Seto Kaiba

Excalibur. "Blazer Valkyrie" is an unofficial nickname for it... though, to be precise, the term "Valkyrie" passed into common usage as a common name for Variable Fighters. Any VF can be referred to as a "Valkyrie" (in much the same way that "Kleenex" is now synonymous with "tissue"), though the only variable fighters actually named "Valkyrie" are the original VF-1 Valkyrie, and the Macross II continuity's VF-1R Valkyrie Kai and VF-2SS Valkyrie II.

Always good... by all means, share your insights with us. Unsurprisingly, a fairly common occurrence... rather a lot of western Macross fans initially discovered anime and Macross through Robotech, though it's becoming a less and less common phenomenon among the younger anime enthusiasts who were introduced to their hobby by newer shows, and sidestepped the Robotech phase by seeking out the readily-available fansubs of all the shows Harmony Gold's been blocking. Cue the disillusioned "WTF" directed at Shadow Chronicles in 3... 2... 1... Aaaaaaaaaand... there we have it. Joking aside, this is an all-too-common phenomenon among what remains of the Robotech fanbase. Now that the Harmony Gold "creative team" has made it appallingly obvious that they will never produce anything of quality, fans of Robotech find themselves in a difficult position. The most rational fans simply accept that Robotech was just doomed to fail, and move on to other shows that actually have potential. They might retain a lingering affection for the show that introduced them to anime, or they might just walk off shaking their heads and wondering what the hell they were thinking. The more devoted Robotech fans, who've stuck with the franchise through two and a half decades worth of disappointment, will often work themselves up into a frenzy of denial over the current state of affairs. They'll spend hours or days trying to justify how Shadow Chronicles really isn't as bad as everyone says it is, and all the while it's painfully obvious that they don't actually believe the things they're saying and are just trying to retroactively justify 20+ years of wasted time to themselves. The most devoted Robotech fans, who are generally thick enough to actually believe Harmony Gold's hype, have been clinging to the franchise for so long that they've lost all contact with reality and actually believe that Robotech is a strong property and that Shadow Chronicles is a misunderstood gem. Oddly enough, this most devoted group of fans is also usually the group that knows the least about Robotech, frequently tripping up on simple stuff like what character belongs to what saga and the fact that not every minor one-shot character has a huge, elaborate backstory. This last group is Robotech's core constituency... the strange, mutant creatures whose completely alien concepts of "fun" and "entertainment" leave you wondering if they unwind by building databases in Microsoft Access. More often than not, they give their unwilling audience cause to wonder whether they're masochists, stupid, or both. In practice, nostalgia is about the only merit Robotech has ever had. Even as early as 1986, Harmony Gold was already gleefully proving that they hadn't a clue how to write original material of their own. Eventually, the nostalgia of the people will run out, and Robotech will finally die... albeit a far less dignified death than the one it should have had back in 1987.

As far as the whole "continuing Shadow Chronicles thing goes, they did at least have that dreadful draft which was floating around the internet. McKeever's loud protests that "on hiatus" doesn't mean they're not working on it aside, the remarks made by Richard Epcar at various conventions are most telling. He was very open about the fact that when he was contracted to lend his voice talents to a trilogy of new Robotech, of which Shadow Chronicles was to be the first installment. He also went on record to say that after he was informed that the project was on hold with a "don't call us, we'll call you" with regard to recording his lines, he didn't hear from them again. It definitely looks like nothing will ever get done on Shadow Rising, since Tommy is waiting for Warner to unfuck the franchise's reputation, and Warner is twiddling its thumbs waiting for the writers to produce something coherent as far as a draft. Unsurprising to say the least... no doubt Harmony Gold intends to play it safe with the live action movie. If it's a hit, they won't bother faffing about with Shadow Rising, and will do a new animated series based on it (ala Transformers Animated) while the property is hot. If it flops or gets canceled, they'll fall back on squeezing the die-hard fanbase's blue balls for more cash from the relative safety of their Shadow Rising safety net. Warner would have to be blind not to know that Macross is their best bet for a successful Robotech movie, yet they're going ahead with the idea of a reimagining to sidestep the litigious nightmare the original represents... and thus the end result will probably end up bearing no resemblance to the classic anime to which Harmony Gold has been desperately clinging these past twenty-five odd years. Oh, so Kevin McKeever's falling back on his usual trend of revisionist history and bullshit... charming. Either way, it comes right back to his long-time stance of "we'll do a new series if and only if we can get a network to give us an episode commitment". It sounds like he's trying to engage in some Carl Macek-esque buck-passing, to lay most of the blame for having no new properties out there on the doorstep of the big television networks, for whom the Robotech franchise is such a pathetic small-time outfit that it's barely worth their notice. Incidentally, it also appears that SPACE has taken Robotech out of the lineup entirely... it's not listed anywhere on their broadcast schedule, and the series page has no airdate listed under "next episode". I guess it was inevitable, since the series was put in a timeslot (Saturday @ 7:00am) that made it abundantly clear that the network probably thought it was a real channel-changer campfest and almost guaranteed nobody would watch.

Well, like I said... if it was an acrimonious parting they probably would've kept it quiet as a courtesy thing, and if it wasn't and they'd just had other things to do at the time there likely was never a reason for their parting of ways. Speculation is probably all we'll ever have on this note, since unless something goes seriously pear-shaped with a production, they don't usually talk about this sort of thing.

Episode 27 was originally going to be the finale under Big West's original plan, but after the first three episodes aired and became a runaway hit, they extended the show's run (only once) to 36 episodes.

Really, I don't think we'll ever know exactly why Big West stopped working with Tatsunoko. It may simply be that after Macross: Flashback 2012 they never thought they'd be making another Macross show again (Kawamori was saying that, for sure) and decided to part ways. Tatsunoko may simply have been committed to another project. At the general time Big West was working on Macross II, Tatsunoko was involved in Space Knight Tekkaman Blade and Irresponsible Captain Tylor. If it was an acrimonious parting, odds are nobody will know the details of it, since they tend to keep that sort of thing quiet.

Yes, Studio Nue started working on the show that eventually became Macross under the sponsorship of Wiz (Uizu) Corp., who wanted a ~48 episode series done as a comedy spoof of the highly successful Gundam series. Sort of right... Wiz (Uizu) went bankrupt/out of business and Studio Nue bought back the rights to the series and started shopping around for a new sponsor, eventually teaming up with Big West, who cut the run of the show down to 27 or so episodes, but agreed to let them do it as a serious story. Sort of true again... once Studio Nue had done pretty much all of the creative legwork and refined the series into its final shape and started to produce the animation, Big West discovered that it was going to run more than they'd budgeted for the series, and brought in Tatsunoko to help fund the animation process. They also found they didn't have the manpower to animation the whole thing solo, so Big West brought in Artland, while Tatsunoko brought in AnimeFriend and StarPro. An incredible oversimplification... basically, Tatsunoko only holds a copyright on the animation of the series itself, and has the distribution and merchandising rights to the show outside of Japan which they were given as compensation for their involvement. Tatsunoko only funded the animation process, and the creative work was done long before they got involved, so Tatsunoko has no claim on the intellectual property of the series, but does have ownership of the animation they funded the production of... (basically, they own the footage itself, but not the contents). Tatsunoko's contracts for DYRL were presumably drawn up much more strictly, because the confusion over who owned what never seems to have touched that title. Also, Tatsunoko is listed in the credits for Macross: Flashback 2012, but the degree of their involvement is unknown. Macross II: Lovers Again was the first title to exclude Tatsunoko from the production process. No idea... I don't think they've ever really offered any insight into it. It might have something to do with the creators of Macross II opting to use AIC and Onrio, and Macross Plus originally having been developed as something not related to Macross, but we'll probably never know for sure.

Which is really obnoxious, because I've explained it to most of them at least once... Um... not quite... we know Harmony Gold's rationale for delaying Robotech: Shadow Rising indefinitely, and it's all budget-related. Basically, as Tommy Yune explained it, Harmony Gold's management decided that they were better off waiting for Warner's live-action Robotech movie to raise the Robotech franchise's standing so their investors would be willing to give them more favorable terms, thus giving them a bigger budget to ensure that the continuation of Shadow Chronicles was a higher-quality product than the first installment. Take that for what you will... but at least some of it makes sense. Insofar as Carl Macek's return to the franchise in an advisory capacity, I'll wager that was intended to convince the fans that Harmony Gold's creative team hasn't just been sitting around picking their noses all this time, and make them think that big things are happening when in truth they're just sitting around waiting for Warner to fix their poo. Now, I've got no idea where you got it into your head that Shadow Chronicles was supposed to be a series... the Robotech 2004 thing's format was never announced, and by the time they'd gotten around to announcing details (right around the time it became Robotech: Shadow Force) it was announced that it was going to be a series of movies. McKeever's always said that they won't develop a series unless they can get an episode commitment from a network, so it's highly unlikely that they ever intended this aborted "Shadow Saga" to be a TV series. If they did, and managed to get an episode commitment, we'd probably have been celebrating Robotech's cancellation sometime around February 2007 instead of mocking a laughably bad movie. Harmony Gold has at least implied that the limited budget of Shadow Chronicles was because they weren't sure if the movie would be a success, and didn't want to risk scads of money from their investors on it, so they did the whole thing on a shoestring budget and called it a day.

The viewer? It's not just you. Definitely a classic "Oh poo" moment.

Even so... as long as the engines are running they're still going to be consuming fuel at some rate. No matter how gently those engines sip from the fuel tanks in atmospheric flight, they'll still run dry at some point. So, in practice, it's probably more along the lines of the fighter having more endurance than the pilot... by a considerable margin if Macross 7 is anything to go by. How many days were Basara, Mylene, and Gamlin stomping around on the surface of Lux before they returned to the fleet? Two? Three? In any event, the light fuel consumption rate goes right out the window in space flight since the VFs use the waste plasma from the reaction engines as ion thruster propellant in space flight, which would be the reason for the use of boosters and additional propellant tanks in the form of super parts. Would it perhaps be that the manufacturer is listed as General Galaxy rather than Stonewell/Bellcom? Or maybe the 3 barrel particle beam gatling gun? All things considered... the credibility of the VF-1 Master File was damaged beyond repair right around the time its writers decided to copy large portions of material from the long-discredited Sky Angels VF-1 Tech Manual. Stating that the VF-4 couldn't transform is the least of its problems where accuracy is concerned.

In my opinion, Jeebers is every bit as obnoxious as Rhade is... just for different reasons. Both Jeebers and Rhade belong to that bizarre subset of Robotech fans who actually know almost nothing about the Robotech universe and continuity, yet hold themselves up as devoted fans and experts on the franchise. Rhade just doesn't know that he doesn't know it all, and runs off at the mouth about things he doesn't understand and can't be arsed to look up. Jeebers, on the other hand, is seemingly incapable of understanding the distinction between canon and fanfiic, and thus brings his ineptly-made D20 Future Robotech game up at every opportunity as though it actually had some bearing on the discussions he interrupts... made all the more obnoxious by the fact that his RPG only vaguely resembles Robotech itself. It's a problem not helped in the slightest by his having seen one (and only one) Macross show and deciding the whole of Macross was completely batshit crazy based on some misconceptions he has about how the military works in the real world. Call a spade a spade... Macross's continuity isn't nearly the mess you're making it out to be... it's just a very big universe and its creators have adopted the method of giving us bits here and there rather than trying to tell one huge monolithic story, since that's an easy way to write yourself into a corner like Star Trek and Star Wars did... Good night Mr. van Winkle, we'll see you in about twenty years...

And they're right... after a fashion. Not just Macross... EVERYTHING. It's probably just that they're so used to following franchises that produce nothing new or interesting to be able to figure out a franchise that actually produces new content with some regularity... all those sequels and prequels confuse them...

When you get right down to it, there generally isn't much in the way of difference between being a fan of Robotech and just being ignorant. Some of the blame for their ignorance must fall on the heads of Harmony Gold's creative team, who have put a lot of effort into keeping fans ignorant of Macross, but we can't excuse their ignorance outright, as much of the basic information is still readily available online. Even among Robotech fans, whose ignorance and belligerent nature is common knowledge in mecha anime circles, Rhade is a somewhat exceptional case. Like many of the most belligerent and devoted Robotech fans, he seems to be completely out of touch with the franchise as a whole... and particularly the new material created by Tommy Yune as part of the continuity reboot. Admittedly, his tastes run towards the strange even for a Robotech fan, since he's an avid Masters Saga fan and thinks General Leonard was a great leader despite every single Robotech adaptation or continuation that featured him depicted him as an arrogant, xenophobic, team-killing bastard, and Tommy's recent work depicts him as also being a traitor to the United Earth Government and secret agent of the Anti-Unification League. He's also in with that whole pro-HG pro-Masters Saga fandom gang that harasses anyone who mob up on anyone who points out that Leonard being a xenophobic, team-killing, traitorous douche isn't opinion... it's canon. He's always thought he's smarter than everyone else, and tried to pull a couple fast ones on the other fans... usually accompanied by tall tales which get progressively more absurd the more he's confronted. It doesn't surprise me that once again he's spouting off about Macross without knowing what he's talking about.

Eh, given their endorsement of MEMO's behavior, I don't think they care if the income is disposable or not so long as they spend it on Robotech crap. What the Harmony Gold "creative team" wants is a blindly loyal fanbase whose desire to purchase the latest feeble Robotech merchandise borders on an obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Oddly enough, when confronted with the facts of the Macross rights situation on Robotech.com's forums, Tommy and Kevin mysteriously clam up and refuse to comment, when ordinarily a challenge to their perceived success and authority would have them all over the thread like a kleptomaniac on a poorly attended table of iPods. After reading that, I wouldn't say they're trying to disillusion the kid... it does look like they're doing some hasty retroactive ass-covering to keep the guy from concluding that Robotech has just been riding Macross's coattails in the most inept of fashions since 1985. All I'll say is this... the authors must've been smoking a lot of "protoculture" when they wrote EotC.

Of course... which is why Harmony Gold has put so much effort into obfuscation and misdirection intended to convince the Robotech faithful that the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series is seen as inferior to Robotech and that the other Macross shows aren't worth looking into and take all kinds of pointers from Robotech.

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.