Seto Kaiba

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)