Seto Kaiba

Honestly, at this rate I'd be surprised if Palladium managed to get the New Generation sourcebook finished and printed before the end of summer. On Palladium's own website, the general mood of the populace seems to be that we'll be lucky if the book comes out before year's end. Getting as many as four books written, edited, and into print before year's end is absolutely impossible with Palladium's resources even if they didn't have to contend with Tommy's editorial veto power over their contents. I'm sure any marketeers among us will resent me saying this, but deception (lying) is a fundamental part of marketing. The mark of a good marketeer is that they can tell a convincing, plausible-sounding fib to the customer to promote your products or at least to do a passable job of covering your arse when things go pear-shaped. Kevin is, as you know, not a very good marketeer. The man just doesn't have a clue how to tell a convincing lie. I'm not sure if he's just afraid of accidentally offending the few companies which are still willing to do business with Harmony Gold, or he's just a complete idiot, but either way he does more harm than good whenever he opens his mouth. As far as the market for RPGs goes... Palladium's Robotech RPG doesn't appear to have ever really been a strong seller. Before I was banned from Robotech.com, the most common reason I found that Robotech fans were buying the RPG books had nothing to do with actually playing it. Most of them used it as a kind of tech manual and encyclopedia for the Robotech universe, since there's never been much in the way of printed reference material for Robotech. Out here, I have yet to find a hobby shop that stocks any of the new Robotech RPG books at all... and if the devoted hobbyists on Palladium's own forums are anything to go by, they fans are generally dissatisfied with the new books. In particular, printing the books "manga-size" (which means far fewer pictures) is really loathed by the hobbyists. Yeah, he's actually kinda creepy in that regard... ever since he got banhammered for ineptly trying to troll me in this thread, he's been creeping my profile page here (and those of a few of my friends) to see what I'm posting. After the last spate of bannings, I think he's trying to 1.) intimidate me, and 2.) see if I'm posting on robotech.com under an alias or something.

Really, I doubt it... witht the "sidequel" supposedly delayed until next year and nothing else on the horizon for Robotech, this should be exactly like every other convention tour they've ever done. They'll talk a big game and make lots of extravagant claims about how influential and important Robotech is, and they probably won't STFU about China, but in the end it's just going through the motions... an utterly pointless exercise to distract the stupid and spendthrift in the fanbase from their lack of measurable achievements. Mind you, after MEMO reported that the preview was anticlimactic, that was a pretty clear sign that nobody with even a tiny bit of objectivity was going to jump at the chance to plug it online. Y'know, I half-expect that one day it'll come out that this whole convention tour business was a clandestine and poorly thought-out experiment in non-linear time. Spot on... word from Palladium is that Kevin Siembieda had a sitdown with Tommy Yune not too long ago, and that Tommy wants them to get 2-4 new Robotech books out before year's end. Considering Palladium's track record with release dates, particularly with Robotech books, this is pretty much an impossible request. They've been working on the New Generation source book for something like two years now (or so I'm told), and there's still no sign of an imminent release. The same goes for the supposed "UEEF Marines" book, and the "Spaceships" book was canned after Palladium fired the writer assigned to the project. There's a rather substantial amount of discussion about it on Palladium's website, where a fair few people are suggesting the reason that Palladium's Robotech line has been delayed so often and so badly is that Harmony Gold is insisting on major changes to those books AND/OR that Palladium responded to it by putting Robotech books on a lower priority than their own original content. Sounds to me like Tommy Yune is trying to get Palladium to cover his arse by churning out a few Robotech releases so he'll have something to show for 2011, in the absence of new animation for the sidequel and progress on Shadow Rising and the allegedly not-yet-dead live-action movie.

Something I've been saying for years... it's kind of weird seeing it come from someone who was actually involved with the movie at one point though. It was a given that the Shadow Chronicles movie OVA overlong intro cinematic was going to sell, at least with the existing fanbase, being that it was the first new Robotech animation to be released since Harmony Gold tried to salvage the crash-and-burn failure of Robotech II: the Sentinels by selling the wreckage to Robotech fans as that same kind of "movie". At the time it came out, Shadow Chronicles was virtually guaranteed to get a pass regardless of quality just because it was something new with the Robotech name on it. Honestly, I don't think Kevin expects anyone apart from the "Robotech faithful" to take the things he says seriously. He's an idiot, but by now even he has to have noticed that his job is less to do with marketing Robotech to anime enthusiasts who haven't seen it yet than reassuring the existing fanbase that they aren't wasting their time on a dead franchise. McKeever's behavior on Robotech.com shows that he knows it's easier by far to just get rid of the inconveniently sharp people who don't buy his garbage instead of trying to convince them.

That is a tough question... I've checked the earliest Macross publications in my collection, the three This is Animation books from the series (1983) and Macross Perfect Memory (1984), and I've come up dry. The chronology over on the Macross Compendium lists its development as starting in 2003, but timeline printed in Macross Perfect Memory doesn't include it in the 2003 entry. The VF-X-2 isn't listed in the "VF-History" article in June 1992's B-Club Magazine Vol.79 either, but that may or may not be a result of the article having the DYRLverse development history of the VF-1 in it instead. Sadly, I don't have a specific answer for you... but hopefully that'll narrow the field a bit for someone with a less-specialized collection than mine.

If it has, then it's fairly likely that McKeever was the one who turned up his nose at it. After all, he was the one who scorned using the website for promotional material, and insists on doing ALL of their advertising on the convention tour.

Eh... actually, the Robotech universe got a lot better in that respect after Tommy Yune rebooted the continuity. The problem is that there are too many older Robotech fans who, either because of a nostalgic attachment to a particular adaptation or because they resent Tommy for taking over Carl's position, refuse to acknowledge the new canon and carry on the bickering over what sources are/aren't official canon. As I've said (and a surprising number of people have added to their signatures on other sites), Harmony Gold's public position on canon basically amounts to a "Schrodinger's Continuity" in which anything can be canon provided that it doesn't conflict with the series is an attempt to appease those old-time fanboys. In interviews and discussions in the forums, the Harmony Gold staffers invariably identify the canon as comprising only the "original 85", the new comics, and Shadow Chronicles. In all fairness, Robotech is probably going to be put to bed for that long anyway... despite the efforts of Harmony Gold. They just CANNOT stick to a release schedule. I'd really prefer to see Robotech put to bed permanently, but I suppose I shouldn't get my hopes up.

Ah, yeah... that explains it. Yes, Carl Macek did leave the Robotech franchise (presumably involuntarily) after the failure of the all-CG Robotech 3000 series concept in 2000 and his subsequent attempt to salvage it by turning it into a traditional animated series with Tatsunoko's help. He was replaced as Robotech's creative director by Tommy Yune in 2001, and didn't return to the franchise until the 25th Anniversary in 2010.

Yes, he was Robotech 3000's writer and director... which really says a lot about his creative abilities. Not sure why you're asking if Carl lived after Robotech 3000 fell through... you know he did. Robotech 3000 was canceled in 2000, and he later worked as a script writer for Viz's dubs of Naruto and Bleach before being invited back in an advisory capacity as some kind of grandiose gesture for the 25th Anniversary in 2010. Tommy claims that the side-story project was Carl's brainchild, but that may or may not actually be true...

Hm... not sure where you heard that, but I remember seeing someone ask Tommy how much Harmony Gold lost when Robotech 3000 went under, and he said that it was about half what they spent on Shadow Chronicles. That much is true... under Carl Macek's direction, Harmony Gold tried to salvage the Robotech 3000 concept after Netter Digital declared bankruptcy by partnering with Tatsunoko to produce the series by traditional means. The project got as far as a couple pieces of concept art before senior management pulled the plug, dismissed those responsible, and brought in Tommy Yune as creative director to reboot the franchise. If you take what Tommy and co. have said at face value, they won't sink more money into Robotech because they don't see it as a safe investment. They were probably a lot more optimistic about their chances during development of Robotech 3000, since Robotech had been airing on Cartoon Network's Toonami block... though CN dropped it before reaching the New Generation. Nobody wants to invest in a property that has failed THAT many times in a row, so they're having difficulty raising the money to exceed the shoddy level of quality presented by Shadow Chronicles, and they won't make a series because no network is willing to give them an episode commitment.

According to Tommy Yune, the total budget for Shadow Chronicles was less than $1 million USD... and it seems like a fair bit of that went to the voice actor budget, being that most of the original Robotech cast now belongs to the Screen Actors Guild and hiring Mark Hamill can't have been cheap either.

Quite understandable... it was quite disconcerting how frequently the character animation ended up being off-model, and it only got more obvious once I had the AoTSC book to refer to. Given what we know of the Shadow Chronicles film's circumstances, the most likely explanation for all the spotty and off-model animation in Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles is that the film's minuscule budget didn't permit the third-string bush-league animators working on it enough leeway to do the job right and forced them to cut a LOT of corners along the way. The character animation wasn't the only area where they had problems and cut corners either... the Alphas and ships had a lot of issues too. Really, I suspect the reason for their sudden interest in China is a lot simpler... they saw Astro Plan and realized that China was a country that didn't see anything wrong with a ripoff, and resolved to peddle their ripoff products there in the hopes of making an easy buck. Oh, they can try... I doubt they would bother, after the reaction Canada's equivalent of Syfy (SPACE) had to running Robotech. They dumped the show in a time slot that virtually guaranteed nobody would watch it.

Yeah, I know... and the weird bit is that you almost always want to go into it expecting something better than what you actually get in Jason and John Waltrip's Sentinels series because so many Robotech fans hold those up as pretty much THE BEST title out of all pre-reboot Robotech comics. On the whole, it's pretty dreadful stuff, but since the first issue of Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles is just a scene-for-scene repeat of the last issue before the Sentinels comics were canceled, you can go right from that to Shadow Chronicles if you actually wanted to.

Shoehorned? It was abrupt and felt out of place, I'll give you that... but I don't think it counts as being shoehorned in when they had clearly marked the guy for death from the word "go". Hell, I think the reason his character design dropped around 100lb was so his role as the spiky-haired ersatz-Kakizaki death-bait wouldn't be quite so transparent. I liked Alex more than the rest of the cast, because I was hoping they'd all kick the bucket and he was the only one who obliged...

I remember that bump! I also remember not being the least bit surprised when [adult swim] responded with sarcastic laughter. The sad part is... in the current state of affairs on [adult swim], even a half-assed show like Robotech would be the high point of their nightly programming.

Just got my copy a few hours ago (before Talos got his for once!), and I'm surprised to say this book exceeded my (high!) expectations for the VF-25 Master File. I'm particularly pleased with the Super Part variants having art now, and I'm somewhere between amused and bewildered that the Vajra Aggressor made it in there too...

Weird... and they actually covered that in Master File. That's gonna be an interesting section to read. Just out of curiosity (since my copy ain't here yet), are they identifying the magazine as removable? Also, how big of a capacity did they give it? That's one thing that's been nagging at me ever since I first saw the VF-25. It's got a fairly slow rate of fire in the show, so even a small magazine should last a while... I hope so, I'd love to see an internal view of the Tornado packs, and get an ammo count for its missile launchers.

None taken! ... and that. Is. Awesome! 's not that surprising... after all, one of McKeever's favorite excuses for having no news of the live action movie is that Warner Bros won't let them talk about it. Aside from that, which chrisk aptly pointed out is "on autopilot to oblivion", they don't have anything that would actually be worth talking about. It's not exactly newsworthy to gab on about how they released their ineptly-made imitation brand product (Robotech) in the homeland of ineptly-made imitation brand products (China). Wait... wait... wait... is it just me, or is that basically McKeever invalidating his only "contribution" to Robotech? The Robotech Con tour was his brainchild, and he's the one pushing to keep all of their promotional convent convention-exclusive. Isn't it a little on the counterproductive side to do that if his position is "anime cons are dying"? It's practically an admission of "I don't have a clue what I'm doing, so I'm clinging to a market model even I can see is a horribly bad idea". Either he's even dumber than I routinely give him credit for, or he's schizophrenic. Funny, but not altogether unexpected... who's gonna follow the unofficial news blog of a guy whose favorite mantra is "Why should we show or tell you anything?". Why the hell would anyone in Japan or America want that? The Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross series was a failure in Japan, and is roundly scorned as the worst saga of Robotech in the west. Harmony Gold USA won't even make Southern Cross collectibles because they're firmly convinced that nobody would ever want to buy them. Why would Big West waste their time and money doing a manga revival of Southern Cross when the show was a failure that almost nobody remembers anymore? Sure, if we judge Southern Cross by its actual content... it's still a disgusting waste of celluloid. I don't think anyone could salvage that mess. You can polish a turd, but what you're left with in the end is still a turd. It's things like this that make me wonder if you actually understand the things you say. You've basically just announced that the bad part of Southern Cross is the series itself.

Eh... if you'd slowed your headlong rush to post something belligerent long enough to actually read my post, you would have come to much the same conclusion Jasonc did. I'm not complaining about the poster, it's a nice poster. It's just making an observation on a part of the design that struck me as unusual (the lack of the "main character" mecha from Southern Cross), since it jumped right out at me as the result of a discussion I've been having about the series elsewhere. I'll briefly explain... Y'see, at the request of some people on the Palladium forums, I've started to do a bit of digging into Southern Cross. I've had a few Southern Cross magazine articles and the This is Animation book for ages now, but I've never had a reason to go through them in any detail because I'm not a fan of the series. One thing I noticed while I was going through them all, and what made the lack of a main character mecha from Southern Cross in that poster jump right out at me, is that the show's creators seem to be unwilling to talk about, or give details and art for, the mecha of the series. There's maybe six pages worth of actual mechanical line art in the entirety of This is Animation 10: Southern Cross... a 120 page book. There's more than three times that amount in material that doesn't have anything to do with the series at all. It's the same in other publications for the series. The official publications for Southern Cross seem to be doing their damnedest to shift attention away from the mecha, which is a decidedly odd move for a mecha anime. That's why I found it odd that they apparently passed up a golden opportunity to use the Spartas in the poster and opted for Jeanne's Arming Doublet instead. Hm... yeah, you're probably right about the Logan overcrowding the bottom of the poster. I'm just kind of surprised by the lack of a Spartas on the poster, since every Southern Cross fan I've ever talked to about the series invariably had a great affection for the tank (often because it was the only "groundpounder" main character mecha in Robotech). It was actually a discussion of the Spartas on another site that got me digging in those Southern Cross publications in the first place.

Nice! Thanks sketchley, that answers my questions. Now I'm REALLY stoked for my copy to get here. Really? Wild... I've only been getting the Macross the First series separately from Macross Ace. Guess I've been missing out on some interesting stuff.

No. Ah, that's kind of disappointing... I was hoping for detailed coverage of the Super, Armored, and Tornado packs. ESPECIALLY for the Super packs, since they've never actually shown the alternate armament loadings for that which replace the micro-missile launchers with beam cannons or reaction warhead containers. If it's not an imposition, do they show/talk about that at all? Yes. Hm... not too surprising, is it just a brief mention like the VF-4/VF-3000/VF-5000 got, or is there some actual length and detail to it? (I only just got the "Your package shipped" notice for my copy, so I've got a couple days yet before I can dig into it)

About time... it's a shame he wasn't captured alive and sentenced to spend the rest of his life as "Bubba's girlfriend" in a Federal prison, but dead is almost as good. I hope his end was every bit as painful as his crimes deserved.

Eh, I could care less if she spams this thread... but there's no reason or excuse for posting scans from the dreadful old Robotech comics in the Macross the Ride thread. Personally, I don't see it as being unduly harsh... there are precious few Macross articles where information from Robotech could be appropriate, if only as a side note. You can maybe argue that it's appropriate to talk about the Robotech-specific variants of the VF-1 and/or VF-4, but at the point information about Robotech's SDF-3 is being added to an article about the Megaroad-class then there's little justification for it... and even less once you've read it and noticed that a fairly large percentage of the Robotech info added to the articles is incorrect anyway. As a side note... this jumped right out at me thanks to a discussion I was having elsewhere, but there's something distinctly odd in the choice of subject matter for that poster. The choice of characters is a no-brainer, but the designs in the background lead one to think "One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doens't belong", and I'm not talking about the character from the failed series (Jeanne). For the first two shows, Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Super Dimension Century Orguss, you have what's arguably the iconic main character mecha... the VF-1S Valkyrie and the titular Orguss. From Southern Cross, you have an arming doublet? It's not even a mecha, it's a suit of unpowered, profoundly ugly body armor. Every official Southern Cross book and magazine article I've run across has tried to minimize the coverage of the mecha from the series, to the point where I have to wonder if the designers were actually ashamed of the Spartas, Logan, and Auroran, and had resolved to try to sweep them under the rug once the show'd been canceled.

It has nothing to do with the licensing or all of the Robotech debate... yui1107 is basically just a spammer and Wikipedia vandal.

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)).

... 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.