Seto Kaiba

Eh... can we really hold that against them when so many Robotech are clueless about real anime? On the rare occasions when some Robotech does suggest that a particular anime title be rewritten into a Robotech saga, the vast majority of Robotech fans come out against it because they want Robotech to stand on its own... which I'm sure you'll agree is hilariously ironic, considering that there's no such thing as original material in Robotech... not even in the Shadow Chronicles movie. The only real cases where fans did attempt to integrate mecha and story elements from other shows into Robotech were where fans just wanted to add some variety and interest into their Robotech RPGs, rather than continue to slog through the same tired material over and over again for the better part of 20 years. Yes, the inclusions were in bad taste and reflect the Robotech fanboy mentality that everything original is inferior to Macek's rewrites, but they were at least done for reasons we can understand. (Even Sketchley's done this to some small degree with his Macross RPG stats page... though the few items he's included are ships from Macross's nearest neighbor, Gundam, to flesh out the civilian ships for the game)

Probably, of course by then she would have had control of an entire Vajra hive and the combined New U.N. Spacy fleets, which would be a pretty formidable force once she managed to track down the Zentradi and/or Supervision Army. But in realistic terms, we'll never know because she never got that far. She might've just continued the same policy the NUNS used, and just confront them as they show up rather than seeking them out and destroying them. Okay... the spellchecker in your browser is your friend. Please use it. Also, the Protodeviln and the Varauta Army have been a non-issue since 2046, so they aren't a factor anymore. The Supervision Army is supposedly still out there, though all we've seen of it to date is a pair of gun destroyers... one that crashed on Earth, and one that the factory satellite capture mission stumbled across.

Super 8 was also the common name for Kodak's Super 8mm motion picture film cartridges... maybe it's a film reference?

Your guess is as good as mine. You're right in that the original Macross series makes the female troops out to be a fairly small percentage of the Zentradi 118th Main Fleet. Presumably a lack of Zentradi women would only drive the rate of inter-species breeding up when the bulk of the female breeding population is human. Macross II's parallal world continuity makes things a bit less messy by adding defectors from two cultured Meltrandi fleets into the mix along with the cloning program and the various Zentradi fleets that defected. Not that I've seen, but presumably they got the cloning technology from somewhere. C'mon, with a handle like "Lott Sheen"*, what were you expecting? His attitude towards Kawamori reminds me a lot of the way some of the older Star Trek fans and writers regard Gene Roddenberry... a good idea man, but not someone who should be allowed to have full creative control of the projects he works on. (The example Star Trek fans usually give is the first season or so of TNG, where the human cast were faultless paragons of virtue who spent a lot of time preaching at and/or outsmarting morally, ethically, and intellectually inferior aliens) I can kind of see where Lott's coming from, since I prefer the Macross shows made before Kawamori returned to the franchise with Macross Plus, since the later stuff's changes in theme and tone made them feel almost like a different series at times, though I'm not quite so extreme as to say Kawamori ruined Macross, since I rather enjoyed Macross Plus and Macross Frontier. * In case you don't know who Lott Sheen is, he's Komilia's wingman and love interest from the PC Engine games which were made as prequels to the Macross II OVA. Specifically, Macross 2036.

Oh, no doubt of that... especially given that they STILL refer to the fact that Robotech is made from three unrelated anime titles as the show's "dirty little secret". If Robotech II: the Sentinels proved anything about Robotech as a whole, it was that the franchise's "creative team" had absolutely zero creative talent. The only way they could produce a marketable product was to take someone else's work, slap a hastily rewritten story onto it, and play it off as something they came up with on their own. Eh... it's possible that some people are taking that particular attitude. However, I expect it's more to do with the fact that actually sitting down and watching the unedited Southern Cross series practically guarantees pain and suffering for the viewer. The show is just a clusterfart of bad decisions. The story stank, and was made even worse by trying to wrap it up abruptly, the mechanical designs were just idiotic, and the cast was completely unlikeable. Even the music was bad by the standards of the day. As I've said in the past, Southern Cross is probably the one original show that actually benefited, story-wise, from inclusion in Robotech, if only because it was tied into characters and stories that didn't completely suck. It should say something that the only die-hard Southern Cross fan of my personal acquaintance primarily likes the show because he has a massive axe to grind against the entire officer class and pilots in particular, and the Southern Cross series focuses mainly on ground troops led by officers who are generally either either maliciously incompetent (Claude Leon) or just pants-on-head retarded (Jeanne). If you know anything about Southern Cross it should come as no surprise that his favorite character was Andrzej Sławski (Angelo Dante in the RT dub), the only one who seems to realize that Jeanne falls into the same intelligence demographic as the office furniture. No, you're not in any way atypical for that... in fact most Robotech fans don't have a bloody clue what anime is, and don't care. They just want more Macekres. It's only after they seek out other stuff for whatever reason that their eyes are opened.

Plausible, but there's always parenting classes. I can't imagine the U.N. wouldn't sanction that sort of thing in the event Zentradi started having families. Insofar as Zentradi ship crew sizes, the mean is easily enough established as 1,507 by the simple expedient of taking the ship count in the 118th Main Fleet and dividing it by the rough estimate of the fleet's total population. So we can assume the average battleship's got around 1,500 people on it total.

Eh... I didn't get much of a "vilification" vibe from that Animerica piece. To me, it felt more like a casual dismissal of the whole Robotech franchise as no longer relevant or interesting now that the originals were available, rather than a declaration that Robotech was a horrible crime perpetrated against Macross. Granted, the whole Robotech franchise seems geared to deny the very existence of the genre it's supposed to belong to. Harmony Gold's stance that Robotech is superior by far to the "flawed" originals seems like a calculated attempt to put the fans in a mindset where they're predisposed to be dismissive of unedited, uncensored anime. I suppose that's why so many Robotech fans seem to be completely clueless about anime, and why several still insist that Robotech is something completely different from anime.

Couldn't tell ya... that was a bit before my time... Since at that point my first experience with anime was still a little while in the future, I didn't get a chance to observe how anime enthusiasts reacted to Robotech in the 90s. Of all the anime magazines I've collected as part of my research into Macross II: Lovers Again, only one of them actually mentions Robotech when discussing the history of the Macross franchise... Animerica Vol.1 #0. In that issue, Robotech is only mentioned briefly, and only then when it's relevant to Macross. The two brief mentions it gets are: #1. A brief blurb about Streamline's plans to release subtitled versions of Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada as part of the Robotech Perfect Collection. Interestingly, the Robotech episdoes which are intended to be the main purpose of that release are mentioned only in passing, and more as extra baggage than as something worth watching. #2. An even briefer mention of Robotech as an ungainly mishmash of Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada that enjoyed a brief moment of success in the US before bombing spectacularly, done as an aside in the featured interview with Haruhiko Mikimoto.

Okay, poor choice of words on my part... but no poorer than calling it "free TV". I'm talking about regular broadcast television which is supported by commercial endorsements. It's not "free" by any means, it's all supported by advertising revenue. But that's exactly the point... that the shows failed to gather any kind of significant following during their limited runs on broadcast television, and that it was the cable channels decision to run anime that really took anime from an obscure niche market to something that most people are at least passingly familiar with. Realistically, none of the shows you listed did much of anything as far as giving anime mainstream appeal in America. Those are relics from days gone by when most people didn't even know what anime was, and the industry was almost an underground outfit. Those shows didn't have much of any influence on the industry because nobody gave a toss about them back in the day. They came before the anime craze the cable providers started in the late 90s. Just look at Robotech... even during its initial broadcast run it was a poor performer and was all but eclipsed by the Generation 1 Transformers series. Carl Macek himself even attributed the failure of Robotech: the Untold Story to, among other things, being completely overshadowed the the release of Transformers: the Movie. Saying that old shows like Robotech were what got the ball rolling and helped give anime its current level of recognition is nothing short of absurd. They weren't what made the public sit up and take notice, and most of them aren't remembered fondly, if at all. It's the stuff from the late 90s that deserves credit for making the anime industry more accessible.

Part of that is, no doubt, the result of a good deal of energetic fornication on the part of the Space War 1 survivors and a good twenty years of mass cloningat the behest of the U.N. government. While we see a handful of Human-Zentradi hybrids take center stage in Macross, it seems a bit odd to assume they ended up on the rare side when 87% or more of Earth's population was Zentradi immediately after Space War 1's conclusion. It may simply be that there is a significant percentage who are hybrids and the show simply doesn't call attention to them. By 2045, nobody seems to think it remarkable that a neighbor or a classmate is part-alien. Eh... if we take the contents of the Macross Frontier Pash! Animation File at face value then the 5th Generation colony ship Macross Frontier is operating at only a fraction of its maximum capacity. Taking that into account, even if the Zentradi population's resource demands are five times that of the micloned population, they still wouldn't be anywhere close to pushing the limits of the bioplant ship's resources. In war, however, the drain on resources and damage to the ship did eventually force them to miclone their Zentradi residents.

While I'm reluctant to bring any RT community shenanigans here for the obvious reasons, I just have to speak up briefly to voice my incredulous disgust. On a related side note, I took a look at the boards over on Robotech.com and RobotechX.com for the first time in about five months, and I'm having second thoughts about the idea of a Robotech Wiki. I know there are other, much less idiotic Robotech fans out there... but if these are the sort of people who'd be populating the project's community section, it's probably not worth the effort. Sure, the material is still worth documenting... but the PEOPLE. My god, the PEOPLE in that fanbase SUCK. Not to toot my own horn, but it looks like the illiteracy brigade's concerted effort to remove anyone with a functioning brain and a legitimate opinion from the fandom has, if anything, succeeded in driving the quality of discussion on the forums down to a level where describing it as "abysmal" seems overly generous. It's like everything went to hell in a handbasket as soon as the handful of knowledgeable fans stopped holding their hands and beating their skulls in with the facts. Hell, I thought Robotech.com was a crapsack even before I left, and now... the community has deteriorated to the point where I'm almost unwilling to believe it's the same site. I'm not sure what was more galling... the thread where they're making what they fondly imagine are profound arguments in favor of adopting Astro Plan as the next Robotech Saga, another "what became of the SDF-2" thread, the thread about how protoculture is like the force, or the threads hating on "Macross Purists" for not being shattered by Carl Macek's death and saying mean things like that he liked to take credit for the work of others and that he wasn't the anime messiah Robotech fans want to think he is. Seriously... if this is the standard by which the Robotech fandom is to be judged, I'm going to have to seriously rethink the idea of a Robotech section for my site. I didn't think it'd gotten THIS bad...

Well, to be fair... Genesis Climber Mospeada wasn't a bad show, it was a decent concept that ended up mediocre as the result of executive meddling. If they'd had the sense to keep the show's focus on ride armors instead of faffing about with transforming fighters in a transparent attempt to cash in on Macross's success, the show would probably have been more popular. As it was, they banked on it being the next big thing and it just didn't sell... Now, there's no arguing that Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross was just a turd. Even the show's This is Animation book is pathetic, to say nothing of the concept art contained within.

Eh... it might have been that way in your neck of the woods, but that doesn't necessarily hold true elsewhere. Personally, I'm looking at what you're saying and I'm seeing a largely indefensible argument. By any rational measure, the influence public access television had on the anime industry is somewhere between "minimal" and "nonexistent". The shows you've cited here were largely forgotten almost as soon as they went off the air, assuming anyone noticed them at all. Even into the late 90s anime was a poor performer of public access television. Even the popular titles of the day, Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon, failed to gain much of a following and were canceled. Anime didn't really gain a foothold on public television until the debut of Pokemon and similar titles around 1998. Even now, anime is still practically a nonentity on public television, with very few shows on the air, and almost all of them geared towards the youngest of audiences. The thing that really sold anime to the American audience was the material that aired on cable television. In particular, Cartoon Network's "Toonami" block was instrumental in establishing anime's popularity. It wasn't until the show moved to Toonami that Dragonball Z became wildly popular, and other popular titles from that period followed suit... shows like Outlaw Star, Gundam Wing, Tenchi Universe, 08th MS Team, Neon Genesis Evangelion, etc. If even Robotech could enjoy a modest success on Toonami in 1998, then it goes without saying that the original Macross would likely have done the same (if not better due to subsequent licensing of the other shows). All the same, there's no denying that the influence of shows like Robotech and hacks like Carl Macek are minimal, and that the real factor that helped establish anime as something marketable in America was the release of largely unedited faithful dubs on cable television. Precisely. Apart from a few brief attempts at revival in 1998, 2001, and 2006, Robotech has been a dead property since 1987. Ever since it failed to take off, all Harmony Gold has done with the property is use the rights that made the show possible to block legitimate licensing of the real deal to protect their dead horse.

Eh... personally, I'm inclined to say Macek's earlier account is the more plausible of the two on the grounds that it came to light before his trend of lying and stretching the truth began in earnest. Once he started trying to spin himself as the anime industry's answer to Gene Roddenberry and touting Robotech as the result of a grand creative vision he had from the very beginning, he buried the truth in the name of self-promotion and retroactive arse-covering. If what he said was true, and executive meddling was what really produced the overarching Robotech story, then that should be the real dirty little secret of Robotech's history... that the "generational story" Robotech fans are so quick to boast about is a sham, and everything (even the show's name) is the result of commercial necessity rather than creative intent.

Indeed... had Carl Macek managed to get Robotech out there as a sort of "anime masterpiece theater" showing separate, accurately dubbed versions of Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada under the banner of Robotech rather than the quickly slapped-together, badly rewritten mess we're familiar with today, his reputation (and Robotech's too) would probably be a lot less dire. If you're willing to take Macek at his word, he does claim that his original intent for the syndicated Robotech TV series was to produce the same kind of anthology-style series you're talking about in one of the Robotech Art books. Just as you would expect, the first thing Macek did after explaining that part of Robotech's history was to insist that the failure of the anthology show concept wasn't his fault was to immediately shift the blame elsewhere. The party he blamed was the network executives, who he alleges wanted a single overarching story rather than a loosely linked anthology series. Of course, since this is an anecdote from Macek himself it has to be taken with a modest little mountain of salt since the man made a habit of telling extravagant lies both to exonerate himself of the guilt of all his various failures and bad decisions, and to exaggerate the extent of his involvement and input into the "creation" of the series. (It's worth noting that this early account is in reasonably obvious contradiction with his later assertions that the overarching story was a grand, preconceived idea he had going into the project)

My sentiments exactly... the defense that Robotech gave Macross more exposure is not, in and of itself, even close to being enough to justify the way the source material was abused, and it comes at the price of having to forever remind people "no, we're not talking about the nightmarishly bad rewritten version". Admittedly that last part is less and less problematic as time goes on, since the general attitude towards Robotech could best be summed up as "anyone who tries to defend Robotech is either an idiot or an extremely unsubtle troll". No, I don't think it would. It seems a fairly safe bet that Macross would still have caught on in the US thanks to the licensing of Macross II: Lovers Again and Macross Plus in the 90s, though it would've taken longer for people to get into the series as a whole. It'd definitely be less embarrassing if the Macross name wasn't dragging around Robotech's lousy reputation and collection of failed sequel attempts...

That's a pretty fair summation of my reasons for continuing to keep an eye and an ear on the Robotech franchise... without having several friends who're active in the fandom, I probably would've said "to hell with it" and given up on it ages ago. I'd be surprised if they tried... the novels are one of the most divisive titles in Robotech, and one of the two writers from the original run is dead now... In Robotech... protoculture is like duct tape... you don't question it, and it holds the universe together. Basically it's whatever the writers decide it needs to be for that particular episode. General purpose plot spackle. In application, it can be anywhere from "magic" to "Minovsky particles", depending on how seriously you take the original explanation of how they generate power using it. If anything, that answer works a little TOO well...

Huh... that's definitely interesting. It certainly explains the ridiculous levels of production that allowed the main continuity U.N. Spacy to build up its fleet so fast and continually replace its VFs with newer models and keep the colony missions on schedule. Presumably there are more, since I do recall mention that the various colony fleets incorporate any satellites they run across/capture into their forces as well. Certainly far more prolific than Macross II, where capturing a factory satellite nearly intact was a BIG deal, and the U.N. only had like two...

And now, another post in Mike's ongoing series of "Too Long; Didn't Read". Part ? of π*10^8. Refresh your browser... my old avatar was an orange done up to look like Jeremiah Gottwald from Code Geass. My new one is Kirby after eating Judge Dredd. For a while, I used the "Ordo Hereticus - Heresy Begets Termination" stamp as a joke on the attitude that certain Robotech.com and RobotechX.com moderators have taken towards anything resembling a personal opinion. (The seal's still set as my personal photo if you want to see/use the recolored version) No, that's just something I did with Mr March to get some of the information I've been collecting out there for the fans to enjoy while IRL issues springing from the local effects of the economic recession have been running me ragged. I'm still working on it, (in fact, I'm almost done with my translation queue, just three magazine articles to go), and what's in the articles on M3 is only a fraction of what I've uncovered. Long story short, we're moving to a new domain because of the dick move our current webhost pulled with regard to their promise to keep their systems up to date (the current server load is so out-of-date that it can barely run basic CMS software). As part of the move, we're also expanding our focus to cover the main continuity as well, as a complementary resource for the Macross Mecha Manual, which will also be making the move with us. Basically, we're tryin' to make ourselves into a sort of "one-stop-shop" for Macross information... with the exception of the Macross II stuff, the focus of my coverage will be the characters, story, setting, music, etc., while Mr March's Macross Mecha Manual covers the mecha exhaustively. The expanded project is semi-jokingly called the "Macross Galaxy Guide", and will be (is) on a different, much more potent server. I just have to get through the next week or so, then we can start getting things set up. Eh... I disagree. Here's why: You're assuming that the Robotech die-hards are rational people. If they were rational people, then they wouldn't be die-hard Robotech fans, would they? If they were, they would've abandoned the Robotech franchise as an outfit that'd hit rock bottom with no prospect for recovery either in 1987 when word got around that the Robotech: the Untold Story movie and Robotech II: the Sentinels TV series got the axe, or in 2000 when Robotech 3000 sank without a trace and saw the removal of the terminally inept Carl Macek from the creative directorship. They would not have stuck with the franchise for 25 years when it consistently failed to produce anything that didn't suck. You see, the Robotech die-hards are strange, alien creatures with completely foreign concepts of "fun" and "entertainment" and a tenuous grip on reality that lead them to think things like Shadow Chronicles are actually good cinema, and that Robotech is the internationally renowned blockbuster Harmony Gold says it is. If starving them for content was enough to drive them away from the Robotech franchise, our problem with them would've solved itself at least a decade ago. Bricks were shat.

Thanks! Excellent work as usual... VERY informative piece (at least for me). I'm particularly digging those more realistic fighter capacity numbers. Having their roles in fleet tactics spelled out is also quite nice.

Okay, now THAT is a good question... one with a long answer, but a good question nonetheless. This might venture into tl;dr territory, so please bear with me since the explanation's somewhat complicated. As you've said, it's certainly no secret that I don't have a whole lot of use for Robotech these days. It's not that I hate the show... it's that I hate what the show has become, what it stands for, and the sort of asinine behavior it brings out in its fans. To me, Robotech is a relic of a bygone era in the American anime industry. It's an interesting little historical curiosity that we can all gawk at and wonder what the hell the people responsible for it were thinking. Putting aside its alleged and highly debatable influence on the formation of the anime industry, the show itself itself aged about as well as unrefrigerated milk, and as a result has a weird retro camp aspect that at least lends it a little entertainment value. As I see it, the Robotech story had potential once, but that potential was wasted by the terminally inept, generally unimaginative, and incredibly dishonest people in charge of the show. The general antipathy I display for the Robotech franchise is largely the result of what the show has come to stand for... ignorance, deceit, and abuse of the source material. I find it particularly appalling that, rather than be honest about the show's origins, both Carl Macek and Tommy Yune opted to treat it as a "dirty little secret" and made an effort to convince the fans that the shows which make up Robotech are inferior and have no value outside of their adapted versions. In short, I don't hate Robotech so much as I hate what Robotech and its fanbase have become and what they now stand for. Now, as to why I'm planning this particular endeavor... (in no particular order) Honestly, I suppose the main reason is that one of the chief reasons Robotech fans annoy the crap out of people isn't that they're apefaces (most aren't), but rather that they're just plain ignorant. One of the things you'll notice just in looking at Robotech.com and RobotechX.com is that many Robotech fans are pretty clueless about Robotech itself. This ignorance leads them to say and do stupid stuff that gets on people's nerves, and thus perpetuates the lousy reputation of the online Robotech fanbase. Remedy the ignorance, and you not only sweep the rug out from under the feet of people like Maverick, MEMO, and dougbendover, you also give them fodder for intelligent discussion (which you'll no doubt agree has been sorely lacking for a good while now) and the means to stop acting like idiots. It also can do rather a lot for the non-fan who is curious about this "Rowboattech" thing they've heard about but can't find much of any information on. Another reason I'm doing it is that, like as not, Robotech is a part of Macross's history. It might be a part we aren't particularly proud of (or one that we'd like to bury forever like evidence of some dreadful crime), but it's still had an affect on Macross and the way Macross is perceived by western fans. Some of it is, yes, that I made a promise to a few decent Robotech fans of my acquaintance that I would try to put together a community site for them free of the bullshit, politics, and witch-hunting that are all Robotech.com and RobotechX.com are really about these days. And yes, some of it is nostalgia. Robotech was one of the first anime titles I was exposed to, so I do have some fond memories of it.

Okay... you've got me there... but let's remember that the majority of fans aren't that goddamn stupid, and just end up getting caught in the clusterfart of insane theories bouncing around Robotech.com. This isn't a project for the die-hard nutjobs, it's something for the everyman.

Okay, I can appreciate the desire to be helpful... but opening with the suggestion that the whole project is a waste of time can't really be called help. Contrary to what you asserted, the project is not fan-fiction (as it relies on the most stringent fact-checking possible and virtually indisputable logic insofar as continuity), nor is it an unnecessary endeavour as our pal Einherjar asserted, since the niche it would fill has, in point of fact, never been filled before, and Robotech has yet to provide any kind of comprehensive official information source. The closest they have is a reference written for someone's fan-fiction series... the Unofficial Robotech Reference Guide, which makes no secret of the fact that it was never intended to serve as a reference for the official continuity. Because then I'd be arrested for mass murder after all the Robotech basement-dwellers who spend their copious free time trying to make me care that they badmouth me on their podcasts overexert themselves and suffer fatal heart attacks due to going decades without exercise. I could maybe get away with it if I convince them there's a Geocache in an active volcano somewhere and write the whole thing off as voluntary virgin sacrifice to a volcano god. Perhaps, but you know as well as I do that the only part of this site that the mods actually care about fostering actual discussion in is the toy section. Everything else is moderated into a borderline catatonic state. Context would've been nice in the initial post then. Really, I would've been more interested to get feedback on my attempt to impose some sense of logic on the various Robotech stories, but someone decided to fixate on "a wiki is a bad idea" instead.

Oh my, I'm sorry if we're boring you... while I realize that it must be upsetting for you to see something as unusual as someone having a conversation that isn't about toys on this forum, perhaps you could do the mature thing and ignore the thread if you don't like the subject matter instead of your usual tack of calling attention to yourself and/or making a fuss about how you don't like it? After all... this isn't 4chan.

Which just increases the chances of human-Zentradi interbreeding as the human population grows. Certainly by 2059 in Macross's main continuity and 2092 in Macross's alternate continuity, nobody seemed to find Human-Zentradi hybrids unusual or remarkable. Such racism was certainly present in the survivors of the Space War 1 generation, even as late as 2040. The general in charge of Project Super Nova seemed to think Guld was untrustworthy because of his mixed heritage, and said as much directly to Guld's face during that inquiry after Guld shot up Isamu's YF-19 using illicitly-loaded live ammo during a blank round test sequence. Once news of the Zentradi uprising on Gallia IV came to his attention, President Howard Glass had started to say something untoward about the Zentradi before being reminded that he should be careful what he says by Leon.