Seto Kaiba

Oh yes... our wannabe film industry insider and expert, who thinks the very height of wit is a film about his drunk-ass friends breaking car windows in a junkyard. It is worth noting that he tried to ignore the fact that it was an early draft being shown around, not a completed script or anything close to it. Odds are it was the completed Lawrence Kasdan script from about two years ago, not something by Gough, Millar, and Smith. Either way, it's par for the course with more of Maverick and MEMO talking out of their asses in hopes of stirring up some enthusiasm. So far, the people who've responded seem to all be either the ones who're praying for ANYTHING new, and the ones who've been sucking up for aeons in hopes of getting a mod post. Sounds like a perfect fit for Robotech... he can handle the incredibly stupid dialogue, bad writing, and hackneyed premises because he's already used to that sort of thing. Exactly right... Robotech has been a dead property for so long, and fans have gotten so desperate for any news that will convince them the franchise hasn't finally up and died that any news is good news. For any rational reader, that Sylvain White was approached to direct speaks volumes about the low regard in which Warner holds Robotech. If they were serious about the movie and thought it would be a blockbuster, they would've approached candidates who've headed up highly profitable properties like James Cameron or Michael Bay. There's no doubt in my mind these people would be hailing Plan 9 from Outer Space as a misunderstood cinematic gem if Ed Wood had been approached to direct Robotech.

Oh, definitely... but let's remember that this mook hasn't signed on with the good ship Titanic Robotech, so he might not be joining the rest of the idiot brigade in their march to shame and oblivion. Hopefully accompanied by the rest of her... though in this age of implants, who can tell?

Another talentless hack potentially joins the Robotech live-action movie debacle... For those too lazy to look up his IMDB profile, Mr. Sylvain White's directorial credits include (or to be precise, consist entirely of) The Losers, Stomp the Yard, I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, Trois 3: the Escort, and Quiet. The highest rating any movie of his has received is a 5.3 out of a possible 10.

I'm not sure what scares me more... Exsedol's "woah, awesome!" face, or Kamjin's unnaturally wide grin.

Okay, last time I'll weigh in on this particular subject so I don't derail this thread too badly... Firstly, Macross is not Yamato, and Yamato is not Macross, so one holds true for one does not necessarily hold true for the other. Second, the description does, as you said, call it a "super dimension energy cannon". At no point are particles mentioned. The clear implication is that it is exactly what the description says... a cannon that fires super dimension energy. The Zentradi (and Meltrandi) equivalents are also specifically flagged as being energy beam cannons rather than particle beam cannons. On the occasions when particle beam cannons do crop up, they're usually identified with distinct terminology that separates them from other flavors of beam weapon, often up to identifying the particle involved (electrically-charged, electron, MDE, etc.). This would be a well-reasoned assertion were it not for the faulty basis... the VF-27's beam rifle is, under anti-Vajra spec, a heavy quantum reaction beam cannon, not a super dimension energy cannon. Different technology.

Not really, no... most of us here on MacrossWorld had committed to not release any scans from Macross Chronicle until the magazine is out of print. If you want, I can point you to where I get mine, and you can order your own copies. If you're just after previews, there are slightly larger preview images of select articles on the publisher's website: http://books.shopro.co.jp/macross/

Rather more than that, actually... virtually all of the background music on the radio in City-7 is all taken from the second volume of the Macross II OST. Just about anytime anyone turns on a radio and it isn't Fire Bomber, it's something from Macross II. One day, I'll have to watch my way through the series and identify when and what songs they're using in each episode. Still gotta watch the ep myself for this, so I'll probably catch up when we do the next ep. Okay... in the interest of keeping this short and sweet, this theory can be summed up succinctly in four words: "Did not do research". It's pretty much a given that the U.N. Spacy DOES know how to construct them properly, since they're the most ubiquitous beam weapons in the entire Macross universe. Even the Macross itself had eight scaled-down versions of its main gun mounted as anti-starship turrets, and the ARMDs each had five. By 2040 they could scale them down far enough to start mounting them on fighters... the YF-19 had a pair, and the VF-22S had three, two in the forearms and one in the head. If there is a reason for it beyond "rule of cool", that's DEFINITELY not it. Odds are it was simply a modularity thing... in the event the macross cannon was damaged or destroyed, repairing it or replacing it outright wouldn't involve a major overhaul on the rest of the ship too.

Granted, it is phenomenally stupid of the fans to hang on Harmony Gold's every word to convince themselves the franchise isn't dead, but you'll find that the fans who are still trying to pretend the franchise isn't dead are, as a rule, phenomenally stupid people. For the most vocal fans, levels of literacy seem to be inversely proportional to their faith in Harmony Gold's creative team. On the one end of the spectrum you've got JT, the reasonably intelligent and well-spoken everyman who knows only too well that Harmony Gold's creative team is marginally less competent than a troop of ten-thumbed howler monkeys suffering from paranoid dementia. On the other side, you've got your MEMOs, your Mavericks, and your dougbendos... people whose functional illiteracy and total inability to recognize simple patterns or comprehend basic logic leaves their posts unintelligible, and who genuinely think that Carl Macek and Tommy Yune are the greatest cinematic geniuses of the modern age. One day, in a brighter future than we have now, believing that the Robotech franchise is capable of producing quality products will be grounds for getting sectioned. Pretty much my take on things too... By any realistic standard, Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles was Harmony Gold's last real chance to breathe some life back into the Robotech franchise... and it failed miserably. It failed to even briefly capture the attention of the stated target audience, and only succeeded in irritating many of the more discerning fans with another low-quality false-start. Now that they've pinned all their hopes on the live-action movie, the odds of ever seeing Tommy continue his little fanwank called Shadow Chronicles are pretty slim. Honestly, I have to agree with HP on this note. That ship sailed a looooooooong time ago. In the two years since the announcement that Maguire Entertainment had acquired the rights to make a live-action Robotech movie, nothing has happened. Writers have come and gone, producers have come and then moved on to projects that actually stand a chance, and all without so much as a working draft of the script. I feel fairly safe in saying that it's a 99.9% chance that we won't see any kind of live-action Robotech movie unless it's a fan production. In the extremely unlikely event that Warner does decide to move forward with it, it will probably end up as a direct-to-DVD release... albeit one so bad as to make G-Saviour look good by comparison.

Yeah, you've got me there... thinking is definitely not the strong suit of your average Robotech fan. If it was, they wouldn't be Robotech fans. They'd have jumped ship to another franchise ages ago.

Um... with the possible exception of the Konig Monster, there aren't any combat mecha even close to being 40 meters tall. Also, as seen in Macross Plus, VFs are perfectly capable of "hitting the deck" in a firefight if the situation calls for it. I don't think it usually does, since the use of VFs in shootouts against non-flying targets doesn't seem t happen all that often, since the bulk of combat takes place in space, where the deck that one would normally hit is conspicuously absent. The whole argument that VFs would be horribly inefficient against human-scale infantry and armored vehicles is generally a valid one*, but we must remember that with very few exceptions (Cheyenne I) these robots weren't developed to fight humans, and any use against human targets was when circumstances made it unavoidable. The targets they were designed to fight were ten meter tall giants packed inside even larger bipedal walkers. They were designed to cope with an extraordinarily unconventional enemy... and the enemies they faced since then have been similarly unconventional... In terms of whether or not overtechnology could've improved existing conventional weapons platforms to a level where they'd be superior to a VF... there are some problems with the logic here from an in-universe standpoint. Jamming a set of reaction engines and energy converting armor onto a conventional fighter jet might not work out so well, since, as we have in the stats, energy demands of flight leave the energy converting armor running either at a very low level or not at all... thus eroding the potential benefits of its usage. Some of the equipment may simply be too bulky or suffer from other mechanical complications that would make it difficult to integrate into a tank or normal jet fighter... unless I've missed something MAJOR in Chronicle, we aren't exactly dealing with an alien version of Plug & Play. * For a show that plays this completely straight, see Full Metal Panic!, and particularly episodes 0 and 1 of Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid, wherein the existence of robots for combat use is justified by them being able to go into combat with the versatility of infantry, the firepower of a main battle tank, and the ability to operate effectively in circumstances and environments were doing the same job with a main battle tank would be anywhere from "hideously difficult" to "virtually impossible".

You're not the only one... that is one atrocious piece of fan art. What the hell was that person thinking? It certainly seems that way... Of course, things being the way they are in the Robotech franchise it's a fairly safe bet that we'll never run short or reasons to define any new Robotech project in the works as a good try at redefining "epic failure". The breathtaking idiocy of Harmony Gold's creative staff and the increasing inanity of what we can only laughingly call Robotech's "story" guarantee that without any extra help. With the only saga of the "original 85" that the fans actually care about beyond Harmony Gold's reach, any attempt to expand upon the Robotech universe is destined to fail anyway. There's just no way to make the fans give a toss. The only sure-fire way to make sure Robotech stories will sell is to fall back on what the old comics did, and continue peddling Macross Saga side-stories until they finally exhaust the appeal of the saga and the fans lose interest. Speaking of epic failure, there's a few funny rumors doing the rounds lately concerning the live action Robotech movie. I've got no idea how accurate these are, but they're so outlandish that they bear repeating... particularly since they allegedly come from loudmouth suck-ups who are close to Tommy Yune. The first is that Warner's option for a live-action Robotech flick has a fairly short fuse... and that Warner has until September 15 to decide whether or not they want to move forward with actually making the movie. The other rumor going around was that Tommy Yune wants to distance Robotech from the "original 85" using his "Shadow Saga" and possibly the live-action movie, essentially leaving the old fans high and dry. I'll let you all know if I can get some corroboration on these, so consider them food for thought for now...

Eh, more or less... thus far there hasn't been any indication that they intend to extend the run of Macross Chronicle beyond the 50 planned issues. Back when they put out the organization guide for getting everything into five binders, they did say something to the effect of five binders fitting "all 50 issues". Just to be safe, I checked the publisher's website, and there's nothing there which indicates an extension at the present time.

True... though at least in some cases we have to consider magic labor-and-material-saving appliances like the factory satellite... labor and material processing expenses are a substantial part of the cost of something like a fighter jet or a tank... delete those from the equation and they're not very expensive at all on a per-unit basis... We just don't get help like that in the real world...

Instead of asking increasingly silly questions, you could consult the first post in the thread... which contains an adequate summary of the situation. As you could have ascertained from doing nothing more difficult than check Wikipedia, this all started because Harmony Gold started sending cease and desist letters to import toy dealers on the grounds that they'd somehow gotten it into their heads that the rights to the original Macross series they'd acquired from Tatsunoko as part of their original license agreement also extended to all of Macross's sequels. So, of course, this prompted the back-and-forth where Big West and Tatsunoko sued each other to confirm that they owned the rights they thought they owned. The end result was that nothing really changed... Big West and Studio Nue (joint parties) still owned the original material they'd created, and Tatsunoko owned the animation they'd produced and the rights they'd been given in their contract with Big West. Tatsunoko also went after Bandai to demand restitution for Big West and Bandai "profiting unfairly" from Tatsunoko's work on the original Macross series with their sequels... a demand the courts rejected in pretty short order. As a result, the claims Harmony Gold had made about their license giving them rights to all of Macross were quickly invalidated, and they quickly turned to trademarking the Macross name and logo in the US, and acquiring the DYRL merchandising rights from Tatsunoko to block any goods and distribution licensing that might threaten the terminally ill Robotech franchise.

Really, this is an entirely needless assumption... none of the copyright confirmation lawsuits which rattled back and forth between Big West and Tatsunoko in the early 00's actually changed anything as far as rights to the original Macross series. All they really did was reaffirm the status quo... that Big West owns the intellectual property that they funded the creation of, and the franchise as a while, while Tatsunoko owns the physical animation they paid for and produced, and the rights they were given under contract (merchandising and distribution outside of Japan). If we take the remarks made by Carl Macek in his Robocon 10 interview at face value, Harmony Gold always knew that they couldn't use the copyrighted character and mechanical designs from the original Macross series. So really, any speculation on what would've happened if Tatsunoko had given Harmony Gold all rights to Macross is entirely needless... you can't sell what you don't own, and the courts have already weighed in on that matter with some force... Tatsunoko never had any legal claim on the intellectual property (characters, mecha, etc.) of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series because weren't involved in its creation in any way. As I've illustrated above, such an event could never come to pass because Tatsunoko never actually held those rights to begin with, and you can't legally sell or license something you don't own. For the sake of argument... if Tatsunoko's lawyers had switched off their brains for some reason and allowed Tatsunoko to grant Harmony Gold ALL rights to Macross in their license agreement, the portions of that agreement concerning rights Tatsunoko did not own would essentially be null and void. Those portions of the contract simply wouldn't be in any way enforceable. Big West could (and likely would) sue Harmony Gold for copyright infringement, and no doubt Harmony Gold would've rounded on Tatsunoko with a great big "WTF GUYS!". The fun part is that, depending on how the licensing agreement was written, Harmony Gold could potentially turn around and sue Tatsunoko for contract fraud... and expect to win handily. As I've already explained above, the rulings wouldn't have to retroactively cancel out anything, because the disposition of rights to the series didn't change... all that happened was both parties confirmed what rights they own. Since the rulings concerned ownership of copyrights, the rulings of the Tokyo District, Appeals, and Supreme courts would be enforceable internationally under the host of treaties which make up the bulk of international copyright law. Had the court rulings changed the disposition of rights that Harmony Gold had originally acquired under license from Tatsunoko, Harmony Gold would've been affected by the rulings... but they didn't, so the whole point is moot. It doesn't... the court rulings didn't actually change who owned what rights to the series.

Well, I guess that clears up pretty much any questions as to the reliability of that information... it's definitely a dick move on Harmony Gold's part to use an ultimatum to try and force fans to give all their hard work to Harmony Gold with no expectation of compensation or credit. Bah... the real shame here is that the closure notice on RobotechX isn't legitimate. It would just be too funny if, after spending all those years backstabbing fans, sucking up to Tommy, and trying to police the fanbase for heretics, MEMO's own website was targeted for closure by Harmony Gold. It would be just compensation for the way he's acted, especially now that he's tried to frame me and HP for the cancellation of Robotech Genesis and the deletion of a bunch of Nenead's stuff from DeviantArt. Yeah, you were fool enough to submit it without reading the submission waiver of rights and now your work belongs to Harmony Gold.

Let's cross our fingers and hope for the best, eh? Well, I'm definitely looking forward to the Macross Frontier mechanic sheet, I can't say any of the other stuff stirs my interest... especially not the Macross Quarter and the VF-5000. Honestly, there ought to be a rule that they can only print dedicated character sheets for people who actually had some kind of characterization or relevance to the plot... shallow stocks like Nanase, Nene, and Raramia belong crammed into Extra Reports or on "People of <BLANK>" sheets. Every time I see one of these, it gets me curious... the more info on the colony program the better. Equipment to nuke the space whales? Okay Macross Chronicle... NOW you have my attention... No Azrael... we're NEVER done... Chronicle 47-50 are gonna be 32 pages of Mylene and the VF-1. Somehow, I think that's it for timeline sheets... period. After seeing the incredibly disappointing Metal Siren sheet, I don't think I could stomach seeing a Parallel World continuity Timeline Sheet in all its maddening incompleteness.

Huh... looks like the promo images for #46 are the atmospheric version of the VF-11C Super Thunderbolt from Operation Stargazer, a joint character sheet for Pixie Team background characters Nene Rora and Raramia Rerenia, and another "Game and Advanced Valkyrie" Extra Sheet with the Milky Dolls and the Feois. #47 seems a bit more interesting, with another "Variable Fighter Development History" sheet (apparently featuring the VF-25 and VF-27) and unless I miss my guess covers the business between Project Super Nova and the "present day". Also mentioned (but not pictured) is a character sheet for "flower girl" and Rex's biker gang (I think, I'm not sure about the last one), and another Sound Force related history sheet...

Doubly appropriate for a Harmony Gold panel, since ignorance is one of the few things keeping the Robotech franchise from doing what it's been threatening to do since 1986... sink without a trace. Oh, considering what I've heard about JuanRT being almost as determinedly pro-Harmony Gold as MEMO is, it does sound rather like it was intended as a trap. I don't speak any Spanish, but with a setup like that it seems pretty much inevitable that they'd try to discredit Nenad or goad him into saying something inaccurate so they can carry on pretending that UEG are the apefaces, not Harmony Gold. Admittedly, that explanation HP got from Nenad is frightening... Harmony Gold tried bullying UEG into submitting their work under the terms and conditions of their fanworks agreement. In practice, that's a choice between ceding all rights to, and control over, their work to Harmony Gold or giving up on their fan project. Talk about dick moves... good grief. It's even more disgusting that MEMO's running around behind the scenes trying to pin the blame for Harmony Gold's asinine behavior on me and HP. That man is a bootlicking toady with no shame whatsoever.

Really, the reasons behind Harmony Gold's extreme reaction to the rather amateurish Robotech Genesis CG fan film project and not other, far more unambiguously detrimental fanworks is a complete mystery. Of late, the only times when Harmony Gold has felt it necessary to trot out their legal counsel to start shooting cease and desist notices at people have been occasions when they feel the rights they obtained from Tatsunoko under license have been threatened or violated. It makes perfect sense for them to have gone after that MechWarrior game, since the developers were violating their rights and a pre-existing court settlement. I can see them looking the other way when it comes to YouTube, since the show is already out on YouTube AND Hulu. That said... there doesn't seem to be an obvious reason for them to go after UEG and their Robotech Genesis fan film. I can see two possible reasons for their actions, but since UEG Productions is determined to clam up we'll probably never know the real reason for this. The more likely of the two possible explanations for Harmony Gold's sudden move to kill the Genesis project, which MEMO seems to have fixated on, is that they saw or otherwise heard about UEG's plans to eventually go commercial with their talent at some unspecified point in the future. The answer may be as simple as Harmony Gold not wanting a fan film based on their work associated with (and owned by) another company, and deciding to put a stop to it in order to prevent another MechWarrior-like situation or other legal complications from coming to pass, and didn't want to be arsed to hammer out some kind of deal with UEG either. The other possible, though far less likely, explanation for Harmony Gold's completely over-the-top response to UEG's fan project is that they thought the project's status as a derivative work based on Super Dimension Fortress Macross (and maybe Southern Cross too) would draw unfavorable attention from Big West (and their lawyers) if they had officially supported the project like Nenad asked them to in his e-mail to Kevin McKeever. They might've seen it as a lawsuit waiting to happen if it was mistaken for something done with official sanction or support, and decided to protect their business interests by killing it before it could become an issue. Of course, both of these are strictly theoretical, and assume that Harmony Gold is behaving in a rational fashion... which may not be the case. And I got it from one of the other folks he'd talked to.

Eh, never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers... If they actually went after EVERY fan project with the potential to make their official products look bad, there wouldn't be any fan projects left. They just target the most visible ones that aren't already kissing their asses. No, what's REALLY funny is HOW MEMO's been telling UEG that we did it... reportedly he's been telling them that I "posed as Harmony Gold" and contacted DeviantArt to demand the removal of all of their Robotech Genesis fan works. The lies MEMO's telling are getting more and more extravagant and unbelievable as he attempts to undermine someone who just doesn't give a poo about Robotech anymore.

Oh yeah, I remember that post... though I'm not sure if we could really call seeing Harmony Gold resume their bad habit of killing off any fan project that could potentially one-up them or is run by fans critical of the way Harmony Gold runs the franchise. On the one hand, it's always amusing to see Harmony Gold shoot themselves in the foot by abusing the loyal, long-time fans who've been keeping the franchise alive all these years. On the other hand, you can't help but feel bad for the fans who put months or even years of their free time into their project, only to have it turn out to have been for nothing when Harmony Gold gets nervous and starts threatening to sue. Considering that at least one of the Robotech die-hards had a signature reading "Death to Macross Purists" on his Robotech.com profile for a good long time before anyone could be made to do anything about it, one could say that Harmony Gold has already given tacit approval to the idea of having Robotech fans resort to violence and intimidation tactics to silence critics. It seems a pretty safe bet that MEMO would endorse it, since Bendo does and MEMO has already endorsed Bendo despite that. All the same, since they've failed spectacularly to attract the attention of the people they want to draw into the Robotech fanbase, they really ought to take heed of how their actions appear to the long-term fans who keep them employed. Is it bad that I thought this post was totally awesome? Shh! You're not supposed to tell them that I'm really The Awareness, leader of the Haydonites and the secret menace destroying all things Robotech and protoculture... they're not supposed to find that out until Robotech XLII: Rick Hunter gets a Fixed-Rate Mortgage! Nothing at all... but let's be honest here, what do they care if the fans think they're jerks? The only fans they care about are the die-hards who'd buy Tommy Yune's bowel movements so long as they put "Robotech" and "Masterpiece Collection" on the box somewhere.

Now you're just splitting hairs... I suppose you could say that he is one of the people who best exemplifies the qualities of being a gratuitous kiss-ass for Tommy Yune and hating anyone and anything that goes against Harmony Gold's company line and going to almost any lengths to shut those people up... but I'd still prefer to say "worst" since those aren't positive qualities from the average person's perspective. Actually, I can do the Cobra Commander voice pretty well... that's actually how the Macross II RPG group I used to run got the name for the fighter squadron the player characters were in... (one long evening of warped humor involving a comic printed in the back of an issue of Toyfare that one of the guys brought over to discuss the super-poseable RT stuff) Eh, even then... UEG was pretty adamant that they weren't aiming to make a profit from it, and continue to insist so... if we take their remarks at face value (and the e-mail they've shown) then they never represented themselves as a business entity looking to make a profit from it, just a fan group looking to see if they could get some kind of support for their fan project from HG, a move that probably would've benefited Harmony Gold enormously if they'd had the sense to spin it right... but they opted to can it instead.

Whatever their particular shortcomings, they'll be someone else's problem soon. He's aware of it, trust me... one of the first things I did after he uploaded M3 to Macross2.net was do a complete inventory of links to make sure we didn't have anything broken. The absence of VF-0D battroid art is a known issue, and presumably one that will be corrected either once we find some decent line art image stock or Chronicle goes out of print, whichever happens first, due to that informal agreement most of us have not to publish scans of Chronicle while it's still being sold. Insofar as coloring goes, the process tends to involve tedious examination of the animation and existing line art stock, and rather a lot of checking and double-checking until he's sure it's correct. This is made somewhat irritating by the lack of good color and black-and-white line art for Macross Zero and Macross Frontier... and Chronicle's occasional inexplicable deviation/correction of the existing color scheme. It's basically just coloring the basic pattern and shading, and then tweaking the colors until they look "just right". Since my collection of Macross Chronicle is more complete than Mr March's (for the time being) and I'm the one with virtually every Macross II book and magazine at my disposal, lately we tend to end up exchanging .gif images over MSN while we're doing color checking.

And let us make no mistake, the creators of Macross are fully aware of just how impractical things like VFs would be on real-world battlefields. Remember, they've always had VFs and destroids down as extremely expensive hardware, and have toyed with the idea of replacing them with more cost-effective, non-transformable unmanned fighters on at least two separate occasions... in Macross Plus and in the backstory of Macross Frontier. On more than one occasion, the initial cost and upkeep costs for a particular VF were cited as reasons for its development, adoption or rejection (ex. VF-5, VF-6, VF-7, VF-9, VF-14, VF-171, VF-25), and the same goes for the AIF-7S Ghost, which became the primary air force of many emigration fleets because they cost 1/3 of what the VF-171 does, and that thing's considered extremely cost-effective for a VF. So, let it never be said that Macross's creators are completely blind to the fact that something like a VF would be an implementation nightmare, or that the increased cost would make non-transformable fighters much cheaper and far more appealing by comparison once they were on roughly the same technological level... they just keep coming up with various reasons to keep the VFs as central figures in the story because it's much more exciting than watching some mook in a control center ordering UCAVs about.