Seto Kaiba

On the one occasion I was able to have a full and frank discussion about the whole Macross rights/licensing issue with Tommy Yune during my tenure on Robotech.com, he never alluded to Harmony Gold having wanted to incorporate subsequently licensed Macross shows into Robotech... so I'm not entirely sure where this business about HG wanting to incorporate Macross 7 into Robotech is coming from. What I gleaned from the conversation was that after Harmony Gold obtained the trademark on the name "Macross" to keep Macross confined to Japan and the dust had started to settle in the whole Big West v. Tatsunoko thing, Harmony Gold approached Big West and offered to work with them on a "mutually beneficial" (parasitic) licensing arrangement to bring Macross to the rest of the world. Understandably, Big West told them they weren't interested. While Tommy tried to tart it up to make it sound more amicable than what it really was, what the "mutually beneficial" arrangement boils down to once you remove the flowery language is "yeah, we'll let to distribute Macross in the Americas... but only if we get a piece of the action". Basically, Harmony Gold wanted to sit back and continue to collect royalties for use of the name while Big West and the regional distributors bore all the costs and did all the actual work. Well... the whole "HG wants to incorporate Macross 7 into RT" is unsubstantiated, but they are pretty bloody shameless as my talk with Tommy revealed. On a semi-related matter... new information has come to light about the whole UEG cease & desist letter thing... it looks like, for once, Harmony Gold might be getting an unduly bad rap for their actions. Word is that while UEG didn't want to exploit Robotech Genesis for profit directly, they did want to use it as a springboard to promote their own original works for potential commercial exploitation. It also seems that when Harmony Gold attempted to discuss the situation with them, they made some rather unreasonable demands... including that they be allowed to retain full ownership of, and creative control over, their redesigned Southern Cross and Mospeada mecha if Harmony Gold endorsed their work, a promise Harmony Gold couldn't make because they don't really own those designs themselves, Tatsunoko does. As more facts emerge, it's looking less and less like "big, bad Harmony Gold bullies up small, defenseless fan-film team into quitting their own project" and more like "small fan-film team with a tenuous grip on reality tries to exploit someone else's intellectual property to promote their own products and plays the victim when the rights holder tells them they're not allowed to do that". Well c'mon... isn't it obvious that Mark Hamill and Chase Masterson were only included to try and draw the attention of the Star Wars and Star Trek fans?

Overall, the decision to veto Sue Blu's plan to bring in new voice actors was almost certainly detrimental to the project's extremely limited budget. As mentioned in AoTSC, most if not all of the original Robotech VA cast are in the screen actor's guild these days, so they cost more. Between bringing the original VAs in on the project and hiring "big name" VA talent like Mark Hamill and Chase Masterson, a considerable part of their aggressively limited budget was devoted to just bringing in familiar voices. Using new voice actors could've saved them a not-inconsiderable amount of money... money which could've gone towards hiring a real writer or producing higher-quality animation. Having members of the original voice cast reprise their roles in Shadow Chronicles might've appeased the more anal Robotech die-hards, but it hurt the project in the long run. Hearsay doesn't even cover it... he claimed to have talked to an industry lawyer during the course of his day job, but didn't show said lawyer the court documents (or a translation thereof), and simply posed hypotheticals based on his incredibly limited (nonexistent) knowledge of the legal situation. When prompted, he couldn't give the name of the lawyer he supposedly spoke to, or any other pertinent details.

Toss away, I have no doubt that Harmony Gold will continue to ignore the time-honored advice that when one finds oneself in a hole, the first thing one should do is stop digging. Well, it's entirely possible that she simply ran afoul of someone influential in the endless rounds of backstabbing that supposedly pass for corporate politics at Harmony Gold. It wouldn't exactly be difficult to end up hurting Tommy Yune's delicate feelings or bruising his massive ego in the course of an honest day's work. It's never exactly been a secret that Harmony Gold talks a big game and never delivers... they've been doing that for decades now. For all their doubletalk, Shadow Rising is stalled indefinitely while Harmony Gold waits for a live-action movie that may never happen to raise their franchise's profile in the eyes of potential investors so they can get bigger budgets and stop turning out material that would've easily been a profound embarrassment to any capable studio ten years ago. The live action movie is in no better condition, stalled in early pre-production while they wait for an inept group of writers, one of whom has NO experience writing sci-fi at all, to finish a script. Nah, that wasn't a wooden face... that was a "damnit, I'm trying as hard as I can not to facepalm in front of everyone" face.

Saying that Harmony Gold places very little value on the opinions and feelings of Robotech fans doesn't quite do it justice. On those rare occasions when I've had to deal with Harmony Gold staffers directly, I've always come away with the distinct impression that they see the vast majority of Robotech fans as unthinking cattle who don't have a clue what they really want and will happily buy any damn thing they're told to so long as it has the word "Robotech" on the box somewhere. It seems like, to them, Robotech fans only matter as a group... a herd of gullible mooks who can be easily manipulated using their nostalgic childhood memories of the show. Individual fans don't matter, as they're not likely to cause a huge dent in Harmony Gold's bottom line, and intelligent, well-informed fans are more a liability to them than anything else. If I had to point to a cause for their casual disregard for the fans and public opinion of how they run the franchise, I'd say it's probably because Robotech has always been a side job for Harmony Gold. If the franchise goes under, it's not a big deal because it won't unduly inconvenience Harmony Gold any or do severe damage to the company's bottom line. It really is a case of them having no incentive to keep the fans happy. Oh, no doubt... I seldom see a company that seems to take as many pointers from the management in Dilbert as Harmony Gold does. Phases of a Project: 1 -- Exultation 25th Anniversary! W00T! 2 -- Disenchantment Hey wait a goddamn minute, they don't have ANYTHING new to show us this year? Nothing at all? 3 -- Search for the Guilty It must be the economy, or maybe Warner's interfering, or maybe it's the Macross purist trolls! 4 -- Punishment of the Innocent BURN BAN THE HERETICS! 5 -- Praise for the Uninvolved LOL OMG CARL MACEK IS BACK ON ROBTOECH! THIS IS GREET NEWS! Or something along those lines...

As far as I can tell... yes, it was. It looks like the developer and/or publisher bowed to their wishes rather than try to fight things out in court. It kind of got missed in the whole brouhaha over MechWarrior 5, but initially what drew Harmony Gold's attention to that whole franchise again was the announcement that there was going to be a BattleTech artbook coming out and that it'd feature the return of "the unseen" mecha that were untouchable after the Harmony Gold v. FASA settlement (which they apparently didn't know anything about). The current licenseholder, Catalyst Game Labs, bowed to Harmony Gold's wishes with almost indecent haste and pulled the disputed art from the publication.

Nor can I... particularly since they're attempting to talk out a rationale for a do-over on Robotech II: the Sentinels, a Robotech story concept so piss-dribblingly awful that even the most devout Robotech fans generally label it one of the worst mistakes in the franchise's history. So long as they're trying to make it fit with the rest of Robotech the only ways to make reworking Sentinels work are to either throw out Shadow Chronicles or pound nails into your cranium until the plot holes and weak writing don't matter anymore. Y'know... even on some Robotech boards a statement like this about Sentinels would be considered grounds for being sectioned under whatever your local mental health act is. You expected it not to? Pretty much as soon as I heard the news that Harmony Gold's lawyers had thrown a cease and desist order at a bunch of amateurs making a fan-film, I figured it would cause at least a momentary resurgence in the anti-Harmony Gold feeling on the net once word started to get around. Some folks are still smarting over Harmony Gold farting over that BattleTech artbook and the most recent MechWarrior game, which probably didn't help much at all. It's not like anti-Robotech sentiment out there is new on the web... even if you discount the fact that they're hated for undermining Macross and BattleTech/MechWarrior, there's all the scorn directed at RT for being an Americanized rewrite and leeching off the success of other shows instead of coming up with new material of its own, and the inevitable fan groups complaining about how Tommy Yune is the cancer that's killing Robotech. This latest batch of anti-Harmony Gold bitching just made the pool of people with a grudge against Harmony Gold a wee bit bigger. No doubt Harmony Gold will blow it off as a temporary thing, the same way they did the whole brouhaha over their interfering with MechWarrior 5 because of an old design that looks like a Tomahawk being used. Assuming that the people in charge at Warner and Maguire Entertainment haven't just been giving each other piggy-back rides and tossing cards into a hat for the last two years or so, they probably already know about the feeling of general antipathy anime fans have for Robotech, and/or its horribly bad reputation... unless they're stupid enough to have not bothered to do their homework, which doesn't seem entirely likely. All the same, it would make my day if Warner or Maguire Ent. took Harmony Gold to court later for fraudulent misrepresentation of the current state of the IP.

Can't find an easily-accessible picture online, but yeah... the Tommy Yune redesign of Ambassador L'Ron was basically a bear with a slightly more human shape in a big red robe. EDIT: Found one... courtesy of Roboblog III: http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1956/14...RELUDE_1_19.jpg

It wasn't exactly my intention to identify each and every title that uses material from Macross shows that have nothing whatsoever to do with Robotech, as I'd be here all week if I did. You are, however, correct in assuming Robotech: Wings of Gibraltar and Robotech: Firestorm are two such offenders. Wings of Gibraltar was particularly bad since many of its characters were traced from the movie Independence Day, and each and every VF-1 Valkyrie that appears in its pages was traced from DYRL line art. Robotech: the Misfits was also an extremely prolific "borrower" of Macross material, as that's where the VF-4 erroneously labeled "US Spacy" and several characters from Macross Plus (easily distinguished by their different uniforms) show up prominently. Okay, as someone who's familiar with all three incarnations of Sentinels, I'll indulge you on this note. Let's see what you've come up with. Kind of a tall order, since the expeditionary fleet is under the command of Admiral Lisa Hunter (nee Hayes), the mechanized contingent is under the command of Major General Rick Hunter, with involvement from both Max and Miriya Sterling, Breetai, and Exedore. Of course, in at least two of the three versions of the whole Robotech II: the Sentinels story arc several major plot points depend on having Linn Minmei stow away on the SDF-3 during its departure. Having it tie seamlessly in to Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles also requires the presence and visibility of Rick Hunter, Lisa Hunter, Exedore, Breetai, Dr. Lang, Linn Minmei, and Linn Kyle... the latter of whom ends up dead, and the scene where it happens serving to tie in the nominal end of the Sentinels comics (Book IV) with with start of Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles. Good luck with that... while Tommy might've decanonized most of the Sentinels gibberish, unfortunately the whole "Sentinels Council" thing and the designs of all but two of the aliens involved came through completely untouched. The only aliens that were redesigned were the Kabarrian ambassador L'Ron (pictured in taksraven's avatar), and Haydonite ambassador Veidt, who went from looking like a really bad art deco bust moving of its own accord to the Hal 9000 in a red robe.* If you intend to remove the 70's camp from Robotech II: the Sentinels, the task you're embarking on is called 'burning the whole thing and starting from scratch'. * On an unrelated side note, the red robes the Haydonites wear are the subject of an interesting error on Tommy Yune's part. In the Prelude comic, all members of the Sentinels Council (incl. Lisa Hunter) wear the same red robes... yet in the Shadow Chronicles movie, the robes are what EVERY Haydonite wears. Laziness, or Haydonite tailoring... you be the judge. Actually, his motivations don't flip-flop THAT much... there are the platitudes he trots out to shut Hunter up, and then there are the stereotypical villainous monologues when he's alone or just with his one idiot lackey. Overall, the comics made his motivation out to be a profound desire to screw Rick Hunter over out of a mix of profound hatred for the man himself (after Rick unknowingly abandoned Edwards and his dying lover in the Grand Cannon... how it's drawn, I don't see how he could've missed them, so Edwards might have a fair complaint here) and disgust with how Hunter's naivete and "give peace a chance" preachy bullcrap have colored REF tactical policy (which, by the events of Prelude, was also extremely well-warranted), and wants to take over leadership of the military and use any means necessary (including allying with more gullible aliens they can easily turn on and defeat later) as a means of protecting Earth. Prelude goes a long way towards clarifying his motivations, while he gives the typical villain lecture to some captured lackwit or newly arrived enemy. He intended to use the Invid Brain and the Invid it controlled along with other tech he developed during his tenure as head of R&D on Tirol to liberate Earth from the Robotech Masters, and later from the forces of the Invid Regess. Well... she doesn't really have much of one, except briefly being manipulated to provide compromising photos which would ruin Hunter's reputation and damage his credibility as a leader right after his wedding, serving as the focus for Jonathan Wolfe's romantic affections and the ensuing subplot, briefly being introduced to Cabell and Rem, and being abducted by T.R. Edwards... an event that bridges the gap between Sentinels Book IV and Shadow Chronicles. Tommy can't design mecha for poo. Tommy can't design mecha for poo. Tommy can't design mecha for poo. Let's face it, the REF was SUPPOSED to be equipped with the latest toys, which logically means that they should've been equipped with the latest VFs that would later come into service with the outer solar system colonies and whatnot. So the Alpha/Legioss makes the most sense for that particular endeavor. At the time they left (2022) they had state of the art mecha with them, which they later revised with improved technology (shadow fighter). Now, Tommy has tried to come up with new mechanical designs of his own, but they never work out well. The best he could do for an all-new design was the VM-9L Silverback, a transforming jeep with a battroid mode SO topheavy and so precariously balanced on a miniscule pair of legs that there's a virtual guarantee the damn thing can't move... and the transformation doesn't work out anyway. His other two attempts never made it to footage. In Robotech: From the Stars, he briefly (in the background of ONE panel) introduced the "VF-X-6 Genia", a supposed Alpha fighter early prototype... which looks like a bog standard AFC-01H Legioss with the normal delta wing replaced by the ones off the VF-0D and a Macross-style Skull Squad paintjob. One of the leaked sketches was an unused design for the "VF-13 Gamma Fighter" from Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles... which on even casual examination is revealed to be a transforming AF-03 Combat with a battroid mode that looks suspiciously similar to Macross M3's VF-9 Cutlass. Unfortunately untrue, thanks to the abundantly unoriginal stylings of Tommy Yune... which recanonized many elements of Carl Macek's Robotech II: the Sentinels draft, and ties DIRECTLY into the events of Robotech II: the Sentinels Book IV... going so far as to re-draw entire scenes in the new style. Many of your other suggestions would also require extensive revision of the Robotech continuity, making it virtually impossible to gracefully tie this new Sentinels into the existing body of work as a canon story. You'd introduce far more plot holes than you'd fix.

Now that there's a losing proposition no matter how you slice it. In the final analysis it doesn't really matter what you do if you're revisiting Robotech II: the Sentinels, since the majority of Robotech fans tend to consider the whole Sentinels story arc to be goddamn stupid... and that's on a good day. Admittedly, if you actually sit down and read what Carl Macek intended for the story of Robotech II: the Sentinels, you'll probably end up conceding that they've got excellent grounds for saying so. Essentially, what Carl Macek had planned for Robotech II: the Sentinels was that Exedore and co. filled the United Earth Gov't in on the Robotech Masters and what they were after. In response to this new threat, the REF builds a fleet headed up by a new SDF done up to look like a Zentradi warship in hopes of putting one over on the Robotech Masters long enough to open a dialogue. Of course, nothing is ever simple for these people, so when they actually arrive at Tirol they find it occupied by the Invid Regent's forces, who're looking for the protoculture matrix there despite them having already been informed by the Regess that the damn thing isn't there. So the REF launches a mission to liberate Tirol, wherein they meet Cabell and Rem, who placidly inform them that their whole mission is a waste of time because the Masters are probably most of the way to Earth by now, and the SDF-3's fold drive is a wreck. So they piss away a lot of time liberating alien homeworlds instead of fixing their ship and getting home to save Earth... all the while being busily backstabbed by some of their alien allies AND one of their own senior officers (General Edwards), both of whom couldn't possibly make their evil intentions more obvious without wearing a sandwich board that reads "HEY! SERIOUSLY EVIL DUDE HERE!". The moral of the story? That going to talk with the Robotech Masters was a farting waste of time that didn't accomplish dick and left the Earth open for two more alien invasions. Let me sum up why revising Sentinels is a bad idea in just a few choice words from the original concept: Robot Unicorns, Space Rome, Invid Inorganics, "The Brain", T.R. Edwards, Jack Baker, The Sentinels Council, SDF-3 Pioneer. It's with good reason that petitions to revive Robotech II: the Sentinels usually never get more than the same two dozen signatures... most fans immediate reaction to anything Sentinels-related is "KILL IT WITH FIRE!". Why would they react that way? Because, just like in Prelude, Sentinels makes fan favorite Rick Hunter out to be an idiot with a malformed three-inch-thick skull, a frankly unhealthy level of naivete, and a grasp of tactics that would've embarrassed a toddler. When you take all that in context with the Shadow Chronicles, which IS, regardless of what anyone else might tell you, a continuation of Sentinels, you have to realize that Rick Hunter isn't just gullible... the boy has barely any mental activity at all. After some of the judgment calls he makes you'll be amazed the boy hasn't been sectioned on the grounds that he's too stupid for normal society. Aside from the obvious legal problems stemming from the fact that the entire core cast of Robotech II is populated by designs that Harmony Gold can't legally use... the Zentradi issue is moot because they pretty much don't exist except for a brief panel or two in Prelude, where they're all blue eight-foot-tall giants. Well, there's always the Sentinels aliens... they're the only aliens in RT who aren't part of the OSM. All the same, without the stories and characters of the OSM, Robotech's story really has no redeeming values. Macek's story is rather bland and samey.

Well... it wasn't Harmony Gold who purged the fandom of the people who liked the McKinney novels, it was the many fans who didn't like the novels and found their many departures from the story of the animated Robotech series pointless. Usually the fights would start as innocent debate/discussion threads about particular characters, plot points, and/or mecha in the TV series and someone would drag up the novels and be shouted down for it. On rare occasions, someone would start a thread about the novels and people would inundate the thread with complaints about how the novels made all kinds of nonsensical and needless departures from the original story. Either way, it usually ended in people on both sides heaping verbal abuse on each other while the moderators waded in to restore order with their banhammers. The McKinneyists would generally seek safer ports elsewhere while the Purists would either beg for the lifting of their ban or just register again under a new name and pick up where they left off. For Harmony Gold to redo the novels and make a modern rendition of them, they'd need to find a writer. One of the two guys who used to write under the name Jack McKinney is dead, and I don't know what became of the other one. All the same, that would take time, money, and effort, and the reputation of the novels among the remains of the fandom isn't exactly great, so the most effort they're willing to put into them is printing omnibus editions that exclude the books that cover the time between sagas and the Sentinels storyarc.

Remember that they've tried that before... it was called Robotech 3000 and it went over like a mercury-filled lead balloon when they trotted the teaser trailer out to show it off. The proposal to just start fresh and abandon their focus on Macross characters and merchandise sounds like a good idea on paper... to us... but to Harmony Gold that's totally out of the question. Their primary market is Macross goods, and the fans don't give a toss about a Robotech show unless Rick Hunter's involved somehow... the only thing Robotech is currently selling on is the ongoing adventures of the Macross Saga cast. It's been that way since 1986. I doubt it's anything as simple as someone's ego running amok. Essentially, the reason Harmony Gold pushed all the low-quality licensed materials from the late 80s and the 90s "under the carpet" was because there was absolutely no way, rational or otherwise, to make them fit with the original series, let alone the material they intended to produce later. Doing so would've introduced a temporal clusterfart the likes of which we've never seen before. It'd be like trying to undo ALL of the retcons in Marvel's history and splice all the timelines into one universe. It just won't work. The novels and comics were made non-canon out of necessity. It doesn't help that many times different comic lines by the same publisher seemed to be set in different versions of the Robotech universe... often with histories that didn't quite match up with the TV series or the novels... and understandably so, as several comics were less original storytelling and more ripoff free-for-alls with whatever sci-fi story happened to be handy and popular at the time. It doesn't really help that the moderators there are the thought police and the Terms of Use are so restrictive that you can't talk about anything more mature than Barney and Friends without having to worry about the mods kicking your shins off for "potty talk". Like BlackRose dubbed it years ago... Robotech truly is Baby's First Macross... and Harmony Gold is trying to run the official home of the franchise like their audience is a tenth of their actual age.

To such a degree that Steve Yun had to descend from "on high" (or maybe just "while high") and issue a proclamation that bagging on people for referencing or talking about the novels or comics was a no-no and lay out ground rules to quash the fighting. If you want, the thread in question is still pinned in the Robotech Series & Stories section of the Robotech.com message boards. Well, that's debatable... particularly since, as I've said, many of the fans regard the material from the late 80's and the 90's as having no significant redeeming merits of any kind, and Harmony Gold's representatives have essentially moved that material to non-canon status citing the lack of oversight in its creation. They're not considered "real Robotech", so I guess a philosophy of live and let live might not have occurred to the people denouncing them as weak attempts to make a quick buck. Even Steve Yun's pronouncement didn't stop people from raiding each other's threads to deliver verbal thrashings to their source material of choice. Why bother perpetuating the parts that contradict the direction they've chosen for the franchise or that use potentially problematic material like art from Macross: Flashback 2012 and Macross Plus? It's just an invitation to more trouble. As far as they're concerned, the most that those old titles are worth is a brief mention in the bibliography they didn't think was worth adding to the site until about 2007. NB: Just so you get the context of the above remark, many MANY Robotech comics produced under Eternity/Malibu, Academy, and Antarctic made a habit of tracing art from Macross shows, publications, and toy boxes that weren't related to Robotech in any way. Among the pilfered designs were the DYRL variants of the VF-1 Valkyrie, the VF-4 Lightning III (erroneously rebadged "US SPACY"), Captain Higgins from Macross Plus, and many others. There are also many "original" designs in the comics that are clearly based on designs from Macross... several of which were slightly redesigned versions of the VF-2JA Icarus and VF-19F Excalibur.

Was that a Captain Caveman reference? If so, bravo... Well, it's a safe bet that Harmony Gold's reluctance to add character and mecha data from Shadow Chronicles to the Robotech.com Infopedia is motivated by the belief that doing so will remove the primary motivation for fans to buy things like The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles and the new Palladium RPG. Now, if you know anything about the old Palladium RPG, you'll know they have good grounds for thinking this. The majority of fans who're buying the Palladium RPG aren't buying it to play the game... they're buying it because it's the closest that any Robotech publication has come to being a tech manual. If they make the information in those books available for free, there's no reason for anyone to buy the books.

Really, it's the attitude that all of the material produced between '87 and '01 isn't really Robotech and isn't worth bothering with that motivated all of the witch hunting that's gone on ever since the fanbase went online. Initially, pretty much any mention of material from the comics or novels in a debate or discussion just got dismissed as irrelevant, but eventually it turned hostile. By the time I'd registered on Robotech.com, just mentioning something from the McKinney novels or the old comics was enough to make participants on both sides round on you and tell you to take your totally irrelevant crap elsewhere. It was only after they scourged the McKinneyists and Spanglerists from Robotech.com that they turned on the fans who also enjoyed the original Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada. They lumped the dissatisfied fans in there too under the assumption that they were secretly Macross fans working to undermine Robotech, and started trying to get the lot of them banned. Now that they've scourged the "Macross Purist Trolls" from their midst, they've once again rounded on each other and started fights among fans who prefer one saga to another, or who like one character and can't stand to see him or her criticized in any way. It's really hard to muster any enthusiasm for Robotech at all when the fanbase has spent at least 10 of the last 25 years tearing itself to pieces over matters of personal preference, and the franchise's creators haven't had an original idea in at least 24 years. Now, if Tommy had taken that approach with Robotech, the fanbase might not be the colossal mess of infighting it is today. Of course, the old comics are so badly written, so shot through with internal inconsistencies, and incompatible with each other in so many cases that the only way to divide them up into universes would be to make each and every title its own universe... and that kind of defeats the point of doing it in the first place. The inconsistent nature of the work done without oversight back when Harmony Gold was whoring the license out to whoever wanted it essentially doomed all of comics to being little more than a widely scorned collection of non-canon side stories that don't matter to the "one true timeline". Oh they knew... they just want to keep living the lie that Carl Macek, and later Tommy Yune, were selling... that the originals are inferior, unpopular shows that were vastly improved by their inclusion in Robotech. By the time the 90's rolled around, the only people left in the Robotech fanbase were the obsessive fans who were convinced for whatever reason that Robotech was the best show ever, and continued to buy the weak comics and novels which kept the franchise limping along. Those are the people who would've found the idea that Robotech wasn't just as good as, or better than, the Japanese originals profoundly offensive. All but the most obsessed among them gave up eventually after Macek and Harmony Gold's licensees produced a seemingly never-ending succession of failures. Some folks close to Harmony Gold have alluded to Warner having been motivated to pick up the Robotech license by a desire to get in on the frankly ridiculous amounts of money Paramount's live-action Transformers was making and do it cheaply rather than any actual belief that Robotech was popular. I think the general school of thought was that they'd take a title people vaguely remembered from the 80's, redo it, and roll it out for a revival in hopes of making scads of money with a mindless summer action flick that preys on nostalgia. More fool them, of course, since they picked a real dud full of material they can't legally use. You mean like a MMORPG, something like Habbo Hotel, or what? Either way, it costs money to develop crap like that, and Harmony Gold has likely been convinced that it's just not worth the trouble. After all, they went to the trouble of having a dice rolling system added to their forums so people could play the new Palladium RPG... and NOBODY's playing. The dice roll system just became the topic-bumping spam method of choice in the areas it was enabled in. Similarly, their attempt at online console gameplay, Robotech: Invasion, sold bugger-all and the game was so utterly lackluster that within weeks of it going on sale it was virtually impossible to find an online game to play in and Harmony Gold had the servers taken down because they weren't being used.

EDIT: Long post is looooooooooooooooooooooooong. Um... well, in all fairness you could probably make a pretty good case for calling me "that kind" of Robotech fan. I might not have much use for the franchise these days, and I never saw the point in collecting toys, but if you're looking for someone familiar with the intricacies of all the various Robotech adaptations, I'm probably about the best you'll do unless you go looking for some of the people who quit the fandom back around '04. Due in no small measure to my frankly ridiculous memory for details, I'm pretty confident I could provide an accurate, well-worded answer to most any question about Robotech... which is why even now, months after being banned from Robotech.com, people still try to track me down via e-mail to get their questions answered. Now, if you want to know why "that kind" of Robotech fan is so rare, I'll happily spell it out for you. You'll probably end up saying something like "well that's obvious", but it's the most honest and accurate answer I can give. If I had to name any one factor as the main reason "that kind" of fan is practically nonexistent among Robotech fans these days, I'd have to point to the way Harmony Gold handled the Robotech license in the late 80s and the 90s. Back when the fanbase first started to migrate online, the licensed comics and novels were the only thing moving the "Robotech story" forward. Even then, there was a lot of contention about their various departures from, and clashes with, each other and the "original 85", but fans still treasured them because that was the only thing new in the Robotech franchise at the time. Once Tommy Yune took over creative directorship of the franchise and rebooted Robotech's continuity, the old comics and novels were left out in the cold as no longer relevant to the story. The fans weren't entirely stupid, many of them found the novels and comics disappointing, with exciting-looking cover art sandwiching pages upon pages of awkward writing and bad art. Now that they had the new comics, which despite their fairly shoddy writing were a massive step up in quality, they didn't need to excuse the many failings of the old comics and novels anymore. By the time McKeever told everyone on SSL that the old comics and novels were the result of HG whoring the license out to whoever wanted it, the fans had already decided that nothing produced between the failure of Robotech II: the Sentinels (1987) and Tommy's continuity reboot (2001) was worth a damn, and that most of it was so different from the original series that it wasn't "real Robotech". If nothing else, it's the attitude the fans have that 99% of Robotech is cheap crap Harmony Gold's licensees turned out to make a quick buck, and that it's all of such low quality that it's not worth the time it takes to read it that prevents people from becoming "that kind" of fan. Honestly, as someone who actually read all the McKinney novels and almost all of the old comics, I have to say I agree with them in most cases. You don't get many expert fans who know every part of Robotech like the back of their hands because so much of Robotech is just piss-dribblingly awful. Even by 1980s standards most of what's in the comics and novels is every bit as stupid and campy as the worst material from the old Star Trek cartoon... and most of it is so far off from the TV series that in many cases it almost feels like an Elseworlds book. So, I guess if you wanted to sum it up nicely... you don't get die-hard experts in Robotech because most of it is so bad nobody wants to read it. He's a prat. He's an even bigger prat. He's an insincere prat. He claims to have been manipulated into acting like a prat. Are we seeing a pattern here yet? Your quest to find a rational Robotech fan who can explain what's so great about Robotech is a complete boondoggle because most almost all of the Robotech fans we get here are the disenchanted fans who are sick of broken promises, the angry fans who were banned for HERESY!, and the ones who're spoiling for a fight. We don't get the fanatics here because they spend all day telling each other we're all a bunch of baby-eating Sith Lords conspiring to destroy their fanbase from within, and we never see any rational, levelheaded fans who are enthusiastic about the franchise because there's no such animal. Anyone smart enough to read about the franchise's history instantly becomes disenchanted, and anyone dense enough to believe Harmony Gold's propaganda easily becomes a fanatic. Like I said... no such animal. Now if you'll excuse me, Sasquatch and I are off to go hunt grays and Chupacabras in Atlantis with Tesla's death ray. Not just Robotech.com... that's a fair description of pretty much EVERY Robotech fansite with a community section.

What I've heard on that note was that some, not all, of the charges were dropped due to the statute of limitations. Like nobody else here hasn't been banned from a few Robotech websites... Y'know... that may very well explain all the complaints I've read about how serious arm-twisting is needed to get them to fix anything on the properties they lease out.

Nah... some of the people who're speculating are also making ridiculous assertions about the movie and banning anyone who points out that they have no basis in fact. But does Hollywood love an idea with a history that can best be summed up as a sequence of embarrassing failures?

Thanks again for taking the time to summarize the last issue Sketchley. Unless Chronicle drops another Macross II article in #44, I'll go ahead and make my next order #40-43. Oh well... I didn't expect there to be one, but I did cherish a small ember of hope that they would add one with more hard data. Unsurprising... none of the previous publications bother, but the animation would seem to suggest that they number in the dozens, and that the ship is much more massive than Palladium would have us believe (244m... feh). Now THAT'S news I can use. Hmmm... it looks like they're referencing two distinct fleet formations there... the 12th Fleet is the Earth Defense Fleet which appears in the final two episodes of Macross II and is headed up by Capt. Balzae and the Gloria, and the 2nd Battle Group 17th and 18th Cruiser/Destroyer Squadron/Groups are the forces the U.N. Spacy scrambled to Mars to meet the initial Mardook offensive, headed up by the Heracles. It's VERY nice to hear that my suspicions regarding the beam cannon numbers were correct, and a pleasant surprise to hear about the missile launchers as well... which may indirectly confirm my theory about the similar looking ports amidships on the Gloria being similar in scale and armament to the big honking missile launchers on the TV-series ARMDs. I'll have to get the article myself to see if it confirms my other suspicions about the standard battleship... that the array of little ports that are similar to those on Mardook ships are fighter launch ports, and that the six large hatches behind the bridge tower are VLS hatches similar to those on the Oberth. I actually have lineart somewhere of the semi-confirmal gun thing... it's basically a halfway variant of the gun turrets on Zentradi battleships, where the "blister" splits along a seam to expose the gun turret itself... kind of like those gun blisters on the Thuverl Salan. Did they print the alternate/unused variant of the design that with the seventh, larger, forward-facing beam cannon on the dorsal gun mount?

Oh, they'd no doubt still send nasty letters and all, but I don't think they'd be able to do much apart from make a fuss. Context here... I wasn't talking about the cease and desist in what you quoted, I was talking about if it came down to actual litigation.

While I dread the inevitable answer, I gotta ask... did Macross Chronicle provide a size for the Gloria and standard battleship, or anything about their armaments? Yeah, the spoiler images on the blog show that #43's sheet is the long-awaited (by me at least) mechanic sheet for the VF-2SS with the Super Armed Packs.

Oh, you'll hear no disagreement from me on that note. Ultimately, the one overriding factor that has doomed pretty much every Robotech to eventual failure isn't that the franchise's owners (Harmony Gold) see the series as little more than a way to shake down gullible and nostalgic fans for a few quick bucks or the ineptitude of those currently running the franchise's "creative team"... it's the practices used to create the show in the first place. When you get right down to it, Carl Macek's tired old line about Robotech being an epic, generational sci-fi space opera and something he'd intended to do all along just doesn't hold water. If you examine the original accounts of the show's creation from the 80s, they're much more upfront about their real goal. To put it bluntly, Robotech was an attempt to ape the successful business model of Transformers Generation 1 with a bare minimum of actual work. Instead of starting from scratch and making their own TV series to push a preexisting toy line, Harmony Gold slapped together a show from whatever was handy, edited it minimally, and rewrote the existing stories a bit to make them a single continuity. Because the original show wasn't original in any way, the franchise is hamstrung by the legal constraints of their license agreements with the rights owners. As a result, they can't manipulate much of the material for future use, and the most popular installment is almost entirely off-limits. By sheer bad luck, the one installment of the series they're most limited in their ability to use is far and away the most popular, so any future sequel attempts are ultimately doomed to fail and disappoint the fans. Their only real options are to: (1) strike out on their own with a new series unrelated to any of the previous titles in the franchise and be crucified by the fans for making a show that's Robotech in name only, or (2) retcon like crazy and attempt to exploit weak dialogue in an effort to tack a continuation onto the increasingly convoluted story of a series from 20+ years ago.

Quoted For Truth. I think what me meant was that Harmony Gold is killing Robotech for its fans with a crippling lack of imagination and their cavalier attitude towards their fans.

Granted, it wouldn't reflect well on them in court that they spent six years ignoring the project only to deliver the coup de grace with a cease and desist notice a few weeks before the project would actually produce tangible results. All the same, there are far too many cases where the courts find that waiting on the cease and desist order and/or or not taking it up in court sooner isn't going to let the violator off the hook. In fact, FASA tried exactly that argument when they motioned for summary judgment right away after Harmony Gold took them to court over their use of Macross designs, and the courts said that failing to take action right away didn't constitute a waiver of rights. Now, Harmony Gold would have a much harder time establishing that UEG's project would damage their bottom line or reputation in some way, but corporate lawyers being the soulless sadists that they are, I'm sure they could concoct at least one way to tentatively prove it to the judge, or construct some other, far more actionable rationale to put a stop to the entire thing. No doubt you'll be even more shocked to learn that this isn't the first time this has happened either... this is just one of the more blatantly dickish moves on their part. For the longest time they were stringing Seifrietti Weisse along about a fan-art/fan-fic collection he wanted to publish, making him jump through hoops and even fire his cover artist because he'd landed on a list of "undesirables" in the eyes of Harmony Gold. 's probably a good thing, because I'm kind of enjoying my life of evil right now... just as soon as I persuade my girlfriend into a skintight leather bodysuit I'll have my evil overlord checklist all rounded out. Yes, many of them do.

Are we done yet? Yes and no... I'm neither the best nor the fastest translator in the world, but it looks like they're saying that we'll get yet another video game Extra Sheet covering the VF-9 from Macross M3... which, if that sheet also covers the VF-3000, and U.N. Spacy-variant variable glaug they'll have completely covered the playable mecha from that game. That second line's about the "VF-19 Kai (Custom) Basara Special"... though they've covered that one pretty thoroughly already... ?

Actually, they could make a pretty good case against Robotech Genesis on the grounds that it's derivative of those elements of the Robotech story owned entirely by Harmony Gold (aka all the poo they created to stitch the original shows together). While they can't make any kind of case about the use of Macross designs, they could likely make something of a fuss over the use of Southern Cross and Mospeada designs, since they seem to at least have licenses permitting them to use both. Yes, it's a scare tactic... but not one entirely without teeth. What makes you think they won't if he actually manages to get the project off the ground? The difference between what UEG did and what most fanfilms do is that they were actually on track to release something tangible. When you think about it like that... Harmony Gold probably felt they were being one-upped and resolved to stop it at any cost. This is Harmony Gold we're talking about... doing stupid, pointless crap that screws over the fans is practically their stock in trade.