Seto Kaiba
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Sure, buying the whole Robotech franchise would get you the rights to Macross they've been holding onto for dear life... but it isn't strictly necessary in order to obtain the Macross rights. In the unlikely event that Harmony Gold was willing to part with the whole of the Robotech franchise, they'd most certainly be amenable to selling just the Macross rights if the price was right, and I doubt that Bandai would want Mospeada or dead weight like Southern Cross. Harmony Gold's legal tiff with FASA (and now their successors) only extended to the Macross designs FASA was using under highly dubious terms, and doesn't extend to any of the original designs in the game/series/whathaveyou. If they've never mass-produced model kits or that sort of thing for it, it's probably because there wasn't enough interest in it for them to think it was worthwhile. I've never been a fan of Battletech or MechWarrior, and I can't claim to have seen all or even the majority of their original designs, but I didn't thrill to any of the ones I've been exposed to. The really popular designs, and thus the ones that would sell the best if made into model kits, seem to be the "unseen" ones that FASA and its successors can't legally use. Strictly speaking, "merchandising" covers all merchandise, not just what's sold in your local stores. There is merchandise for the Robotech series... it's just that pretty much all of it is hideously overpriced low-quality garbage. Even Robotech fans turn up their noses at a fair bit of it, and the show has had ZERO name recognition for so long that there's no point in even trying to get a store like Toys-R-Us to carry Robotech merchandise. There's no series on TV because they don't have the money or the talent to make one, and no network is willing to give a show with a record as poor as Robotech's the time of day, let alone an episode commitment. (Hell, the best they've been able to do for getting Robotech back on the air in the North America this past decade was to get it onto SPACE, Canada's CRTC-created Brand-X equivalent of the Sci-Fi channel... and the network promptly stuck it in a time slot which showed how little they thought of it (7am Saturday)).
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... generally unfeasible and/or unlikely, being that most depend on a display of competence and/or a firm understanding of how the anime industry works. Contrary to popular belief, past performance is actually a pretty good indicator of future results, especially in Harmony Gold's case... so anything other than ignorance and incompetence is probably out of the question. Why would a successful outfit like Bandai want to buy a proven failure like the Robotech franchise? Seriously, why would they? The show's track record is terrible and its amateurish merchandise sells for crap. The only part of the franchise that's actually worth any amount of money is the international rights to the original Macross series, and they don't need to pick up the whole franchise to have those. Redesigning the franchise's official website would cost money without a direct and visible return on investment, and Harmony Gold employees have made no secret of the fact that the company has no interest in updating the parts of the site that don't make money on their own (namely, everything but the store). In order for a redesign to happen, a fundamental change would have to occur in the Harmony Gold corporate decision-making process, which would only happen if someone competent with a solid understanding of the industry was somehow placed in charge... a turn of events that would require the company to relocate to Bizarro World. But why would a competent, industry-savvy individual want to join the crew of the long-sunken ship that is Robotech? I mean, if you were really out to destroy your career, there are easier and less painful ways to do it... like alcoholism or hitting on your boss's wife. It's obvious from the way they act that the people currently in charge of Robotech hold their positions because they were fans of the series and nobody sane wanted the job. If the Robotech franchise was capable of attracting and retaining competent employees, the franchise would be a lot better off than it is... or nonexistent, if the competent people end up in charge. But in order to finish what they started, they would need... you guessed it... money and a competent staff! Two things that Harmony Gold's Robotech franchise doesn't have! I mean, c'mon... the whole reason that the Shadow Chronicles continuation movie ended up on indefinite hold was because even Robotech's owners don't consider the sequel worth investing much in. Something that would require Harmony Gold to: 1. Fire Kevin McKeever 2. Remove the senior management bottlenecks preventing news from reaching the front page of the site in a timely fashion. Naturally, neither of these is likely to ever happen. Yet another problem for which the solution entails not only firing Kevin McKeever and replacing him with someone who isn't a massive wanker, but a complete re-engineering of Harmony Gold's corporate culture. Fat chance of that ever happening. So long as Tommy Yune is creative director and McKeever is their marketing man, that ain't gonna happen. Replace them both and you MIGHT have a chance of persuading them to do that. Oh yes, they sound good... but that's because they're all both simple and horribly unrealistic. You forget, the people in charge of the Robotech franchise are NOT rational, competent people who understand their industry and their customer base. The people we're talking about don't have a clue what they're doing, and it shows in everything they do. I remain firmly convinced that if I were to pay a visit to Harmony Gold's offices in Cali, the manager would be the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert or Gary Cole's character from the movie Office Space. By in large, they're not even sharp enough to notice that there's something horribly wrong with the way they run the franchise in the first place.
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Variable Fighter Master File VF-25 Messiah
Seto Kaiba replied to Shin Densetsu Kai 7.0's topic in Movies and TV Series
Likewise... I was rather hoping that Master File would shed some more light on the YF-24, and maybe give us a look at its battroid mode. Just ordered my copy an hour or so ago, so I should have it before next Friday. -
Three idiots... Tommy, Steve, and Kevin. Appropriate! It certainly fits the situation, with Harmony Gold clearly being deep in denial about the franchise's role and influence in the anime industry and the appeal of the show itself.
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Nah... at least, I definitely wouldn't call what happened back then a "revival" of the Robotech franchise. It didn't have anything that wasn't already available in previous releases, and didn't do much to draw the attention of the average anime hobbyist. It was, like most Robotech releases, something that appealed primarily to people who had already seen the series. Things died down quite swiftly once they exhausted the interest of the nostalgic folks who picked it up because they remembered it from "back in the day". Compared to this past decade, the 90's were a pretty good time to be a Robotech fan. Sure, we've had about the same number of reissues of the same old TV series and direct-to-video movie spawned by another false start, but that's really about it. The comics were every bit as awful then as they are now, but there were a hell of a lot more of them and several attempts at an ongoing series instead of just a handful of limited-edition miniseries titles. The 90's also had the novelizations, only a select handful of which got re-released. Really, all Harmony Gold and Robotech have to show for the 00's is a pair of mediocre video games, overpriced toys, just a few dreadful comic books, and an overlong intro cutscene passing itself off as a stand-alone movie. Waved around nothin'... they've used that thing so much it's in danger of wearing out.
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Eh, that wasn't a theory... to revitalize the Robotech franchise with an influx of new fans by making Robotech accessible to a much younger target audience of anime enthusiasts was one of the things Harmony Gold was hoping to accomplish with Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. As you know full well, it's a goal they failed miserably to achieve. Between the contents of the movie and their frequent and increasingly frantic attempts to defend it from criticism, the Shadow Chronicles movie has succeeded in driving more fans away from the franchise than it could have ever hoped to bring in. There's nothing that illustrates just how little Harmony Gold understands the anime industry quite as much as the realization that the Bleach and Naruto crowd is the very audience that they're targeting with Shadow Chronicles... the only thing they could think of to appeal to that target audience was completely out-of-place fanservice. Likewise... and Macross II being my all-time favorite, it certainly doesn't hurt my feelings that I can at least get that one and some of its related publications via legitimate channels here in the states. To be honest, I would've pronounced Robotech dead back in 1987 after the Robotech movie and Robotech II: the Sentinels both crashed and burned for various reasons. Yes, those two failed features were Harmony Gold's first and last honest attempts at a continuation of Robotech. Everything that came after... from Robotech 3000 and Shadow Chronicles, to the novelizations, comic books, and video games... is nothing more than Harmony Gold beating a dead horse on the off-chance that the shaking will fool some legendarily thick people into believing that it's still alive. Okay, I'll just say it... I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic here or not, but explaining why would be treading a bit close to the ever-prohibited subject of politics.
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Beats me... during my six year tenure on Robotech.com and my time on other Robotech fan-sites, I didn't see much in the way of new fans coming into the fanbase. My experiences with the fan community pointed to "re-discovery" as the most common reason people would become active in the Robotech fandom. Sure, every now and then you'd get someone who'd been introduced to the Robotech series by a friend or just picked it up at random, but the vast majority of new arrivals were people who'd seen Robotech when it was on TV in the 80's or 90's and looked it up out of idle curiosity. The "new" fans who'd rediscovered Robotech seldom lasted long though... most of them would either get bored and leave after a few months, or would get banned for acting their age (28-36, typically). Just two years after Robotech.com opened, Harmony Gold had already managed to drive away most of the long-time "veteran" fans, and had already made a good start in whittling down the casual fanbase to just its most devoted, obsessed, and fanatical members. Nowadays, they seem to have run out of old viewers who rediscover the series and are focusing on their largely unsuccessful attempts to bring new fans into the fanbase by peddling Robotech in countries progressively further down the development index. So, I guess you could say that they're mostly hanging onto a dedicated bunch from 13-25 years ago, but they're not really doing a great job of hanging onto that crowd either. The latter, definitely... the only piece of new animation they've put out (Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles) failed to cause the huge influx of new fans they were hoping it would, and generally flew under the radar.
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Not quite... as the court rulings illustrate, the rights to the original Macross series that Tatsunoko was granted in exchange for their involvement in its production don't extend to any of Macross's sequels. Since Harmony Gold's rights to Macross are derived from a licensing agreement with Tatsunoko, their rights don't extend to the sequels either... with the noted exception of them having gone back and separately acquired the merchandising rights to DYRL decades later. It's not their merchandising rights to the TV series that's blocking importation of other Macross shows like Macross 7... it's the trademark on the Macross name they filed for in 1999. As a businessman, I would suspect that it has less to do with pride than it does the fact that what Harmony Gold is doing here is nothing short of attempted extortion. I can't imagine a company that would react well to being told that if they want to market their products under the brand they created and own, they'll have to pay royalties for the use of the name to a morally-bankrupt minor regional distributor with a side business peddling cheap imitations of their products. No sane executive would ever agree to a contract under those terms, especially not with a party that basically wants the sum total of their involvement to be collecting an undeserved share of the profits without doing any actual work. That's not exactly acting in good faith, so I can hardly blame the executives at Big West for politely but firmly declining when Harmony Gold tried to open negotiations several years ago. We'll never know... if Harmony Gold wasn't in the way, Macross would probably have a much bigger presence over here than it does, which would make it at least possible that some of those titles would be regionalized and released here... and I'd much prefer their release being unlikely but possible over being completely impossible.
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Yep, that kind of thing happens every now and again... when Tommy hasn't had the time to prepare an official Harmony Gold USA non-answer to a question, he'll occasionally slip up and give an honest and straightforward response. Then, I guess, he ends up getting chewed out by his boss and starts backpedaling before sending McKeever in to take the blame while he tries in vain to run damage control. Like I said earlier, that sort of announcement is nothing new. Carl said the same thing back in 1995, and they're trying to sweep that one under the rug too. I guess it's to be expected... after all, the Robotech series is a whole far less than the sum of its parts. Macross is what sold the original series and kept the franchise alive this long, so obviously telling the fans that Macross is off the table as far as Robotech sequels are concerned is right out as far as Harmony Gold is concerned. I'd sure as hell love to have R1 DVD releases of 0, DYRL, FB2012, 7, and Frontier, plus english languages releases of Macross Chronicle, Master File, Macross the First, Macross the Ride, and maybe VF-X, VF-X2, M3, 2036, and ELS too... I'd call it an issue that pretty much all of that is impossible right now. I also find it kind of a pain to have to pay for EMS shipping for every single book that I order instead of being able to walk into my local bookstore or hobby shop. (When you stop to consider how many of those books I ordered for translation purposes, it stacks up pretty damn fast)
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The posted images say that it's a 1/72 scratch build.
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Ah, my mistake. Now, Talos didn't say that those variants had put in an appearance in the actual narrative of Macross the Ride, just that they'd been mentioned/referenced in the material about it. Not sure how the VF-19A+ got in there, but the description of Shinsei team's customized VF-19A Excalibur (flown by Oscar Brauhitsch) does mention that its upgrades were influenced by data from both the -P and -C types. The point that Talos seems to have been trying to make in response to sketchley is that the only way the material in Master File will become part of the official setting is if Kawamori-sensei references it in future works that are part of the official Macross setting. He seems to have been using those variants as an example, even though there's no indication thus far that the VF-19C and VF-19E mentioned in connection with Macross the Ride are the same VF-19C and VF-19E described in Master File.
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Now, the weird thing is that the whole "rapid aging" thing doesn't seem to be just between those two incarnations of the character... in the Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles miniseries, Rick literally goes COMPLETELY GRAY between panels. Sure, there's a time skip, but he goes from having a no gray at all in one panel to totally gray in the next, and it's a span of less than a year in the story too... Boy, corroborative evidence just doesn't come any more definitive than that.
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Yeah, but that's assuming that there's actually a tangible link between the future works and Master File. The mentions of the VF-19C and VF-19E in Macross the Ride could be drawing on Master File, or they could just as easily be something with different specs and a different history but the same variant letter. There's just not enough information for us to tell (yet). Originally? A feature in several issues of Model Graphix magazine between 2002 and 2003 called "Advanced Valkyrie in Action", which featured completed and customized Macross model kits. In the articles, several of the completed YF-19 model kits were labeled "VF-19C", while others were labeled "VF-19A" and one of the custom ones was labeled "VF-19ES" and described as a customized VF-19 designed to set the fold speed record. Also noteworthy or at least interesting is a delta-wing VF-22 that gets designated as a bomber. It's non-canon, but it's also the earliest mention of a "VF-19C" or "VF-19E" that I've run across. If you're interested, there's a gallery on MAHQ for Advanced Valkyrie in Action, and there's also some scans to be had from those articles in the "Magazines" section of the main site here. Eh... just because someone involved with Macross's production contributed doesn't really make it "Creator approved" either. The "Sky Angels" thing was done unofficially, IIRC. Of course, the Master File series wasn't the first time Kawamori-sensei had made contributions to a Macross publication and then said that the whole lot wasn't part of the official Macross setting either. He did the same thing back in '02, where he did a column called VF-Experiment in Character Model magazine, and trotted out two all-new VF designs, gave them in-universe backstories, and then ruled them out of the official Macross setting anyway.
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Yeah, that was exactly how Maverick_LSC reacted to having that pointed out to him, he claimed it was a remark taken out of context and tried to claim that it really meant that Carl Macek didn't want to use the iconic Macross designs. It really drives home a pattern... the most vocal Robotech fans are usually the least knowledgeable. The more you know about it, the less likely you are to actually attempt to defend it as something worthwhile. Exactly... and as Carl Macek himself explained, the reason that the cast looks only vaguely like the Macross characters that they're supposed to be and that the factory satellite was redesigned to look nothing like it did in the series is because Harmony Gold had full foreknowledge that they couldn't use the designs from Macross, and tried to work around the problem by having Ippei Kuri and Naito Anmo create new designs for the returning "Macross Saga" cast and mecha to avoid infringing on any copyrights. As I've explained already, the character was redesigned... the whole goal was to make them look at least vaguely recognizable but remain visibly different from the copyrighted Macross designs Harmony Gold knew they couldn't use. It's walking a fine and rather ethically unsound line, but it was enough to let them mount a modest defense if Big West's lawyers came calling. Then again, it'd really be no exaggeration to say that Robotech itself is about as ethically sound as a knock-off brand like "Sany". The use of some names and terminology doesn't seem to be a huge issue... if it was, they wouldn't have used those names in Sentinels, since the legal issues surrounding their use of Macross was apparently a major issue for the project. Of course, you have to understand the legal distinction here... Harmony Gold does have the merchandising rights for the Super Dimension Fortress Macross series outside Japan. Comic books and video games are both technically merchandise, and thus Harmony Gold can use the designs of the original Macross series in those as they see fit. The Shadow Chronicles movie isn't a merchandise item, it's a derivative work because it's a motion picture, and thus they couldn't legally use the copyrighted Macross material in it, just like they couldn't use it in Sentinels. To be frank... there's no indication that Harmony Gold's rights to the original Macross series have changed. The substance of the court rulings can basically be summed up as "nothing changed". The distribution and merchandising rights to the series weren't affected by the rulings, so Harmony Gold's limited rights to Super Dimension Fortress Macross haven't changed. If the lawsuit did one thing, it seems to have put a scare into Harmony Gold. Notice that the first thing they did for Shadow Chronicles was to use a miniseries of comics to dispose of anything and everything with even a tenuous visible link to Macross. They seem to have been genuinely afraid that using anything that smacked of Macross would have Big West's lawyers laying siege to their offices within a fortnight, because they even got rid of the "safe" but possibly recognizable Sentinels redesigns. They killed off or disposed of the entire surviving Macross Saga cast, and redesigned Rick Hunter so that they only way anyone would know it was meant to be the same guy would be if someone told them. They even made sure that there were no direct references to the Macross Saga in the movie. Even though there are plenty of areas in Shadow Chronicles where it's clear that Harmony Gold is trying to work around the legal issues by adding Macross-like aspects to their Mospeada-based story, the Shadow Chronicles movie is practically screaming its message of "See! We're staying off your turf! Don't sue us!". The live-action movie is a somewhat different case, since there's no problem with WB using the broad strokes of the Macross Saga story (Zor's Battlefortress and all that), they just can't draw on the iconic visuals of the Macross story. So, of course, they've made it no secret that the live-action movie isn't a direct adaptation, but rather a reimagining. In the unlikely event that the film actually gets made, and Warner Bros and Maguire Entertainment haven't spent the entirety of the last 5 years quietly boggling at the idiocy of buying such a legally problematic license, it'll be nothing like Macross... the broad strokes of the Robotech "Macross Saga" story will be there, but otherwise it will be something completely different by necessity. Personally, I'm inclined to suspect that WB bought the license with the intent to sit on it so nobody else could use it.
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I would assume they felt that as a doujinshi, it would be obvious that the contents of the Sky Angels VF-1 tech manual weren't canon. My guess would be they felt the need to include that disclaimer in the Master File series to avoid any confusion the book might cause, since they do occasionally deviate from canon in the details... like adding new variants, omitting or replacing existing ones, coming up with new sets of super parts, adding a ramjet/scramjet mode to the VF-1's engines that doubles its top speed to over Mach 7, etc. EDIT: Cleaned up my wording a little.
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No, I'm afraid not... the disclaimer in each Master File book basically says that the book and its contents aren't part of the official Macross setting. It's not one of those "any resemblance to real people or organizations is strictly coincidental" type disclaimers. Talos was the one who pointed it out, over in the VF-1 Master File "Wings of Space" thread. Either way, I agree. Likewise... it's a reasonably plausible answer that's more than adequate in the absence of a canon explanation.
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Ah, thanks! I figured it would probably turn out to be Master File after I failed to find anything about it in the usual sources. It really is a crying shame that those Master File books aren't part of the official Macross setting, there's some fantastic stuff there... and some WTF-y stuff... and even a couple Macross II references... Seems pretty logical to me, actually... I mean, it doesn't look like the VF-19's head-mounted beam gun has wide enough range of motion to get fully horizontal (or lower) the way a VF-1, VF-2, or VF-25's can... and rotating the whole wing surface in battroid mode simply to bring the lasers to bear on a ground target in battroid mode would probably cause some problems with hitting the arms and/or walking. Mounting a laser on the chest like that seems like a pretty good way to make up for that particular shortcoming.
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Unless you also point out that Carl Macek himself said that Harmony Gold had to have faux-Macross designs made for Sentinels by Tatsunoko because they couldn't use the ones from Macross series at his Robocon 10 interview, transcripts of which were printed in multiple Robotech comics from that year... then they run to the moderators for a banhammer.
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By all means, if you do find an explanation of that from an official source, I'll add it to the stuff I'm pulling together for updates to M3. It's not surprising... most transforming mecha rely on "anime magic" to make all the moving bits work out smoothly, and the VF-19's certainly no exception. Transforming toys, on the other hand, don't have that luxury, so they can't replicate the transformation 100% accurately. I skimmed through the Variable Fighter Master File VF-19 Excalibur and didn't see anything about those bits jumping out at me. If there is something in there, sketchley would probably know, since he's gone over those books in greater detail.
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No idea what they are... but given the line art, they're not exposed on the underside in fighter mode. If you look at the color-coded transformation diagram, they're actually inside the main body of the aircraft in fighter mode, and only become exposed in the other modes, when the engines swing down to become the legs. If I had to guess something other than "just an aesthetic touch" I'd be inclined to guess they're probably some kind of structural point for fighter mode. Whatever they are, they were left out of the F/S.
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Variable Fighter Master File VF-1 Valkyrie Vol. 1
Seto Kaiba replied to sketchley's topic in Movies and TV Series
Yeah, I'm not fond of that idea either... the thing that made Roy's "Skull One" special when it was passed down to Hikaru was that it was Roy's old plane, a sort of tangible symbol of his being forced to grow up and fill his senpai's shoes. After all, Roy's VF-1S was one of 30 assigned to the Macross, it didn't need a unique development history to make it special. IMO, what they're trying to do with Roy's VF-1S there is more in keeping with Robotech than with Macross. HMV still has it in stock, IIRC. HMV has the book in-stock, along with the other two if you want. -
Easy, their motivations are something other than a fear of improbable copyright-motivated retribution. If it really was a fear of having Macross's creators take them to court, they would be putting the kibosh on ALL fan-film projects. As Darkwater illustrated, there are plenty of potential reasons for them to do so, including the hilarious-as-hell fear that people might mistake the fan-project for official Harmony Gold product and/or a failure to kowtow to Harmony Gold's specific and unreasonable demands.
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No, why would you think they would? If it came to that, all Harmony Gold would have to say is "No, it's a fan film, take your complaints up with the fans who made it." and that would be the end of their involvement in the matter. It likely wouldn't even get to that point, for two reasons: the first being that Big West's lawyers aren't stupid people, and would definitely check into it before pursuing any legal action; and the second being that Big West isn't in the habit of pissing on fan projects... that's Harmony Gold's thing. Even if the quality of Harmony Gold's production deteriorates to the point where a fan-made animated project can be mistaken for official material by someone with a working brain, a fan-film likely wouldn't bear fairly important touches like Harmony Gold's logo, and/or be mentioned/advertised on robotech.com's news section the way an official product would. Only a blithering idiot would immediately leap to filing a lawsuit without first checking to make sure their complaint is a valid one, and the lawyers working for Big West are demonstrably pretty sharp people. Also, as I've already said, it's infinitely more likely that the creators of a Robotech fan-film would be receiving threats from Harmony Gold than anyone from the Macross franchise. Yes, because the animated intro to the game would be part of the game.
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Eh, in all fairness... that's probably a very real and very serious concern from Tommy's perspective. After all, if the Robotech fanbase can't tell the difference between Robotech material created by fans with more nostalgia than sense and the low-quality trash that the franchise is producing on his watch and his employers notice, then they'll quickly run out of reasons to keep him on the payroll.
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As do I... but in order for that to happen, Harmony Gold is going to have to come to grips with the reality that Robotech never was the wildly successful, genre-defying, industry-shaping masterpiece they want to believe it is. Once they've done that, they can finally lay that turd to rest once and for all and get out of the way of Macross licensing in the Americas. Yeah, I can't see them doing it either... at least not these days. As far as I've heard from people who've asked him directly, he's just lazy.