Seto Kaiba

Now, it's no secret that the Robotech graphic novel was the chief parts donor when Tommy Yune was stitching together the lurching Frankenstein's monster we know as the miniseries "From the Stars", but it would be unfair to the other "donors" to claim it was the only source he was treating with light-fingered contempt. Parts of the pre-Space War 1 Macross timeline got "sampled" as well, as did some Mospeada concept art, and some character designs from the Street Fighter arcade games. The creative process currently in use at Harmony Gold for the animated continuity could easily be summed up as a bizarre recursive form of plagiarism. Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles was a film assembled almost entirely from bits and pieces of Sentinels and the remake of Battlestar Galactica, the former of which was also composed in large measure of material shamelessly lifted from Macross and given a minor and poorly done Southern Cross facelift, and a good deal of material "based on" content from contemporary sci-fi (Star Trek: the Next Generation being the most obvious "donor"). The next one, when they finally get to making it who-know-how-many years down the road, will probably be a ripoff of Michael Bay's 3rd Transformers movie done entirely with pre-established content from Shadow Chronicles. I wouldn't have expected him to. After all, Tommy's MO has always been to pander to the fanbase and string them along by playing on their desire to view more stories about the Macross Saga's cast without straying into actual Macross. If one thing has remained constant since the mythical entirely fictitious "glory days" of Robotech, it's that you'll have a hard time finding a group of people who hate Southern Cross more than Robotech fans. Why would he shoot himself in the foot by including something that the fans have been saying they don't want for the better part of 25 years now? Really? And here I was thinking that the main prerequisites to be a modern Robotech fan were to have eaten a lot of lead paint as a child and be the sort of gullible prat who would fall for a scam like "Double your IQ or no money back".

Don't worry... sooner or later Maverick_LSC'll cook up a rationale to ban you if you keep trying to question the Harmony Gold company line and his bullshit. Some of the reasons he comes up with to ban the people who disagree with him are quite amusing. After calling him out on the obvious lies he was posting in the Macross legal threads on RT.com, he snapped and accused me of doing so only to cause Robotech fans "pain and suffering", and banned me. That you've gotten away with it this long makes me wonder if Tommy's finally leaning on them to stop banning people right and left after realizing there's almost nobody left on the discussion boards at Robotech.com to discuss Robotech. If MEMO's agreeing with you, that means he's probably hoping he can suck up to you to get you to do something for him later. But they're the same damn character... Jack Baker is a blatant clone of Rick Hunter in the same way that his girlfriend Karen Penn was a blatant clone of Lisa Hayes.

To be blunt, any traces of a compelling story in Robotech are a byproduct of the original Japanese shows, not the work of Robotech's writers. They've proved that time and time again. The (relatively) successful comics were not those with the best of writing or art, but those which pandered the most to what the fans wanted to see... the ongoing story of the Macross Saga cast. Part or, to be honest, most of the reason the "new" comics were far better received than the "old" ones was that the quality of the art improved significantly. True, they're not up to the standards of mainstream comic book titles today, but they're a hell of a lot less offensive to the eye than the old ones were. Since the writing was also done under the supervision of Harmony Gold, there's also the added "bonus" that they supposedly fit into the canon story of Robotech these days. Of course, they also get a pass from many fans for the same reason Sentinels did... pandering to the fanbase's desire to expand on the Macross story and characters. I doubt it... but the possibility exists. Of course, this could all be in MEMO's head, like most of the news he reports. So, business as usual? Another inconveniently sharp Robotech fan catches the mods trying to resuscitate the community they've been suffocating with bullshit and calls 'em out on it, and gets marked for a ban. Truly, the only ones welcome in the Robotech fanbase anymore are those too stupid to see the writing on the wall. (Or, indeed, those too congested to smell it... since it's written in bullshit ON bullshit)

Quoted for Truth... also, that's bloody well going in my sig. As someone who used to be a fan of Robotech many moons ago, and someone who still spends a fair bit of time conversing with the more sensible remnants of Robotech's fanbase, I would be inclined to cast my vote for the present situation as being the more disappointing of the two. I think those Robotech fans that I still talk to, and a good many others who aren't sucking Tommy's dick in hopes of getting a job, would say the same. While there's no denying that virtually everything that came out with the Robotech name on it in the 90's was a badly written and/or badly drawn piece of poo not worth the paper it was printed on... at least something was happening in the franchise. Sure, those in charge were as inept as they are now (if not moreso), and there was no movement on the animated continuity, but at least they were getting SOMETHING out there on a semi-regular basis. Nowadays, the only signs of life the franchise shows are some embarrassingly lousy toys that trickle out at a pace of about one a year, import toys from Macross, and the occasional empty promise that they're still working on a sequel to capitalize on what they're still calling the smashing success of Shadow Chronicles. Well, what were you expecting? If you're going to run a blog or a podcast talking about Robotech, there's not a lot to talk about. There's been no movement on continuing the Shadow Chronicles story arc for at least three years, and there's nothing in the foreseeable future either, so once they've exhausted the series as a topic the only things they can fall back on are the old comics and novels that Harmony Gold and most of the fans would like to pretend never existed. What did you expect? Robotech was never a popular title, even during its "golden years" in the 1980s, so it never had the clout or the appeal necessary to attract a big name comic book publisher. The license changed hands between independent publishers for years before finally croaking in 1998. Many of the artists involved were clearly out of their depth, and frequently resorted to tracing characters and mecha out of other shows, art books, and magazine articles. Quite a few of the writers seemed to have, at best, a vague idea of what Robotech was about, and were clearly trying to make the story more appealing by imitating whatever anime title was popular at the time. The result of this mishmash was, more often than not, embarrassingly amateurish and almost completely unreadable. In the end, what it boils down to is these amateurs were given an unpopular title their bosses picked up for cheap and told "make this marketable". Needless to say, they failed quite spectacularly most of the time. I suspect the only reason that the Sentinels continuation comic by Jason and John Waltrip was somewhat well-received was because it's a pseudo-canon continuation of the story of Rick Hunter and the Macross Saga cast, which is what Robotech fans care about more than anything else. The decision to toss the lot of them from the continuity and pretend they were never made is one of the few major decisions of Harmony Gold's current creative team that I actually agree with and approve of. Rubbish belongs in the bin, after all.

What's there to be confused about? The cover shows us that protoculture fuel is made by giving a naked man with a bright purple mullet electroshock therapy while he lays on top of a roulette wheel and balances a terrarium on his stomach.

Hell, you don't even need to look anywhere outside the video to know it's a Pachinko game advertisement... if the large Pachinko machine in the background wasn't a tipoff, there's the prominent statement that it IS a pachinko game right in the voiceover, with the word "pachinko" clearly intelligible to even someone who doesn't speak Japanese. I wouldn't even bank on them thoroughly reading this thread before jumping to the wrong conclusion... remember that Captain Donovan guy?

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.