Seto Kaiba

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

Where's a puking emoticon when you really need one?

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.

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.

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.