Seto Kaiba

What that is is a cheaply-manufactured convention-exclusive knockoff of the Macross 25th Anniversary VF-1, with Strike packs. The paint scheme is almost a direct copy of the 25th Anniversary VF-1, as is the design of the toy itself, though I believe it's a smaller scale than the original. Harmony Gold stealing everything that isn't nailed down, as usual. Honestly, I don't think there's any way for Harmony Gold to exploit this one... and it'll probably be overturned on appeal anyway. The British court's logic appears to be something along the lines of "props of generic or utilitarian design aren't art because their distinguishing traits are trivial or nonexistent". The Imperial Stormtrooper armor may be familiar, but it's not exactly distinctive in and of itself, it's just gloss-white plastic body segments and a fairly bland helmet. If you saw someone wearing white glossy body armor, you couldn't immediately point to that and say "that's from Star Wars" and expect to be correct. I don't think the ruling could even be extended to anything props which are distinctively Star Wars, like C-3PO's face, or the helmets worn by Darth Vader and Boba Fett, or a distinctive character from another series like the Dalek from Doctor Who. I don't think this ruling could be applied outside of background props in live-action movies... let alone to a whole other type of cinema. The majority of the Macross designs ARE distinctively Macross, so I don't think there'll be any worries there. As it stands, the judge limited the scope of the ruling to only within the UK, so it's a non-issue where it actually matters (the US), where the guy actually didn't even bother to defend the lawsuit because he knew he'd lose. I have to agree with Lucasfilm's argument though, the stormtrooper armor design is a fairly integral part of the story of Episode IV, it's part of the movies as a whole, and therefore is art by dint of being a component of a piece of cinematic art. I get the feeling that the courts see Lucasfilm's copyright on such a generic design to be open to all kinds of abuses, like to sue other filmmakers for any generic design that looks even remotely similar. They haven't done so, but I think that's probably what the court is thinking. And oh boy does it ever... but again it's only applicable to prop designs with a "utilitarian" purpose, so it's kind of vague in and of itself, and will probably end up overturned on its next appeal. Oh, he'll try... he'll no doubt "forget" that the scope of the UK judge's ruling only covers the UK. They're not saying that Lucasfilm's copyright on it isn't valid, just that it's being treated differently inside the UK. If that guy tried to take his stuff outside the UK again, he'd be open for another lawsuit like the one he already lost against Lucasfilm in the US. Since this case only applies to props of "utilitarian" purpose, I don't think it could be rationally applied to Macross in any way, as virtually all of Macross's mechanical designs are distinctive and figure into the story in fairly major ways at one point or another, and none of them are utilitarian background props in a live-action movie.

The term Meltran/Meltrandi is exclusive to Macross: Do You Remember Love? and Macross II: Lovers Again wherein the timeline has the all-male Zentradi forces fighting the all-female Meltrandi. In the main continuity shows, the term "Zentradi" is used to refer to both males and females, who are fighting on the same side against the Supervision Army. Ranka is indeed 1/4 Zentradi, though exactly which side of her family the Zentradi blood comes from, and whether it comes from a male or female main continuity Zentradi is unknown.

Oh absolutely . In all seriousness, my point was that it makes a great deal more sense for the next-generation destroid to be an evolution of the previous design generation, as in the case of the Macross II destroids, rather than a throwback to one of the earliest (known) destroid designs. Stylistically, upgunning the 50 year old Cheyenne to pass it off as "new" is about as logical as attaching road effects, flame decals, and a big chrome spoiler to an old powder-blue Nissan Stanza. I stand by my theory that the Frontier fleet is using remodeled ADR-03 Cheyennes because they blew their entire defense budget on VF-25s and keeping SMS on the payroll. To sum it up nicely... "more dakka", though the rollers in the feet were a nice touch, and it's the first appearance of that particular design choice in Macross (though that doesn't necessarily indicate the Cheyenne and Cheyenne II's use of that feature was inspired by Macross II). Excellent examples, though the earliest example (chronologically) of Anti-U.N. terrorists exceeding the U.N. forces in developing ground mecha would be the two shield-enhanced destroid Monsters used on the planet Bellfan in 2030 in Macross M3.

It doesn't make much sense from an in-universe perspective, does it? Instead of having updated versions of the existing Space War 1-era family of destroids or a new model of destroid designed specifically for use in colony fleets, the Frontier fleet uses a "redesigned" version of a pre-Space War 1 predecessor of the original ADR-04 Defender series... a model of destroid that's been obsolete for a good fifty years. The explanation that the Cheyenne II is an a jack-of-all-trades since they bolted a pair of beam guns, some small missile launchers, and a few small rocket engines to it screams "This is an excuse to justify reusing an existing design!". The only part of it that actually makes sense is that the wheels in the feet don't wreck up the pavement like a giant walking robot would... though it does leave you wondering why they're more worried about destroids inside the dome ruining the pavement when their job is ostensibly to stop the enemy from ever getting inside in the first place. You'd think once there was fighting inside the dome itself, pavement damage would be the least of their worries. As far as the Spartan goes, it's really no surprise that one was an evolutionary dead-end. Once VFs were durable enough to saunter into close-quarters combat with the Zentradi and not embarrass themselves, the MBR-07 Spartan was, for all practical purposes, redundant. Yeah... that's pretty likely IMHO. The destroids in Macross Frontier were always going to be minor background units, so why bother spending a lot of time and money building an all new CG model for something that's only going to get like five minutes of screen time across a 25 episode series? Still... it doesn't make a lick of sense where the technological continuity is concerned. Maybe they should've taken some pointers from the Macross II mechanical designers and done it anyway. "Standardized designs"? I could see that being true if the Cheyenne weren't a fifty year old, obsolete design, and if we hadn't seen in Macross 7 that the Space War 1-era destroids are still in use for a variety of purposes. Maybe after blowing all their money on the VF-25 and SMS the Frontier Government had to cheap out on their anti-aircraft defenses, and that's why they've got souped-up antiques on the battlefield.

Bleh... I'll never get past how UGLY the Gundam 00 movie designs are. The only one that's not sinfully ugly is the 00 Qan[T], and that's just because it's a rehash of the GN-0000/7S 00 Gundam Seven Sword from Mobile Suit Gundam 00V. The rest... yuck.

Y'know, if they hadn't ascribed velocities in excess of Mach 7.2 to it and just stuck to the old Mach 3.87 figure I could've totally seen it as being not only practical, but possibly canon. Instead, it just blows the old high-altitude figure out of the water entirely, which leaves me shaking my head. The hybrid engine concept has been around for ages, so it would make a great deal of sense. Apart from the stated speed, that's the other thing that spoils the VF-1 ramjet/scramjet thing for me... that the next-gen fighter (the VF-4) has separate ramjet systems built into the wing surface inboard of the nacelles... if they had the tech to build them right into the main reaction engines, why have a separate system? As for the rocket engines, I think Talos said it best in my chat with him when he said the VF-4 (a nominally space-specialized VF) is essentially a VF-1 Strike Valkyrie with all the external hardware built into the airframe instead.

Yeah, that was one of the things that really caught my attention when Talos showed me his copy, I'd always wondered exactly how far the semi-submersible Prometheus could submerge, and seeing it running with just the bridge tower above water for stealth purposes was wicked cool... though what really got my attention was, yes, the ramjet/scramjet diagrams and explanations from the book. Not exactly canon, but a great application of theory and so practical I found myself wondering why the show's creators hadn't thought of that back in the 80s. Yeah, though the various contradictions with the previously established, far more credible publications really kind of spoils that part for me, like retconning Hikaru's VF-1J into a Block 4 model (when it had previously been a Block 5) and making some of the later fighters Block 7 models despite their lack of the appropriate cockpit layout... it just doesn't make sense.

No... it's one of these, which only show up in Love Drifts Away (Super Dimension Fortress Macross ep27). If memory serves, the nickname "Funny Chinese" comes from the Macross Model Hobby Handbook.

I only just ordered a copy of the Master File a little bit ago since I was kind of hesitant to purchase seemed to be just an updated version of the Sky Angels book, and only moved on it after a lengthy discussion of the book with Talos. I'd say, given the sheer number of contradictions with established canon (speed, armament, models, block variations, flightsuits, number of ARMDs) and the amount of stuff that is new and never-before-seen (ramjet/scramjet mode, some of the new variants like the VF-1G and VF-1N), and other perplexing goofs, that in terms of accuracy the Master File leaves something to be desired... particularly since in a few places in the development history section it seems to borrow from alternate universe sources pertaining to Macross II's backstory. Is it a canon resource? No. Is it particularly accurate with respect to the established stats and history? No. Is it cool as hell? Yes. Enough that I was willing to plunk down my money for it and spring for EMS shipping, and I'm not the sort to normally go for non-canon sources.

Y'know, I somehow interpreted this as an off-topic comment about how Blame! when I was skimming this topic... Any sane or logical person could say the same... it's not just the constant caps-lock shouting, it's the conspiracy theorist logic he's using.

Well, if the "2nd Edition" RPG is any real indication, the answer to that question is "no". It seems like once Harmony Gold actually started paying attention to what their licensees were doing, their licensees started actually drawing their own art. *starts in with the first verse of "Dude looks like a Lady"* I'm not convinced those heady days weren't just a hallucination brought about by overindulging in the "flowers of life". Drama's the only way they can keep the attention of the remaining fans. They've got no new products coming out in the foreseeable future, no continuation of Shadow Chronicles, the live-action movie's a distant "maybe" on the horizon, and the Masterpiece Collection is stalled due to that recall of the Maia Sterling VF/A-6ZX, so about the best they can do to make it look like exciting things are happening is to throw a bloody hissy fit whenever someone questions that the LAM or Shadow Rising is being worked on in hopes that a sufficient show of outrage will present the illusion of "We've got so much awesome stuff and we're totally pissed off that we can't show it to you, so stop getting on our asses about it". We're not bagging on him specifically, we're largely criticizing the tendency that MOST Robotech comics had to trace whatever they could from Macross artbooks instead of drawing their own material. Kinda sorta already done... it's called The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. In the foreword (written by no less a nutjob than Carl Macek), they attempt to spin their involvement in all of the various Robotech failures as them being victims of circumstance, with the sole exception of Robotech 3000, where Carl Macek ALMOST actually acknowledges the show went under because Harmony Gold didn't have a farting clue what the fans wanted... but he also lumps a lot of blame on Netter Digital. I think they were genuinely trying to distract people from actually reading the foreword though, since all the actual text is crammed into the bottom third of each page, and top two-thirds is full of screen captures and MPC boxart done by Tommy Yune. The book is mysteriously mute on the subject of Macross II and Macross Plus though. I gathered that the book wasn't exactly a big seller... it didn't even sell out on Robotech.com, and the few bookstores to carry it still seem to have most of their stock collecting dust in a warehouse somewhere. Even old-time Robotech fans seemed thoroughly dissatisfied by it, as I was able to obtain a copy in pristine condition (opened once, then thrown aside in disgust by its original owner) for a dollar at a local garage sale... and let me tell you I genuinely think I overpaid by at least $0.75. I thought it was kind of amusing that almost all of the actual information was reprinted (unedited) directly out of the Infopedia, and while Tommy and Carl are the only names on the cover, the back of the book lists a fair half-dozen others who did most of the actual writing.

The sad part is, when you factor in the EotC stable time loop... this is actually possible.

Okay, so you're citing an exception that tests the rule... that's cool. Doesn't really change the fact that the vast majority of Robotech comics did indulge in blatant and occasionally nonsensical plagiarism... even engaging in some cross-genre theft of characters and stories, with appropriately bizarre results. Um... the "Tactical Battle Pod" DID make it into what little of the intended series was actually animated. It appears in the first five minutes of the "Sentinels movie", during the simulator scene. A bunch of 'em pop out of the undefined body of water that "Rick Hunter" crashes in, and waste rookie Jack Baker, ending the simulation at about four minutes in. Whether the "tactical battle pod" is legally actionable or not is kind of sketchy. It's clearly based on general design elements from the Regult and Glaug, yet it's so stylistically different that in my opinion it'd be next to impossible to build a successful case that it was copyright-infringing material. Just like the character designs, it's different enough from the originals while remaining at least vaguely recognizable that it would probably be in the clear. To date, I'm still not certain what "Robotech style" could possibly mean... aside from "turn your brain off and act like a complete twat".

The line between what was Macross and what was Robotech was drawn clearly enough that Palladium had to, and did, establish what could and could not be used for lineart in the original Robotech RPG. Well, Harmony Gold's resident spin doctor has gone on record to say that the reason the comics and novels were made non-canon was because they had been made during a period when Harmony Gold exercised little-to-no creative control over the products their licensees were creating, so that much at least can be taken as reasonably accurate. However, in light of the magnitude and frequency of the tracing, not merely from Macross but also from other shows which had nothing to do with Macross or Robotech such as the movie Independence Day, and the fact that at least some of their licensees WERE aware of the distinction and what they should not use, it seems fairly obvious that there was a LOT of blatant, senseless plagiarism on the part of the writers and artists doing the Robotech comics. If they had drawn it themselves, it would be one thing, but almost all of what they did was tracing from artbooks, from screen captures, and from box art. That's not interpretation at that point, that's plagiarism, pure and simple.

Yeah... let's have a look at these and see just how spurious they all are... Sorry, but nothing here is unique to Robotech or Southern Cross... this isn't a link at all. For one, Bowie isn't anything like a "guitar freak", the instrument he plays the most in the series is a piano, not a guitar. Not just a different instrument, but also a different genre. There was noting "vaguely mystical" about the Zor Lords either. Likewise, human soldiers being brainwashed and used by aliens is nothing new... Star Trek has done it at least a dozen times over the years. Bowie isn't a guitar freak, so there's no romancing of an alien girl by a guitar freak either, there's an alien musician sort of hooking up with a human musician, and I guarantee you Sivil was no harp virtuoso. Rejected, nice try though. Aside from the obvious fact that Alto's hair is not purple, and the circumstances of their dressing as women are totally and completely different... Alto Saotome being an oyama, a male actor who plays female roles in kabuki theater, and Yellow Belmont was a soldier who adopted the disguise of a female lounge singer to hide from the Inbit troops hunting survivors of the Mars Forces. Furthermore, the Inbit/Invid are not biomechanical, they are organic lifeforms operating mecha, and the Vajra are entirely organic lifeforms. Sorji/Sera is an Inbit/Invid in humanoid form, Ranka is a quarter-Zentradi girl who just happens to be infected with the virus that serves as the Vajra communications medium. Additionally, the Vajra are not a hive mind, per se... the description of how their communications work is more in line with a distributed intelligence. Additionally, while the 3rd Earth Recapture Force were hell-bent on wiping out the Inbit who had occupied their home planet, whereas the Frontier NUNS forces were mislead into a war with the Vajra for ulterior motives. Again, rejected because no actual link exists here, except in terms of generalities produced as a result of DRAMATIC oversimplification and omission of key detail. Eh, I could point to a half-dozen other mecha that do the same thing... not indicative of a link either. Nope, no link here either. The three muses of the Zor Lords were used to inspire the Zor people, and did so not by singing, but by playing ugly techno versions of stringed instruments. The muses in Robotech were used to keep cloned soldiers complacent and obedient. The Emulators of the Mardook in Macross II were used solely for the purpose of controlling the battlefield behavior and tactics of the brainwashed Zentradi troops by singing. The first two are similar, the third is not... and the third one is the one your argument depends on.

Jeez... you make it sound like FSS model kits are a controlled substance or something. It takes so long to do each kit that in terms of cost vs time it's probably a lot cheaper to do FSS kits than it is Macross ones. Aaah... I've got a few unstarted model kits, but unfortunately none of them are FSS.

It always was a cheap imitation of the DYRL flightsuit, which isn't surprising... since reportedly Tatsunoko's animators had difficulty understanding the distinctions between Macross and Robotech... or so Carl Macek claims. And that ain't the only place either... there were a couple years there where I think every single Robotech comic must've traced this image from DYRL artbooks at least once. I think the only companies to get the Robotech comic license who didn't indulge heavily in tracing from Macross artbooks and stealing characters and stories from other mecha shows were Comico and Wildstorm, though one could argue that Wildstorm's From the Stars miniseries was nothing but a Robotech version of events from the existing Macross timeline. Ooookay, now there's a dubious claim if ever I saw one. I challenge you to find me one good example of Macross ripping of Robotech. Macross is readily available (legitimately and otherwise) in the US and abroad, but Robotech is NOT available in Japan. I'd guess that any of this you perceive from the Macross end is either coincidence or something not unique to Robotech at all.

Actually, that there were no large-scale emigration fleets is another common misconception about the Macross II continuity. In fact, the official continuity provided in B-Club 79 makes mention of two specific colony missions, and the implication is that there were others as well. As can be expected, the Megaroad-01's departure is mentioned, though for reasons unexplained multiple publications put its actual departure in 2014. The other emigration ship mentioned is a ship called the Million Star, identified as a Macross-class colony ship, which was attacked by a large rogue Zentradi fleet only 1.8 light years from Earth in May of 2054, which is what kicked off the 2054 Zentradi invasion. The Million Star is also noteworthy for being the first instance of a mass-produced Macross-class ship in Macross, as the SDF-2 wasn't completed, and the main continuity didn't get 'em until Macross Frontier retconned them in.

Well, for starters those are two different mecha, one from Southern Cross and the other from Mospeada. The fighter in question is from Southern Cross (the Logan) and only has the two modes you see there, a transformation diagram is actually printed in This is Animation 10 (and is the ONLY mecha to get such a treatment in that book). The other is a nominally non-transformable mecha from Mospeada, whose name I have forgotten. Can't blame Robotech for that one either, actually... that too is from Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. If memory serves, that's the searchlight thing used by the Zor when they first land on Glorie.

The god-awful Sentinels mecha designs were made for the aborted Robotech II: the Sentinels TV series and were created by Naito Anmo. Only a handful of the mechanical designs created for the series were used before work on the show was aborted. The only new designs to actually appear in the footage are the Zentradi battlepod (which appear just long enough to kill the protagonist in a simulation, about 4 minutes into the "movie"), the original "red turd" look of the SDF-3, and the redesigned "Robotech Factory Satellite" which looks nothing like the factor satellite in Macross. Also noteworthy are the imitation Macross character designs by Ippei Kuri, which look only vaguely like the original versions, and the pilot's flightsuit, which is a weak, ugly imitation of the flightsuits worn in DYRL. Nope, those are OFFICIAL designs created for Robotech II: the Sentinels, though I believe the specific art pieces are material drawn by Palladium's in-house artists and colored by the same hamhanded hack who did the rest of the art on the site those images are on.

No kidding, though the Waltrip bros. Sentinels comics ended up being a lot less weird, but no less campy, than the Sentinels novelizations written under the Jack McKinney pseudonym. It isn't just weird having both Lynn Minmei and Dana Sterling being Jonathan Wolfe's ex-lovers, Minmei slept around a fair bit, being bedded by Rick Hunter, Jonathan Wolfe, T.R. Edwards, and her own cousin Lynn Kyle, who IS a close blood relative in Robotech. Mercifully, the old comics never went the pseudo-mystical route the novels did, turning "protoculture" into not just a fuel, but a borderline magical substance that controlled the destiny of the entire universe... almost like putting The Force in your gas tank... (is anyone else remembering the "Liquid Schwartz" from Spaceballs now?) Not quite... if memory serves the Haydonite awareness merged with the protoculture matrix and did the black hole thing, and everything is revealed to have been a stable time loop and the very worst kind of predestination paradox, wherein Minmei is the mother of the original Zor and the SDF-3 is catapulted back in time, becoming the ultimate source of all of the universe's suffering, oppression, and genocidal wars by creating the Robotech Masters.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the Robotech fansites which dealt with the Robotech II: the Sentinels story were free Geocities websites which are now inaccessible since the hosting service has been discontinued. It's been a long time since I last read the old Sentinels comics, but in the current official continuity their role is minimal. Most of them were just stereotypical alien races who'd been oppressed by the Robotech Masters and later the Invid, had their occupied homeworlds liberated by the Robotech Expeditionary Forces, and later join the REF to form a goofy parallel to the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek, governed by the "Sentinels Council". The whole thing is really kind of unsettling, because as I've said before, the Sentinels Council aliens end up more as servants to the REF than equal partners in its operation or respected dignitaries. Apart from the Kabarrans lending their shipyards and manufacturing facilities to the REF, and the post-retcon Haydonites lending their advanced technology to the REF with ulterior motives, their involvement in the story was minimal at best.

I can... I downloaded the THORA blu-ray rips back when they first became available as a batch torrent. I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the encoding job, both in terms of the clarity of the picture and sound, and the size on disk of the files themselves. IMHO, it's probably the best fansubbed version of Frontier available. I didn't note any major spelling or grammatical errors when I watched it all the way through, though there are a couple terminology goofs that occur, generally centered around reaction weapons (which are often called "reactive" weapons in the subs) and fold travel, where the ships are referred to as traveling "in the fold" for some reason. Overall, they did a damn fine job. Yes, there are 25 episodes in the THORA release. Episode 1 is the "Yak Deculture" edition, which merges the "Deculture" edition pilot with the broadcast version of episode 1 to produce a somewhat longer-than-usual episode. In a word... "yes". The sound quality is excellent, and the picture quality is quite good too, though your mileage may vary depending on your monitor's contrast ratio, your video card, and the player you're playing it back on. I got great results using ZoomPlayer 6, a GeForce 7 series video card (in my laptop), and a nice high-contrast LCD. VLC Player produced excellent results as well, except that it may briefly stutter on the audio and have a bit of temporary blocky artifacting on the video if you skip forward too vigorously using the playback progress bar, though it clears itself up after a second or two. Can't help ya there.

Y'see... this is why I said you're wasting your time. No matter what you say, they're never going to realize that their arguments are complete and utter garbage, let alone acknowledge it. You're certainly welcome to ask them how they think the animation supports their ridiculous nonsense, but don't expect anything more than the same pants-on-head retarded arguments and the sort of twisted logic normally reserved for recent victims of Do-It-Yourself brain surgery. Really, no matter what you do they're going to try and spin it as a victory for them. It's the only kind of victory they'll ever have, since the odds of them outsmarting anyone capable of rational thought are virtually zero. Let's face it, you ARE arguing with people who are frequently outsmarted by the shift keys on their keyboards and/or are completely unable to figure out how to work a spellchecker. You are having a battle of wits with UNARMED men, Beltane. I suppose so... but only if you thought Beevis and Butthead was the very height of intellectual humor. I don't find them funny, but a lot of what they do is genuinely facepalm-worthy. Oh, no need to apologize. What little hate-mail I've gotten from Robotech fans that could be deciphered has always been hilarious reading. I've gotten a couple where the author was clearly so angry at me that his already lamentably bad writing skills deteriorated to the point where I spent twenty minutes asking if anyone recognized what language it'd they had been written in before someone pointed out it was just REALLY bad English. On the rare occasions I do receive hate mail for what I say about Robotech, I usually print it off and tack it up to the corkboard behind my desk as a trophy of sorts, right next to my collection of product documentation with atrocious "engrish".

Granted, you've got a point... My advice to you, Beltane... don't waste any more of your time on those idiots. None of them have the maturity or the knowledge to hold a rational debate, they just want to pretend they're experts by bullshitting and trying to shout down the people who actually know what they're talking about. If you're absolutely desperate to get your fix of mindless and nonsensical bullshit, just turn on C-SPAN. Otherwise, your time would be much better spent on communities populated with more reasonable, rational people... like MacrossWorld. Eh, most of Sentinels has already been ruled out. Just a few small elements were included to appease the fans who wanted to see a continuation of Sentinels. The way Prelude was put together essentially excludes a lot of the material in the comics and novels.