Seto Kaiba

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.

Honestly, considering the number of complaints I'm still receiving on a weekly basis about the sorry state of affairs over there on Robotech.com, I don't think much was improved by Pizza's banning. True, he's not jumping on people at MEMO's behest anymore, but that hasn't stopped other people from stepping up to the challenge of making that place as hostile to intelligent discussion as humanly possible. For the time being, it just means MEMO has to get his own hands dirty for a change. Y'know, if this exact thing hadn't happened at least a dozen times since I first got involved in the online Robotech fandom back in '03, I might've been able to feel sorry for them. Instead, the only emotion this news of Harmony Gold's latest dick move brings is exasperation that UEG Productions has such poor pattern recognition skills that they honestly didn't see this coming. It might seem a little bit cruel, but it's nobody's fault but their own for pursuing a fan project that was practically guaranteed to end with a cease and desist notice. To the best of my knowledge, they never bothered to check with Harmony Gold to see if they had any objections, nor did they bother researching it to see if they could get away under fair use... so I really can't bring myself to feel bad on their behalf. Hell, I can't even muster an insincere platitude about what a loss their project's abrupt termination will be for the whole Robotech fandom. I've been aware of the project ever since it's inception, and during my tenure on RT.com I was repeatedly exposed to their concept art and trailers, all of which gave me the distinct impression that they didn't have a goddamn clue what they were doing. It takes a certain, special variety of suck to take some of the ugliest designs from Southern Cross and make them even uglier than they already were. What they did to my poor VF-1 Valkyrie was practically criminal. Apparently in their minds, smooth and rounded surfaces are the enemy, so every mecha is liberally covered in panel seams and sports more ridges and jagged edges than a bag of Ruffles potato chips. When you combine ugly designs, awkward animation, and stilted music, what you get is a losing proposition (or a direct-to-DVD movie called Shadow Chronicles). Either way, I can't really bring myself to see the project being shut down as a great loss. Cold? Maybe. Cruel? A bit. Honest? Totally.

Looks like they want to get back to producing toys that're guaranteed to sell now that they've successfully dragged their Masterpiece Collection line through the mud by having the reissued Maia MPC be just as bad as the recalled version.

Not really, no... but Harmony Gold has always had a problem with promising far more than they can deliver. It's not at all uncommon for them to hype up their latest project like it's going to lead the fans to the promised land. Just look at all the effort they put into trying to make it appear that Shadow Chronicles took the film festivals by storm when in truth it won a few minor awards at insignificant festivals, frequently by having little or no competition in its category. To say nothing of the fact that it appears they've botched the Maia MPC twice in a row now...

No problem, glad I could help. All this and they're still doing VF-1 sheets... that fighter's been covered to death and back again, isn't it about time they started using that space for something else? Like, say... my f***ing Metal Siren and Icarus? Seems that way, yes. That's what the compendium has down for his given name too.

Sure, we can have a stab at it... Mechanic SheetsVF-4 Lightning III (w00t)VF-1A ValkyrieSDR-04 Mk.XII PhalanxNupetiet Vergnitzs 5361VF-11B ThunderboltMacross 7 FleetVF-2SS Valkyrie II (B-sheet) Character Sheets Maximilian Jenius (DYRL)Gadget M. Chiba (M7) Timeline Sheet Ranka Attack History Sheet Minmay's Farewell Concert Tour (FB2012?) Worldguide Sheet Earth (Terrestrial) Unified GovernmentVajra Technology Sheet Spacesuit Glossary Sheet VF-1 Valkyrie thru Britai 7018 EDIT/Notice: I'm not 100% sure the phrasing on the History Sheet is correct, and I corrected a typo on the Glossary sheet which mistakenly says Britai 0718. EDIT #2: I took a look at the cover in patent-pending squint-o-vision... it's DYRL Max, not Macross 7 Max.

It's a safe bet that any Robotech fan who's posting here and isn't complaining bitterly that we shouldn't criticize the show itself or the fans who support it has long since given up on waiting for Harmony Gold to fulfill their empty promises of a future Robotech sequel that will go down in history as the mind-blowing, genre-redefining, epic masterpiece of science fiction that silenced all the doubters and nay-sayers forever and conferred upon Robotech the status of the most popular and successful mecha anime of all time. Honestly, the sad part is that I'm barely exaggerating the content of Harmony Gold's promises at all... and there are a fair few Robotech fans out there who honestly believe that one day soon the next Robotech sequel will shut Macross down forever and make Robotech equal to (if not superior to) the great American sci-fi franchises of Star Trek and Star Wars.

Which is, to anyone familiar with Harmony Gold's business practices, almost as good as admitting that they've been sitting on their hands and waiting for someone competent to save their asses for them. In all honesty, knowing Harmony Gold's "creative team" as well as we do, that seems like a winning proposition for them. All they have to do is rest on imaginary laurels for a while until Warner Bros either produces success, which they'll no doubt claim at least some credit for, or the live action movie goes under and Warner takes all the blame from the fans, leaving Tommy and company free and clear once they deny any involvement in it. I'd wager that their projections for the live action movie spin an optimistic tale of a glorious revival for Robotech that ultimately leads to a massive influx of new fans. If they're working under that assumption, they have no real reason to try and appease the handful of long-time fans and newbies who populate Robotech.com and attend their convention panels. If everything goes to plan, those people won't be necessary anymore, so they likely feel they don't need to put in the effort necessary to keep them interested anymore. Long story short... according to Tommy, the reason the live-action movie caused the animated Robotech continuity to grind to a halt again was that Harmony Gold saw the live action movie's potential success as a golden opportunity to obtain better sponsorship deals and thus a bigger budget for Robotech: Shadow Rising. Unfortunately, it seems this long-term approach was probably unwise, as it just means awkward stalling and backpedaling to explain why the movie that was "coming soon" is now "coming in the foreseeable future... maybe".

's Tommy's weak-ass attempt to underline the fact that the only two parts of Robotech that matter to the fans and to the ongoing story are Macross and Mospeada. When you look at it, it's just a trio of slightly modified U.N. Spacy logos from Macross with the white bits painted black so that it also forms the upside-down equilateral triangle that was Mars Colony's logo in Mospeada... just without the superimposed white M. Tommy probably thinks what he did is really clever, instead of just being really ugly. In the new comics, his design for Space Station Liberty is seems to have been shaped more by a desire to make it look like a massive version of that logo from a top-down perspective than any actual aesthetic considerations.

I'm contemplating setting up a mirror for it on one of my domains... I'll probably do that in the next day or so if all goes well, assuming I don't hear back from Mr March.

Okay, spelling issues aside... what I'm getting at here is that there's a distinction between (semi-)informed speculation and assertion. If you intend to talk about the accuracy and reliability of a publication, that distinction does matter. You won't see me verbally crucifying a magazine for posting informed speculation about a show, but when the writers start representing their guesswork as hard facts any pretense of accuracy goes out the window. Protoculture Addicts crossed that line far too often for it to be considered an accurate in any meaningful way. Publishing wild guesses and unfounded speculation as though they were hard fact is not accurate reportage by any rational definition, or even good journalistic ethics for that matter. Now, if the writers had at least bothered to qualify their statements to show what they were saying was speculation, I wouldn't have grounds for complaint... but they didn't. Instead of saying "this is what we think this is" they simply said "this is what it is". Perhaps I'm being unduly harsh because of my scholarly approach to this kind of thing, or because their gleeful idiocy and casual disregard for the truth created most of the misconceptions about Macross II I've spent the last couple of years fighting. All the same... if we're going to give a magazine a free pass to print unhinged, unfounded speculation as fact, does this mean we're also going to give MEMO and Maverick a free pass to come here and tell everyone that their crazy theories about the Macross rights situation are factual too? Bad example to pick, sketchley... the MAT book was written by Masahiro Chiba, someone who actually worked on the original Macross series and other parts of the franchise... and speaking as someone who has access to most of those early publications with regard to their wonderfully inaccurate Macross II article I feel fairly safe in saying those mooks didn't get their crackpot ideas from any reputable publication, or any of the less-than-reputable ones for that matter... most of it seems to have been pulled out of thin air.

Having never owned any of the old Matchbox Robotech toys from the 80s, I can't really say one way or the other about their quality... but I've heard a great deal of griping about their quality. It is noteworthy that at least in the 80s Harmony Gold's licensees weren't above trying to cover mecha from all three sagas in toy form (like the Hovertanks). Well... according to those in the industry the rights to DYRL have always been somewhat confused. Representatives of AnimEigo have said that nobody really knows who owns the distribution rights to the movie anymore, since it had been licensed for distribution abroad and released in a heavily edited form. What we can say for certain is that Tatsunoko retained the rest-of-world merchandising rights to DYRL, and later licensed those to rights to Harmony Gold after the whole legal brouhaha got started, as Tommy Yune has said at several convention panels. Despite some awkward verbiage, Harmony Gold has never claimed to have the distribution rights to DYRL... just the right to produce toys and other goods based on it for sale outside of Japan (probably a way for them to shut out any competing VF-1 toys). Presumably Tatsunoko was given the rest-of-world merchandising rights as part or all of their compensation for their role in the movie's production... rather like the arrangement that gave them the distribution and merchandising rights to the original Macross series outside of Japan. It doesn't look like they were given any rights other than merchandising though...

Um... fallacy control on the fallacy control: While Mecha Press was established to focus primarily on mecha shows and the like, Protoculture Addicts did still cover rather more mecha shows than anything else, particularly in their early years. I'll address the issue of their accuracy (or rather, lack thereof) below. Accurate from the start, eh? I've got a bunch of old issues of Protoculture Addicts and Mecha Press that point to rather a different answer. Rather more often than journalistic ethics would find reasonable, the authors tended to stoop to making it up as they went, often introducing things in articles that anyone familiar with the shows being covered could easily spot as untrue or unsubstantiated. Even without having my back issues in front of me I can pick out some pretty galling cases of bullshit... like their Macross II coverage saying that the green-haired hologram girl was Minmay, the Mardook are the Protoculture, and of course, completely getting the Meltrandi's role and backstory wrong, and to a lesser extent, farting up how the story relates to the original Macross and DYRL. So... accurate from the start? No. Not even close. A commendable effort, given the times and their situation, and rather more detailed than their contemporaries, but nothing like entirely accurate. (As a side note, Mecha Press's coverage was just as spotty, if not worse... their coverage of Five Star Stories had frequent cases of the writers making up specs and whole new technologies not present in the original story) (There's a whole host of lesser screwups I could pick on, but I'm not here to nitpick, just clarifying a point) What little Harmony Gold has been willing to say about the abrupt cancellation of Robotech II: the Sentinels hasn't exactly formed a consistent picture of what went wrong. Over the years, their story's changed a bit in the details, which tends to deflect the actual blame further and further in the direction of Matchbox. Fortunately for us, Harmony Gold's licensees tend to be a little less tight-lipped, offering us a bit more detail on what went wrong. As it stands, the prime factor that everyone points to when asked why Sentinels went tango uniform is the crash of the dollar/yen exchange rate which reportedly wiped out 25% of the show's budget almost overnight, forcing the powers that be to truncate it from 65 to about 36 episodes, and then cancel it altogether. Harmony Gold also lays some of the blame at Matchbox's door, though their reasons for doing so have changed between accounts from being described as a "lack of support" from their toy partner to Matchbox itself encountering financial trouble. I'm not sure about someone making a "wrong line of toys", but I've heard some 85ers attribute Matchbox's "lack of support" for the project to the lackluster sales of their mediocre Robotech toys. How much of their account is actually accurate... I can't say.

Not quite... initially, Protoculture Addicts was an unofficial Robotech fan magazine until Harmony Gold caught wind of the publication and offered them a choice between becoming the official licensed Robotech fan magazine in North America or being forcibly shut down. Understandably they chose the former, but ran out of Robotech material around the time they hit issue 10 and turned to general anime coverage with a bias towards mecha shows... and covered whatever was trendy in Japan in wildly inaccurate manner that many of their writers became known for in their work for Palladium Books. By the time they'd hit issue 15 or thereabouts, Robotech hadn't just taken a backseat to real anime, it'd simply been dropped from the publication altogether except for the occasional advertisement for the Streamline VHS release.

Not the exact story, no... but it's correct in the essentials. In the most general terms, what killed Robotech 3000 was the same thing that killed Robotech: the Untold Story and Robotech II: the Sentinels: a clusterfart of genuinely bad decisions made by the inept "creative team", failure to read industry trends, and circumstances beyond their control. The only thing that changed is the symptoms caused by the problem. For Robotech 3000, apportioning blame is somewhat difficult because Harmony Gold did their level best to bury the project forever rather than admit they'd produced such a turd. The most frequently cited reasons for the project's failure are the overwhelmingly negative reaction the fans had to the teaser trailer they trotted out on their annual convention tour, and Netter Digital (the animator) falling on hard times. Some also point to corporate politics that resulted in the dismissal of Netter Digital's lead animator and lumping of the work onto two totally inexperienced managers as a major contributing factor in the show's embarrassingly poor quality. Pretty much the same thing that Macross II: Lovers Again was doing as the featured article in Protoculture Addicts #19... they ran out of actual Robotech material after just a few issues and changed the book's format to a general anime fanzine. Issue #19 doesn't mention Robotech at all except for a full-page advert for the Sentinels VHS tape and a brief mention that all the Macross stuff mentioned within has nothing to do with Robotech. #19's featured articles were Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise, Macross II: Lovers Again, and Gundam F91. That the cover of that issue you posted even mentions Robotech is rather unusual. It would actually be a halfway credible publication of it wasn't written by the same obnoxious bellends who usually write for Palladium.

Yeah... MEMO always types all in caps. He's strangely reluctant to explain WHY he types all in caps, but the majority of the answers he's given when prompted boil down to "I'm too damn lazy to worry about things like spelling, capitalization, and punctuation". It just makes it that much harder to take what he says seriously under any circumstances... which is really a feat in itself if you find something he's said that isn't so obviously inaccurate you ignore it out of hand. By any rational assessment, if you gave the Harmony Gold "creative team" the directive to create a new, entirely original Robotech series with no direct ties to Macross, Southern Cross, or Mospeada... they'd waste a few years mixing generic science fiction plot elements, come up with a few new mechanical designs that look like something stolen from a particularly untalented DeviantArt contributor, and either come up with an excuse to cancel it before it can see the light of day so they can talk about how awesome it would've been if they'd been allowed to finish it (also known as the Robotech II: the Sentinels method) or trot it out to show the fans, only to have them reject it and cancel it then (the Robotech 3000 method).

's no mystery there... the VF-1 Master File is basically a rehash of the old MAT Book (Sky Angels tech manual), with a LOT of non-canon material lifted right from the MAT book and printed again in the Master File. Nothing in it should be taken as even remotely accurate unless independently confirmed in more reliable publications. Recall that this is the same book which lists the VF-1 as having a top speed in excess of Mach 7, and attributes several ARMDs to ships that were never built (SDF-2 Megalord, etc.). (To date, only one of the new pieces of information from the old MAT book and new Master File has been confirmed to be canon... the meaning of the acronym ARMD)

About the only way I can see that happening is if by some extraordinary means Harmony Gold finally manages to make Robotech completely unpalatable to everyone, successfully alienating their hard core of fanatically loyal fans and finally achieving what they've been on the verge of doing since 1987... killing the franchise altogether. If and when that happens, one would think that insincere contrition from MEMO would be one of the least important topics up for discussion in this thread.

The words "too stupid to die" come to mind... though one would imagine some kind soul would've taken it upon themselves to give natural selection a helping hand by removing Kaifun from the gene pool. Still, I guess he's probably still alive due in no small measure to latching onto some band or another (incl. Fire Bomber American) to keep himself fed.

Confidence would be the wrong word for it... all I'm saying here is that since Pizza says he realizes his error and is making an effort to change his behavior, we ought to at least give him a chance to make good on it. If he's true to his word and he becomes a serious contributor in the community here, that's great. If it turns out this is just to tweak MEMO for using him and throwing him away, well... at least we gave him a chance and it didn't cost us anything. I'll say this though... from my conversations with him before he went all apeshit on Robotech.com, I don't doubt that his interest in Macross is genuine, and regardless of any suspicion that others might have about his motives, that won't stop me from answering his questions and helping him explore the Macross universe(s) for himself. Let's just say I think I'm much safer banking on a shared interest to overcome any hostile impulses he might still have rather than just needling him about past mistakes.

To date, I've never met anyone who's actually preferred the ADV dub of Macross to the AnimEigo subs-only version when they'd actually seen both... but I imagine there are some people out there who find subtitles aren't their cup of tea and are keeping the dub voice actors employed for the time being. It's not ADV's worst work, but it's pretty damn close.

Actually, yes. Hikaru and Misa had a daughter (Miku Ichijyo) who was board aboard the Megaroad-01 in 2013. Since all communication with the ship was lost in 2016, it's not known if they had any other children. I know I sure as hell do. And you're right... Macross doesn't kill off Bruno Global, he and the rest of the Macross's bridge crew do survive that kamikaze attack of Kamjin's... Captain/Admiral Global goes on to become a U.N. Representative, you know Misa becomes captain of the Megaroad-01, and the fates of the rest of the crew are revealed in the Macross 7 Docking Festival CD... if memory serves Kim Kabirov stayed in the U.N. Spacy and was living on Eden, Shammy Milliome had like eleven kids and was living on the moon, and Vanessa Laird was living on Earth with the lolicon trio. For the record, Exsedol Folmo went on to become an adviser to the 37th Colony Fleet (Macross-7), which was commanded by Max Jenius, with his wife Milia as mayor, and Vrlitwhai went on to become commander of the U.N. Spacy.

Y'know... I really don't think it counts if your accounts never last more than a few months before getting banned. Some of the old VF-4 model kits and toys?

It was for at least as long as I was there (from 2003 on)... the site started in 2001.

Why you gotta make me facepalm like this dude? Did I say it was the distant past? No. The recent past is the past too. What were you expecting, that he'd start cleaning up his act by spending a year in seclusion in a cave somewhere, living on crickets and honey, and emerge wearing a hair shirt? I'm not telling you to forget what he did, I'm telling you to stop complaining about what he did long enough to give him a chance to prove he really does want to change his ways. Either way, the truth'll come out. Nothing will be gained by pissing and moaning about it. Since November 5th, 1991 if the DNS records stored by their webhost are accurate... so technically I guess for as long as Robotech.com has been active, plus a little bit.