Seto Kaiba

Gee, put it like that and you might hurt Tommy's feelings by making him think that people might not want a side story about an Invid princess with boobs bigger than her head. Nah, that particular rule only applied when it was Macek talking about the failures he presided over during his tenure as creative director. If something went right, it was always his idea or part of his grand vision, even though he almost invariably had nothing to do with it. If things went awry, it was always someone else's fault and the result of either circumstances beyond his control or executive meddling that went on over his head. Hilariously, it almost invariably worked the other way around, with the decisions the fans all point to as evidence of Macek's genius having been made without his involvement by other, more competent people in positions of actual authority. By the same token, the decisions that many fans loathed in the various failed sequels were mainly his doing. Truly, he was a man with one and only one skill... the ability to fly under the radar while taking credit for the work of others and blaming others whenever his own decisions ended in catastrophe. Yes, it does sound like the sort of thing Macek would do, doesn't it? I doubt it, though, since what we're getting is Tommy Yune art as a "teaser". Odds are it's going to be an extremely brief and amateurish-looking OVA knocked out for a shoestring budget by some studio's janitorial staff like Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles was. Y'know what? That's a good thing. As you haven't been subjected to their company for nearly as long as I have, you probably missed the fact of life that the vast majority of Robotech fan projects turn out to be utterly unoriginal rubbish unfit for consumption by human, or even animal, audiences. At least the guys who made Genesis were trying to put their own spin on things... the blokes behind Skull Knights seem to just be trying to thieve as much from the Macross Zero OVA as they think they can get away with. Killing more fan projects is only going to accelerate the rapid decay of Robotech's fan population. It increases the already overwhelming feeling of stagnation that's begun to get to even the most hardcore Robotech fans active in the online community.

Well, for once it looks like Google Translate and/or Bablefish aren't playing you false... that definitely says "Kamiya Power Shovel". パワーショベル is a reasonable enough approximation of the english words "Power Shovel", romanized as "pawaashoberu", and 神谷 is Kamiya. My guess would be that it's referring to the piece of mining/excavation equipment known as a power shovel, a type of excavator.

So, in other words, it's just more of the usual gibberish from a borderline-illiterate nutjob that even the Robotech lunatic fringe has a hard time taking seriously these days. I'm not surprised in the least that MEMO is doing everything he can to hype this latest weaksauce bullsh*t from Harmony Gold... he's been sucking up to Tommy since Robotech.com opened, and he probably still thinks that it'll get him a job at Harmony Gold. I wonder what Steve and Tommy think of him now that he and his best pal have essentially killed the Robotech.com community section.

It's possible, yes... but I doubt we'll ever get the particulars of the contract out of Harmony Gold. If there's ANYTHING in it that might be perceived as even remotely unfavorable to them in any way, you know they'll bury it deeper than Jimmy Hoffa. After all, Harmony Gold always put a higher priority on appearances than on substance. That's why they've been presenting the announcement that the movie project exists as though the movie'd already been made, and why they're announcing that Warner has the merchandising rights to the movie like it's something out of the ordinary.

Suddenly, I have the strangest urge to join the U.N. Spacy... (Max and Kakizaki are clearly liking what they see too. )

Of course... it's dollars to donuts that's exactly what happened with this new unnamed project they're allegedly working on. As many in the fanbase are still engaged in wailing and gnashing of teeth over his death and "remembering" what a visionary he was, Harmony Gold could get them to buy into just about anything by saying that it was something Macek had envisioned. Hell, it started before the man even died with them inviting him back in an advisory capacity, a choice which made the dumber fans think that he would have at least partial creative control over the series again (ironic, as it turns out, since Tommy Yune had far more success in his tenure as creative director than Macek ever did). I'll wager that, if this side story is really something they're working on and not just noise they're throwing out so people think they aren't just jerking off to Shadow Chronicles concept art, it was something that crossed Macek's desk only briefly, and was probably one of Tommy's ideas that Macek said wasn't completely stupid, or something like that.

Yeah, I had a moment like that when I looked up Bin Shimada's filmography. I knew he'd done both Paptimus Scirocco and Stick Bernard, but I had no idea he'd also been cast against type as a shy and indecisive bike cop (and main character love interest) in You're Under Arrest!, which I'd happened to be watching at the time.

Among other things, I collect art books from mecha anime titles. If my interest in mechanical design ever wanes or it gets too expensive, I'll probably stop collecting... though I'm fairly conservative in my acquisition habits so getting burned out hasn't been an issue. Not really applicable to my situation... but since my interests are fairly diverse I haven't really managed to burn myself out on any one title. Don't collect toys, for the most part... though I'll go up to about $100 or so in rare cases when something genuinely appeals to me. On art books? $500 tops, if I run across a bunch of titles on my wish list. Models/toys are something I don't normally collect, so I think the most I've ever spent in one year was ~$120 (incl. shipping). My ex shared my hobby, so it was never a source of contention. My new girlfriend is somewhat amused by it since mecha isn't really her thing, but since I don't tease her about the stuff that she collects, it's all good. On a bookshelf in my study. I did once... when I found several rare Macross II art books and magazine features, but then Macross Chronicle came along to give me something to get good and angry about, and that pushed the melancholy out of my head. Now I'm just slightly amused that I apparently know more about Macross II than Chronicle's writers.

Of course not... they've made it abundantly clear that they're crossing their fingers and hoping that Warner will make a successful live-action adaptation of Robotech to undo the damage Macek did to the franchise during his tenure as creative director. They claim that they "have a say" in the movie, though it's obvious from the way they act that they have no influence on the project whatsoever and are just along for the ride. Because the hardcore fans are their safety net in the event that the decision to bank on the live-action movie to revive interest in Robotech doesn't pan out. If they were no longer dangling the promise that they'll reveal the fate of Rick Hunter over the heads of the fans, what's left of the fanbase would fall apart almost overnight, leaving them with nothing if the live-action movie project falls apart. Now, that doesn't mean that Tatsunoko is actually involved (unless it was mentioned explicitly in the videos). It's entirely possible that Tatsunoko could have only been involved in a minor advisory capacity and to get approval to use the Mospeada designs. It doesn't mean that Tatsunoko will be doing the animation.

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.