Seto Kaiba

No kidding... most of the convention-goers I know avoid the Harmony Gold booths and panel discussions like they're handing out free samples of the swine flu. The few who are either bored or optimistic enough to attend usually end up sending me the exact same complaint every time... the attendees are usually the same small group of die-hards with essentially just a handful of curious passers-by mixed in. If the senior management at Harmony Gold could be persuaded to get a goddamn clue and wanted to eliminate wasteful spending, you bet the convention tour'd be at the top of a very long list of wasteful business practices. Well, can you honestly blame him? After all, McKeever's supposed to be their marketing director, but he's reputation's so lousy that only the most delusional, lifeless, die-hard Robotech fanboys take him seriously. On Robotech.com he's got people constantly questioning the veracity of his statements and demanding honest answers to questions that'll make Harmony Gold look bad. The convention panels are about the only place he can poo out the company rhetoric and expect that SOMEONE will actually be stupid enough to believe it, or at the very least that people will be polite enough not to call him out or shout "bullshit" while he's talking. The more I read of McKeever's posts, the more I get the distinct impression that he's a man who quietly loathes his job because he spends most of his time doing damage control and being made fun of for only being able to tell people that he's not allowed to tell them anything. I've also started to suspect that he's finally beginning to appreciate just what a Sisyphean endeavor trying to improve Robotech's crappy reputation really is. Oh yes... threads requesting information about when or if Shadow Rising is coming out have, as I understand it, become something of a recurring problem over in the "Robotech Production" forum. It looks like after I got banned, Harmony Gold lowered the bar for what constitutes an "inconveniently sharp individual" considerably, and they're now looking askance at people who're asking uncomfortable questions about just how "successful" Shadow Chronicles was, demanding information about why Shadow Rising is on hiatus, and asking when or if it'll be released. Shadow Rising information request threads seem to have become a perennial favorite for the more subdued critics over there... since they offer them a chance to thumb their noses at Harmony Gold indirectly.

Bingo! Give the man a prize! The two main reasons Robotech even still has a fanbase are that the long-time fans don't want to admit they've been wasting their time for 18+ years, and the lot of them are just too damn apathetic to look into other, far better shows or to check the validity of the increasingly obvious bullshit claims Harmony Gold and its representatives make. Damn, you really ARE turning into me. It's not even that, actually... by Harmony Gold's own admission Warner just wanted something, anything, that could compete with Paramount's Transformers movie(s). It IS a pretty transparent lie, isn't it? Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles didn't even get decent coverage in what little America gets in the way of anime news media, and all indications are that it's sold bugger-all, with people lining up none deep in stores across the US, and many stores (particularly in the midwest) consigning Shadow Chronicles DVDs to the "bargain bin" and selling them at a loss just to get them the hell out of inventory... and now, in a desperate attempt to get attention, the movie's free on Hulu. Clearly they realized they weren't going to be able to milk any more money out of DVD sales, and decided that was their best course of action. Kevin McKeever certainly likes to ramble about how successful Shadow Chronicles was, but the question that makes the whole thing fall apart is "exactly what is his definition of 'successful?'". Since RTSC was made on a shoestring budget, is he considering it a success for earning back the initial investment? If so, that's setting the bar pretty damn low. Is he calling it a success because it didn't have completely empty theaters when it did its VERY limited, VERY short theatrical run? That's setting the bar pretty low too, because by all accounts it was the same people in each region watching the movie over and over again. The whole idea that Shadow Chronicles was a success is entirely contingent on the exact definition of success a person chooses to apply... and with McKeever not talking, we can only assume that he's calling it a success because the bar was set ALARMINGLY low.

RT.com's a Russian news site now? I've been jokingly calling it "Pravda" for a while now, but I didn't think anyone'd take it THAT far... Here is your link, by the way: http://www.robotech.com/community/forum/re...&id=2027877 It's RT.com user Richardmvela asking "The Powers That Be" at Harmony Gold three money-related questions... 1.) What was the budget for Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles? According to Tommy, less than $1 million USD, but of course Maverick and MEMO'll never own up to that... 2.) How much money that could've gone towards Shadow Chronicles did Harmony Gold lose on Robotech 3000? I'd wager "not a lot", since Robotech 3000 sank without trace early in the production process, the animation was of horrifically poor quality, and almost no footage was completed. Naturally, he'll never get a straight answer to this one out of Kevin McKeever, if HE even knows. 3.) How many units of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles (DVD/Blu-Ray) have been sold to date? Anyone here who expects this question to get a straight answer, please report to detention for a compulsory course to improve your pattern recognition skills. The best Kevin McKeever will ever say in response to this question is that it's "selling well", but will never quantify it. I'm kind of surprised that Richardmvela, who's normally a pretty rule-abiding guy, is pushing the envelope over there with help from a newbie called Whitehall l33t. They're putting Maverick_LSC and MEMO1DOMINION in a very difficult place... I wonder how quickly they'll decide that those two are "disruptive influences" and ban them. What surprises me even more is that in my absence, several people seem to be vying for the post of "troublemaker-in-chief" now that I'm no longer there to say the horrible truths that keep Kevin McKeever up 'till 2am doing damage control... ... though speaking of "damage control", I've been keeping an eye on dougbendo's podcast ever since he flash-scheduled an episode just to address all the people who were giving him crap for kissing up to MEMO and whatnot. He's been running this series on the so-called "Core block" of mecha anime, and he's got it into his head that it consists of Gundam, Macross, and Robotech. I listened in (and even participated a bit) in the last one, which covered most of the AU Gundam titles, and it wasn't bad... his format has improved from "frothy-mouthed fanatic badmouthing anyone who dares to tell him what's what". Now it's more along the lines of a vaguely organized stream of consciousness-type spiel. Instead of being offensive, it's now just kind of boring... but in terms of substance it's a vast improvement over what he used to do. He was on his best behavior today, though I think that might have something to do with the majority of the live audience badmouthing him for being over an hour late to his own show. The next one, which is scheduled for 11/15 at 7:00pm, should prove to be a ticking time-bomb...it's the one where he's going to try and build a case for Robotech being a cornerstone of the mecha anime genre... which I'm sure has most of you rolling your eyes just thinking about it.

It's starting to look like that's the case... maybe they'll roll out with a special 25th Anniversary edition of the same old crappy DVDs they've been selling in different boxes for the past eight years or so, maybe toss in an extras disk with a few "creator" interviews, and then peddle that along with a bunch of reissued old comics.

Meh, leave it be.

Harmony Gold hasn't so much attempted to outright conceal that Robotech is a hastily (and poorly) executed rewrite of Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada as they have tried to distort the actual relationship between the originals and Robotech. Carl Macek did a lot as far as distorting the truth, trying to make it sound like Studio Nue was working for Harmony Gold when they made Macross, that Studio Nue's intent was to make it part of Robotech, and that the originals were all failures on their own and had only succeeded as part of Robotech. Basically, it wasn't the originals they were trying to hide, it was the existence of the rest of Macross as a successful franchise... something that they still try to sweep under the rug even today.

We aim to please... And y'know what... that's damn scary. Sure enough, MEMO's loudly claiming that it's not real and that it must be the work of someone trying to destroy the future of the "Shadow Saga". Pretty much everyone's assessment but Pizza's... that MEMO is trying to steer people away from the truth by trying to handwave the whole thing (including Harmony Gold's attempt to have it taken down) as a fraud.

Now there's a statement of questionable accuracy... would you like some Iraqi WMDs with that? Robotech is, was, and always will be just another squirt in the crowd. It was one of the last major titles before bowdlerization became the very height of uncool. Yes, it was one of several "Americanized" titles that made anime accessible to western audiences back in the 80's, but it lacked the momentum to leave a lasting impact on either the industry or the audience, and it quickly lost its audience to Transformers and other shows when it failed not once but twice to produce a viable sequel. Macross got a foothold in the US despite (and in fact, because of) Harmony Gold's attempts to keep Robotech fans ignorant of the fact that the original form of its most popular saga was a far more successful franchise that had produced quite a few sequels. By blocking imports, they opened it up to legitimate and largely unopposed fansubbing, which followed on the heels of the introduction of "real" unedited anime in exposing fans to what they'd been missing out on because of Harmony Gold's greed, making Robotech slightly less socially acceptable in anime circles than a morbidly obese xenophobe with a chronic flatulence problem. Okay, the words "Robotech" and "original" are mutually exclusive, and should not be used in the same sentence. Actually, the TV series is the canon version of SW1, they've just substituted some of the DYRL designs and events into it over the years. DYRL is currently only canon to the alternate universe continuity of Macross II: Lovers Again. Let's be accurate here... Macross went off and did its own thing... Robotech went nowhere and did nothing, because it was preoccupied with floundered around in a morass of serial incompetence, idiocy, stagnation, and bad writing... laudable for its consistently poor quality if nothing else. It kept itself alive by re-selling the same story to the fans over and over again in different forms... novels, comic books, role-playing games... but never bothered to produce anything new. Even the comics that branch out from the main story often stole stories from whatever anime or live action sci-fi/action series was popular that month. Hasn't stopped anything... it's just made our hobby essentially free of cost. I don't know how many anime boards you visit, but Macross Frontier was part of that hat trick of must-have mecha fansubs that had mecha anime enthusiasts waiting for bated breath and attracted a half-dozen or more different fansub groups. If you ask for a list of must-see mecha anime on most of those boards, you'll find the original Macross and/or DYRL on it at the very least (and usually one or more of the later ones too). Eh... not keeping up with recent events either, like Macross Frontier breaking some DVD/Blu-Ray sales records at Bandai, the big concerts, and the various other indicators that Macross Frontier is flying under no radars and is doing quite well for itself. If memory serves, there were several volumes of Macross Frontier that sold better than many of its contemporaries in DVD form. It's a stretch to say Robotech lives... it depends largely what you call "life" at that point. Robotech is, at best, in a coma... one which has remained unbroken for a good 20 years. One more good, solid failure, like the loss of the live-action movie or the final cancellation of Robotech's animated features would be enough to put Robotech out of its misery, and Harmony Gold knows it. To be precise, it's more like apples (Macross) and pieces of inedible wax painted up to look vaguely like apples in hopes that the audience is gullible enough not to notice the difference (Robotech).

I know I'm going to hate myself for this later, but... Yo Roswell, New Mexico! I'm happy for you and I'mma let you finish, but Robotech had one of the best conspiracies of all time! OF ALL TIME! No doubt he thinks all the affairs are part of the conspiracy too... makes me wonder why I haven't been accused of having an affair with HP too. *feels left out now* Not me! Somehow I got left out of the People Against Harmony Gold fundraiser orgy.

Okay, this is so bonkers I just HAVE to share it. It seems that Pizza the Hutt (or Ghost Maker, or whatever the hell he's calling himself now) got it into his head that the leaked outline of the "Shadow Saga" is a forgery constructed as part of a vast conspiracy to undermine and destroy the Robotech franchise from within, orchestrated by Tom Bateman and carried out by those Robotech fans who are opposed to Harmony Gold's handling of the franchise (P.A.H.G.'s?). From the sound of things, he also believes that all the unpleasantness directed towards Kevin McKeever and MEMO, the rumors surrounding Robotech's involvement in MEMO's divorce (that he left his wife for a female RT fan, or that his wife left him because he emptied their bank account to fly HG company reps and VAs out to Chile for a con in hopes of landing a job at HG), the criticism directed towards Shadow Chronicles, and him being banned from RobotechX and (briefly) from Robotech.com are all part of this conspiracy too. Apparently our man Pizza didn't stop at persecution complex crazy... he went all the way to tinfoil hat territory. And this guy wonders why I keep telling him to chill the hell out. I'll never understand why some Robotech fans are THAT unwilling to accept that there IS a lot wrong with Robotech, and that it's entirely possible for Harmony Gold to make a bad Robotech sequel.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was the origin of the giant tuna. *shrug* There were a couple good ones, like Full Metal Panic and Saiyuki... but yeah, most of ADV's work is crap. The Macross dub was just SO atrocious that I have no trouble believing Harmony Gold asked/told them to do a substandard job in hopes that people who bought it wouldn't go looking for more Macross.

Go to "Options" at the upper right corner of the topic, and switch the view mode to "standard".

I once handed over a copy of the Robotech soundtrack to a friend of mine who frequents the nightclub scene as a DJ as part of a bet that he couldn't make something listenable out of it. I ended up forfeiting out of sheer amusement when he handed me something that sounded suspiciously like a porno soundtrack that he's created by remixing a bunch of the character BGM. I ought to see if I still have it, it'll make the perfect soundtrack for the all-pornstar movie cast.

It's a manga that's currently running in Macross Ace... it's an adaptation of the Space War 1 era, but with a mix of DYRL and TV series aesthetics and such, modernized a fair bit too.

Aye... as the only person who seemed to realize how batshit insane most of what was going on in Macross 7 was, he's certainly got my respect.

Unfortunately for you, there's been very little that's newsworthy among the Robotech fans this week. About the only thing worth mentioning is that dougbendo has been making a big fuss over on RobotechX because he's catching a lot of flak from a bunch of different people over a podcast where he claims Robotech is, along with Macross and Gundam, one of the most important, influential titles in mecha anime. It's a spurious claim to say the least, but he's responded in defense of his claim with his usual array of colorful language and juvenile behavior. I'd conservatively estimate a good 30% of his comebacks have had something to do with his penis, or the penises of Steve and/or Tommy... which is kind of disturbing on several levels. Apart from his strange penis fixation, his default response usually takes the form of a transparent attempt to goad his detractors into making guest appearances on one or more of those podcasts of his, and then he gets really angry and starts accusing people of being afraid to face him when they all inevitably refuse, citing his juvenile behavior as proof positive that he wouldn't be able to actually conduct the reasoned, civil discussion he claims to so ardently desire. The part that really got me chuckling is that since I'm one of the most vocal critics in that particular thread, he keeps accusing me of cyber-stalking him, but he's spent something like the last week and a half alternating between trying to invite me onto his "Robotech Fan" podcast as a guest, and trying to goad me into it when I tell him I'm not interested. He's also drawing a lot of criticism from some quarters for a variety of others reasons. He didn't really endear himself to anyone when he tried to play both sides of the recent banning sprees on Robotech.com by pretending to sympathize with the victims and badmouthing MEMO and Maverick, and then turning around and sucking up to MEMO in hopes of earning some kind of legitimacy for his "Robotech Fan" podcast. It's not helping his case that he's claimed to be the one leading the entire Robotech fanbase on several occasions, and acting as though his podcast was a contribution of such staggering magnitude that all other fanworks pale in comparison. dougbendo is also suspected of being the one who posted a comment praising dougbendo's so-called achievements and threatening violence against JT on the Protoculture Times website. The other suspect is WDkaiserV1, who is well-known for his asinine behavior, having once challenged myself and other members of HP's site to a fistfight and then chickening out by giving fake addresses in Pennsylvania, and adding "Death to Macross Purists" to his signature on Robotech.com. Well, that's all the news that's fit to print... and a good deal that isn't.

Yeah, the 1/100 transformable VF-2SS toy is the only transformable one released to date... though there's one coming as part of the anniversary VF-100 series in the near-ish future. There are a bunch of B-Club and G-Port non-transformable model kits out there though.

FUND IT. That's all I'll say on the matter.

Your account was deleted (a permanent ban), I just had my posting privileges revoked (nominally a "temporary ban"), though there's no sign that they will ever be restored, so my ban is every bit as permanent as yours for the time being.

I feel fairly safe in saying that the honest answer 99% or more of us would give would be one or more profane variations on "No".

Nah, back in the day Steve was actually pretty okay with the bawdy stuff. I guess the idiots at corporate must've taken umbrage over something and clamped down on the boards. Eh, there are still easier ways to get around that problem that don't involve making everyone talk as though they're in a classroom full of precocious first-graders. A simple waiver of liability for objectionable material on the boards could have achieved the same thing without having to compel the ~30yo fans to dumb their discussions down to a PG level. They've already got accommodations for COPPA, so it's not like they're completely clueless. *shrug* Instead of having a few uptight fans leave the site because they don't like how a show with a predominantly adult fanbase can have adult conversations, they've chased away many of their adult fans in favor of a hypothetical teenage fan who failed to materialize back in 2006-2007. Ultimately, I think they've done far more damage in following this course of action than they could ever have hoped to do by allowing discussions above PG/TV-Y7 level.

Apparently not. No matter how hard I try, I can't come up with a rational explanation for why Harmony Gold USA puts so much effort into making the Robotech.com forums conform to a level of family-friendliness and political correctness seldom seen outside of reruns of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. It just doesn't make any sense when you stop to consider that the average Robotech fan is more than old enough to buy his/her own guns, porn, and liquor, and has been for the better part of a decade, and their younger fans are almost all old enough to get into R-rated movies on their own. I could maybe see it as justifiable if Robotech were a show that had any kind of teenage fan following, or at least appealed to that age group, but it doesn't, and it probably never will. I mean, sure, there are twenty- and thirty-somethings there who act like they're thirteen (and write like they're seven), but I'm pretty sure it's chronological age that matters for things like that. What takes the whole thing from ridiculous all the way to hilarious is that there are quite a few scenes in the remastered "original 85", the Shadow Chronicles movie, and the planning materials for the rest of the so-called "Shadow Saga" that you couldn't even talk about on Robotech.com because of the "adult themes" in those scenes. Think about that for a second... there's lots of stuff in Robotech that you're not allowed to talk about on Robotech.com because it's not family-friendly enough. If that leaked draft is anything to go by, there's going to be a whole subplot concerning Janice and Marcus that'll be off limits on Robotech.com. Why? Because Janice is supposed to spend a good portion of the movie putting the moves on Marcus and trying to ride his pocket zaku.

Anything is better than nothing at all... I'll take whatever I can get if it adds to the body of knowledge we already have. Yeah, I know, but I can hope. After all, the U.N. Spacy ships in Macross II are the only ones that don't have canon sizes... the Mardook ships all do. Having a canon number for the Macross Cannon is nice and all, but I'd have liked them to cover the Heracles, Gloria, and line battleship too, so I didn't have to come up with various ballpark estimates based on nothing more than the footage, which is kind on inconsistent in a few places. (My estimates put the standard battleship at about 900m long, and the Gloria and Heracles at between 1090m and 1300m)

Not surprising, really. Robotech.com has been dying slowly for years, and now the decay is starting to accelerate a bit. I mean c'mon, they've banned most of the best, most prolific, generally helpful contributors. The majority of the remaining contributors over there are the Robotech purists who hate everything that isn't animated, the fascists who can't stand the thought that not everybody has the exact same opinion they do, the pro-Harmony Gold trolls, and the people who don't contribute enough to notice what a rathole Robotech.com has turned into. There are a few good, helpful people left (if you'll forgive the shout-out to those determined souls), like Rhade, and P Thomassen, and occasionally ShadowLogan, but most either are completely out to lunch, or just don't give a damn anymore.

Found it... looks like Steve deleted your account for recommending porn in that "what should I watch next" thread.