Seto Kaiba
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Eh... no. As I illustrated earlier, the aircraft in question is not an original design for this "side story" project... it's a holdover from the original Genesis Climber MOSPEADA. It's the very same model of fighter that Yellow Belmont ("Lancer" in Robotech) was found in after being shot down by the Inbit (Invid). It's not a transforming fighter either, so it's not really a part of Robotech's messed-up and highly contrived VF design lineage either.
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You should know better than most that Robotech doesn't run on logical answers... it runs on bullsh*t and "because I said so". I'm wondering that myself... last I heard, he had no posting privileges, so this came as quite a surprise.
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Nope, about all the comics they seem to be adapting say on that note is to briefly acknowledge that they were trained in the use of Alpha fighters and were expecting to use them, but they suddenly weren't available. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, the REF's weaponry is no better... and the series repeatedly and quite unambiguously does show that the Invid are the ones with the overwhelming numerical advantage. The same, frankly, goes for the Shadow Chronicles version of events, wherein the REF is so thoroughly curb-stomped that 80% of their fleet doesn't come back. The advantage they acquired for the final battle was the Shadow fighter and its passive stealthiness (in the series, active stealth in RTSC). That's all. That's about where they were, really... except they didn't bother to explain it except to briefly acknowledge that they were supposed to use Alpha fighters but didn't have any to hand for some reason. Throwing men to the lions seems right about Hunter's speed tho.
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Oh, it makes perfect sense when you consider that Admiral/Major General Rick Hunter is an incompetent pillock... but really, this is probably one case where we can't blame Tommy for something that doesn't make sense. His hands are tied because the original Mospeada, and thus Robotech's New Generation, establishes that [Yellow/Lance] Belmont was flying one during his time with the Mars Forces and shows that he was flying one when he was shot down and crashed. Robotech's one (recent) attempt to make it more Robotech-esque was to add a storage compartment for a Cyclone on that bulge on the back end of the plane in the Robotech: Invasion comic miniseries.
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Given that this side-story is supposedly covering Lancer's backstory... smart money says it's one of these: Not transformable, just ugly. Tommy did a transforming version and called it the VF-13 Gamma Fighter, but it never made the cut for Shadow Chronicles. As per the comics they seem to be adapting, the "Conbat" non-transformable fighter was what the REF forces were using (in the unexplained absence of Alpha fighters) during the ill-fated 1st Earth Reclamation mission.
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Oh, granted... but even back then, Tatsunoko Pro. had a fair amount of experience in distributing its work overseas. By the time the licensing agreement with Harmony Gold was drafted, Tatsunoko had already been licensing its work to distributors overseas for a good 16 years... and they're no strangers to success in that arena either, what with their earlier forays into international distribution being Battle of the Planets and Speed Racer. I would bet real money that their lawyers were on the ball enough to include at least some provision to give Tatsunoko control over a potential sale or first dibs on buying the rights back if Harmony Gold tried to sell. Eh... present circumstances being what they are, I would be inclined to suspect that if Harmony Gold went under and the Agrama family decided not to hang onto Robotech, Tatsunoko would definitely either try to reclaim the rights via contract provisions for that situation (if any were included) or would buy back the rights to the original Macross series simply to give themselves a bargaining point in any future dealings or conflicts with Big West and Studio Nue.
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Ah, yes... you wouldn't spot him if you were looking for his Glaug. He uses a Nosjadeul-Ger powered suit in the movie, one that has black trim instead of the usual silver. He only shows up in one scene, when Hikaru, Misa, and Roy are trying to escape from Britai's ship, wherein he crushes the head on Roy's VF-1S and smashes the cockpit before being shot in the stomach and caught in the explosion when Roy's VF-1S blows up. (In Macross II's continuity (DYRLverse?) he pulls a "comic book death" and comes back to have another go against the UN Spacy on several occasions)
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One would assume, given Tatsunoko's long experience in the industry, that their lawyer(s) would've had the sense to ensure that the terms of their licensing agreement with Harmony Gold USA would include some kind of provision to either allow them to reclaim the rights to Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada in the event that the licensee went under, or at least to give them "first dibs" if their licensee tried to sell off the rights to cover their losses.
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Shoji Kawamori "created" Macross: load of bull?
Seto Kaiba replied to danth's topic in Movies and TV Series
As eugimon just pointed out, this is pretty much a misunderstanding on your part. In point of fact, the concept from which the original Macross series was developed was created by Shoji Kawamori, and he's been involved in Macross's creative process as much more than "just a mechanical designer". His "claim to fame" as Macross's creator is entirely legitimate, and he's been setting the direction of the Macross story since the very beginning. -
Sort of... but, as you might expect, the way they did it was spectacularly tasteless. Instead of just posting a link and plea for donation to the Red Cross like they did with the disaster in Haiti, Harmony Gold decided the best way to raise donations for the crisis in Japan was to organize a charity auction and donate a bunch of the shoddy Robotech merch that wasn't selling at the Robotech.com store... all at a venue called Meltdown Comics.
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Heh... if it was "take a shot every time they lie or exaggerate their standing", we'd all be on our way to detox in the first ten minutes.
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Only the faithfully blind, people with poor pattern recognition skills, and the morbidly curious... When isn't that the case with them? Still, if their own in-house news piece about their plans for the AnimeExpo panel is anything to go by, you could just as easily switch "Day" with "Decade". Most of their itinerary seems to be the usual flimflam, though they clearly expect the promise of showing a few clips from their memorial documentary about Carl Macek and their heavily-biased and highly-selective version of Robotech's origin story to be the big point of interest... which, oddly enough, they're pitching as though a more honest and less flattering version hadn't been available in print for a good 25 years now.
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Where's a puking emoticon when you really need one?
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Nah, the evil Soviet powers weren't the only ones with those godawful "original" mecha designs in the old Palladium Robotech RPG, there were a fair few in the UEG forces in the main books and the Sentinels stuff too.
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Oh, there were tons of sites like that back around the time I first got involved in the online Robotech fandom... most of which have been "lost to history" due to free hosting services pruning unused sites and the closure of Geocities. MS Paint chop jobs like you described were pretty rare, the most common approach was to take designs from whatever mecha show was popular at the time and give them a Robotech backstory, sometimes going as far as to Robotech-ize the story of an entire series to use it as a fourth Robotech saga. Macross and Gundam were both pretty popular targets for that sort of thing, though I've also seem them draw on Evangelion, Patlabor, Blue Gender, and at one point even the Star Wars: the Clone Wars cartoon. It's funny you should mention that kind of messy image editing though, because the "2nd Edition" Macross Saga sourcebook has some of that. One of the artists tracers who worked on the book tried to make new, official-looking line art for Robotech's "VF-1R" variant by crudely editing Tommy's art of the head onto Studio Nue's art of the VF-1 battroid. The end result looks awkward and out-of-place, with two radically different levels of detail.
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Quoted for truth. Seconded. Not long after the Shadow Chronicles core book first came out, I was given a copy of the book by a friend of mine who runs a gaming/hobby shop in town. He'd ordered the bloody thing on a lark, and decided he'd get it off his shelves for good when nobody showed any interest in buying it. I gave it the once-over, and I was left wondering if Harmony Gold had deliberately tried to sabotage the book's fluff text and setting information so it wouldn't hurt sales of The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. The crunch is, if anything, even worse... "issues galore" doesn't quite cover it. The supplements have been just as bad, to the point of having fans expect the books to have enough problems that the errata/corrections thread is made before the book even gets back from the printers. Just a few weeks ago, a well-meaning bloke on the Palladium forums gave me a copy of the new Macross Saga sourcebook, and we went over the thing together. Despite the Robotech fanbase's frequent protestations that Robotech isn't Macross, the Macross Saga sourcebook was clearly written using Macross sources, almost to the exclusion of everything else. The only real differences are in terminology, some of the fluff, and the NERFing of pretty much everything compared to the previous edition of the game and that old Macross II RPG. I haven't yet been exposed to the Masters Saga sourcebook yet, but given that the errata thread ended up turning into a flame war, and that I've heard nothing but complaints about it from everyone I know who has a copy, I'm not exactly eager to go over it myself. Then again... having Robotech fans build the universe by making stuff up as they go isn't anything new. That was the premise of at least half of all Robotech fan sites on Geocities and other free-hosting sites. They'd "borrow" designs and stories from any mecha anime they ran across and incorporate them into their Robotech games or fan-fiction. Macross was the usual favorite, though I've seen them also do Gundam, Evangelion, Patlabor, and a handful of other robot shows. I haven't seen any official commentary from Palladium about the sales of the Robotech RPG books, but there's a lot of discontent from those who did buy them regarding the "manga size" and the excessive price of the "normal" 8.5x11" hardcover edition.
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No, the only variants of the VF-4 Siren depicted in Macross: Eternal Love Song are the VF-4S, VF-4SP, and VF-4ST.
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Uh... since Macross tends to imitate the tri-service fighter designations, VF-4A-0 would be shorthand for "VF-4A Block 0", which fits neatly with its status as the trial production model. The VF-4A-0 is just a pre-mass production VF-4A. In all likelihood, the VF-4B, -C, and -D came from the same place as the VF-4S, given that the VF-4S is supposedly a derivative of the VF-4D, and we know the VF-4S is a valid variant twice over thanks to Macross: Eternal Love Song (DYRLverse) and Macross the Ride (main timeline).
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Seriously? The VF-4A's first appearance was in the Macross: Flashback 2012 OVA. AFAIK, the VF-4B, -C, and -D types fall into that same "mentioned, but never appears" category as the VF-1B. The Macross Chronicle mechanic sheet for the VF-4A alludes to the existence of the atmospheric variants by mentioning that the upper nacelle block with the beam guns can be removed, but I think it comes from an older source since I've found mention of them going back at least as far as 2005.
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Nah, the debate might've ended long ago... but this thread exists for two reasons: 1. Robotech might be dead as a series, but its fans say and do so many breathtakingly stupid things that commentary on it is virtually inevitable. This is a container for that so it doesn't leak out onto the rest of the boards. 2. Even now and then, a Robotech fan or someone who's listened to one and taken his "views" on the legal matter seriously comes here and has questions, which should be answered for their own good. Besides, the commentary is amusing.
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Yet, we've got some Robotech fans who are seriously insisting that Robotech needs an injection of racist, jingoistic, US protectionist mentality to make it more "realistic" by adding "modern references"... and what they mean by "modern references" is kinda terrifying in a way. They're suggesting that Robotech would be much improved by the addition of an evil communist empire in a similar vein to the Eastern Bloc Soviet Independent States faction that Palladium invented for the old RPG, but made up of the Chinese and Koreans.
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Hm... thanks for that, very informative! I guess that explains how they were able to produce the movie so cheaply, and still have a budget to hire Mark Hamill and the former Robotech cast to do the voice acting. True... and that's a rather apt comparison. I just wish someone would make a move on it already, and cut Harmony Gold's BS off at the source. Just the other day I was subjected to a copy of the Robotech role-playing game 2nd Ed. "Macross Saga sourcebook", and it provoked a mixture of facepalming and depression when I realized that there were people who were actually GLAD to get the book.
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Not actually an opening theme, mind you... but this is one of my favorites. Yoko Nagayama's "So Far Away in the Eye", the theme song of the Five Star Stories movie. I couldn't find anything for it except for the theatrical trailer, which has the blabbering narrator, so I found a fan-made video for it instead.
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Because, for all practical purposes, it's the only way to guarantee the revocation of Harmony Gold's licensed rights to the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series. Keith's suggestion for an amicable resolution to Harmony Gold's virtual embargo on everything Macross was to have Kawamori help them replace the disputed section of Robotech with something else that doesn't cause conflicts in exchange for the return of the distribution and merchandising rights, ending the "embargo" without the need for lawsuits and one side (Harmony Gold) getting completely screwed. After all, it's not like Tatsunoko can actually do anything with their rights to the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series. Their licensee, Harmony Gold USA, has done very little with the license apart from letting it languish behind the Robotech name or just going off the deep end and using it to start a costly legal battle between Tatsunoko and their former business partners (Big West). Since their licensee is a do-nothing nitwit and the law says they can't make their own Macross shows, there's really no reason for Tatsunoko to want to retain the license except for the small stream it royalties. Heh... that wouldn't be at all difficult, since Tommy Yune alleges that the Shadow Chronicles movie had a total budget of under $1 million USD. Mind you, I've heard from various people who've had tiffs of the legal sort with Harmony Gold that they don't have any kind of in-house legal staff, and generate everything (including their Cease and Desist notices) using one of those cheap internet legal document generation services.
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Kawamori has had an interest in the U.S. market for awhile. The problem is that there seems to be too many other cooks in the kitchen, and there isn't much he can do about it. [...] Eh... really, I think there's a more immediate problem with Keith's idea than that, and I'm not talking about convincing Tatsunoko to relinquish their rights to Macross. As far as new productions go, Robotech is so hilariously failure-prone that no sane network would ever give Harmony Gold an episode commitment for a new or remade series. Even McKeever will readily admit that unless they're given an episode commitment by a network, there's no way management will move on any kind of new series. Confidence in the Robotech brand is SO low that even Harmony Gold itself is unwilling to invest more than pocket change in any new Robotech title, so it's profoundly unlikely they would ever find a sponsor. As is stands, Harmony Gold (and by extension, Tatsunoko) are never gonna give up their rights to the original Macross series since that's the only part of Robotech that actually brings in the money. Giving it up would spell the end of the Robotech franchise, both commercially and the collapse of the fanbase. The active Robotech fans are fanatically loyal to the "original 85", and any change to them is invariably received poorly... even on a small level. This ain't a small change, so the fans would almost certainly reject the idea out of hand.