Seto Kaiba

Unlikely, IMO. In light of the fact that it was an informal panel, it seems far more likely that Tommy simply failed to check the facts with senior management and the lawyers. Had something major actually changed in the relationship between the creators of Macross and Harmony Gold, it's HIGHLY unlikely that Harmony Gold would've kept it quiet. That would've been front-page news on their website the day it happened, since it'd be the biggest coup in Robotech's twenty-five years of mediocrity and failure. No, smart money says this is a slip of the forked tongue by Tommy Yune... one the company lawyers are no doubt already scolding him for. The answers to your questions are: Q: Why would he go all the way to San Francisco for the first stop of the Robotech Convention Tour? A: Foolish optimism, wishful thinking, and blind faith stemming from his complete and total inability to spot a pattern in Harmony Gold's behavior over the past twenty-five years and a general unwillingness to admit that the franchise he's given so much to over the years will never give anything back. Q: Was he really hoping that anything would come out of this because of the 25th anniversary? A: Yes. Odds are MEMO will spin this however he can so that Harmony Gold comes out smelling of roses and he can continue to believe that Robotech will one day wow us all with its awesomeness instead of continuing to quietly decay in a dingy corner of the internet most people pretend doesn't exist. MEMO doesn't see it as a waste, for him the convention tour will always be proof that Robotech hasn't curled up, shat itself, and died. Don't tell me you're surprised by that... it was inevitable. Somehow, I seem to have become wrapped up in it to such an extent that I'm still working on a replacement for the fansite MEMO ruined with his almost Soviet attitude towards dissent, and have apparently drawn down the attention of more than one Robotech voice actor in the offing, though JT is at least partially to blame for that. EDIT: O.M.F.G.. Pizza is taking MEMO to task over AOD and Harmony Gold's failure to deliver there too. Gentlemen, I think we may have to consider that the proverbial honeymoon is over and the subject has contracted a terminal case of logical thinking where Robotech and Harmony Gold are concerned. He may very well be outgrowing the antics we so often criticized him for. I must confess... I am genuinely surprised.

No kidding... that, plus Kawamori changing the reason we got the "New U.N.", really makes figuring the whole thing out a fair bit messier. Given the available information, my take on the situation is that the little-n "new U.N. Government" likely was established as a continuation of the system of government they'd had before the war, and thus was only "new" in the sense that it was re-founded with new representatives after the war. After a while, the distinction would simply no longer seem important, and was probably dropped altogether, leaving the government as the U.N. Gov't, and the military as the U.N. Forces. According to Kawamori, the big-n "New U.N. Government" came along when the government was forced to reorganize after the constituency of the old government became too spread out for the little-n "new U.N. Government" to govern effectively. From the description, the big-n "New U.N. Government" is a new governmental system established to cope with the realities of galactic colonization on a large scale. The U.N. Spacy presumably became the New U.N. Spacy during this reorganization to bring it under closer civilian oversight, perhaps because of the events of Macross VF-X2. In a nutshell, the important distinction between "new" and "New" seems to be whether the actual system of government changed significantly enough to consider it a whole new government. The "New U.N. Spacy" seems to have only cropped up after the governmental changes passed the point where it really couldn't be called the same system anymore. I could, of course, be completely wrong in my assessment, but it seems to support the available facts and what Kawamori is saying in the Otona Anime interview.

Kind of a non-issue, they didn't have any problems churning out a passable but weak imitation of the old Robotech Art series (The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles) via Stone Bridge Press.

Wow, you actually managed to make something MEMO wrote make sense... It's not like it's not happening in ones and twos now... they're just afraid it'll turn into a stampede to get away from the franchise once the smell of bullshit can no longer cover the smell of death.

Assuming, of course, that MEMO's video isn't conveniently damaged in several places where Tommy appears to be saying things that don't line up with what MEMO wants to believe like the last one he posted was.

Unsurprisingly, this new stance that Carl Macek made the creative decisions he did to combine Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada into Robotech while watching the show with neither sound nor a translated script is at odds with Carl Macek's original account in Robotech Art 1 where he says he picked the latter two shows just on the grounds that they were convenient, and that he reviewed all three stories to see how best to combine them. The editors responsible for Robotech seem to have a love of revisionist history that borders on the fetishistic. They keep trying to make themselves look better by pretending the humble, honest accounts of the show's history from twenty years ago don't exist and are banking on the relative scarcity of those publications and the current fanbase's ignorance of them to mask what would otherwise be laughable, completely transparent lies. It really should be setting off some warning lights that even Robotech fans as devoted as Pizza the Hutt, who until very recently went to bat for them even when there was no hope of victory, are turning on them.

What, having the idol in Macross Plus be a computer-generated simulation wasn't androgynous enough for you? Honestly, no... I like my Macross idols performing music that doesn't suck, and that's something you just don't get from "artists" like Lady Gaga.

Actually, yes... they probably do think that. I think the specific fear is that if they come clean about their (in)ability to use Macross characters and mecha in future cinematic works they'll lose much of the remaining fanbase. Let's face facts, while Harmony Gold may be an incompetently-run outfit, their employees aren't completely stupid. They can read a trend line in television ratings and merchandise sales as easily as you or I, so they're well aware that over half of their fanbase consistently names the Macross Saga as their favorite part of Robotech, and that interest in Masters Saga and New Generation merchandise is limited at best. Their one accomplishment in the past twenty-four years, the Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles movie, used the promise of revealing the fate of the Macross Saga cast as its primary selling point, and both the cliffhanger end and leaked draft leave no doubt that they intend to continue dangling the promise of Macross Saga characters in front of the dwindling fanbase to keep them interested. Their fear, which is extremely well-founded, is that if they announce they can't use Macross characters and mecha in the Shadow Rising movie and live-action movie, that interest in the movies will collapse and take their franchise with it. Considering that most of these guys at least claim to have been Robotech fans before joining up at Harmony Gold, you have to stop and wonder if they've just become so used to accepting obvious falsehoods during the time as fans that they've come full circle and believe the lies they're telling. Well, okay... you've got us there... they can always take THAT road. Of course, I think the implication was the use of the designs in new material, but whatever... lol

Of course, that isn't stopping MEMO from spreading half-remembered, mostly-false accounts of the AOD panel and what Tommy said as though by distorting it and taking it out of context he could overturn the court rulings and change the way the copyright laws work and give Harmony Gold the ability to use material from Macross in derivative works, which they have NEVER had the right to do. If PTH actually calls MEMO out on this latest bit of bullshit, I may very well be forced to reconsider my position on his recent bout of intelligent behavior.

I'm astonished the miasma of stupidity that perpetually surrounds him didn't suffocate you. And that brings me nicely around to prerequisite #2 for being a long-time Robotech fan... you must either be totally ignorant of the show's origins, or be deep enough in denial that you can rationalize the show's origins as something other than an attempt to imitate the success of Transformers and sell lots of transforming robot toys without having to do much, if any, actual creative work.

Well, thanks for wasting a few minutes of your time on our behalf to let us know that the Robotech's 25th promises to be every bit as anticlimactic as we predicted. Honestly, I'm not. If they didn't try to present Shadow Chronicles and the various MPC Beta repaints as new each year they wouldn't have anything to show at all, and that would make for a pretty pathetic booth and panel. Of course, what they're doing now is just as pathetic, but a little less obvious to the casual viewer. If it weren't for the fact that it's the 25th anniversary this year, I'd wonder why they were wasting the money to fly Tommy and company around the country for these conventions. It doesn't accomplish anything. Now there's an obvious bit of misdirection if ever I saw one... It looks like he's trying to, intentionally or otherwise, blur the distinction between merchandise and derivative works in the eyes of the audience by referring to toys as "productions" rather than "products". He's done it before, and it fooled nobody last time either. All the legal documentation and other evidence available indicates quite clearly that Harmony Gold is perfectly at liberty to produce merchandise based on the original Macross series and DYRL, because they hold the merchandising rights to those shows outside of Japan. It seems like Tommy's attempting to generalize his way out of the second issue... their ability to use the character designs. It's impossible for Harmony Gold to use the original Macross (or DYRL) character and mechanical designs in derivative works (animation, live action) because those designs are the copyrighted property of Big West and Studio Nue... neither Harmony Gold nor Tatsunoko Productions have any right to them. The court rulings made sure that wasn't open to debate. It's entirely possible for Harmony Gold to use the Southern Cross and Mospeada designs in derivative works, since those are the property of their partner Tatsunoko. Harmony Gold's original Robotech creative director (Carl Macek) even went on record at Robocon 10 back when he was still working on the franchise to say that they had to redesign the Macross characters for Robotech II: the Sentinels because they couldn't use the originals. Tommy's trying to sidestep the matter by being obtuse. At one convention panel, Tommy tried to claim Macross was inferior because, according to him, Robotech had been fansubbed into Japanese. All attempts to find this alleged Japanese fansub of Robotech failed.

While I don't want to (grievously) offend the more levelheaded Robotech fans out there, I really have to say that I honestly think that one of the prerequisites for being a long-time Robotech fan is having faulty pattern recognition skills. Let's face it, a complete and total inability to spot a negative trend as it emerges is the only thing that could keep someone hoping earnestly that Harmony Gold would one day roll out a decent sequel and revive Robotech after 25 years of failure and broken promises. Granted, past performance is no guarantee of future results, but you should still examine the track record and adjust your expectations accordingly. I'd bet real money that they honestly believe the stupid claims they make on a daily basis are accurate, well-reasoned, informed arguments and that we're just making fun of them out of spite. They don't stop to take stock of what they say because that would mean admitting the things they said were wrong, and they'd much rather believe the delusion that Robotech is a highly successful, wildly popular, genre-defining franchise than accept the grim reality that the majority of few the people who know about it regard it with barely-disguised contempt. They won't ever stop saying the stupid poo that they consistently get ridiculed for because that would entail admitting they've been betting on the wrong horse for over twenty years. Faulty pattern recognition skills and a frantic desire to validate two decades or more of their lives wasted waiting for a revival that will never come.

Smart money says he'd deny it flat-out, and attempt to rebut it with the sort of argument only someone who spent the entire day pounding nails into their skull with a tea tray would find even remotely convincing. Then he would no doubt launch into another comical tirade about how fear of Robotech motivated the producers of Star Trek's and Avatar to rush their movies to release, or that Macross's creators were in awe of Shadow Chronicles and decided to copy as much as they could from it to help them compete against Harmony Gold's next sure-fire blockbuster... Shadow Rising... a movie Maverick's been waiting for for over four years! EDIT: Oh, I forgot... and then he'd accuse you of taking pleasure in the suffering of others and revoke your posting privileges, assuming you were somewhere he could do the latter and get away with it.

Somehow, it doesn't surprise me at all that Maverick_LSC is trying desperately to come up with some way to convince himself that Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, and Robotech itself, was something other than a lame direct-to-DVD movie many Robotech didn't think was all that good, and was ignored by the anime industry at large. He wants a way to validate twenty-plus years of waiting for Harmony Gold to get their act together and produce a sequel. Basically, Maverick's trying to legitimize Robotech and his belief in its superiority by trying to present the illusion that even Macross's creators think Robotech is the better story and are trying to imitate it. It's errant nonsense, of course... Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles has nothing that even remotely resembles an Itano circus. All they have are a few cases where large numbers of missiles are launched and the mini-missiles swarm together briefly, just once, shortly after launch, and then speed off in straight lines.

Y'know, despite Carl Macek spending a fair bit of time rhapsodizing about what he perceives as flaws in the story of the original Macross TV series and how he "fixed" them and "improved" the series as a whole, I don't think he's ever attempted to say Robotech is perfect (an indefensible statement if ever there was one), he just goes on with the standard "because I say so" assertions that Robotech is the superior story. It's certainly not what taksraven was saying in any case. Exactly what Carl Macek thinks of having Tommy Yune reboot the continuity in order to kick virtually everything he ever did, including most of his post-facto explanations and rationaliations, to the curb remains something of a mystery, as he never seems to actually comment on it when given the opportunity to do so.

No, I don't think we've bothered to cover that one, but we can be fairly certain that the VF-25 does in fact have some kind of secondary engine system providing the thrust for forward motion in fighter mode. Exactly what kind of engine it is, your guess is as good as mine, but its glowing pinkish-purple exhaust is visible in Macross Frontier episode 2 at about five minute in, when Alto and Ranka are cruising in GERWALK over the city in Gilliam's VF-25F right after Michel shoots the last Vajra down. It appears to be mounted more or less where we'd expect it to be. Just looking at the CG model, the engine's built into (or are on the underside of) the plate that protrudes backwards between the vertical stabilizers in GERWALK mode (the one with the Skull logo painted on it on Ozma's VF-25S, which is color-coded bright green in this chart).

While I could yammer on about how each culture has certain tropes endemic to its traditional storytelling, and the various regional perceptions of what constitutes "foreign" styles of storytelling, it's really neither here nor there. Your point is valid in that there is no one set of rules or characteristics that divides schools of storytelling into "Western" and "Eastern", or by any other vague geographical definition you could think of. It would be remiss of me not to qualify it by saying that while there's no objective definition of such, most every culture makes subjective classifications along those lines when the writer's background influences their style in a fashion that doesn't appear often among native writers, or draw upon some element of their native culture the readers won't be familiar with. While it IS a seriously flawed premise, people are going to make distinctions like that based on their own experiences anyway. That Maverick is using it as an attempt to draw a distinction between Macross and Robotech is pretty bloody ridiculous... he's falling back on the obviously flawed facade that he's a film industry expert and relying on the old axiom "If you can't dazzle them with your knowledge, baffle them with your bullshit." EDIT: Good grief that first paragraph sounds pretentious, but I really can't think of any way to word it better right now.

Too technical? My bad. I just cited a few examples of just how prevalent ending the story with some form of cliffhanger is these days in "Western" storytelling. It's bad practice, but it gets done a LOT in narrative-driven merchandise... not so much in cinema, but it crops up every now and again there too.

Yeah, I found that amusing too... he's definitely trying to cast Macross as an inferior product that's being "exploited" for a quick buck rather than a franchise that succeeded entirely on merit, seemingly oblivious to the irony in what he was saying... the creator of the cheap knockoff accusing the original creators of making a cheap knockoff. Actually, he says that he picked titles that were already in Harmony Gold's catalog of licensed works... he didn't decide to acquire anything, he just used what was already available. Clearly you don't play many video games... easily 3/4ths of all narrative-driven games these days end in some kind of cliffhanger or at the very least have "to be continued..." stapled onto the back end, regardless of whether or not they actually intend to make a second game, just to leave the option open if the first game sells well enough. It's the same with a lot of popular (and not-so-popular) novel series these days, where each and every installation ends in a cliffhanger or with some new villain presenting itself, to force the story to go on FOREVER... the Star Wars and Star Trek novels did it all the time, as do a LOT of fantasy series. On VERY rare occasions, if skillfully hidden under a larger, overarching plot, it CAN work... but examples of that are few and far between. The only one I can think of offhand is Dan Abnett's "Gaunt's Ghosts" series of Warhammer 40,000 novels... though after fifteen novels or so the many variations on "they recruit the disenfranchised soldiers of another destroyed unit/settlement and slog off to the next warzone" have long since started to pall.

Ask and ye shall receive... from part 1 of Robotech.com's Carl Macek fan interview, published 10 May 2001: and from part 2 of same, published 21 May 2001: Nah, I'm a computer scientist with a software engineering bias... give me the answer to the nearest tenth of a second or express it in quartz clock cycles.

Remember, one of the areas where Carl Macek insists he improved on the original Macross series with his Robotech adaptation was eliminating music as an important plot device and making Minmay into an obnoxious twit with "marginal talent" with the stated intention of showing that even a misguided person can make a difference. Just like virtually every claim of intent the man makes with regard to the production of the Robotech "original 85", this is almost certainly something he came up with after the fact to perpetuate the illusion he created Robotech according to some grand preconceived vision rather than slapping it together in an amusingly haphazard manner like he alludes to during his earliest interviews. As if he was completely and totally determined to set off every bullshit detector in the house, he then went on to claims Macross's sequels were moving away from giving music a central role in the story and that it was likely the result of Robotech's influence. Now, just to put this bullshit in context, this "interview" of his was posted on 21 May 2001... at which point the state of the Macross franchise renders the remarks he made so obviously wrong they verge on comical. Remember, a major part of Harmony Gold's efforts to keep the Robotech franchise limping along is giving the fans an exaggerated impression of the franchise's popularity and influence, along with a rather heavily rose-tinted and extensively censored account of its history. All too often, they mistake fantasy for fact and assert that Robotech is great classic of both anime and science fiction that rivals much more successful titles like Star Trek, Star Wars, Macross, and Gundam in popularity and influence. Some of them you can blame for it, namely the ones who bought into the lies of Tommy, Kevin, and their lackeys because they didn't know any better. Others, like those lackeys themselves, just have a tenuous grip on reality and don't want to accept that it really is just an obscure show with VERY limited niche appeal. Unless the live-action movie actually makes it to release and resuscitates the slowly cooling corpse that is Robotech, it'll never make it to 50 years. It'll be a bad footnote in Macross history LONG before then.

For pretty much any rational Robotech fan (yes, they DO exist) the prospect of any RT project actually being seen through to the end is almost unthinkable. In Robotech's long, sordid history, Robotech projects that didn't meet their end in failure and cancellation are astonishingly rare commodities. Given the mixed reception Shadow Chronicles got, I'd be surprised if more than a few of the rational fans were expecting a continuation of any kind. The general sentiments I saw from their corner were that Shadow Chronicles was going to be another Sentinels... a weak pilot for a series that never got off the ground. Considering all the delaying and double-talk surrounding Shadow Rising, they may yet be vindicated in that belief too... Yeah... but that still doesn't make the 4+ years statement work out... it comes up about eight months short of the 4 year mark at the absolute earliest.

Considering his almost Bendo-esque penis fixation where you're concerned, one might wonder if it isn't all projection caused by some deep-seated inner turmoil over his own sexual orientation... who knows, the "LSC" in Maverick_LSC might very well stand for Likes Sucking... well... you can fill the rest in for yourself, it shouldn't be too difficult. Not surprising, he seems to find something terribly fascinating about my profile, considering he seems to be checking it roughly every 24 hours or so. I didn't think my "About Me" section was THAT captivating... While I'm not sure about #3 there, it's no secret Maverick_LSC and MEMO1DOMINION both make a hobby of spying on "dissenters" who visit message boards like this one and periodically report any criticism directed towards Harmony Gold and/or Robotech so their RT.com profiles can be earmarked for a speedy ban on entirely trumped-up charges. No doubt he not only expects Robotech and Macross fans to be in awe of him because he claims to have insider knowledge of the goings-on at Harmony Gold (something he's never been able to prove) and because of his moderator status on Robotech.com. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he expects anyone here with an active RT.com account to be afraid that he'll shut it down for speaking heresy. ;-) For some reason, as I was writing this I was struck by just how very much Maverick_LSC's acting like an Imperial Commissar from Warhammer 40,000... the only significant difference being that instead of screaming "HERESY!" and shooting the offender, he screams "HERESY!" and reaches for the ban button wherever he has the power to do so... Some call Maverick_LSC's methods "unconventional", "questionable", or "ethnically unsound", but Maverick_LSC knows what notions like that are: HERESY. Fortunately for us, he wants to clear up a few things. Now you might be wondering, just what is "heresy"? Is criticizing Tommy Yune's work as Robotech's creative director heresy? Maverick_LSC: IT'S HERESY! How about criticizing Carl Macek's work on the original Robotech series? Maverick_LSC: IT'S HERESY! Liking Macross more than Robotech? Maverick_LSC: THAT'S EXTRA HERETICAL! Protecting the minds of Robotech fans from heresy is hard work, but it's certain to pay off eventually, right?

Yes, the Shadow Chronicles movie will have been out for 4 years this August, but only actually available to the fans for three (as it went on sale in January 07)... the pertinent point is that the existence of a sequel was not even announced until February '07 and wasn't named until July '07. So for Maverick_LSC or anyone else to have been waiting for a sequel to the movie for 4+ years, they would've had to know about it back in or before January 2006, well before even Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles came out, and if memory serves, before the name "Shadow Chronicles" had even come to light. At or around that point it was still known tentatively as Robotech: Shadow Force, an interim name it held between being Robotech 2004 and its final title.

Yes... yes it is... though in rather a different way then you meant, perhaps. For Maverick_LSC to say he's been waiting 4+ years for Robotech's revival is a masterpiece of understatement. It'd probably be more accurate to say he's been waiting 20+ years for that, but then again that just makes him sound like a desperate loser with lousy pattern recognition skills who can't accept that his favorite childhood TV show bombed back in 1986. More importantly, if he's been waiting 4+ years for Shadow Rising... the boy must be clairvoyant. How else could he be waiting 4+ years for the Shadow Chronicles sequel that was announced less than three years ago? Well, Robotech's standards for quality music are abnormally low... their great cosmic idol is a singer who makes the worst one-hit wonders look like timeless classics, voiced by a woman who had to get shitfaced drunk before she had the courage to warble those horrible songs. I remember what BlackRose said when she first saw that scene... "Now this is a brave new world... one where masochism isn't just socially acceptable, it's a favorite group recreational activity! Let's all go to the mess hall and suffer horribly for a half-hour!". Pretty much nobody, except the few n00bs too green to know better. Bear ye in mind that the reason Maverick_LSC thinks he's a film industry expert and Hollywood insider is because he does his own (awful) amateur films, some of which he posted here in a pathetic attempt to troll me, and claims to be occasionally talking to Kevin McKeever. The guy's a massive blowhard who goes to extreme lengths to make himself look like a bigshot because he has a unglamorous day job in aircraft maintenance and a wife who treats his anime hobby like something sick or criminal that needs to be hidden from their friends and neighbors at all costs. His buddy and backup is a rent-a-cop who emptied his family's bank accounts for Robotech and thinks he's a film industry legal expert and Robotech guru because he claims to have talked over the legal situation with a film industry lawyer he can't name, and has had Carl Macek at his fansite convention booth.