Seto Kaiba

Of course... though as one would expect from a publication undertaken on such a large scale and relatively small timeframe, Macross Chronicle is not without its fair share of errors of both the typographical and omission varieties. Some, but nowhere near all, of the errors got an errata page slapped onto the inside of the back cover of issue #50, which unhelpfully was not a pull-out page intended to fit in the binders. While some of the more obnoxious typos, like the hotly contended VF-19 engine thrust error, are only slightly frustrating, the real achilles heel of the publication is what got left out. Some sheets had preexisting information from other sources simply omitted, and the gaps filled in by wildly inaccurate guesswork that often contradicts the official data. In a few cases, there was ample evidence that they had access to the publications containing the missing information and, for whatever reason, simply didn't reference it like they had done on other sheets. Nowhere is this more crippling to the completeness and accuracy of the magazine's coverage than the pages devoted to Macross II, which are all but useless due to the aforementioned predilection for substituting guesswork for proper research and some genuinely sloppy editing. In this, Macross II was done some justice in the form of an absolutely beautiful painting of the Mardook fleet for their worldguide sheet.

Okay, the only one in there that came as a surprise was "gas leak"... that still doesn't really excuse the fact that the ones who are looking for an engaging narrative and good writing are looking in the wrong place... they could do much better watching most any of the made-for-TV movies the SciFi (SyFy?) channel runs these days. You shouldn't... it's their own damn fault for having unrealistic expectations that are impossible for the franchise's owners to live up to. Anyone who honestly believes those idiots at Harmony Gold are capable of producing something of value despite 25+ years of evidence to the contrary DESERVES to be disappointed. There comes a time when, if a man is determined to hurt himself with his own stupidity, you can no longer justify feeling sorry for them. For Robotech fans, that time came many years ago. Better late than never, right? I have a hard time with the term "realist Robotech fan", since it really does sound like a contradiction in terms. A Robotech fan who is also a realist would know full well that the franchise will never produce anything of value, and such a viewpoint would likely cause them to give up on it altogether. Robotech's fanbase has the same sort of bizarre obsession with the fate and deeds of every minor, background, or one-shot character mirrors that of Star Wars, with the notable exceptions that Star Wars is actually popular, and that the expanded universe titles which are still canon actually cater to that tendency. For Robotech fans, what this means is a lot of guesswork and unanswered questions as they attempt to find significance in the actions of every character who's ever shown up in the show... often with results that are irritating beyond belief for anyone who's unfortunate enough to get dragged into it. Plus it goes against what Tommy had said previously about Shadow Rising being on hold because they were waiting for the live-action movie to succeed and raise the whole franchise's value in the eyes of its investors.

Ah... I looked into the manga version of that one a while back and thought it was fairly well executed for a zombie apocalypse story. I'd imagine that, as with the manga, it all falls rather flat if you're not really into the whole zombie thing. If they stay true to the source material, there'll be plenty of fanservice and the occasional bout of female cast members being "almost raped". Not really my bag, but if they aped the style of the manga it will be a very stylish zombie apocalypse, if nothing else. At the behest of Talos and his girlfriend, I'm wading through the first season of You're Under Arrest!, which has thus far proven rather less entertaining than I'd been led to believe. The animation quality takes an abrupt and unexplained nosedive right after episode 4 (which I was told later was because episodes 1-4 were an OVA and as such had a higher budget) which hinders enjoyment a bit. The show's cast is endearing enough (excluding Yoriko and Nakajima), but at some 31 episodes in I have to say that it feels like the writers ran out of ideas early on and resolved to just keep re-using the same four or five plots with different characters each time. I've also started watching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood in the lulls between meetings at work via Hulu, and found it to be surprisingly enjoyable. IMHO, it blows the original series into the weeds in terms of quality and makes itself much easier on the viewer by brooming Ed and Al's Shinji-esque long bouts of whining in favor of moving the plot ahead.

Calling it "sad" doesn't quite do it justice... that they're getting all worked up over a graphic that probably took Tommy all of thirty seconds to make in Photoshop because those among them who attended AX are blowing the announcement all out of proportion and taking the statement to mean a variety of things including a new movie and/or TV series is just pathetic. then why are you watching Robotech? Let me second that question... why would anyone watch Robotech if what they want is a well-told and engaging story? That's like saying you want haute cuisine and then looking for it in the dumpster behind the nearest McDonalds. Robotech never even came close to being an engaging narrative with a solid, well-written story even at its peak, so looking for those traits in future Robotech works sounds to me like taking on a Sisyphean endeavor.

Pretty much, yeah... the hardcore fans have been thrashing around protesting that they really are working on something new for a while now, so this little "coming soon" JPEG probably feels like vindication to them. Oh hell... I've opened up a bottomless pit of protoculture-themed technology. They're NEVER ready to announce anything... hell, if you take them at their word they've only got the Twitter feed so they can sidestep the incredibly long approvals process they need to wade through to get stuff up on their own website.

Tohru Furuya (Lord Feff in Macross II) also did: 1.) The titular character in Casshern Sins. 2.) Amuro Ray in a ton of Gundam titles including the original series, the movie trilogy, Zeta Gundam, Gundam ZZ, Char's Counterattack, several of those SD Gundam shows. 3.) Ribbons Almark and the narrator in Gundam 00. 4.) Tuxedo Kamen in virtually all of Sailor Moon. 5.) Pegasus Seiya in Saint Seiya. Hiroko Kasahara (Ishtar) also did: 1.) Azalyn in Irresponsible Captain Tylor. 2.) Naomi Armitage in Armitage III. Yumi Touma (Sylvie Gena) also did: 1.) Urd in Ah! My Goddess. 2.) Flair in Dirty Pair Flash. 3.) Helba in .hack//SIGN. 4.) Cecily Fairchild/Berah Ronah in Gundam F91. 5.) Deedlit in Record of Lodoss War. 6.) Tokimi in the Tenchi Muyo! OVAs. Bin Shimada (Nexx Gilbert) also did: 1.) Stick Bernard in Genesis Climber Mospeada. 2.) Paptimus Scirocco in Zeta Gundam. 3.) Charles de Etouard in Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. 4.) Ken Nakajima in You're Under Arrest!.

Even if the only piece of information we'd gotten were just that tiny tidbit, we'd still have gotten more from Macross Frontier's creators than Robotech fans have gotten from Harmony Gold about their latest abortion that may or may not actually be in production. Hell, they even made more of an effort with Shadow Chronicles, though even that was just three or four pieces of concept art, mostly for minor characters, and one tiny picture barely bigger than a postage stamp that depicted a fighter design they didn't even use. Are you still having difficulty seeing the difference here? I can explain in more depth if you are. No, it was just a polite suggestion... I would, after all, be quite concerned if this was making you uncomfortable, and thus suggested an alternate venue where factually unsound defenses of Robotech would be welcomed with open arms.

Hey... azrael is secretly Elmo Kridanik! Just think of it as "scalable marketing". The amount of effort and thought they put into their generally futile attempts to get someone to care about what they're doing nowadays seems to be inversely proportional to the size and desperation level of the fanbase. Now that they've whittled the fanbase down to almost nothing and ensured that those who are left are both devoted to the franchise no matter what and starved for new content, they know they can get by with the bare minimum amount of effort... a scrap of artwork and a cardboard box full of surplus merchandise. No no no... "protoculture" particles. After all, the fans'll believe anything so long as you say protoculture is at the bottom of it. It's so ill-defined that there's no problem with doing that either... Promoted with sketches, pre-production artwork, and frank discussion about what they were doing with the series... and it was a hell of a lot more than just one piece of art. The creators of Macross Frontier put a fair bit out there to stir up interest in their new show, whereas Robotech's "creators" can do no more than toss out a badly drawn picture of a Mospeada character and say "We have something that might be coming in 2011 but we're not allowed to show you anything relevant to it or even actually tell you anything about it". Can you see where this might be different? If not, then you might be more at home over on Robotech.com.

Indeed they did... very few of the designs Ippei Kuri created for the failed Robotech II: the Sentinels series were updated and reused in Shadow Chronicles, though Breetai's bucket was one they opted to keep. Like the other Macross holdovers, he appeared only briefly and was abruptly disposed of. The only things that really changed when he was updated was he's got the same spandex-clad superhero thing going on that all the other characters do, and his old uniform was replaced by the standard RTSC jumpsuit.

Two movies, the first of which came out last november, you can find more in the relevant news thread.

Now there's a desire I'll never be able to understand... I always found the designs that Tatsunoko helped create for Robotech II: the Sentinels appallingly ugly, and the Invid inorganics were at the top of the list. From a purely technical standpoint, there was nothing wrong with most of the attempts to revive Robotech except that they had the overall poor quality one would expect of a film produced on a shoestring budget by incompetent idiots. The bulk of the glaringly awful stuff was in the story, and the designs for the characters and mecha. Sure, the Shadow Chronicles movie was free of bucket-wearing Breetais, but the story arc itself is not. The aforementioned blue-skinned buckethead does show up in Prelude, where he's promptly killed off in an exercise intended to get as many leftover Macross characters out of the picture as possible. Exedore shows up and dies too, though he now looks like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons with slightly longer hair.

On a generally unrelated note, the handful of active members left on Robotech.com are now starting to spazz out because Harmony Gold added a tiny and dim "Coming Soon" graphic to the right of Shadow Chronicles on the series navigation bar.

Sure, I can try... though it's not something that was ever explained very thoroughly, so I'm resorting to skimming Macross Chronicle WorldGuide sheet 08B, which has a little bit about the Vajra maturation process. The chart provided shows roughly eight phases in the Vajra lifecycle... or at least the life cycle leading up to the khaki-colored hammerhead Vajra drones that seem to make up the bulk of the swarm. The chart doesn't cover how the big red ones, queens, or ships grow and develop. In the diagram, the Vajra lifecycle is depicted as starting with the queen laying lots of eggs in a hive, which we saw going on in Macross Frontier ep.13. From there, they hatch into those green legless squirrels like Ai-Kun, which eventually grow into the big version that looks kinda like an overlarge green hooded cobra (the kind that Ai-kun was when he tackled Ranka right before she left Island-1 with Brera). They then go into some phase I don't recall seeing that looks like a chrysalis, before becoming what Ai-kun was at the end of the series... a creature that looks like a miniature organic Big Zam with antennae. From there, they mature to the slightly larger versions of that form with the top-mounted beam gun (like the ones that were swarming all over the Islands and killed Michael Blanc), and then from there they grow into the big hammerhead ones we saw in the very first episode. If anyone cares to weigh in with an actual translation of the sheet, feel free... it's in Macross Chronicle issue #49 (pp23-24).

Granted, many do... but merely acknowledging that the characters and set pieces that they so ardently molest are not of their own creation is not the same thing as showing respect for the original work. In virtually all cases, it's nothing more than a simple disclaimer intended to keep the lawyers away, inserted simply out of habit or because the website on which the fan-fiction is hosted requires it to ensure their asses are covered. Of course, if fan-fiction writers actually respected the integrity of the original work, we wouldn't have things like Mary Sues and author-insert fan-fiction, or at least they wouldn't be as common. Not always... and, of course, there are plenty of sites that use fan-fiction hosting to help keep their operating expenses down and/or turn a profit via banner ads and various stats-tracking tools. Again, the not-for-profit nature of most fan-fiction still really boils down to keeping the rights-holder's lawyers off the fan-fiction writer's back. And you'll never hear me say otherwise... though, as I said, addressing Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles as the first real sequel to Robotech's TV series is done on the grounds that, unlike all the attempts that preceded it, Shadow Chronicles was completed and released according to plan. Subjective judgments of quality and the show's dubious claims of originality are immaterial in the face of the fact that it's the only Robotech to ever be finished and released normally. Of course, once we delve into the realm of the actual content and it immediately becomes evident that the movie is a godawful mess shat out by a clique of "writers" who ought to be forbidden near a writing implement again for the rest of their natural lives. That it was "inspired" (ripped off from) the reimagined Battlestar Galactica and made up of characters and set pieces shamelessly poached from Robotech II: the Sentinels certainly does nothing to make it an attractive option for the prospective viewer, but you'd have a hard (impossible) time finding a Robotech sequel that isn't a crime against cinema or at the very least painful and nauseating to watch.

I'd be inclined to agree with what you have to say, though I wouldn't be quite so hasty as to lay the blame for EVERY obstacle the Robotech franchise has encountered at Harmony Gold's door. All the same, there's no denying that the overwhelming majority of the problems besetting the Robotech franchise are the result of their ineptitude and arrogance. The heart of their problem will always be beyond their control. That the show itself is composed of source material they don't own is, above all other concerns, going to limit the potential avenues for continuing the series dramatically. Everything else that's standing in their way is the result of a set of business practices that are practically an itemized list of things no business should ever do, and thus is their own fault. Now, you raise a valid point here... it's a question of how you define "success". By any rational standard, Robotech II: the Sentinels was a failure. The final product we got wasn't what they'd intended to make. It was hastily slapped together by Harmony Gold as a means of salvaging what they could from the project as it came crashing down around their ears, put out to recoup the losses incurred by the project's failure. Now, whether or not you want to call Harmony Gold's unwillingness to continue the story with a sequel a failure for the story arc as a whole, the fact remains that, for better or worse, the Shadow Chronicles movie was the result of a project that was carried all the way through to completion and released. It was, in the most basic terms, a success, whereas Sentinels was a failure. Putting aside subjective judgments of the content, there's a world of difference between kicking a literal abortion out the door and releasing a completed product. Not sure about the higher production standards... even for its day Sentinels was animated rather poorly. Just as with Shadow Chronicles, they definitely did NOT get their studio's first string animators. And the hilarious thing is that Yune has still achieved far more in his brief tenure as creative director than Macek did in something like fifteen years.

Y'know... that completely slipped by me until you pointed it out. It would be pretty easy to read that as a subtle dig at what Tommy's done with Robotech since he was given the post of creative director back in 2001. True, he did what Macek couldn't and actually managed to get Robotech's first animated sequel successfully released, but it's no stretch at all to call it a legitimized piece of Sentinels fan-fiction, since the entire movie is made from characters and set pieces poached without shame from both the Sentinels TV series materials and the comic books. Now that's a dubious statement... especially given that every time Harmony Gold has put up a poll about what saga is the favorite, the result is inevitably the Macross Saga by an enormous margin. What the Robotech fans want, as anyone who's interacted with them as much as I have can tell you, is for future Robotech shows to basically be Macross in everything but name. They want the continuing adventures of Rick and Lisa Hunter, of Max and Miriya Sterling, and the other mooks who survived the end of the Macross Saga. They've been dangling Rick Hunter out there like a particularly grizzled carrot to get people interested in the Shadow Chronicles movie. With regard to the Macross sequels, the Robotech fans largely don't want 'em because they've been told by Harmony Gold that they're inferior to Robotech, and are blinded by nostalgia, or just find something offensive about Japanese cultural references in the shows. They want more comfortably Americanized shows in the same vein as Macross, but under the Robotech name. Whereas Macross fans are generally operating in the realm of "I like the sequels, except (NAME)", where (NAME) almost invariably is either Macross II or Macross 7. Never... if memory serves, Rebecca Forstadt said on her blog that she was rather ashamed of the quality of her vocal performance in Robotech and that even when they were originally recording her singing she knew she was bad at it... and that they had to get her a bit buzzed before she could record her songs.

Of course... that poor cobra bit into him and discovered to its peril that his body was made up of 70% bullsh*t instead of water like a normal person's. Let's not unintentionally perpetuate the lie by calling it "Carl's vision". It was, after all, a poorly coordinated effort done entirely at the insistence of the network and their toy partner. None of the important creative decisions in Robotech were made by the hack we knew as Carl Macek, they all occurred far, FAR above his head. So speaks a foolish fellow who doesn't understand the industry he works in... typical of a Robotech staffer. Time and time again, the anime industry's consumers have made it very clear that they want a viewing experience as close to what the original Japanese audience got as is possible. That's why shows like Robotech are considered by the majority to be substandard and the names of the companies that make them are watchwords for failure and incompetence. Can you blame them? It's practically a thrown gauntlet as far as the integrity of the author's work is concerned. To change parts of the author's vision and then claim the result still reflects the original author's intent, or to claim that the rewrite is a superior work to the original as Macek did is the very height of arrogance, and could only be taken as an insult by those responsible for the original. Even after it's canceled, they'll still be saying that... They also did a lot of hard drinking, if some of the earlier VA and writer interviews are to be believed... due in no small measure to there being a bar in close proximity to the studio. Said bar apparently played a large role in getting Rebecca Forstadt liquored up enough to record Minmei's singing bits. Sure you can... the internet produces thousands of talentless fan-fiction writers every year, many of whom have no respect whatsoever for the works they bastardize. The lot of them are already operating on Macek's level in terms of both creativity (or rather, the lack thereof) and artistic integrity. At the end of the day, Robotech is nothing more than a badly written piece of Macross-Southern Cross-Mospeada crossover fan-fiction granted partial legitimacy via a licensing agreement. The man couldn't save his own company, or even his own do-nothing job at Harmony Gold... how could a man like that possibly save the entire industry he spent his career failing in?

Wow... these people are clearly earlobe-deep in denial about the fact that Robotech had pretty much no significant impact on the anime industry and just a 25 year old anachronism that some extremely thick real estate company just won't let go of. This whole "Robotech was responsible for creating the American anime industry" line is just more bullshit Macek started back in the 90s to make himself out to be the Gene Roddenberry of anime. The man was a habitual liar, prone to telling his audience anything they wanted to hear once he thought he could make himself famous by painting himself as anime's great messiah. Actually, it's quite easy to understand why these people keep insisting that Carl Macek somehow single-handedly created the entire American anime industry. The elaborate facade of deceptions they've built around Macek's role in the formation of the industry are part of the web of lies that keep the self-deluded Robotech fans thinking that Robotech was an important, influential show ahead of its time instead of just another squirt in the crowd that nobody gave a toss about even in 1985. If they don't push aside the contributions of every person and show that came before (and after, for that matter) then the illusion that Robotech actually mattered at one point quickly falls apart. Faulty assumptions, of course... but an essential part of the illusion that has kept them in jobs despite having accomplished less in 25 years than Studio Nue accomplishes in six months. Unless they can convince people that Robotech mattered at some point and that it could matter again, there's no reason for anyone to pay attention to it. In several of his later interviews, after he'd gotten it into his head that he was a creative genius fit to rival George Lucas or Gene Roddenberry, Carl Macek tried to claim that even the creators of Macross felt that Robotech was far superior to their own work, and even that they were striving to imitate Robotech in future sequels by placing reduced emphasis on music. A statement about as far from the truth as it's possible to get, and a lie which depends entirely on keeping Robotech fans completely ignorant of Macross. That's a damn lie... we all know Al Gore created the internet. Don't forget Tatsunoko Productions, Studio Nue, and Big West... according to Macek they're all such big Robotech fans that they wanted to imitate Robotech when they made more Macross shows.

Now, what I found amusing about the non-video coverage of the event that I've seen via their Facebook pages and Twitter was that while Harmony Gold was gushing about how the panel's line was huge, the room itself was only about 2/3 full during the presentation, putting a pretty sizable dent in their bragging rights. From the pictures I've seen on Robotech.com, it looks like, for all the protesting about the size of the line, the RT panel's turnout was actually lower than last year's. For me, just the thought of being in the same room with a creepy, obsessive idiot like MEMO creeps me right the hell out. Having to watch him hero-worship Tommy Yune from the audience would probably send me scurrying to the nearest trash can to throw up. And there we have it, kiddies... substituting endless lamenting over Macek's death for providing actual content, just as predicted. I wonder how long it'll be before they blame the collapse of the "new" feature or Shadow Rising on his untimely death. So, business as usual... Shadow Rising is still on indefinite hiatus while they wait for someone with actual talent to fix the mess that ham-handed hacks they've had for creative directors and licensees made. Yep, business as usual... all hype, no substance. Rest in peace, Carl Macek... your legacy of lies and wild exaggerations will live for as long as Harmony Gold thinks they can make a buck off Robotech.

Someone wanna summarize the bullshit-a-thon for us so those of us with no patience for watching Tommy Yune stammer and pretend he isn't wildly incompetent?

--V No such luck, I'm afraid... since all things Robotech tend to fly right under the general public's radar, and the Robotech: Invasion videogame was rather unpopular even among Robotech fans, it's unlikely that you'll find a decent walkthrough for the game on any mainstream gaming site. Your best bet is probably to dig up an archived copy of RobotechResearch's coverage using the Internet Wayback Machine and other sites like it to see what can be recovered that way. When I checked the Wayback machine, the most recent archival copy of the walkthroughs was made on 14 July 2008, and had complete walkthroughs for only the first seven missions of the game.

It looks like a trace of a page from Mikimoto's Macross: the First. If you wanna see that exact same scene drawn by Mikimoto himself, it's in Macross: the First Vol.1.

Or it could just as easily be meaningless window-dressing drawn by Tommy to show in lieu of actual content. After all, it's been his standard practice for years to toss up a new piece of art every few months when the griping about having nothing new gets too loud. So, imagine the most logical scenario? Gotcha. Given Harmony Gold's track record with the franchise over these past 25 years, it was to be expected that Robotech's big 25th anniversary bash would end up being all hype and no substance. Who'd criticize you for that? Most, if not all, of the VAs who worked on Robotech 25 years ago have gone on to do good work on a variety of good shows. The only time that working on one show is enough to mark you for life and ruin your career is if that show is Star Trek or Star Wars. The sane fans aren't bad people, they're just overly nostalgic or have bad taste. So, business as usual... and they're already implicitly using Carl's death as an excuse for having nothing new to show for 25 years of faffing about.

Exactly... this latest announcement that an unspecified Robotech "production" is going to be released in 2011 smacks of a knee-jerk attempt to convince the fandom their failure to follow up on the "success" of Shadow Chronicles isn't going to be the start of another slide into inactivity and failure like Sentinels and RT3K were. Yes, the statement that Harmony Gold put Shadow Rising on hold while they waited for Warner Bros to raise the franchise's image in the eyes of potential investors came from the mouth of Tommy Yune. McKeever was the one who initially said it was on hiatus, and then came back to say that hiatus doesn't mean what general convention and common sense say it means. Richard Epcar confirmed the movie was on indefinite hiatus, and he also said that resumption of work was on a "don't call us, we'll call you" basis. As to why this latest announcement has come dribbling out of the corner of McKeever's mouth instead of from someone who actually matters, who cares? With a track record like Harmony Gold's, it'll either be a pathetic joke that only the most deluded of die-hard fans will try to defend, or it'll be canceled as a money pit and quietly ignored while Robotech fans pretend it was a blockbuster epic in the making that fell victim to circumstance, like they're presently trying to do with Robotech 3000. Yeah, you'd expect that would be a pretty big news item, but there's absolutely nothing to indicate that anything of value actually happened. I'm unsurprised that nothing has been posted in the AX thread on Robotech.com, since that particular hive of scum and villainy is all but dead these days. Our predictions of only a few months previous have come true in a most startling way, with the site's traffic having dropped off to almost nothing thanks to Maverick and MEMO banning or otherwise driving away anyone who was a long-time contributor or even remotely inclined to actually discuss Robotech itself. Whatever it is, it's almost certainly by Toynami, so it's probably George Sohn's turds in the box instead.

Ooo! I cracked the code! The new production is a new Microsoft PowerPoint slideshow to replace the one they've been using non-stop since 2006! No, I'm pretty sure the fluid that filled my mouth when I saw a somewhat battered looking cardboard box with the Southern Cross Army crest on it was vomit, not saliva. Hey, maybe now that Toynami's managed to reduce interest in the masterpiece collection from a max of 15,000 unit to a mere 5,000, they're going to cut it still further and do a Masterpiece Hovertank! They couldn't sell outta those if they limited the run to 20 units.