Seto Kaiba

Well, clearly that's going to have to be updated/corrected with the new information, now isn't it? Makes me wish I was a faster translator, but you can't have everything in life... Refer to my previous post... I was talking about the mind system from Macross 7 Trash, which is either a spirita weapon or at least extremely close to one in principle, being that it's a system for collecting and weaponizing negative emotional energy. It's from Macross 7 Trash, one of the canon manga titles from the main continuity. Nothing at all... except, y'know... the Macross Compendium, Macross Chronicle, Macross 7 Trash... quite a list when you think about it. It wasn't the MAIN variable fighter, but there's no denying that it was still in service as late as 2047. You might want to check your facts before posting so we don't have to wade through a big list of corrections each time. Does it say "exceeds in every category" or "completely surpasses"? No. It doesn't. In fact, it's quite vague about how the VF-11 supposedly surpasses the VF-4 and VF-5000, though the previous paragraph seems to imply it surpasses them in flight performance, not necessarily other fields like armament. As such, most of my points still stand. Also, it doesn't help to throw something sketchley pointed you to earlier today at me and act as though you'd known it all along. Isn't it? It makes the fighter a bigger target, impairs stealthiness (of course that kind of goes out the window anyway when you're talking giant robots), and without them the VF-11C is armed only with a gunpod and rear-facing laser. Compare that to the fighters that don't need super packs to carry a normal combat load, like the VF-4, VF-5000, VF-14, VF-17, VF-19, VF-22, etc. Ooookay... so your assertion here is that a fighter that doesn't have/use wing hardpoints and relies exclusively on micro-missiles stored in its super packs is less versatile than a fighter that has semi-conformal missiles recessed into the airframe AND multiple hardpoints for carrying a wide variety of munitions? To quote an old robot phrase... "Does not compute". Anyway, the idea that the VF-4's guns are insufficient falls flat on two fronts. One, there is another, rather successful fighter that also relied on beam armaments... the VF-27. Also, there are VF-4 variants that can (and do) use 30mm gatling guns instead of beam cannons. Though I'm not sure how credible it is (and would suggest treating it as unfounded speculation until such time as we source it), I've also heard some noise about some sources saying the VF-4 can also take a gunpod. Maybe sketchley can shed some light on that last note, since he's done a few of the Great Mechanics articles. As a side note, the Zentradi Army might also want a word with you for your "beam guns alone won't cut it" position... Not to rain on your parade, but your self-congratulations here seem somewhat premature. Just because the VF-11 eventually replaced the VF-4 as the main variable fighter doesn't necessarily mean it was better in every way... just that it was an improvement in the fields the U.N. Spacy felt needed improving or focusing on. (Which, of course, the kind people at Chronicle have helpfully pointed out for us)

Okay, on review of the material I may be slightly mistaken. It's somewhat unclear whether or not the so-called "mind system" in Macross 7 Trash is a spirita weapon or if the technology's just similar. Either way, it's basically a beam weapon that runs on emotional energy. The system was apparently installed on a flight of VF-4's for testing, where it resulted in the destruction of one of the aircraft and the death of its pilot. The manga's kind of vague as to dates, but as it was what prompted 1st Lt Mahara Fabrio to retire at the start of the manga, it was presumably in either early 2046 or late 2045. Either way, they didn't exactly have as shortage of VF-4's if the test flight was anything to go by. There were a good two or three dozen of 'em out at once. (Not quite as bizarre as seeing the classic ARMD design mingling with other ships in the 37th Colony fleet, or a QF-3000E converted into a two-seat leisure spacecraft... but it's close)

But that, in and of itself, raises another question... why would the U.N. Spacy return to using a jack-of-all-regimes fighter like the VF-11 when they know the vast majority of the combat the fighters would see would be in space? One can only wonder why they went with an all-regime unit like the VF-11 and then went right back to regime-optimizing variants in the next generation of main VFs. Perhaps the VF-11 was every bit as underwhelming in other space conflicts as the ones attached to the 37th Colony Fleet were against the Varauta Army's VF/VA-14-derived mecha, designs based on a fighter that excelled in space performance. As far as I know, the whole business about the VF-4 having an unacceptably high cost-performance ratio is a Robotech-ism... their explanation for why the VF-X-4 (which they call YF-4) is conspicuously absent after the "Macross Saga". On reflection, I think he probably got that idea from the VF-5000 entry on the Compendium Wiki. It doesn't look like the article's been updated to account for the fact that the VF-5000 shared the main fighter designation with the VF-4 due to their being regime-optimized. Right now, it's still using the statement that the VF-5000 ousted the VF-4 as main VF due to its lower costs. (For me, it's kind of strange seeing all this stuff that's come to light in Chronicle about the VF-4 and VF-5000 being a space-and-atmosphere tag team like the VF-2SS and VF-2JA, since I don't recall seeing anything explicit to that effect prior to Chronicle... of course, it could just be that the focus of my research was on the parallel world continuity exclusively until recently.) I definitely agree that the VF-11 and VF-171 are probably the most prolific VFs out there in the main continuity, though I wouldn't be so hasty to discount the VF-14, since it supposedly enjoyed a great vogue with colony planets, emigration fleets, and survey fleets after its introduction.

It is a bit ugly, isn't it? I'm not too fond of the VFs that transform such that the shoulders don't look like they have a full range of motion... the Pheyos is another one that's on my list for that. Still, the current VF-4 battroid mode isn't the original one... it used to look a lot more like a VF-1 battroid, with a head turret similar to that of the VF-1SR Attack Valkyrie. Isn't that a Robotech-ism? It might just be that I'm exhausted after a long day at work, but I don't remember any Macross publication that calls the VF-4 too expensive as a main VF or not capable enough to cover a variety of mission roles. Just going by what we see of them in the canon depictions, the U.N. Spacy seems to like them just fine all the way up through the 2040s. Hell, they were even used as a test platform for newly developed spirita weapons during the war with the Varauta Army. The U.N. clearly still thought they were useful, since they did keep upgrading them to keep them in service as late as 2047. (This is, of course, to say nothing of the parallel world continuity of Macross II... in which the VF-4 Siren was enormously successful. It remained in frontline service for over fifty years with evolutionary upgrades, and it made several technological "firsts"... including being the first VF in all of Macross to canonically mount a beam rifle, and the second to have its own complement of pilot-controlled drone craft, the first being the VF-2SS Valkyrie II from the same continuity) EDIT: To clarify the above, I'm talking production order in terms of shows... chronologically the VF-4ST Strike Siren was first out with pilot-controlled drones Clearly superior in all areas? That's going to be a hard sell to make... after all, the VF-11 only carried missiles in its super parts, while the VF-4 didn't need super parts at all. Plus the VF-4 also had, by all accounts, six hardpoints for under-wing munitions, of which we never really see the VF-11 with any. Of course, there's the issue of the VF-11 having somewhat more main engine power, but the VF-4 also has two other sets of engines for which thrust ratings aren't known at the present time (a set of ramjets and a set of rocket boosters). The VF-4 has integrated forward-facing guns, while the only beam gun on the VF-11 faces rearward and it has to use its gunpod for any close-range engagements in all modes. There ya go... I've poked a couple pretty sizable holes in the VF-11's alleged superiority in all areas, and I'm not even trying yet.

Yeah, you and me both. My only real beef with Robotech is that in 25 years the people who "created" it never really managed to do anything original with it, and just keep milking the same three TV shows for a quick buck instead, which is really more a beef with Harmony Gold than it is with Robotech itself. Lots of folks in mecha circles object to Harmony Gold, even the ones who aren't Macross fans, because they act like apefaces. There are very few folks in the Macross fandom who genuinely object to Robotech itself, though it might not be their cup of tea. So, we just need to trick them into looking up when it's raining, right?

Oh, I'd say that happened right around the time Maverick and MEMO finished banning or otherwise driving fans away from the major online hubs of Robotech fan activity, leaving only those fans who agree with their views or are too scared or apathetic to voice a dissenting opinion and get properly banned like everyone else who genuinely gives a flip about Robotech. Indeed, that is strange... but let's not forget that many of those behaviors stem from the lies and exaggerations that Carl Macek and Harmony Gold were spoon-feeding the fans for something on the order of fifteen years. I think the reason these hostile behaviors are far more visible and even condoned and encouraged in the Robotech fandom is because these are people who have spent years or decades being told flat-out that the original shows are vastly inferior and that they have no value or merit outside of their inclusion in Robotech. In recent years, the lies coming from Macek and HG have expanded to the point where they've gone so far as to claim that Macross's creators think Robotech is better and sought to imitate it in the later Macross sequels. In the end, they're part of the "outlandish claim" set, but the outlandish claims they're basing their hostility on aren't their own... they're Harmony Gold's. Others adopt the practice of hating on the show's origins as a way to validate their own faith in the show in an industry that considers Robotech an example of practices that are now obsolete and unacceptable. They really don't NEED to do it, but I suppose they must feel a bit threatened when Macross fans bang on about all of its various sequels while the boys at Harmony Gold are still struggling to wrap up the overlong intro cut scene called Shadow Chronicles. Well, we'll find out sooner or later... from the tone of his coverage of the comics, I get the distinct impression it's more the "I feel obligated to do something special for the 25th" than genuine enthusiasm... but who knows, maybe this is like a bad movie marathon for him and he's enjoying the suffering? Y'see, the problem is that this sort of hostility is actually being encouraged by Harmony Gold and its volunteer staffers. So you've got the one side (Macross fans) that doesn't care much what the other says or days, and the other side (Robotech fans) that takes umbrage over every little thing that could be taken as a slight against their favorite show or those responsible for editing it together. For the most part, it's a one-sided vendetta. About the only thing we can really muster when they get going is a mixture of exasperation and a vague feeling of disgust.

For at least as long as I've been involved, directly and peripherally, in the goings-on of the Robotech fanbase, the fans have always been slaves to trends. This recent trend of fans putting out blogs and podcasts is just the latest in a long line of things they've done to try and convince themselves they aren't flogging the bleached skeleton of a long-dead horse. Back when I first found Robotech.com, it was the forum-based RPGs that were really trendy. Everyone wanted to run their own, and it eventually turned into a fight. After that, it was the social "bar" threads, which predictably turned into a fight after choking the life out of the site's off-topic section. These days, it's blogs and podcasts. Ever since JT came onto the scene and garnered the favorable attention of voice actors and the like, every wanna-be big name fan in Robotech's fanbase is starting their own blog or podcast in the hopes they too will get recognized for it. Predictably, that also devolved into a protracted flame war between the guy who earned his kudos and the wanna-be bigshots. Like all other trends in the Robotech fanbase, this one proved to be short-lived. Just one or two credible folks hopped on the bandwagon before the idiot brigade rolled in with the drama and tried to ruin it for the sake of their own self-advancement. At least the sane ones freely admit that there's just not enough to talk about to keep going for long, and will stop once they run out of material. Part of the reason is, I think, that he's coming back to resume his blogging after having made all that noise about how he was going to quit because there was nothing going on worth talking about anymore. Now that he's come back, it's got people wondering why. Some of the fans that I talked to about it were speculating that he's worried JT is usurping his niche as the one sane voice among the vocal fans. On the other hand, the majority said that it feels like he's doing what he's doing because he feels obligated to do SOMETHING for the anniversary rather than out of any genuine renewal of interest in the franchise. In any case, slogging through the old comics that most of the fanbase hates and would like to forget has already been done to death by a dozen other defunct blogs and podcasts already. Ask Harmony Gold and their volunteer moderators... they're the ones responsible for stirring up most of the hostility. Unless they instill the remaining Robotech fans with a borderline militant devotion to the franchise, almost all of them would move on to other, far better shows in short order. It's that militant desire to defend Robotech from any and all criticism (legitimate or otherwise) and their bizarre conviction in Robotech's alleged superiority that ends up as the underlying reason for most of the conflict out there. Yes, you CAN love both... though good luck convincing the loyal Robotech fans of that. These days, they consider even the most innocent, well-intentioned statement of "Well I like something about Macross better" to be flame-bait and trolling of the worst order. In the eyes of the Robotech hardliners, yes. Despite knowing rather a lot about RT and cherishing a sort of bizarre nostalgia for the series, I'm persona non grata on virtually all surviving Robotech fansites because of my preference for Macross. Of course, a handful of Macross hardliners would say the same thing going the other way, but they're rarer and quieter than the Robotech ones.

Now, it's no secret that the Robotech graphic novel was the chief parts donor when Tommy Yune was stitching together the lurching Frankenstein's monster we know as the miniseries "From the Stars", but it would be unfair to the other "donors" to claim it was the only source he was treating with light-fingered contempt. Parts of the pre-Space War 1 Macross timeline got "sampled" as well, as did some Mospeada concept art, and some character designs from the Street Fighter arcade games. The creative process currently in use at Harmony Gold for the animated continuity could easily be summed up as a bizarre recursive form of plagiarism. Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles was a film assembled almost entirely from bits and pieces of Sentinels and the remake of Battlestar Galactica, the former of which was also composed in large measure of material shamelessly lifted from Macross and given a minor and poorly done Southern Cross facelift, and a good deal of material "based on" content from contemporary sci-fi (Star Trek: the Next Generation being the most obvious "donor"). The next one, when they finally get to making it who-know-how-many years down the road, will probably be a ripoff of Michael Bay's 3rd Transformers movie done entirely with pre-established content from Shadow Chronicles. I wouldn't have expected him to. After all, Tommy's MO has always been to pander to the fanbase and string them along by playing on their desire to view more stories about the Macross Saga's cast without straying into actual Macross. If one thing has remained constant since the mythical entirely fictitious "glory days" of Robotech, it's that you'll have a hard time finding a group of people who hate Southern Cross more than Robotech fans. Why would he shoot himself in the foot by including something that the fans have been saying they don't want for the better part of 25 years now? Really? And here I was thinking that the main prerequisites to be a modern Robotech fan were to have eaten a lot of lead paint as a child and be the sort of gullible prat who would fall for a scam like "Double your IQ or no money back".

Don't worry... sooner or later Maverick_LSC'll cook up a rationale to ban you if you keep trying to question the Harmony Gold company line and his bullshit. Some of the reasons he comes up with to ban the people who disagree with him are quite amusing. After calling him out on the obvious lies he was posting in the Macross legal threads on RT.com, he snapped and accused me of doing so only to cause Robotech fans "pain and suffering", and banned me. That you've gotten away with it this long makes me wonder if Tommy's finally leaning on them to stop banning people right and left after realizing there's almost nobody left on the discussion boards at Robotech.com to discuss Robotech. If MEMO's agreeing with you, that means he's probably hoping he can suck up to you to get you to do something for him later. But they're the same damn character... Jack Baker is a blatant clone of Rick Hunter in the same way that his girlfriend Karen Penn was a blatant clone of Lisa Hayes.

To be blunt, any traces of a compelling story in Robotech are a byproduct of the original Japanese shows, not the work of Robotech's writers. They've proved that time and time again. The (relatively) successful comics were not those with the best of writing or art, but those which pandered the most to what the fans wanted to see... the ongoing story of the Macross Saga cast. Part or, to be honest, most of the reason the "new" comics were far better received than the "old" ones was that the quality of the art improved significantly. True, they're not up to the standards of mainstream comic book titles today, but they're a hell of a lot less offensive to the eye than the old ones were. Since the writing was also done under the supervision of Harmony Gold, there's also the added "bonus" that they supposedly fit into the canon story of Robotech these days. Of course, they also get a pass from many fans for the same reason Sentinels did... pandering to the fanbase's desire to expand on the Macross story and characters. I doubt it... but the possibility exists. Of course, this could all be in MEMO's head, like most of the news he reports. So, business as usual? Another inconveniently sharp Robotech fan catches the mods trying to resuscitate the community they've been suffocating with bullshit and calls 'em out on it, and gets marked for a ban. Truly, the only ones welcome in the Robotech fanbase anymore are those too stupid to see the writing on the wall. (Or, indeed, those too congested to smell it... since it's written in bullshit ON bullshit)

Quoted for Truth... also, that's bloody well going in my sig. As someone who used to be a fan of Robotech many moons ago, and someone who still spends a fair bit of time conversing with the more sensible remnants of Robotech's fanbase, I would be inclined to cast my vote for the present situation as being the more disappointing of the two. I think those Robotech fans that I still talk to, and a good many others who aren't sucking Tommy's dick in hopes of getting a job, would say the same. While there's no denying that virtually everything that came out with the Robotech name on it in the 90's was a badly written and/or badly drawn piece of poo not worth the paper it was printed on... at least something was happening in the franchise. Sure, those in charge were as inept as they are now (if not moreso), and there was no movement on the animated continuity, but at least they were getting SOMETHING out there on a semi-regular basis. Nowadays, the only signs of life the franchise shows are some embarrassingly lousy toys that trickle out at a pace of about one a year, import toys from Macross, and the occasional empty promise that they're still working on a sequel to capitalize on what they're still calling the smashing success of Shadow Chronicles. Well, what were you expecting? If you're going to run a blog or a podcast talking about Robotech, there's not a lot to talk about. There's been no movement on continuing the Shadow Chronicles story arc for at least three years, and there's nothing in the foreseeable future either, so once they've exhausted the series as a topic the only things they can fall back on are the old comics and novels that Harmony Gold and most of the fans would like to pretend never existed. What did you expect? Robotech was never a popular title, even during its "golden years" in the 1980s, so it never had the clout or the appeal necessary to attract a big name comic book publisher. The license changed hands between independent publishers for years before finally croaking in 1998. Many of the artists involved were clearly out of their depth, and frequently resorted to tracing characters and mecha out of other shows, art books, and magazine articles. Quite a few of the writers seemed to have, at best, a vague idea of what Robotech was about, and were clearly trying to make the story more appealing by imitating whatever anime title was popular at the time. The result of this mishmash was, more often than not, embarrassingly amateurish and almost completely unreadable. In the end, what it boils down to is these amateurs were given an unpopular title their bosses picked up for cheap and told "make this marketable". Needless to say, they failed quite spectacularly most of the time. I suspect the only reason that the Sentinels continuation comic by Jason and John Waltrip was somewhat well-received was because it's a pseudo-canon continuation of the story of Rick Hunter and the Macross Saga cast, which is what Robotech fans care about more than anything else. The decision to toss the lot of them from the continuity and pretend they were never made is one of the few major decisions of Harmony Gold's current creative team that I actually agree with and approve of. Rubbish belongs in the bin, after all.

What's there to be confused about? The cover shows us that protoculture fuel is made by giving a naked man with a bright purple mullet electroshock therapy while he lays on top of a roulette wheel and balances a terrarium on his stomach.

Hell, you don't even need to look anywhere outside the video to know it's a Pachinko game advertisement... if the large Pachinko machine in the background wasn't a tipoff, there's the prominent statement that it IS a pachinko game right in the voiceover, with the word "pachinko" clearly intelligible to even someone who doesn't speak Japanese. I wouldn't even bank on them thoroughly reading this thread before jumping to the wrong conclusion... remember that Captain Donovan guy?

There was some speculation either early on in this thread or in the last one about what would come next in the Master File series. It seems somewhat unlikely that they'll do a VF-4, -9, -11, -14, -17, or -22 Master File book, since those models were touched on in either the VF-1 or VF-19 Master File books, or didn't have enough exposure and backstory for them to devote a whole book to them. I'd suspect the next (and possibly final) VF Master File will be the VF-25, which'll talk about the VF-171 and VF-27 in passing.

Sure thing... have two: Where Robotech is concerned, the truth is the weakest joke of all... No, aside from the few squeaky farts that spelled the end of the Masterpiece Collection series and a vinyl battlepod model, pretty much nothing has happened with Robotech since 2007.

Now, if memory serves, it's been stated or at least heavily implied that at some point prior to Macross Frontier colony fleets obtained (or perhaps always had) some degree of autonomy in selecting what to equip their defense forces with. Macross Chronicle established that there are some fleets that forgo the use of manned fighters altogether and exclusively use the AIF-7 Ghost on said mecha's sheet. Also, weren't the VF-25 Messiah and VF-27 Lucifer supposed to be fleet-exclusive VFs? It may even go back as far as the Megaroad-13, since the colony that the fleet established was apparently using VF-14s when the main VF of the U.N. Spacy was the VF-11. Anyhoo, getting to the point... if my recall is good here, when was there ever anything to say the Macross-7 fleet COULDN'T continue production of the VF-19 Excalibur? I mean, sure... they would be faced with a choice between the expensive, complex VF-19 and the new cheap, versatile VF-171, but it wouldn't be that unreasonable for them to decide to go with the devil they know over the devil they don't, especially after you factor in retooling costs.

Your image post there doesn't work... care to link us to the page where the image is... or maybe just post the image itself as an upload so we can actually see it? Ah, you fixed it... thank you. Yeah, that definitely looks like a reasonable cross-section of the fandom, though not exactly a flattering one. The average age there's got to be what, mid 30's? Consistent with them having seen Robotech in 85 and having been old enough to actually remember it.

Issues of the Master File's unreliability aside, wasn't that already a long-established fact of life in Macross before Macross Frontier came out? The whole point of the Project Super Nova tests was to select the next main variable fighter, and the VF-19 won that. Prior to Macross Frontier establishing that the New U.N. Spacy adopted the VF-171 instead as a cost-saving move, the VF-19 was already slated to eventually replace the VF-11.

Y'know, I don't think we can lay all of the blame for that on Tommy. True, he certainly made the spandex jumpsuits half the cast was already wearing more gratuitous by making them so tight they could easily be mistaken for bodypaint, then making all the men amateur bodybuilders and all the women supermodels with 36-24-36 figures and a minimum cup size of D. I suppose we have even less grounds to gripe about his treatment of Sera, since he not only failed to give her huge tits and a big ol' booty, she was already guilty of wearing a brightly-colored spandex jumpsuit in the original show. It's not the spandex that makes Yune's work juvenile and amateurish, it's the completely needless and transparently obvious attempt to get the teenage audience they were aiming for interested by the simple expedient of ramping up the sex appeal. I suppose we've got no choice but to attribute every female cast member going up 2-3 cup sizes in just a few hours to the mysteries of protoculture.

Granted, it would be rather idiotic of him to trot out a promotional piece for a new project and expect the people he's showing it to not to leak it... particularly since asking the audience to put their cameras away is tantamount to saying "Hey, we're about to bring out something that may actually be worth photographing, so keep your cameras out on the sly to score points with all of your fellow fans". It's enough to make you wonder if Tommy isn't intentionally stirring up drama about this leak so word of it will get around the fanbase faster. Oh, there's no denying that Harmony Gold's "creative" team, and Tommy Yune in particular, have become ultra-sensitive to criticism in recent years. I think they honestly thought Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles was going to be universally loved and accepted by the fans because it was Robotech's first real sequel and the first new Robotech animation to come out since 1987. For it to be openly and vocally criticized and even mocked by many fans, including big name fans like Captain JLS, must not have gone over well. Once it was out on DVD, the mods started threatening to ban anyone who posted non-constructive criticism or negative reviews of the movie, saying they were personal attacks on Tommy Yune. On some occasions, moderators made weak attempts to justify it by saying that Warner was watching Robotech.com and they wanted to put their best foot forward and not let their new partner know exactly how bad things really were for Robotech. (Bear ye in mind, the site already had rules in place prohibiting any kind of criticism of the staff, the show's cast, or the way the site and franchise are being run, and that's been part of the terms of use since before it opened to the general public!)

Yep... the very same, though he's ascribed to a "do as I say, not as I do" and "the rules don't apply to me" stance for a good long while now. All things considered, he should probably be grateful... after all, the drama he's stirring up over this "leak" probably got that anatomically incorrect mess ten times the exposure that it would otherwise have gotten. That principle doesn't just apply to Robotech. No matter what the subject, the fastest way to get people's attention is with some public drama. On average, more people outside any given fandom are more inclined to pay attention to internal drama between fans than they are the subject matter itself. Case in point: Twilight. Tens of thousands of men who've never seen the movies or read the books (myself included) find it vaguely amusing and a little bit disturbing to see middle-aged housewives and socially-inept teenagers beat the snot out of each other over which shallow pretty-boy is better.

So, once again Harmony Gold bites the hand that feeds them. So what? I mean, sure... if you were a heretic like me you could argue that this is easily the best thing Harmony Gold has done for Robotech's 25th Anniversary so far. Or you could even say that if they'd started banhammering the lunatic fringe on sight years ago and never given members of it moderator powers, their site wouldn't be the virtual ghost town that it is these days. Still, now that Harmony Gold is pinning its hopes for Robotech's future on a live action reboot of the story, fans of the animated series have never been less relevant. In the exact same pose as said suit too, just flipped horizontal. Indeed... of course, part of that is the fault of MEMO1DOMINION and Maverick_LSC, who've been helping spread baseless speculation around. It's pretty damn obvious that the reason they're so hostile to Macross fans these days is that they're green-eyed jealous that we get good content at reasonable intervals, while they waited 20 years for Harmony Gold to continue a nominal cliffhanger with a piece of badly written fan-fiction.

It's a project where ADV Films and Harmony Gold are both involved... you expected accuracy WHY?

Unfortunately for the LAM, that particular ship sailed a looooooooooong time ago. Almost immediately after the announcement that Maguire Ent. had acquired the live action movie rights, it got out that the whole reason Warner was interested in a Robotech live action movie was in hopes that it could ape the ridiculous success of Michael Bay's Transformers movie. This is ironic in the extreme since, by all indications, even the original Robotech series started as an attempt to imitate the success of the original Transformers series without doing any actual creative work. In retrospect, it seems somewhat silly for Warner Bros to have pinned their hopes for a Transformers-like success on Robotech. The G1 Transformers cartoon absolutely buried Robotech in the television ratings back in 1985, and even Carl Macek pointed to competition from Transformers: the Movie as a major factor that contributed to the demise of Robotech: the Movie. Expecting Robotech to compete with Transformers isn't just betting on the wrong horse, it's betting on the wrong horse long after the race is over.

Indeed, one has to wonder why it's taking them so long to come up with anything for a story for the Robotech live action movie. There is, however, a growing body of evidence that seems to suggest a rather more mundane reason for their lack of progress. Specifically, it looks like neither the studio nor the producers consider working on Robotech a priority. Far from being the fast-tracked future blockbuster that Harmony Gold and the die-hards want to make it out to be, it looks like Robotech has been put on the back burner by Maguire in favor of working on other projects with broader appeal at least twice since it announced. If I had to hazard a guess as to why, I'd say that they've finally realized what they've bought was trounced by Transformers back in the 80's when it first debuted, and are growing uneasy about staking a large amount of money on a franchise with a history of failure as prolific as Robotech's in the hopes that it will dethrone the Transformers juggernaut. And yet, a hundred dead monkeys in a room full of typewriters is still a huge step up from the in-house writers that Harmony Gold's "creative" team has. I'd rate them rather higher than the mooks from Smallville too.