandom, but were forcibly removed in droves for saying so. Now Harmony Gold is stuck in a no-win scenario... with the Shadow Chronicles sequel stalled while they wait on the live action movie, they're trying to keep fans from deserting them by endlessly repeating "It's coming soon! It'll be huge!" while avoiding the unpleasant fact that it wouldn't look a damn thing like the familiar designs the fans are so hung up on for fear that they'll scream "Sacrilege!" again and desert the fandom. Yeah, our boy Tommy hasn't exactly had a ton of luck or support in his ongoing quest to "lay down the law" about what's what to a fandom that spend more than a decade deciding that for itself. Nor has he won much favor with his ongoing attempt to make the Robotech setting more like the original three shows and making Mospeada more like Macross. There's that old axiom "Don't fix what isn't broken." There should be another one, or perhaps a corollary to that to the effect of "You can't fix what's already broken beyond repair, so don't bother trying." Meh... I have to agree with Zinjo on this one. Honestly, I can't imagine a circumstance in which removing Southern Cross from the "Robotech equation" wouldn't immeasurably improve the series as a whole AND its future prospects. True, it's the central axis on which Robotech's borderline-incoherent story spins... but in what way is having the weakest and least popular saga be the most important to the story a good thing? Pinning the entire series on a perpetual poor performer like Southern Cross is a wildly lousy move if you intend to keep people watching all the way to the end. A middle arc made up of 24 agony-inducing episodes starring unlikeable characters and mechanical designs running the gambit from unremarkable to nonsensical is no way to hold onto an audience.

http://www.macrossworld.com/mwf/index.php?showtopic=35118&view=findpost&p=925913 You'll find it's already under discussion in the RT & HG thread...

Sorry you had to endure that... the voice acting in the english dub of Macross II: Lovers Again is absolutely freaking terrible. There's really no denying that. Macross II's english dub track is a relic of the early days of (mostly) faithful dubbing, so it was passable back when it first came out but generally hasn't aged well. I strongly recommend you watch that one in subs with the original Japanese audio tracks... though I'd say the same for the ADV dub of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, which is somehow even worse for being godawful despite having an all-star english VA cast. Meh... IMO, subs are the way to go with that one too.

Just a minute ago, I stumbled across a reference to the term "Grenade Box Protector" in reference to the Armored Valkyrie. It's in an issue of Animag from ~1987, in a short article by James Teal that discusses the Macross development history of the VF-1. Line art for the GBP-1S printed in the article is captioned "Shinnakasu GBP-1S (grenade box protector)".

I remember seeing "Grenade Box Protector" somewhere before, can't remember where though... it might've been a Palladium-ism from the 1st Ed. Robotech RPG, or maybe from Protoculture Addicts magazine. Yeah, that's the version I've seen more commonly... Ground Battle Protector. I thought it might've been one of the VF-X or VF-X2 manuals or guidebooks where I first saw that one, but I just checked and couldn't find it there. Nah, the acronym BFG (for "Big F***ing Gun") was part of the original Doom design document by id Software co-founder Tom Hall, though they used less explicit variants in the manuals for Doom II and Quake II, where it was described as "Big Freaking Gun", in the latter case with a clear (and printed) hesitation to draw a line under their word substitution. A good (and slightly more closely related) example of a backronym like that coming into common use in a fandom is the backronym for "MOBILE SUIT" in Gundam ("Mobile Space Utility Instrument-Tactical).

Eh... mostly, they're just ignorant. Sure, there are some Robotech fans who do that sort of thing because they think it's a really witty way to troll Macross fans. The rest, well, they're either confused or they don't know any better. A big part of the problem is that, over the years, Harmony Gold has put lots of time and energy into convincing Robotech fans to ignore anything to do with Macross. They've told obvious lies about how it's just knocking off Robotech, and told the blind faithful that Macross wasn't worth looking into. The problem was compounded by the way many Robotech fans exhibit a magpie-like tendency to steal anything that isn't nailed down and on fire and add it to Robotech in the fan-fiction and fanmade RPG supplements they made in the glory days of Geocities and Angelfire, and Harmony Gold's attempts to block Macross imports.

Uh... it may have something to do with you coming to a public forum to complain bitterly about something that most Robotech fans couldn't care less about, to an audience even less inclined to care than the average Robotech fan. To be frank, the general lack of sympathy for your "plight" shouldn't come as any surprise. Nor, for that matter, should the sentiments that you're wasting your time pursuing a fool's errand by trying to overturn one of the few sensible business decisions Harmony Gold has made in the history of their Robotech franchise. Meh... it hardly matters. The only version of the Robotech opening credits that acknowledge the real creators was the one cooked up for that 25th Anniversary party.

As far as I know, there hasn't been a HD re-release of Macross 7. Macross 7's animation quality being what it is, I can't imagine upsampling to a HD format would've done it any favors. I know that the same fansub group who originally did Macross 7 (Central Anime) went back and redid their subtitled release of the series using the cleaner video and audio from the DVD release (instead of the old VHS transfers) and corrected scripts, so that might be something you'd want to look into.

Or to put it another way, setting yourself up for a series of guaranteed disappointments is one way to pass the time.

's not a commercial market thing... the "VIP-caliber" and "VIP-Messiah" transport conversions are intended to ferry around the higher ranking mukkity-muks when they visit the individual theaters during a war. I can't remember which model of bomber they favored for that kind of thing, but a couple generals (as well as Winston Churchill) used converted bombers as their personal transports during World War II. (IIRC, Churchill's was a converted B-24 Liberator II) It seems unlikely, but maybe they've decided to intersperse them with other publications again... AFAIK the next book GAGraphic is working on is a similar thing for Metal Armor Dragonar. I've heard that said of the VF-27's head... but not the VF-25S's.

Oh, I wouldn't say that I hate the Southern Cross series... it's more like I find it intensely disappointing. I'll admit, I certainly had no love for the Masters Saga when I first watched Robotech (and still don't), but I left most of my antipathy for it behind after I watched Southern Cross in its unedited form. Bereft of the annoying alterations, Southern Cross had a decent concept and passable story going for it... but the good bits are concealed behind a battlement of bad mecha design and guarded by a largely unlikeable cast. The overriding impression I got when I was digging into the few existing Southern Cross publications was that if any one factor is responsible for the show's low quality and premature demise, it would be the apathy of its creators. They don't seem to have put much thought into anything but the generalities of the series, and it shows in This is Animation: Southern Cross. Something like half of the book is filler that has nothing to do with the content of the series, and the rest is disappointingly light on actual content. The same goes for what little else was printed about the show. Incidentally, I'm well aware that Southern Cross is far from the worst series out there. Hell, I have worse sitting on the shelves with the rest of my anime collection. (Angel Links being a perfect example...)

Speaking as someone who once put in a little (wasted) time against This is Animation: Southern Cross, I think I'd probably be more impressed by the ability to clearly recall the liner notes. As you'd expect from a Southern Cross publication, the show's TIA book can only honestly be called an egregious waste of paper and ink. Oh, I agree... it's an ailment that only seems to get worse the longer the victim remains an avid Robotech fan. Over time, they get more and more out of touch with Robotech as they form an ever-increasing number of baseless theories to spackle over the plot holes and dialogue errors in the Robotech TV series. At some ill-defined point, it reaches critical mass and they completely lose touch with the series... becoming more like fans of their own Robotech fan-fiction than the show itself.

Nah... to be fair, he is actually pretty knowledgeable when it comes to what little official information exists for the Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross series. It's just a little hard to take him completely seriously when he point-blank refuses to accept that virtually nobody gives a damn about Southern Cross and that it was a failure in Japan and in the international market, or when the official info he presents is so thoroughly embroidered with baseless supposition and fan-fiction that it loses any value it might've had in the first place (e.g. "the Sylphid Veritech"). No, he wasn't belittling you... just your opinion.

And why would there be? What businessman in his right mind would willingly make something he knows almost nobody wants to buy?

Or... and forgive me if I blow your mind with this... the reason Harmony Gold isn't using designs from Southern Cross in Robotech could be as simple and straightforward as having examined things like polling results, television ratings, viewer responses to the saga on video streaming sites, and the general mood of the fanbase and come to the logical (nigh-inescapable) conclusion that more of Southern Cross is precisely what most Robotech fans do not want. Let's see... last I checked, you could count the number of vocal Southern Cross fans in the Robotech fandom on one hand. It's not helping that foremost among Robotech's fans of Southern Cross is none other than dougbendo. Incidentally, has it ever occurred to you that the reason Robotech fans want to see Sentinels finished probably has a lot more to do with it being a direct continuation of Robotech's highest-rated, best-testing, most popular saga (Macross) with the plot completely centered around the most popular characters in Robotech (all from Macross), not its unfortunate and largely superficial relation to Southern Cross, a canceled series and the lowest-rated, worst-testing, most-hated part of Robotech? I'm just sayin... Giving more exposure to a provably broken product that the audience has repeatedly and emphatically illustrated it doesn't want is generally (and generously) called "wasting your time and money". I'm sure you'll write it off as coincidence, but there's probably a good indicator of why they don't give it more exposure in that in several of its television airings the show was either pulled after the Masters Saga or that the Masters Saga was skipped altogether. News flash... that doesn't require the right to produce derivative works (new animation) based on Southern Cross, since that was composed entirely of old animation reworked cut-and-paste style. They can do that because they have the distribution rights to the animation of the Southern Cross TV series. If the audience stops watching a series out of contempt, that's probably a good sign that the merchandise isn't going to sell.

That's it exactly... this has all the hallmarks of a harebrained scheme to boost interest in, and attendance at, the annual Robotech convention tour panel. Robotech.com's sycophantic mods are trying to invite discussion of the trailer, but are actively trying to stop fans from seeing the new footage without attending the panel. It's asinine, it's inherently counterproductive, and it demonstrates a complete and abject failure to understand the industry, the fandom, good marketing practices, and basic human nature... meaning it's almost guaranteed to have come from the desk (or rather, cubicle) of Kevin McKeever. Considering that the official website of the franchise hasn't seen any technological improvements or updates in the decade or so since it opened, that's probably truer than you think. The best part is that even though they've migrated servers to try and solve the crippling lag problems caused by their antiquated software, it still breaks down about once a week and locks up on a nightly basis for about an hour.

Kinda funny... that's exactly what I said about it when I first saw it. I said it looks more like an unused trailer for a proposed Robotech: Battlecry sequel (circa 2003) than a stand-alone OVA. That music is probably gonna be used in the actual production though... it's the generic Invid music from the Robotech TV series.

Yep... 's far as anyone can tell, the key demographic that Harmony Gold is targeting with Robotech is that small and shrinking group of overly-nostalgic fans who got into the series during one of its brief stints on television and have yet to realize what a mess it is. I'd say, based on my own experience, that the average Robotech fan is somewhere in his (or her) early-to-mid thirties. But for the more devoted and unbalanced ones, there's been a general decline in interest in Robotech ever since people found out the hard way that Harmony Gold takes a dim view of criticism... particularly where Shadow Chronicles is concerned.

Yes, there is. Mind you, its alleged battlefield success is entirely "informed ability", with no actual basis in the series or even the canon comics. http://www.robotech....&seriescode=NGE

Exactly... they would have to find competent people to reboot it from the ground up. The problem being, what competent person is going to want to work for a godawful fly-by-night operation like Harmony Gold? Moreover, with Harmony Gold's management apparently of the opinion that Robotech isn't worth spending money on even when it's enjoying a small measure of success for once, convincing them to launch a pricey and risky endeavor like a total reboot of the entire franchise would be a real trick... especially since it would almost be guaranteed to cost them that tiny group of hardcore fans who are their assured revenue stream!

's because they're treading OLD ground here. As in Mospeada, the Robotech "original" series spent an entire episode on the "big reveal" of Lt. Belmont's past and how he ended up marooned on occupied Earth and operating covertly as a female lounge singer. That was rehashed when Tommy took over with an entire comic miniseries devoted to telling a more detailed version of the same damn story, which is apparently being rehashed again for this side story nonsense. Given that they seem to be playing this completely straight and blindly adhering to the idea that his group had no Legioss/Alpha fighters when it attacked, I'm guessing laziness is a major motivation... that and a desire to avoid hacking off the remaining fans by further tampering with the series. (The tried and true Robotech production philosophy of "if they liked it once, they'll love it twice!")