Seto Kaiba

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.

If memory serves, Perfect Memory says that Tatsunoko joined the production only after Big West had already got the ball rolling and determined that it was going to run more expensive than they were budgeting. The court documents leave no room for doubt, since the 2002 court ruling says Tatsunoko has no claim on the disputed design works because they were neither involved in their creation nor funded their creation. By a similar token, the 2003 court ruling over ownership of the animation itself found that Tatsunoko owned the animation because they'd paid for its production, but that Big West owned the contents because they created it all before Tatsunoko got involved. All the same, ownership of the Macross story was never disputed during these rounds of legal back-and-forth. It does appear, given Big West's various adaptations thereof, that it belongs to them rather than Tatsunoko.

Yeah... like Talos said, there were already plenty of VF-1's in civilian hands prior to the events of Macross 7 in 2045. Plenty of 'em were clearly former military models that had been surplussed out, and there was also a dedicated civilian-use model off the VT-1 Super Ostrich platform. I don't think removal of the weapons systems was mandatory though, since the Destroid Monster in civilian ownership was still armed... as was Milia's red VF-1J, which even had super parts right up until Gamlin "borrowed" it and it got shot down. I'm kind of leery about that Fire Bomber-esque paintjob. I could really do without having Basara derail the movie while the cast tries to pound sense through his malformed four-inch-thick skull.

If, as I'm assuming, you refer to the public statement Big West made on their website way back when, that only refers to the design works because ownership of the design works was the only thing being disputed in that lawsuit. They fought over ownership of the design works and of the copyright on the animation itself, but unless there's another case we don't know about, there's really no evidence that ownership of the story was ever in dispute. Insofar as who precisely owns the copyright on the story of the original Macross series, don't we already have a concrete answer to that? The story, like most everything else that was created during development of the series, was created before Tatsunoko was brought on board to help fund production of the series. As such, under a common sense examination it should be Big West, not Tatsunoko, who owns the copyright on the Macross story. The copyright listing pulled in the post you linked to looks like the copyright on an English language adaptation or translation rather than full-fledged ownership of the materials. As owners of the distribution rights, Tatsunoko would have had every right to register a copyright on any and all foreign language adaptations and translated versions they produced for overseas distribution. Normally a good idea, though you won't get very far looking for ownership of the story in the Japanese court rulings because, as far as I know, it was never disputed. The wording in the ruling made in 2003 does seem to support what you're saying in that it says that Tatsunoko's production of the animation does not give them any rights to the materials created for the series prior to their involvement. Saying it'll go on forever is probably optimistic... after all, at the rate the Robotech fanbase is decaying, without a blockbuster to unite them and bring new people in, it'll be a dead title or at least a complete unknown within 10 years.

Yeah, it certainly looks that way... has anyone "in the know" had anything more to say about the September 2010 drop dead date that was supposedly attached to the live action movie license? I'd be very surprised if Warner Bros has actually made any progress on the film since they showed an early story treatment to Sylvain White. Certainly Tobey Maguire isn't making Robotech his top priority... in fact, it looks like he's been ignoring the project for at least two years now, and is focusing on other films that stand a chance of actually being released. Y'know, I have it on excellent authority that they spend a lot of their free time tossing cards into a hat and giving each other piggyback rides when they're not preoccupied with appealing to Tommy Yune's colossal ego in the faint hope that he might do some actual work one of these days instead of just endlessly congratulating himself for Shadow Chronicles. Herein lies the paradox of the Robotech fandom... the fans want to see Harmony Gold pay more attention to the "original" TV series and build on it, but when they actually get it (e.g. Sentinels, Shadow Chronicles) they immediately turn up their noses at it because it's embarrassingly amateurish. This endless cycle of optimism and disappointment that so many Robotech fans are mired in stems from the disconnect between their expectations of what Harmony Gold can do based on their rose-tinted memories of the TV series and what Harmony Gold is actually capable of. In many cases, this disconnect is almost unconscious... the fans don't mentally account for the fact that almost everything they enjoyed about the "original 85" was the work of the original creators, who were actually competent people. So, of course, when the time comes to make a Robotech sequel, those fans expect the same levels of quality from Harmony Gold... a much less capable outfit whose best writers would have great difficulty achieving a passing mark in a middle school creative writing class. It's not a matter of their work on the new shows being worse than what they contributed to the original TV series, since they're on about the same level, it's that the fans rate the series higher based on elements that Harmony Gold had nothing to do with. The reason the stories of the sequels all suck exceptionally hard is because they can no longer get by on changing the names in stories written by competent people. So, it's an hour or so on how to draw women who look like a pencil that's been stuck through two grapes? Isn't that a little outside his skill set? He's a "marketing coordinator" and his education in the fine arts consists of a BFA in lighting design, of all the silly things. No doubt they're hoping the industry is dying so things can come full circle and they can go back to slapping their names on someone else's work and passing it off as something original. So, 3 hours of flim-flam and wild exaggerations in the faint hope that it'll convince people that Robotech wasn't roundly ignored even in the 1980s. It's just insulting to everyone else who worked in the industry before Robotech came along, and frankly everyone who came after too... Nah, didn't you hear? This year they're going to a restaurant that specializes in grilling deep fried food! Seriously though, considering all the hostility and jockeying for "biggest fanboy" points we see in the vocal fans, one has to wonder how they manage to put aside all their idiot tendencies for a few hours to pretend they don't quietly detest each other and themselves. Hey, they gotta do SOMETHING to make it feel like they aren't just going through the motions to string along the brain-dead cattle that compose 9/10ths of the Robotech fanbase. Yep! Tommy baked them himself for a gathering of all of his fans after the convention. They come in two flavors... arsenic and potassium cyanide! In all seriousness, I half-expect a mass ritualistic suicide from the Robotech fans if the live-action movie and/or the Shadow Rising movie get canceled. They're almost as big a pack of nuts as the Scientologists, and that's saying something.

And what, may I ask, is Harmony Gold but a company that keeps its repeat customers by stringing them along with an endless stream of empty promises and weak excuses? In point of fact, there's a strong possibility that they'll do exactly that if the live action movie turns out to be a success. The nature of the so-called "original 85" as a hodge-podge of unrelated shows introduces a great many problematic legal hurdles (discussed elsewhere in this thread) that hamper Harmony Gold's ability to continue the story in any meaningful way. If the live action Robotech movie were to succeed, they would no longer have any reason to try to keep the animated series's rapidly shrinking fanbase (people like you) happy by continuing the story in progress. They could banish the vast majority of the franchise's legal issues for good by tossing the animated series out like they did the old comics and novels, and starting over from scratch with the movies and/or an all-new series based on them. It's what Paramount did, and the only reason Warner picked up Robotech was they wanted to try to make that particular brand of drippy brown lightning strike twice. So, let me get this straight... you, as a fan of Robotech, think it sucks more than usual that Harmony Gold refused to break with their 25 year tradition of failure and incompetence this year by doing nothing of any significance and having nothing to show for all the empty promises they've made? If you don't mind my asking, what makes this year such an exceptional disappointment? Is it just that you assumed this year's damp squib was going to be special because it was 25 years ago that Robotech was shat out onto TV to imitate the success of Transformers ('s funny how history repeats itself, isn't it?) and was promptly ignored because two-thirds of it is rubbish? Did you, perchance, forget that every anniversary occasion for Robotech has essentially been a celebration of how they've achieved nothing in the X years since their last major failure? Seriously, I'd like to know... how anyone familiar with their "achievements" can expect anything BUT failure and disappointment from them is a mystery to me. Well, yes... that's because Macross is a reasonably popular, competently run franchise, while Robotech is basically just bad crossover fan-fiction and shameless plagiarism partially legitimized by a licensing agreement.

I'm sure if they really wanted to they could find some rationale to go to court over it, but if past performance is any indication... they won't have to. Ever since Harmony Gold inadvertently started the whole Big West vs Tatsunoko legal brouhaha, they've been assiduously avoiding using anything from Macross in a way that could be actionable. Dodging legalities is more than likely the reason Harmony Gold opted to kill or otherwise dispose of any and all familiar faces from the Macross Saga who weren't plot-critical in a nice, safe comic book miniseries where the odd fact that comics are technically merchandise gives them the ability to use those designs in a Robotech title without the need to fear litigious retribution. Nah, that big honking MacGuffin and various attempts to recapture it are the central plot point for pretty much two-thirds of the entire Robotech continuity. It'd take a LOT of extreme rewriting and shoddy editing to banish that plot point... and if they manage that, why even try to call it Robotech? Why not just stop beating around the bush and give that mess a new, more appropriate title like Baron von Macek's F*cking Plagiarized Adventure, How to Lose an Audience in 10 Minutes, or perhaps Battlefield Earth 2. No matter what they call it, if the movie does make it to release there's little doubt it'll be a big winner at the Razzies just like Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen was. (Incidentally, Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen was nominated for Razzies in seven categories, incl. Worst Actress (Megan Fox), Worst Supporting Actress (Julie White), Worst Screen Couple (for Shia LaBeouf and either Fox or any Transformer), Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-Off, or Sequel, and Worst Picture, Worst Director, and Worst Screenplay. It actually won Worst Screenplay, Worst Director, and Worst Picture.)

Any way you shake it, the course of action that Warner Bros and Maguire Entertainment are most likely to take will be to sidestep any potential legal entanglements surrounding the source material by using only those aspects of Robotech that are owned entirely by Harmony Gold. In short, only those aspects of the story not present in the original show that were created by Harmony Gold during the adaptation process.

Eh...the idea of having a race of giants as the antagonist(s) wasn't exactly an original idea when Macross's creators did it in 1982. You could argue the earliest example was Gulliver's Travels, which was published in 1726. Of course, if you want to refine it down to giant space aliens, 1973's La Planète Sauvage, a French animated film, is the earliest example I can find. Now, if they were to incorporate aspects that are quite distinctly Macross... like their uniforms, mecha, and insignia, then they'd be in trouble for sure. Whether they'd be able to get away with them being giant aliens cloned for use in war is dubious, since Robotech did change the backstory significantly, which could potentially put them in the clear. After all, it's not like clone armies are something unique to Macross either.

Yeah, apparently the novelization says he's half-Zolan, while 2059:Memories labels him as half-Zentradi. Macross Chronicle appears to favor the latter.

Well, y'see... the way copyright law is written with respect to derivative works, there's no way that Harmony Gold could give Warner Bros permission to do a straight-up adaptation of Macross. However, they can freely use any of the aspects of the "Macross Saga" story that they can legally claim copyright on. In short, they can freely use anything they created that wasn't present in the original work. So, yes... they can technically make a Macross Saga movie. It won't look anything like the Macross Saga that Robotech fans are familiar with, since the copyrighted mechanical and character designs are owned by a company with whom Harmony Gold is not on good terms, but they can still use the character names from Robotech, and have it be about an alien ship called Zor's battlefortress, and have Robotech Masters and all of that malarkey. It won't have most of the landmarks of the Macross story that so many Robotech fans mistake for Macek's handiwork, but at least the names and the general thrust of the plot (giant aliens want Zor's battlefortress back) can be the same.

If anything, the recent behavior of producer Tobey Maguire might shed some light on what's going on with Robotech's live-action movie. Robotech isn't the only project he's involved it, but it does seem to be far and away the lowest priority, since he's also producing two other films... Tokyo Suckerpunch (in which he is also starring), and Afterburn... which are slated to come out in 2011 and 2012 respectively, if memory serves. Clearly Warner isn't the only one who's finally realized what they've bought. But, as my example illustrated, the type of "veto" power they're talking about has been given to property owners before... though it's doubtful they had enough clout to get it added to their licensing contract.

Eh... there's no indication that they are, so the safest assumption is that they're not. I would In the show, perhaps... it's not the case in the supplementary publications. I've heard that 2059:Memories indicates he's half-Zentradi, and he's featured with several of the other half-Zentradi characters in an Extra Report in Macross Chronicle as well...

You might want to try this thread for samples of art from the new-ish manga Macross: the First. Part of the reason you're not finding it is probably that you're looking under the wrong title... its proper name is Macross: the First, and the reason you won't find any DVDs or Blu-Ray releases of it is because it's not animated, it's a manga series running in Macross Ace magazine.