Seto Kaiba

He's talking about the following warning that's currently attached to each and every cup/mug in the robotech.com store: In a way, it's kind of messed up... when McDonalds found out that their commemorative Shrek glassware might contain cadmium in the art from Shrek printed on it, they issued a massive voluntary recall, but Harmony Gold just slapped a warning on the store entry and kept selling them as usual.

Yeah, that's about the letter of it... Tatsunoko didn't get involved in the production of Macross until after Studio Nue and Artland had already created the designs and story of the series. Tatsunoko was only brought in after Big West had already pared the planned number of episodes down to 27 and concluded it was still going to be more expensive than they were willing to foot the bill for. That much comes to us directly from the "The Making of Macross" section in Macross Perfect Memory. Tatsunoko came along later and created the screenplay based on the story that Studio Nue and Artland had already made. Do you understand now? No, what you said was that Studio Nue and Artland contracted with Tatsunoko to make the series... I've quoted and linked to the post where you said as much. The fact of the matter is that it was Big West who sought out Tatsunoko's cooperation in animating the series.

I know... it was a joke. Just about any upgrade that increases firepower can be labeled an application of "more dakka". It's been a while, but I believe they did something to that effect in Macross VF-X2, where the VB-6 is originally from. Just based on the existing animation and line art from Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Macross: Do You Remember Love?, the city is spread out through the ship's "torso" and "legs". Macross Chronicle WorldGuide sheet 15 supports this notion as well. There are top-down maps of part of the city from the Super Dimension Fortress Macross series, but they don't show its orientation inside the ship. The line art and animation of the series and movie shows the parts of the city inside the ship's torso are arranged in layers... up to four layers deep in places, and the areas inside the legs are somewhat more open... though their ability to manipulate gravity meant they didn't necessarily have to stick to just horizontal surfaces for building. Line art showing the orientation of the city components inside the "leg" of the movie variant of the Macross is available on the DYRL SDF-1 Macross page on the Macross Mecha Manual.

No problem... we aim to please. Therein lies the problem and the great paradox of the Robotech fandom... in order for Robotech to have any kind future it needs to make something original, but the Robotech fandom has spent the last twenty-five years being hung up on the surviving Macross cast and their story. The overwhelming majority don't want a new and original Robotech, what they want is Robotech: the Rick Hunter Chronicles. For one... I didn't assert that Carl Macek's attempt to "Americanize" Macross was disrespectful to Big West... I said it was disrespectful to the creators of Macross: Studio Nue. What they did would be like a translator who had obtained the rights to publish a translated version of Harry Potter deciding to combine it with Lord of the Rings by changing all the character names and then crediting only himself and the original publisher without a single mention of J.K. Rowling or J.R.R. Tolkien. (I apologize to any literary buffs I just offended with that lame analogy) Tatsunoko didn't create Macross... they took the existing story, characters, mechanical designs, etc. and made them into a screenplay and animation. That's all. So yes, Harmony Gold is being extremely disrespectful to the people who actually created Macross by crediting only Tatsunoko Productions... a company that wasn't involved at all in the creation of the story, characters, mecha, etc. There's a link to it right there in the block of text you quoted from my post... second to last paragraph. But if you need it again, I have no problem quoting it for you again: (wording is yours, the emphasis is mine) Take as much offense as you like to this... a conscience should be accurate the majority of the time, and on those grounds I have to say you're rather unqualified for the post.

To be honest... it's been ages since this thread was actually about the Macross legal/licensing situation and the role Harmony Gold plays in keeping most of Macross out of the hands of western fans. There was only so much we could talk about the irrefutable facts of the court documents and other sources of information. Once we got to the point where we had more-or-less unassailable conclusion based on those facts, there wasn't really a lot left to talk about. I'm sure there are plenty of possible specific motivations we could attach to Harmony Gold's use of their trademark to prevent other distributors from licensing Macross shows, but the underlying motive is plain to see... they're afraid Robotech will be plowed under by the higher quality Macross shows, and they don't want to see that happen unless they can profit from it as well. Just as you said, they want to be able to profit from Macross without doing any actual work... just sit back and demand royalties for the use of the name. No, it's a matter of record that Harmony Gold acquired the "rest of world" distribution and merchandising rights to Super Dimension Fortress Macross under license from Tatsunoko Productions, who received them as payment for their involvement in producing the series. You might be mixing that up with the tiff between Harmony Gold and FASA over the "unseen" designs in Battletech and MechWarrior, where there was some confusion over the legitimacy of the rights FASA acquired to those designs via a model kit manufacturer. The whole mess ended with an undisclosed settlement that recent events make clear involved FASA surrendering any claim on those designs... something they apparently failed to communicate to the companies they sold the franchise to. Well, no surprises there... it's not like Robotech fans have a lot left to talk about nowadays. They've long since exhausted every significant topic for discussion in the "original" Robotech series, and in the absence of forward motion on Shadow Chronicles and the proposed live action movie they don't have anything buzzworthy to hold their interest. So, naturally, the more desperate and self-deluded Robotech fans spend a downright disturbing amount of time trying to manufacture their own hype. The end result is, of course, an absurd collection of wild guesses and bullsh*t held up as though it were fact. Pity them, for theirs is a miserable lot with not even the faintest glimmering of genuine hope on the horizon.

Not a bad idea... the only problem I can think of is that in places there are going to be so many "lies" coming so quickly that the subtitled corrections are going to either have to race by so fast nobody can read them or pile up until they completely obscure the animation. Probably both in a few scenes.

Thanks for posting that, Tom... you've got great timing, I mentioned it a few posts ago. True... this fan-made "restored" version of the Robotech closing credits sequence doesn't do anything to change the way Harmony Gold tries to avoid crediting the creators of the original shows. It does, however, serve as an excellent demonstration of what I was telling terry the lone wolf... that Harmony Gold's failure to acknowledge the contribution of the show's real creators isn't because it's difficult or unfeasible, but because they just don't care to for whatever asinine reason. It might've been excusable back in the day, but they had a chance to fix it recently with Robotech Remastered and chose not to. As far as I'm aware, their bread and butter is their rental properties and their buying and selling the distribution rights to various shows.

Just going by the content of your last couple of posts... that's a frighteningly long list. In the interest of brevity, let's just skip right to the salient points... ... like this fantastic example of your inability to stay on topic. It would probably be easier for you to grasp what we're talking about if you weren't desperately racking your brains for something that isn't wrong. It's a mystery to me why you seem to think that this is in any way relevant to what we were discussing. The whole point that we were discussing after you let your fingers get ahead of your brain and claimed that neither Voyager Ent. nor World Events Pro. never revealed their shows came from Japan was why it was profoundly unprofessional and somewhat insulting for Harmony Gold to consistently fail to acknowledge the people whose creative vision and hard work created the shows they were bastardizing. That the animation of the series was farmed out to a couple of different studios in the course of events has nothing to do with it. What really drives home how little you understand is that just a few posts ago you asserted that it was Studio Nue who contracted with Tatsunoko, rather than Big West... and inexplicably suggested that Big West "put the screws to" Studio Nue and Artland over it. That's really a completely different issue altogether and has nothing to do with what was being discussed... the brouhaha over Harmony Gold having "disrespected" the original shows by rewriting them (badly) and combining them into Robotech is more a hindsight thing than anything else. Of course, not crediting the original shows and their creators is disrespectful to the source material they were adapting into Robotech. The main reason for that complaint is that rewriting shows to "Americanize" them went out of fashion a few years after Robotech debuted, and Carl Macek's repeated insistence that the originals were inferior by far to his version. That's an insult to the original work and its author any way you shake it. QFT

Kind of hard to interpret that as anything other than a clear indication that you don't understand the situation. How is that holding Harmony Gold to an unrealistically high standard when their contemporaries managed to credit the original creators of the shows they were rewriting (e.g. StarBlazers), and for ages now it's been the industry standard to credit the original cast and crew as well as the English dub staff? If everyone else in the industry is already doing it as standard operating procedure, there's nothing unrealistic about expecting HG to follow suit. Hell, even if we excuse the omission of the actual creators from the original credits, that still won't excuse their omission from the redone credits sequence they did just a few years ago for Robotech Remastered. Even back then, they clearly knew who was involved in making each show. It wouldn't have been at all difficult to credit them for their work then or now.

One day, you're going to learn to make sure you understand the situation before you post. Today is obviously not that day. For starters, in the film industry it's considered standard practice to acknowledge the people who were involved in the production process in the show's credits. In some cases, particularly where various guilds are involved, it isn't optional and there are actually lengthy sets of rules to determine how various contributors are credited for their contributions. The reason George Lucas resigned from the Director's Guild of America was because he got fined $250,000 for not crediting the director in the opening title sequence. Even without guild involvement, the fact remains that it's insulting in the extreme to adapt an author's work and then not credit him for creating the original... and that's exactly what Harmony Gold did. At the very least, they ought to have also credited Studio Nue, Artland, Ammonite, and Artmic for their involvement in creating the original shows. Secondly, as you should already know unless you're breathtakingly dense, Tatsunoko isn't sole owner of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series. Their ability to manipulate it is limited by the parts of it they actually own and the rights they were granted to it under their agreement with Big West. To put it simply, it's jointly owned... if they're going to credit one owner, they ought to credit the other as well. Lastly, if you actually understood the situation at all, you would probably understand that we're not trying to paint Harmony Gold as anything. Harmony Gold has provided abundant proof that they're jackasses, and we treat them accordingly. Big West and Studio Nue didn't kick off the legal tiff with Tatsunoko, it was started by Harmony Gold's attempts to block importation of Macross merchandise. The only thing that Macross's creators have done in all this is they refused to let Harmony Gold force them into giving them approvals over stateside Macross licensing and an undeserved share of the revenue using their dubious trademark. That's not being a "bad guy", that's being a smart and ethical businessman. What Harmony Gold is doing is, by any other name, extortion. The facts point to only one bad guy (Harmony Gold), and one company that doesn't see a sufficient potential return on investment in taking Harmony Gold to court to make them stop acting like twats (Big West).

Like I said, he's long on rhetoric and short on sense... it's a sad affliction that far too many vocal defenders of Robotech suffer from. It is extremely fortunate that Harmony Gold can't use the original Macross character and mecha designs in new shows, it forces them to try to make something tolerable out of the weaker shows they added to Macross to get up syndication length instead of riding Macross's coattails even more shamelessly than they already do. This should be self-explanatory, but the reason that Harmony Gold ought to be crediting the people whose hard work and talent actually created the material that makes up Robotech is that they didn't make it themselves. It's not their work, it's them rewriting someone else's existing work. The original creators at Studio Nue, Artmic, etc. and the owners of those original shows should be credited because Harmony Gold is basing Robotech on their hard work and creative vision. Is that so hard to understand.

Okay, you were long on rhetoric and short on sense before... but now you've crossed the line into full-blown unintelligibility. I'd ask what you were talking about, but I'm not sure even you know anymore.

No, they did not. Big West and Studio Nue only gave Tatsunoko the distribution and merchandising rights to the Super Dimension Fortress Macross series outside of Japan. In order to forfeit their right to be credited for all their work on the series, they would have had to give up ownership of the material they created. Of course, since we have ironclad proof that they didn't do that, the people who created the shows that make up Robotech should've been properly credited for their work. That the people at Studio Nue, Artmic, et. al. whose talents actually made the material that Carl Macek and co. badly rewrote is just insulting, and smacks of an attempt to take credit for someone else's work. But, to date, not in the show... nor is anyone else who actually created those shows. Nobody gives a flip about the old Comico comics and the Robotech Art series... least of all Robotech Art 2.

Come on... is it really that hard to use the quote tag properly? It's really a pain trying to figure out where the quoted passage ends and your post actually begins. Nowhere... to date, I don't think any release of Robotech has ever properly credited the creators of the original shows for their work. The only concession they've ever made to acknowledging the real creators of the shows that make up Robotech is crediting Tatsunoko (and only Tatsunoko) for the production of the animation. One of the things I heard about RT25 was that they went out of their way to properly credit and acknowledge the real creators of those shows. To be blunt, it's not nearly that simple. Part of what kicked the whole legal tiff between Big West and Tatsunoko off was Harmony Gold's baseless and rather perplexing assertion that their license agreement with Tatsunoko covered all of Macross rather than just the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series. Obviously, the reason they've gone to the trouble of ensuring other companies can't license the rest of Macross for distribution is because they found out the rights they had for the original series didn't grant them rights to the rest, and they want to protect their Robotech franchise by keeping superior quality Macross goods and shows out of the hands of consumers unless they stand to profit from it too.

That, I can largely agree with... however... As this still isn't a Macross II thread in any way, I'm not going to spend time delving into every little thing that's wrong with what you're saying here. If you take the supplementary materials away from any Macross series, you're left with pretty tenuous connections to the other shows and borderline-nonexistent connections to the games, so citing it as a specific fault in Macross II doesn't hold water. For your other complaints, there are explanations in the canon materials, if you had the patience to look for them or the wherewithal to remember the last several times I explained them. If you need it explained to you again, feel free to send me a private message.

No, not forgotten... just classified. The whole affair's been declassified by 2059, and the inhabitants of the titular colony ship in Macross Frontier even film a historical drama about it. It is... but it's self-contained enough that it doesn't really affect anything that came after (chronologically).

By that standard, none of us are Macross fans then... not even you. You don't have to like every Macross show to be a Macross fan... you only need to like one. It's not like they're all set in separate universes or something. Now, this is a discussion that really belongs in a thread of its own... you're voicing a misconception that's fairly common among western Macross fans. To be brief, as to not derail this thread much more than it already has been, the guy you got into this argument with (Million Star) has the name of one of that universe's colony ships for his screen name.

Oh, I'll grant you that Robotech: From the Stars differs from Macross Zero in many details, but it's still taking a good many pointers from it and the aforementioned parts of Macross's timeline. Coincidence, is it, that shortly after Macross Zero debuts we get a Robotech comic miniseries about a pre-war Roy piloting a prototype of the VF-1 against Anti-UN forces? That's a little hard to swallow... particularly since there was no "Anti-Unification League" in the Robotech continuity prior to that comic. All they're missing is an Anti-Unification League VF and some technophobic islanders. Then in the second half, we get a weak ripoff of Macross's timeline circa 2005 when Anti-Unification League terrorists steal a reaction weapon-equipped ship and start nuking the UN forces. Sure, this time it's an ARMD instead of an Oberth-class destroyer... but it's still pretty obvious where these ideas are coming from. Honestly Tom, it's not like this kind of thing was a new or unexpected development in Robotech comics. The old comics made a habit of "borrowing" characters, mecha, and even whole stories from Macross or whatever else was popular back in the day. They were certainly adept at keeping their eyes on their neighbor's paper, that's for sure... and Tommy is no exception. Granted... but what about those sites that "borrow" material from other Macross shows like Macross: Flashback 2012, Macross II: Lovers Again, and Macross Zero? Even the uRRG, which is frequently mistaken for an accurate source of information by Robotech fans, draws on Macross: Flashback 2012. Right now, one of the uRRG's minor contributors is pushing a new site that (currently) borrows mecha and continuity from Macross: Flashback 2012, Macross Zero, and Macross Dynamite 7. There are also plenty of other Robotech fan sites that "borrow" from an astonishing array of Macross sources... even going so far as to pillage concept art from Macross art books. It's that kind of BS that I'm talking about. You're hard pressed to find a Robotech site that doesn't steal from at least one Macross source unrelated to Robotech. I guess you've been out of touch for a while then... I've met a fair few on that anemic ghost town we know as robotech.com just in the past few years. I've seen proposals to throw out Southern Cross and replace it with Macross II: Lovers Again and/or make Macross II a Masters Saga sequel/side-story. I've seen proposals to use Macross Zero as a Robotech prequel, complete with suggested changes to the story.

'kay... that's certainly a rare view, and admittedly not one that has a whole lot of relevance to the OP's particular line of inquiry. Of course, the same can be said for this entire love/hate thing we've got going with regard to the Macross 7 series right now. Nor do I... at least, not from a modern viewpoint. On the other hand, if you look at it in terms of the direction Big West was taking with Macross in Kawamori's absence and the current state of the continuity back then, then the addition of Macross Plus is about as awkward as it gets. To make it fit, they had to rewrite the continuity (again) to remove eighty years worth of history and make all of the removed material a parallel universe. It doesn't feel like an awkward addition to the continuity now because it has the support of the shows that came after it. That said, you both have a point. 'kay... that logic doesn't exactly work. You're implying: Macross II fans ≠ Macross fans even though Macross II ∈ Macross It does, actually... it fits quite well with DYRL (by intent, it's a sequel) and the canon games and other continuity materials created to bridge the gap between the two. Still, this is a big departure from what the OP wanted to know.

Huh... from an in-universe standpoint, that's a pretty good question. By the look of things, the reason that they gave the Mk.I version of the Monster a set of vaguely creepy hands was to provide it with the necessary stability to operate as carrier-mounted artillery and make fine adjustments to its firing position. That ability ended up on the chopping block in favor of beefing up the mecha's long-range armaments, and presumably the infinitely more mobile and nimble König Monster just doesn't need that extra support. Having hands on the same side as their missile launch tubes would probably necessitate a very awkward and unintuitive mounting for the hands, or the enlarging of the weapon arms themselves. There was already empty space on the back of the weapon arms, so waste not want not... it seems almost ideal for mounting a hand, since long-range anti-ship missiles aren't going to be much use against the same fast-moving targets the pilot would be shooting at with his/her AA guns. If we examine it from a production standpoint, the answer becomes immediately obvious... they made the König Monster first. Kawamori designed the VB-6 König Monster for Macross VF-X2, a game that came out for the Sony Playstation in 1999. Macross Zero didn't come out until about three years later, and presumably Kawamori didn't see any point in messing with a completed design when he was already tweaking several existing ones for use in Macross Frontier. After seeing it in the movie trailer at the end of Macross Frontier: Itsuwari no Utahime for the first time, my initial thought was "another fine customization by the Orkish Commission for More Dakka".

Ah... if only things were that simple. Unfortunately, thanks to the profound laziness of the Harmony Gold "creative team" and the work ethic of a few extremely resourceful plagiarists in the Robotech fanbase, things are a good deal more complicated than that. It sort of makes sense for them to use specs from the original show, albeit slightly modified, for Robotech. Still, the post-2001 "creative team" at Harmony Gold seems to find it a lot easier to continue to "borrow" from the setting and continuity of Macross instead of coming up with their own material. The comic miniseries Robotech: From the Stars is just a teaspoon-shallow knockoff of Macross Zero that borrows events from the year 2005 in the Macross continuity. The overwhelming majority of Robotech fan-sites "borrow" from one or more Macross shows to fill out the anemic post-Macross Saga Robotech continuity. The ongoing efforts of Harmony Gold and the robotech.com volunteer moderators to portray Macross as something that has no importance or popularity aside from its role as part of Robotech doesn't help in this regard, since it just encourages them to do things like this. Um... Tom? You do realize that you've just classified one of the iconic traits of the modern Robotech fan as some kind of mental illness, right?

It isn't that surprising, really... the importance of music to culture and its power to sway emotions has been a major plot element in Macross, and the music itself usually ends up being one of the show's selling points. All that really changed in the winning Macross formula when they made Macross 7 was that they took the music's importance to its (il)logical extreme. In hindsight, it was a shining example of the right show at the right time, since a break from the dark, serious business shows seems to have been just what the audience wanted. It gets flak from viewers over here for the same reasons that it was a huge success over there... its lighter and less serious story, and its tendency towards comedy and hotbloodedness. If you're the sort of person who insists on a series taking itself seriously, Macross 7 is usually a painful show to watch. It doesn't take itself seriously, so those who try to take it seriously end up with a headache. Those who don't mind suspending disbelief and cynicism for a while can usually find something to enjoy in the completely over-the-top, crazy-ass antics of Basara and company. (That last paragraph is, I suppose, the real answer I should direct to wastegate13's question about Macross 7) 'kay... we don't really need to resort to that, do we?

Sort of... it's not really a requirement, but it helps to have seen how previous Macross shows have built up the history and legend of the Protoculture before tacking Macross Zero. Each installment of Macross is technically a stand-alone title in that they're usually self-contained enough that you don't need to have seen the ones that came before it, but it really does help.

Your guess is as good as mine... the reasons for having the other two modes are fairly self-evident. Upon due examination of the VB-6 König Monster's few appearances in canon Macross, the best I can conclude is that it's probably there primarily to make the mecha somewhat less cumbersome when it's defending itself from smaller mecha, since at least the upgraded VB-6 König Monster has demonstrated that it has some kind of gun system mounted on the arms in battroid mode. For reasons unknown, the guns don't show up in the art for Canaria's VB-6 in the Macross Frontier series, but she's shown using guns in the mecha's forearms defensively during the final episode. The trailer for the second movie, Macross Frontier: the Wings of Goodbye, shows a VB-6 equipped with what appears to be a pair of 30mm rotary cannons off the Cheyenne II instead of hands. I apologize for the large size of this screen capture, but it's in 1080p and I don't have Photoshop on this machine: That's exactly the kind of arrangement it has... though it's easier to spot on the original line art rather than the CG model. You can clearly see on the color-coded transformation guide that, just as on the Cheyenne series of destroids, the König Monster keeps its hands on the back side of its weapon arms. It has its uses... but it wasn't originally part of the design (from an in-universe standpoint). It was an accidental discovery and was made a feature because it had a few uses...

Oh, I'm sure that as technology continues to advance, it'll eventually be possible to do something like that... but I doubt it will ever be practical enough for anyone to want to.