Seto Kaiba

What I've heard about Tommy from the former SoCal Robotech crowd is that his attitude is almost as arrogant and contemptuous when he's outside his controlled environment as it is when he's on the clock. Seeing the way he acts when he's doing convention panels and posting on Robotech.com, it didn't come as much of a surprise to hear people accuse him of being a glory hog who likes taking credit for work he didn't do. He seems to be utterly convinced that his "vision" for Robotech is the best thing that ever happened to the franchise, and gets pretty pissed off when people take pot shots at it. For him, that's a no-win scenario... no matter what he does or says he's going to come out looking bad. He might as well attempt to minimize the damage by exiting stage right at maximum velocity... Let's be honest here... whatever the man's other faults, Tommy Yune isn't a complete idiot. What he's doing by keeping things vague and misdirecting questions about the Macross rights is protecting his job. It doesn't take any great feats of pattern recognition to notice that the only part of Robotech that most of the fans actually care about and want to see more of is the Macross Saga, and consequentially that's the merchandise that sells the best. Now, Tommy's just as capable of spotting these trends as anyone else, and he seems to have arrived at the obvious conclusion that if he tells the fans the truth and admits they can't use content from Macross in any future Robotech sequels, the franchise will fall apart and he'll be out of a job. So, at least for the time being, it's in his best interests to keep being vague and misdirecting questions about the legal situation.

While I don't think we can rule it out... it is entirely possible that the wings are just kept in an intermediate layer in the airframe between the crew compartment and the cargo compartment, and/or fold up upon retraction like the wings on EX-Gear.

To be perfectly honest, it doesn't matter if his arrogance and jackass attitude are the result of his upbringing or not... it's still no excuse for him to act like a bellend in public and verbally abuse the paying customers whose business is the only thing justifying his continued employment. In the final analysis, calling his attitude "arrogance" might be rather generous, it's more like textbook stupidity... biting the hand that feeds you. Admittedly, that's a topic he seems determined to dodge whenever someone "in the know" brings it up just to tweak him... though saying McKeever's an apeface is perhaps a blinding flash of the obvious. Seeing the way they treat customers on a regular basis, I have to wonder how these idiots have managed to stay employed. No company in its right mind would let employees abuse customers and kick them out simply for expressing their opinions about their products. So long as they're paying customers, Harmony Gold's employees should suck it up, shut the hell up, and let them talk even if they don't like what they're saying. It's good for business. What little we've seen of it makes it look like pretty generic office space... like the sort of rental business property you'd find just about anywhere. Dollars to donuts McKeever and Yune are just another pair of residents in the Harmony Gold cube farm. Nah, they're generally apefaces in person too... they're just less blatant about it.

None as yet... The MacrossF.com blog dropped some hints about the content of Issue 46... it looks like we're getting a SMS Macross Quarter B-sheet covering the bridge layout, a history sheet covering what looks to be that battle over Lux in Macross 7, and the promise of a Mylene Jenius character sheet and "Decisive Battle with the Vajra Queen" timeline sheet.

To be frank, I find it almost unbearably pathetic that the supposed professionals at Harmony Gold are so ill-equipped to cope with criticism of their work that, to them, it becomes a personal insult. It's really disturbing to see the owners of an entertainment franchise try to ban critical discussion of their work on the franchise's official site. In the end, they're not really accomplishing anything by doing that, they're just making themselves look silly. I wonder how long it'll be before they're trying to defend Robotech by saying "it's not for critics" like Kevin Smith did with Jersey Girl. What really surprised me was that, while Maverick_LSC and MEMO1DOMINION were busy putting a stop to any and all criticism of Shadow Chronicles using every excuse they could think of, Tommy was actually willing to listen to fan feedback after he announced that he was retconning protoculture out of the 1st and 2nd generation mecha as a power source... we actually had a reasonable discussion that didn't end in him telling me I'm picking on him unfairly or that I was attacking the staff. Of course, since he didn't seem to care what fans thought, that probably helped him ignore the more sulferous remarks directed at him by the die-hards who saw the removal of protoculture as an attempt to copy Macross. Accusations of attempting to make Robotech more like Macross have been dogging Tommy for a while now... I'm genuinely curious to know what he thinks of that. If he really is drawing on Macross for his "inspiration", the very least we can do is giving him points for being smart enough to imitate someone who actually knows what they're doing.

It does if you work as a business consultant... I know guys who are paid frankly ridiculous amounts of money to tell people blindingly obvious things. 's one of the reasons I say that we shouldn't excuse MEMO's behavior just because he tries to present the illusion of civility when he posts here... he's well-known for monitoring this and other threads for signs of Rt.com and RTX members coming here to criticize Robotech so they can come up with an excuse to ban them on those sites. McKeever and Yune seem alarmingly sensitive... they just can't stand criticism of any kind.

Nah, if you were looking for one thread that was guaranteed to encourage people to quit the Robotech fandom once and for all it would definitely be this one over in Robotech.com's Series & Stories section. Your mileage may vary, but almost any thread that tries to talk seriously about the continuity and/or technology of the Robotech universe(s) can usually be held up as a pretty good example of why being a Robotech fan is a stupendous waste of time. I came. I read. I lol'd. Bricks were shat. Are we sure that was really Khyron_Prime? Because if so... ROFLMFAO! If that genuinely was Khyron_Prime, then yes... that was the infamous man who pied Tommy Yune. It'd be a phenomenally bad idea to judge any fandom based on people like Khyron_Prime (unless of course they're the entire population of the fandom, which is rapidly becoming the case with Robotech). He was one unbalanced guy, who thought Robotech 3000 was a great idea cut down in its prime, partnered with another like-minded wackjob who posted a big, wordy article about how Robotech 3000's downfall was entirely Netter Digital's fault, and that it would otherwise have set the world on fire and blown all of our minds, and put up a crybaby appeal for people to send hate (e-)mail to me, Keith, jwong00, and one other guy whose name I've forgotten because we were daring to say that Macross was better than Robotech. He's the same sort of belligerent fan as Doug Bendo, just not quite as venomous.

As Gubaba said, it looks like Gort really was PTH. I don't doubt that he's also Babygirl83, but we'll see how that added bit of creepiness pans out. I did too... my ex got banned from RT.com because Pizza accused her of being me with a clone account, and all because she stepped up and started saying that the whole "how big is the SDF-2" thing was stupid because there really isn't any info on the SDF-2 in the Robotech canon. A couple other people reportedly also got banned for allegedly being me in disguise, so it wouldn't surprise me if Pizza has become the site's new catch-all excuse for banning undesirables and people who question the company line. Business as usual for Harmony Gold. Instead of listening to customer concerns and complaints with a logical mind, they prefer to get defensive and hostile, then insist that the complaining/concerned customer is talking out of their arse, and follow it up with a series of vague, unsubstantiated assertions about the strength and success of the property in lieu of actually addressing the concerns/complaints at hand. In short, they've adopted a philosophy somewhere between "the customer is always wrong" and "the customer is always an idiot"... it's just indicative of their incompetence. For any company with a clue, treating a customer like that would be grounds for immediate dismissal. Of course, since Harmony Gold sees Robotech as little more than a side business or idle hobby with only marginal profit potential, they have no real incentive to bother with trifles like decent customer service. Somehow, I suspect we wouldn't understand the answer even if he explained it to us. No, I really don't know what all their positions are. I usually avoid Robotech.com and RobotechX whenever possible, and have resorted to telling off my friends whenever they send me a link to a thread on one of those sites and say "hey isn't that stupid". I'm free of the whole Robotech mess, and I'm much better off for it. As Robelwell202 found out on his own, being a Robotech fan just isn't worth the trouble, grief, and drama. It's much easier, and frankly much more gratifying, to be a Macross purist. As to why some are hell-bent on getting Harmony Gold public relations mook Kevin McKeever to stop hiding behind their usual vague, unquantifiable statements of "all's well" and admit the truth, you'll find most of the people doing that are the people Maverick and MEMO refer to as the "malcontents". To the administration, they're ungrateful whiners who can't just be happy with what they've got. In practice, they're Robotech fans who're fed up with the empty promises and idle platitudes of the Harmony Gold administration, and would very much like them to provide tangible proof to back up the claims they're making or shut the hell up. The guys who straddle the fence are the ones who're worried about the future of the franchise because Harmony Gold seems to have reneged on its promise to keep the momentum from Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles going and don't want the franchise to slip into another 20 year coma.

DYRL. If the picture on the blog is anything to go by, the sheet is covering this, this, and this.

Exactly which version of Roy's death is better is always going to be a matter of personal opinion, though it probably is worth noting that in DYRL it wasn't nearly as traumatic for Claudia, who seemed to think that was probably the way he would've wanted to go. Y'know, I don't think we've ever gotten an explanation for that directly from Kawamori. It's probably a function of DYRL Hikaru's somewhat different U.N. Spacy career, where he's introduced as an officer (and in the game adaptation of the movie, was a member of Skull squadron on the Prometheus before the war even started) and skipped that intermediate phase where he was just a team leader. On the other hand, the creators of the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA did come up with a post-facto explanation for Hikaru bypassing the VF-1J altogether while they were fleshing out the backstory of both their new OVA and DYRL, which it treats as the canon version of Space War 1. Initially, only the VF-1J was compatible with the GBP-1S Protect Armor, so the existing VF-1Js were pressed into service as Armored Valkyries rather than being equipped with SP-1 series Super Parts and remaining in general service like the VF-1A and VF-1S. (As a matter of interest, Macross II's creators also do mention that the GBP-1S was later adapted to work with all existing VF-1 variants including the VF-1A, VF-1S, and VF-1D. The latter came as something of a surprise, since the D model was generally believed not to exist in the DYRL continuity... a rationale for it not appearing was also provided)

What he got the boot for here on MacrossWorld was posting a fairly racist video in a post about Doug Bendo. His status as one of the Robotech fans who seems to have come here and done little else besides post in this thread probably did him no favors in the eyes of the moderators either. What you predicted was that his interest in Macross would turn out to be a heel face turn done specifically to annoy MEMO, and that once he made up with MEMO or found some other Robotech site to take him in, we'd see a face heel turn and he'd go back to hating Macross again... which doesn't seem to have been the case.

Oh, lol... it looks like you might've been wrong about him changing sides again after being banned from MacrossWorld. It looks like he was re-banned for making a clone account to circumvent the ban on his original account, and for calling into question the honesty and accuracy of McKeever's claims that Robotech is doing better than ever by asking for actual evidence to back it up. Were it not for the slightly creepy earlier clone account where he pretended to be his own sister, I would almost be inclined to pat him on the back for standing up to the propagandists and asking that they put up or shut up... Now that Franklin fellow up at the top of the page doesn't seem to be long for the site... odds are MEMO's already working on a way to ban him for not buying McKeever's bullshit wholesale.

Link? Also, what for this time?

Joy... very little of interest for me in this one... and the prickteases didn't give me a preview page of the Metal Siren either. Really? Haven't we covered this one already? Zentradi Ships one is misc. craft from DYRL according to the promo in the blog... including that Golg Gants Charts and various flavors of shuttle. Ghost X-9 sheet's probably not going to have much of interest since we've already got one for the AIF-7S and cursory mention of the AIF-9. Hmmm... they're really draggin' the timeline out now... guess I can stop hoping they'll do a Macross II continuity in the last few issues. That first one has my attention... the second one, not so much. What's next? "The Many Dangers of Pineapple-Related Foodstuffs" as a worldguide? I foresee disappointment... probably due to a lack of detail. Bleh...

Well, there's a question that begs a definition of exactly what you consider "better off"? At least from a financial standpoint, the franchise is better off for having squirted out the mediocre, direct-to-DVD mess that we know as Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. It was made on a shoestring budget (confirmed to be less than $1 million) and sold reasonably well among the cowardly cattle of the Robotech fanbase. From a PR standpoint, it's solid gold, since it convinced quite a few fanatical Robotech fans that the promised revival was actually happening, and restored the illusion of progress to the brand... which in Robotech's case is far more important than actually making progress. Is the continuity better off? It's hard to say. Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles is so bloody insubstantial and so short that it doesn't really have a chance to go anywhere or do anything. Around half of the movie is a badly executed retcon of the events of episode 85, and the other half is so devoid of actual content or story progress that the whole affair feels like an over-long intro cutscene. The retcons are slightly troublesome for people who actually care about a coherent story, but not giving a toss about continuity and obvious plot holes is pretty much par for the course when you're a "true" Robotech fan. On balance, I would say it's too early to tell what the fallout of this new direction they're taking is... though it bodes ill for the continuity of the New Generation. They've fallen back on Macross again because that's what sells... the New Generation was always a distant second to the Macross Saga in every poll and popularity contest. It doesn't help that they've been ratcheting up the prices of the MPCs steadily either, and marketing them alongside Mospeada collectibles of much higher quality at more or less the same price. The whole Maia Sterling MPC recall and the subsequent price hike for the reissue with just as many major defects as the original did a lot to erode consumer confidence in the brand and interest in future Shadow Chronicles merchandise. So they're taking the logical route and falling back on a product that they KNOW will sell no matter what.

Then, by the same token, we can handwave aside your entire series of complaints about the treatment of Roy's VF-1S since that it was destroyed isn't relevant. Insofar as what's iconic of the original series, you should take a look over at the Japanese Macross websites. What's used to represent the franchise these days is predominantly Hikaru's old VF-1J and the Macross, not Roy's VF-1S. Usually, in my experience, the "Roy's VF-1S is special/iconic" assertion tends to most frequently be made by fans who were introduced to Macross via Robotech, wherein Roy's VF-1S was a super-special, elite, fairy-dust farting one-of-a-kind mechanical wonder. In Macross, it simply isn't that allfired special, nor was the mook flying it. DYRL showed it for what it was... utterly interchangeable with any of the other VF-1S out there, and what mattered was the pilot. In that case, as in the TV series, the story wasn't about Roy, it was about Hikaru. Roy's role was as a big brother figure to facilitate Hikaru's development as a character, who then exited stage left so Hikaru could grow on his own. So it's unsurprising that, at least among fans of the original, the truly "iconic" mecha are the ones most associated with the main character and the one that served as the focus of the original story... Hikaru's VF-1J and the Macross. (In much the same way, when people consider iconic mobile suits and their pilots, they immediately leap to associate Amuro Ray with the RX-78-2 rather than any of the dozen mobile suits he piloted later. That particular combination will always stand out because that's the mecha he was piloting as the audience got to know him for the first time. Very few people hear Amuro Ray and go "Oh yeah, didn't he pilot a RMS-099 Rick Dias" or "Hey, isn't that the guy who used the Re-GZ"?) Ozma Lee is probably the most superficial character homage in Macross Frontier... the resemblance to Roy is truly only skin deep. He never really becomes a mentor figure to Alto in the way that Roy was to Hikaru, and he was rather a lot less boisterous than Roy was on account of the arbitrary tragedy tacked onto his backstory in an effort to make him more interesting. Yes, he wears black and yellow, yes he's "Skull Leader", and yes he has an near-death incident with pineapple at its center, but he's no lift of Roy Focker.

Uh-huh... you mean the iconic VF-1J that Hikaru goes through about three of in the course of the original Macross series? For that matter, there's also the Macross fortress getting severely damaged at the end of the original series and outright destroyed at the end of Macross II... Ooookay... I'm not seeing how ignoring severe torso wounds so you can traumatize your girlfriend by dying in her kitchen while she's making dinner is manly or sensible. Anyone with their head screwed on straight would've gone straight to the medic after being wounded like that. Letting Roy go out with some dignity, sacrificing himself to take down Quamzin and give Hikaru and Misa a chance to escape, makes a lot more sense. Since it's piloted by the same guy as the iconic VF-1S you're so hung up on, I don't think the VF-0S really counts as a homage... Okay, this is kind of a fractured sentence... not sure quite what you're getting at here. Fact of the matter is that there was nothing distinctive about Roy's VF-1S apart from the role of its pilot in the story. In practical terms it was completely and utterly interchangeable with every other VF-1S produced. Making it into some super-important icon of the story is more a Robotech-ism than anything else, since it was a special unit in that context. Also, not all VF-1S lifts/homages have been Skull Leader homages... like the VF-2SS, VF-19S, etc. (If anything, the former was a Max/Hikaru VF-1S homage).

Probably more than just 30 once you account for the additional 534 VF-1s stored aboard ARMD-01 and ARMD-02... but the point stands that Roy's VF-1S was far from unique even aboard the Macross in the TV series. Personally, I never found the destruction of Roy's VF-1S in DYRL objectionable. I've always felt that DYRL allowed Roy to die with much more dignity than the TV series did by letting him go out in battle instead of the eminently nonsensical "Hey, I have no more will to live... let's go have pineapple salad" end.

Really? I can honestly say I've never met a Robotech fan who wanted Tommy to churn out Robotech comics on a regular basis to replace the old comics, or thought that he would keep doing miniseries titles on a regular basis. In the Robotech fandom, comic books and novels are second-class content at best. Continuing the story of the original series has always been what Robotech fans wanted most, and it's no stretch at all to say that while most fans see the new comics as idle curiosities or vaguely interesting side stories, most of them would much rather see Tommy work on the next half-assed direct-to-DVD movie. Admittedly, the novels attached an ending where Carl Macek never intended for there to be one. In his "vision" for the unplanned and unpursued Robotech III, Robotech IV, and Robotech V, Macek explained that he wanted the story to essentially by cyclical, with the whole affair ending with an Admiral Hunter reminiscing about how the whole mess got started, looping back onto episode 1 from a planned episode numbering somewhere around 365. What Tommy did was toss that stuff was largely never intended to be there in the first place, and attempted to modify the New Generation's ending to provide a new villain for the ongoing story... and it didn't work terribly well.

Admittedly, you might have a point there... some of the more atrociously off-model moments in the old Robotech comic books are right up there with the famously-awful work of Rob Liefeld in terms of anatomical improbabilities, oddly shifting body proportions, and a bizarre inability to understand how people's bodies interact with objects around them. I wouldn't evens say that the Waltrips were exempt from these screwups, since the size of Jack Baker's chin seemed to change from panel to panel, as did the size of pretty much every character's hairdo on occasion. We have to cut them a little slack since these guys were not exactly big-name publishers, and their amateurish quality of work could easily be chalked up to their relative inexperience. Still, the one thing that probably killed more Robotech comics than any other factor was the tendency many series had to have exciting looking, reasonably well-drawn covers and contents that completely fail to live up to the promise of their packaging. "Interesting cover, bland comic" was a real problem, particularly once Academy Comics got ahold of the license. "Moderate activity" seems to consist primarily of MEMO banishing anything that resembles dissent to the hidden "Cannon Fodder" forum, and people plugging podcasts. Saying that the Robotech franchise is back where it was about 10-15 years ago is probably giving the current state of affairs rather more credit than it deserves. At least prior to 2001 there was a steady trickle of low-quality comics and novels to give the fans the feeling that the franchise was moving forward even after Carl Macek's third failed attempt to continue the story. These days, literally the only signs of life from the franchise have been overpriced toys trotted out at a rate of one or two per year. That some fans actually take ill-informed, boorish people like MEMO, Maverick, and Doug Bendo seriously is a pretty sad sign of the times for Robotech. For all practical purposes, the franchise died back in 2000 when Carl Macek's latest pet project (Robotech 3000) was canceled and Tommy Yune took over.

Totally... though for me the most interesting bit of this VF-4 translation (thanks Sketchley!) was the mention that the VF-4 does have alternate weapons modules that can be mounted in the forearms. I'd always thought that was dubious since I first saw it in a magazine article, but it looks like it's canon. Actually, as seen in Macross Zero the VF-0 didn't have reaction engines, it was using overtuned conventional turbofans, so the larger size is probably part fuel storage, part extra mass for the larger engine.

Even if it's not your thing, the job has to be done by someone. If the whole series of incidents surrounding dougbendo and Pizza the Hutt proved anything, it's that MEMO is NOT the right man for the job. Regardless of whether it was "your thing" or not, that MEMO was gleefully looking the other way while his cronies dougbendo and Pizza the Hutt were busily calling most of the site's active membership everything from trolls to pedophiles and child pornographers should have prompted a reaction from you without needing me, HP, Viper, and a handful of other people getting on your case about it. Having to wait days or weeks for moderator intervention definitely did nothing to help the already-tense situation. Now that's a stretch... even by the standards of independent publishing houses, the Robotech comics were, at best, nothing special. One of the most common complaints that crops up whenever they're mentioned is that issues often had decent cover art that caught the eye, and that the contents were almost invariably of substantially lower quality. Calling them "good or better" is definitely reaching a bit. Some of them had vaguely interesting stories (and I'm saying this as someone who has all but two or three of them), but more often than not the stories were trite, cliched, and boring, with flat, uninteresting characters and art that not only failed to ape the animation style of the original works, but frequently couldn't even stay on-model. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaw Honestly, I think the decision to place the majority of the old comics and the novels outside of the continuity was easily the smartest decision Tommy has made during his tenure as creative director. The old comics and the novels diverged from the series far too frequently and contradict each other and the series far too often for their effect on the continuity to be anything other than detrimental.

The Valkyrie at the bottom of that chart is a VF-0A. Hey, it's progress... they've acknowledged the missile disparity and the ramjet engines in the wings... that alone is a nice step forward.

Unless the Robotech forums out there have undergone a dramatic transformation since last I looked, the forums are definitely not a place that will entice anyone to purchase the non-canon expanded universe material. Usually, the fans who frequent those forums react badly to mention of the old comic books and novels, with a range of responses that vary from mild antipathy to the sort of vehement condemnation that leaves you wondering if the poster's family was murdered with (or perhaps by) the expanded universe title(s) in question. Once in a while you get someone who actually likes them, but they're exceptional cases and have been growing increasingly rare since the Robotech Purists have scourged fans of the comics, novels, and Japanese originals from their midst on most sites. Well, most of them would be rather difficult to obtain without resorting to eBay or similar measures, since Harmony Gold hasn't seen fit to reprint the novels which bridge the gaps between sagas, the Sentinels novels which wrap the whole thing up, or most of the old comics. Some people pursue them as simple curiosities, evidence of a bygone age that will never come again... like taking a little kid to a museum display of obsolete technology so they can wonder how people ever got things done with monochrome green and black screens and 5" floppy disks. Others pursue them out of nostalgia (duh). Robotech's continuity is such a mess that nobody but the purists actually give a toss about it. Those who don't give a toss about continuity usually pursue them simply for their own sake as stand-alone stories. It's this cavalier attitude towards continuity that contributes substantially to making debates on Robotech sites exercises in frustration and repetition... like arguing with a deaf macaw that only knows three phrases.

At present, it doesn't look like there's any way for Harmony Gold to salvage what remains of the Robotech franchise except tossing the entire established setting and continuity out the window and starting from scratch under the direction of someone who actually knows what the hell they're doing. This is more-or-less a fair description of what they hope the live action movie will be... a reboot, created by someone competent, that stays well clear of all the intellectual property issues which make continuing the story of the "original 85" a complete boondoggle. Really, with so much of their merchandise aimed solely at nostalgic or obsessive long-time fans it doesn't seem at all out of place for Harmony Gold to reprint the more popular novelizations (in short, just the adaptations of the TV series) to appeal to the fans who are either curious or have loved their original copies to death... which many McKinney fans seem to have done over the years. Unless you're overly nostalgic, curious, or just plain stupid, there's very little reason to buy any of the merchandise in the Robotech.com store... particularly with the store's atrocious customer service record.