Seto Kaiba

Um... wasn't it pretty much always that way? If anyone dared to criticize Harmony Gold's handling of the franchise and Tommy's pathetic attempt to keep it limping along, MEMO would banish it to Cannon Fodder where nobody could see it. Don't worry HP, I have a special method to help you understand MEMO's thought process. First, you need to abandon all rational thought, critical thinking, standards, and morals, and then you just have to chant "Carl Macek is God, there is no God except Carl Macek, and Tommy Yune is his prophet" until you lose your grip on reality. Actually, that's a pretty fair summary of MEMO's motivations for everything Robotech-related that he's ever done. If you talk to the people who knew him from the early days of the online fandom, everyone and their dog'll tell you that he does what he does out of a misguided belief that if he rallies the troops, gives 110% (of his income), and goes the extra mile (at his own expense) Harmony Gold will look down on him with pride from their lofty position as sovereigns of the worldwide anime industry (in his own mind) and elevate him to become one of their number. For his purposes, having any kind of dissent "in the ranks" is a bad thing, since he wants to show himself off as the leader of the loyal, die-hard fans who'll buy any damn thing Harmony Gold tells them to. Directly? No. Indirectly? It's highly probable. Macross Zero was in the later stages of production when Harmony Gold inadvertently ignited the whole legal dispute by trying to bar Macross merchandise from entering the US. I'd say the resulting punch-up between Big West and Tatsunoko that was triggered by their actions played at least a minor role in the Macross Zero release schedule. I don't have my copy of From the Stars on hand, but I don't think it has that big tower doodad on it when Roy shoots it up in the last issue. Other than that, your guess is as good as mine.

As I said earlier, while it's certainly unfortunate (for them) that UEG Productions were tripped up by Harmony Gold's legal department as close to the finish line as they were... my sympathy for their plight is diminished considerably by the news that they seem to have brought it on themselves by planning to use the project as a platform to promote their own original work for potential commercial exploitation, attaching unreasonable conditions to their negotiation with Harmony Gold, and spending the years before belittling the official products and badmouthing Harmony Gold's employees. It's like they were doing everything in their power to attract unfavorable attention to their project except leaving a bag of burning dog crap on Tommy's doorstep. Now, think for a minute... if you were in Harmony Gold's shoes, would you want a group that spent the last six years or so telling everyone you don't know what you're doing, that you're an incompetent bellend, and that they know how to do your job better than you do demanding to retain full ownership of unauthorized derivatives of your licensed properties to use to promote their own products? No. Of course not. Even Robotech fan projects don't have much to fear in terms of legal retribution, unless they start doing dumb crap like that.

Ah, I'm surprised he didn't contact me directly... but my point was that the Genia is an Alpha done up in a Skull Squad paintjob similar to the one on Roy's VF-0S, and sporting a wing structure similar to that of the VF-0D. Admittedly, looking at it again, BRL does have a point that it does borrow a lot from the early concept art for the "Vector", which later became Mospeada's Legioss. In my obsessive rage quest for accuracy, I must disagree on a technicality. The bulk of the so-called "new comics" isn't attempts to make small scenes from the Robotech adaptation of Macross seem more significant/dramatic, in many cases it's attempts to go back and fill in the Macross Saga's backstory and explain things that went unexplained in the series itself... like how and why Mars Base Sara was abandoned, what all the principal characters were doing when the SDF-1 crashed on "Macross Island", how a bunch of the characters met and came to hate each other, etc. True, there is also a fair bit of really unnecessary expansion on minor and rather insignificant plot elements in the series too... like the events surrounding Lance Belmont (GCM: Yellow Belmont) after he crashed on Earth, or the full extent of Roy's involvement in the VF-1 testing, and all that crap. Actually, from reading it I got the distinct impression that Tommy saw Macross Zero, said "this poo is AWESOME, I need to make something like this for Robotech". So he modified a plot from an old Robotech about how Roy was manlier than Chuck Norris with Anti-UN and VF test story elements from Macross Zero, and arranged a climax based around an event he pilfered from Macross's backstory (Sept. '05). The use of the whole business with Claudia was a necessary element in it, but wasn't major... it was just to tie the main story into the comic. He also used From the Stars to tie up a lot of little mecha-related loose ends and explain how everyone met, incl. characters from the Sentinels and Masters Saga. Love and War was exactly what you describe it to be... an attempt to blow the knife fight into the park into a sci-fi epic all its own. An attempt that failed spectacularly, and turned Milia/Miriya from a reasonably respectable character with some depth and a sense of honor/pride into a bog-standard Hollywood tough gal with anger management issues, which he seems to have drawn from shameless Milia/Miriya clone "Kiyora" in Robotech: Battlecry. Really, the "new comics" seem to have been Tommy working around a similar narrative model to that of the Expanded Universe of Star Wars, where EVERY LITTLE THING AND BACKGROUND CHARACTER IN THE MOVIES IS HUGELY SIGNIFICANT TO THE ENTIRE GALAXY. </rage>

I always enjoy these little speculative endeavors... especially once the military folks get involved and start dragging in practical know-how. As JB0 said, this raises some actual barriers to performance that degrade the Defender's all-around effectiveness. I'd suggest swapping the autocannons out for something with more kick and fewer thermal issues like a railgun, but that'd be a Defender EX from Macross II: Lovers Again, provided you also strapped a defensive short-range gun and a short-range missile launcher to it too. Soooooo... basically just the Tomahawk II from Macross II then? It fills all the criteria you've listed so far... the arms contain a railgun and a beam cannon each, it's got two more dorsally-mounted beam cannons, and the missile launchers have been integrated into the frame (including pop-out launchers at the knees), and it has the wheeled feet. You'd have to shrink the bloody hands down rather a lot to make that work... those things have HUGE hands compared to the VF-1. It'd probably be easier to keep the huge brawling arms intact and fit it with heavier fixed armaments like those chest-mounted gatling guns on Macross II's Tomahawk II. Or... you come up with a higher-capacity version of the system and give it some defensive armaments... oh wait, that'd make it the Phalanx Kai from Macross II. The Phalanx I (Mk.XII) has 44 missiles and no defense gun, the Phalanx II has 168 missiles and a defense gun. Amusingly enough, it also has the above-stated prerequisite of wheeled feet for added mobility. When you're dealing with an enemy like the Zentradi, for whom swarming tactics with superior numbers make up almost their entire playbook, having the maximum versatility in your close-in defenses would be a very good idea. With much-improved staying power like that of the Phalanx Kai, a second-generation Phalanx could easily be a huge asset in any air-defense setup. Now that's an interesting idea... the cabin on the VB-6 is kinda roomy, and I'm sure with a little extra work and maybe axing the battroid mode, it could serve as a "drop Monster" to carry a few squads of U.N. Spacy Marines into battle and then turn into a standard-setup Monster destroid. Wasn't that pretty much one of the original design concepts that didn't get used... having one common destroid chassis with different drop-in weapons arrangements? Well... exactly who owned the destroids in the original Macross series is sketchy too, it might very well have been the U.N. Army or U.N. Spacy Marines instead of the U.N. Spacy itself. Macross II is the only Macross to show which branch was commanding destroids in a combat operation (the U.N. Army during the final defensive battle of the series).

Just a few days prior to receiving that cease and desist letter, their advertising account on RobotechX was proclaiming the first "episode" of the project was going to be complete and rolled out in about one month's time. Assuming that he wasn't giving an optimistic estimate, they were pretty close to having something tangible out there. Now, what actually got shown over those six years were a few entirely unimpressive stills of their ugly mechanical designs and two or three trailers that made the designs look even uglier than the stills.

No kidding... even Harmony Gold has difficulty getting their masterpiece collection stuff to sell out in a timely fashion, and they're selling in aggressively limited runs to a small but fanatically loyal fanbase. I know we're venturing way off topic here, but I always felt that Mark Hamill's Batman: the Animated Series Joker was the best cinematic incarnation of the character, followed by Jack Nicholson. Heath Ledger never managed to get the whimsical attitude that was/is the Joker's most defining characteristic (and the thing that makes him so farting creepy), and instead came off as a dime store imitation of Ichi the Killer... not whimsical, not funny... just generic unbalanced nutjob. IMO, given the content of the so-called "new comics", it's a safe bet that the answer is "yes". There hasn't been anything new on the Robotech front since before Macross Frontier came out, so it's highly doubtful that Frontier had an influence on Robotech, but there's no doubt that Macross Zero did. Design elements of the VF-0D were incorporated into the retconned-in Alpha fighter prototype (VF-X-6 Genia) which showed up in Robotech: From the Stars. For that matter, that miniseries had a story that was equal parts material "borrowed" from Macross Zero, the events of September '05 in the Macross timeline, and material from the old Robotech comics. The plot had Roy testing the VF-1 prototype in combat against anti-UN forces for most of the story, wrapping up with the Anti-UN using a captured UN ship to attack UN forces. The only noteworthy changes being that Roy was operating a VF-X-1 instead of a VF-0, the Anti-UN didn't have a VF of its own, the hijacked ship was ARMD-01 instead of an Oberth-class destroyer, and it attacked Antarctic Base (lol internal reference) and wiped it off the map with a "reflex weapon" instead of having the hijacked Oberth destroy the Mars Return Fleet.

Under their current business model, it's unusual for most any anime series being distributed in the west to see much of any merchandise. Extensive merchandising is rare even among the shows geared towards the preteen set, and tends to be limited to just those shows which have been extensively sanitized to air on basic cable and broadcast television. Not exactly the faithful adaptation mainstream anime enthusiasts are looking for these days, since the censors working on those kid's shows frequently excise whole episodes (and even whole seasons) rather than risk offending all the bored stay-at-home moms with nothing better to do. Shows targeted towards teens and such tend not to have any licensed merchandise sold directly by the regional distributor at all, simply because the demand is insufficient to justify it most of the time. On a side note, I can't decide if BeyondTheGrave means sarcastic clapping or genuine approval of my criticisms of Heath Ledger's Joker.

They did that... it was called Aliens vs Predator: Requiem.

Well, for starters... the money they'd have to sink into negotiations, having the contracts drawn up, revised, etc. There's also the tedium necessary in secondary licensing like sorting out music rights and all that crap. Like any good intellectual property licensing agreement, it's a horrible fractal paperwork nightmare that burns hundreds or even thousands of man hours on both sides... and that's assuming Big West doesn't try to exercise any kind of oversight over how the licensed rights are being used. Unless, as I've said, the costs inherent in getting it done render any potential benefits insignificant or nonexistent. Buddy, if you think I'm disgruntled, you don't have a clue what the word "disgruntled" means... I'm nothing like disgruntled, and I find the present state of affairs with Harmony Gold's grubby little mitts as far removed from real Macross as possible an ideal circumstance. You might not like having to pay a tiny bit extra for your toys and collectibles, but I just think of it as the "no Harmony Gold bullshit tax" and get on with life. It hasn't stopped me from enjoying my Macross collectibles. Because the only reason anyone considers it "iconic" is because Heath Ledger died during filming... it's one of the worse Jokers in Batman. It's just Heath Ledger homaging Ichi the Killer in too much white greasepaint.

Rest of the tripe aside, the most important factors in Big West and Studio Nue's decision will always be whether or not the terms of the contract are advantageous to them, and whether or not they think the return on investment will be large enough to make it worth their while. As it stands, the anime market over here in the US is so small that it's highly dubious they would make a significant profit on the deal, and because Harmony Gold thinks they have Big West/Studio Nue over a barrel, it's unlikely they're offering mutually advantageous contract terms. No amount of wishful thinking on your part will change reality. You might not like it, but Big West isn't being unreasonable in refusing to work with Harmony Gold. It'd be a bad partnership and for minimal gain. Best... Joker... Ever. Or at least, the one most true to the comic books, but a good portion of that credit also goes to the writers.

No, but I can only define interpreting Big West and Studio Nue's unwillingness to sacrifice their business ethics, common sense, and profits to enter into a distribution agreement with an untrustworthy partner who practically defines sleazy for insignificant or nonexistent gain as "being butthurt" as monumental ignorance. It might just be the businessman in me, but I can't see anything you've proposed as being even remotely sound or practical for either company. It's a series of complaints and suggestions based on willful ignorance of the anime distribution industry's business model and the current state of the industry itself. After reading the rest of your post, I'm starting to understand why. In this particular scenario, you're the butthurt one. You don't care if there's a sound business care, or if Big West actually stands to gain anything from partnering with Dishonesty Gold, you're just mad that the current arrangement is mildly inconvenient for you. You don't give a toss so long as you can get your games and figures a little more cheaply.

Not a pessimist, a realist. I have realistic expectations based on observation of the industry instead of rose-tinted fantasies of a perfect world. Though one could argue that pessimism has a great many virtues... pessimists have the benefit of always anticipating the worst, so on those rare occasions when the worst happens they get to be smug and say "I told you so", and on every other occasion they get to be pleasantly surprised. I expect it's much more liberating than being in a state of near-constant disappointment as an optimist. And you find this a desirable outcome why? I'd like to think we've moved past the point in the anime industry where we need to butcher mature shows to "Americanize" them and make them accessible to the same target demographic as Transformers Animated. If we're going to make a Macekre of Macross, why not just bring the rest over as Robotech 7, Robotech Zero, and Robotech Frontier instead?

If we're going to point fingers over this, let's make bloody well sure we're pointing them at the right people. Word is that UEG got slapped down because they wanted to use the non-commercial Robotech Genesis project to promote their future commercially-exploitable work, and because they made unreasonable demands while trying to convince Harmony Gold to endorse their project. So, at the very least, Harmony Gold isn't the only party to blame here, if they can be blamed at all.

Oh joy... another bunch of assumptions that really don't work out. Really, in order for the merchandising to take off, Macross would have to already be established and popular. In the final analysis, anime merchandise itself is a niche market and only has broad appeal for the most kid-friendly shows like Pokemon, Naruto, etc. With all the occasional gory death and sexual innuendo, Macross is definitely not "little kid-accessible" like Transformers Animated and its ilk, where nobody ever dies or gets seriously hurt, and any romance is confined to "she's my friend, but girls are still icky". Like pretty much every other anime targeted to teens in America, Macross isn't going to move much merchandise outside of the collector's market unless there's a radical shift in viewer demographics. Widespread merchandising just isn't in the American anime distribution business model, and for good reason... there's not enough interest to sustain it. Even in a niche market, the merchandising does add up... but it doesn't add to much. In our case, it's likely that it just doesn't add up to enough to get Big West interested in working with a company that's been doing its level best to screw them over for the better part of a decade.

Okay... I think we might have to diagnose you with a terminal case of optimist's syndrome. In this case, you're really REALLY overestimating the potential profits from a stateside release of Macross. It would be one thing if we had a huge demand for anime here in America, but we don't... it's a niche market. The difference between what they'd make just on the "gray market" and what they could earn in a legitimate release isn't nearly big enough to be an incentive to work with Harmony Gold... a company that, at the time, was doing everything in its power to screw them over and to profit unfairly from their work (and still is, for that matter). Why work with a jackass with a bad backstabbing habit or contest the trademark that would otherwise force you to work with them if the return on investment isn't worth it by a long shot? No company is in business to lose money. (except maybe AIG, but they're bellends) Again, a niche market... the return on investment just isn't worth it, especially not if an adversarial company that's done its best to undermine you profits from it as well. Unless the 100% of nothing is preferable to a contract with unfavorable terms and a return on investment that could best be described as minuscule compared to what they're already making in the home market. Would you enter into a business arrangement with a man who steals your car every morning to drive himself to work if he promised to use it to start a taxi business and offered you $.50 on the dollar? (If you answered "yes", I have some seafront property in Kansas you might be interested in...)

Oh well, if nothing else I suppose Hollywood is at least consistent in its inability to spot a bad idea no matter how many times it's presented. That's got to be worth something, right? Honestly... why do they even try? At no point has shaking down a popular sci-fi franchise for prequels ever been a good idea or produced a film/series that was better than mediocre. It didn't work for Star Wars. It didn't work for Star Trek. It didn't work for Dune. It didn't even work for Macross. Why the hell would they think it would work for Alien? If they wanted to offend the fans and make a genuinely bad movie at the same time, why not just do a remake of the original and attach Uwe Boll to direct, and populate it with a nightmare cast of Jennifer Aniston (Ripley), Eddie Murphy (Parker), John Heder (Dallas), Ellen Degeneres (Lambert), Jack Black (Ash), Keanu Reeves (Kane), and Gordon Woolvett (Brett)... with an alien portrayed (and voiced) by Ahmed Best. To go for broke, they could even get Dweezil Zappa and Giorgio Moroder to rework the original score. (if your mind's eye hasn't started weeping blood, I haven't done my job) I doubt it will kill the Alien franchise... but it might cripple it for a while.

On the one occasion I was able to have a full and frank discussion about the whole Macross rights/licensing issue with Tommy Yune during my tenure on Robotech.com, he never alluded to Harmony Gold having wanted to incorporate subsequently licensed Macross shows into Robotech... so I'm not entirely sure where this business about HG wanting to incorporate Macross 7 into Robotech is coming from. What I gleaned from the conversation was that after Harmony Gold obtained the trademark on the name "Macross" to keep Macross confined to Japan and the dust had started to settle in the whole Big West v. Tatsunoko thing, Harmony Gold approached Big West and offered to work with them on a "mutually beneficial" (parasitic) licensing arrangement to bring Macross to the rest of the world. Understandably, Big West told them they weren't interested. While Tommy tried to tart it up to make it sound more amicable than what it really was, what the "mutually beneficial" arrangement boils down to once you remove the flowery language is "yeah, we'll let to distribute Macross in the Americas... but only if we get a piece of the action". Basically, Harmony Gold wanted to sit back and continue to collect royalties for use of the name while Big West and the regional distributors bore all the costs and did all the actual work. Well... the whole "HG wants to incorporate Macross 7 into RT" is unsubstantiated, but they are pretty bloody shameless as my talk with Tommy revealed. On a semi-related matter... new information has come to light about the whole UEG cease & desist letter thing... it looks like, for once, Harmony Gold might be getting an unduly bad rap for their actions. Word is that while UEG didn't want to exploit Robotech Genesis for profit directly, they did want to use it as a springboard to promote their own original works for potential commercial exploitation. It also seems that when Harmony Gold attempted to discuss the situation with them, they made some rather unreasonable demands... including that they be allowed to retain full ownership of, and creative control over, their redesigned Southern Cross and Mospeada mecha if Harmony Gold endorsed their work, a promise Harmony Gold couldn't make because they don't really own those designs themselves, Tatsunoko does. As more facts emerge, it's looking less and less like "big, bad Harmony Gold bullies up small, defenseless fan-film team into quitting their own project" and more like "small fan-film team with a tenuous grip on reality tries to exploit someone else's intellectual property to promote their own products and plays the victim when the rights holder tells them they're not allowed to do that". Well c'mon... isn't it obvious that Mark Hamill and Chase Masterson were only included to try and draw the attention of the Star Wars and Star Trek fans?

Overall, the decision to veto Sue Blu's plan to bring in new voice actors was almost certainly detrimental to the project's extremely limited budget. As mentioned in AoTSC, most if not all of the original Robotech VA cast are in the screen actor's guild these days, so they cost more. Between bringing the original VAs in on the project and hiring "big name" VA talent like Mark Hamill and Chase Masterson, a considerable part of their aggressively limited budget was devoted to just bringing in familiar voices. Using new voice actors could've saved them a not-inconsiderable amount of money... money which could've gone towards hiring a real writer or producing higher-quality animation. Having members of the original voice cast reprise their roles in Shadow Chronicles might've appeased the more anal Robotech die-hards, but it hurt the project in the long run. Hearsay doesn't even cover it... he claimed to have talked to an industry lawyer during the course of his day job, but didn't show said lawyer the court documents (or a translation thereof), and simply posed hypotheticals based on his incredibly limited (nonexistent) knowledge of the legal situation. When prompted, he couldn't give the name of the lawyer he supposedly spoke to, or any other pertinent details.

Toss away, I have no doubt that Harmony Gold will continue to ignore the time-honored advice that when one finds oneself in a hole, the first thing one should do is stop digging. Well, it's entirely possible that she simply ran afoul of someone influential in the endless rounds of backstabbing that supposedly pass for corporate politics at Harmony Gold. It wouldn't exactly be difficult to end up hurting Tommy Yune's delicate feelings or bruising his massive ego in the course of an honest day's work. It's never exactly been a secret that Harmony Gold talks a big game and never delivers... they've been doing that for decades now. For all their doubletalk, Shadow Rising is stalled indefinitely while Harmony Gold waits for a live-action movie that may never happen to raise their franchise's profile in the eyes of potential investors so they can get bigger budgets and stop turning out material that would've easily been a profound embarrassment to any capable studio ten years ago. The live action movie is in no better condition, stalled in early pre-production while they wait for an inept group of writers, one of whom has NO experience writing sci-fi at all, to finish a script. Nah, that wasn't a wooden face... that was a "damnit, I'm trying as hard as I can not to facepalm in front of everyone" face.

Saying that Harmony Gold places very little value on the opinions and feelings of Robotech fans doesn't quite do it justice. On those rare occasions when I've had to deal with Harmony Gold staffers directly, I've always come away with the distinct impression that they see the vast majority of Robotech fans as unthinking cattle who don't have a clue what they really want and will happily buy any damn thing they're told to so long as it has the word "Robotech" on the box somewhere. It seems like, to them, Robotech fans only matter as a group... a herd of gullible mooks who can be easily manipulated using their nostalgic childhood memories of the show. Individual fans don't matter, as they're not likely to cause a huge dent in Harmony Gold's bottom line, and intelligent, well-informed fans are more a liability to them than anything else. If I had to point to a cause for their casual disregard for the fans and public opinion of how they run the franchise, I'd say it's probably because Robotech has always been a side job for Harmony Gold. If the franchise goes under, it's not a big deal because it won't unduly inconvenience Harmony Gold any or do severe damage to the company's bottom line. It really is a case of them having no incentive to keep the fans happy. Oh, no doubt... I seldom see a company that seems to take as many pointers from the management in Dilbert as Harmony Gold does. Phases of a Project: 1 -- Exultation 25th Anniversary! W00T! 2 -- Disenchantment Hey wait a goddamn minute, they don't have ANYTHING new to show us this year? Nothing at all? 3 -- Search for the Guilty It must be the economy, or maybe Warner's interfering, or maybe it's the Macross purist trolls! 4 -- Punishment of the Innocent BURN BAN THE HERETICS! 5 -- Praise for the Uninvolved LOL OMG CARL MACEK IS BACK ON ROBTOECH! THIS IS GREET NEWS! Or something along those lines...

As far as I can tell... yes, it was. It looks like the developer and/or publisher bowed to their wishes rather than try to fight things out in court. It kind of got missed in the whole brouhaha over MechWarrior 5, but initially what drew Harmony Gold's attention to that whole franchise again was the announcement that there was going to be a BattleTech artbook coming out and that it'd feature the return of "the unseen" mecha that were untouchable after the Harmony Gold v. FASA settlement (which they apparently didn't know anything about). The current licenseholder, Catalyst Game Labs, bowed to Harmony Gold's wishes with almost indecent haste and pulled the disputed art from the publication.

Nor can I... particularly since they're attempting to talk out a rationale for a do-over on Robotech II: the Sentinels, a Robotech story concept so piss-dribblingly awful that even the most devout Robotech fans generally label it one of the worst mistakes in the franchise's history. So long as they're trying to make it fit with the rest of Robotech the only ways to make reworking Sentinels work are to either throw out Shadow Chronicles or pound nails into your cranium until the plot holes and weak writing don't matter anymore. Y'know... even on some Robotech boards a statement like this about Sentinels would be considered grounds for being sectioned under whatever your local mental health act is. You expected it not to? Pretty much as soon as I heard the news that Harmony Gold's lawyers had thrown a cease and desist order at a bunch of amateurs making a fan-film, I figured it would cause at least a momentary resurgence in the anti-Harmony Gold feeling on the net once word started to get around. Some folks are still smarting over Harmony Gold farting over that BattleTech artbook and the most recent MechWarrior game, which probably didn't help much at all. It's not like anti-Robotech sentiment out there is new on the web... even if you discount the fact that they're hated for undermining Macross and BattleTech/MechWarrior, there's all the scorn directed at RT for being an Americanized rewrite and leeching off the success of other shows instead of coming up with new material of its own, and the inevitable fan groups complaining about how Tommy Yune is the cancer that's killing Robotech. This latest batch of anti-Harmony Gold bitching just made the pool of people with a grudge against Harmony Gold a wee bit bigger. No doubt Harmony Gold will blow it off as a temporary thing, the same way they did the whole brouhaha over their interfering with MechWarrior 5 because of an old design that looks like a Tomahawk being used. Assuming that the people in charge at Warner and Maguire Entertainment haven't just been giving each other piggy-back rides and tossing cards into a hat for the last two years or so, they probably already know about the feeling of general antipathy anime fans have for Robotech, and/or its horribly bad reputation... unless they're stupid enough to have not bothered to do their homework, which doesn't seem entirely likely. All the same, it would make my day if Warner or Maguire Ent. took Harmony Gold to court later for fraudulent misrepresentation of the current state of the IP.

Can't find an easily-accessible picture online, but yeah... the Tommy Yune redesign of Ambassador L'Ron was basically a bear with a slightly more human shape in a big red robe. EDIT: Found one... courtesy of Roboblog III: http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/1956/14...RELUDE_1_19.jpg

It wasn't exactly my intention to identify each and every title that uses material from Macross shows that have nothing whatsoever to do with Robotech, as I'd be here all week if I did. You are, however, correct in assuming Robotech: Wings of Gibraltar and Robotech: Firestorm are two such offenders. Wings of Gibraltar was particularly bad since many of its characters were traced from the movie Independence Day, and each and every VF-1 Valkyrie that appears in its pages was traced from DYRL line art. Robotech: the Misfits was also an extremely prolific "borrower" of Macross material, as that's where the VF-4 erroneously labeled "US Spacy" and several characters from Macross Plus (easily distinguished by their different uniforms) show up prominently. Okay, as someone who's familiar with all three incarnations of Sentinels, I'll indulge you on this note. Let's see what you've come up with. Kind of a tall order, since the expeditionary fleet is under the command of Admiral Lisa Hunter (nee Hayes), the mechanized contingent is under the command of Major General Rick Hunter, with involvement from both Max and Miriya Sterling, Breetai, and Exedore. Of course, in at least two of the three versions of the whole Robotech II: the Sentinels story arc several major plot points depend on having Linn Minmei stow away on the SDF-3 during its departure. Having it tie seamlessly in to Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles also requires the presence and visibility of Rick Hunter, Lisa Hunter, Exedore, Breetai, Dr. Lang, Linn Minmei, and Linn Kyle... the latter of whom ends up dead, and the scene where it happens serving to tie in the nominal end of the Sentinels comics (Book IV) with with start of Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles. Good luck with that... while Tommy might've decanonized most of the Sentinels gibberish, unfortunately the whole "Sentinels Council" thing and the designs of all but two of the aliens involved came through completely untouched. The only aliens that were redesigned were the Kabarrian ambassador L'Ron (pictured in taksraven's avatar), and Haydonite ambassador Veidt, who went from looking like a really bad art deco bust moving of its own accord to the Hal 9000 in a red robe.* If you intend to remove the 70's camp from Robotech II: the Sentinels, the task you're embarking on is called 'burning the whole thing and starting from scratch'. * On an unrelated side note, the red robes the Haydonites wear are the subject of an interesting error on Tommy Yune's part. In the Prelude comic, all members of the Sentinels Council (incl. Lisa Hunter) wear the same red robes... yet in the Shadow Chronicles movie, the robes are what EVERY Haydonite wears. Laziness, or Haydonite tailoring... you be the judge. Actually, his motivations don't flip-flop THAT much... there are the platitudes he trots out to shut Hunter up, and then there are the stereotypical villainous monologues when he's alone or just with his one idiot lackey. Overall, the comics made his motivation out to be a profound desire to screw Rick Hunter over out of a mix of profound hatred for the man himself (after Rick unknowingly abandoned Edwards and his dying lover in the Grand Cannon... how it's drawn, I don't see how he could've missed them, so Edwards might have a fair complaint here) and disgust with how Hunter's naivete and "give peace a chance" preachy bullcrap have colored REF tactical policy (which, by the events of Prelude, was also extremely well-warranted), and wants to take over leadership of the military and use any means necessary (including allying with more gullible aliens they can easily turn on and defeat later) as a means of protecting Earth. Prelude goes a long way towards clarifying his motivations, while he gives the typical villain lecture to some captured lackwit or newly arrived enemy. He intended to use the Invid Brain and the Invid it controlled along with other tech he developed during his tenure as head of R&D on Tirol to liberate Earth from the Robotech Masters, and later from the forces of the Invid Regess. Well... she doesn't really have much of one, except briefly being manipulated to provide compromising photos which would ruin Hunter's reputation and damage his credibility as a leader right after his wedding, serving as the focus for Jonathan Wolfe's romantic affections and the ensuing subplot, briefly being introduced to Cabell and Rem, and being abducted by T.R. Edwards... an event that bridges the gap between Sentinels Book IV and Shadow Chronicles. Tommy can't design mecha for poo. Tommy can't design mecha for poo. Tommy can't design mecha for poo. Let's face it, the REF was SUPPOSED to be equipped with the latest toys, which logically means that they should've been equipped with the latest VFs that would later come into service with the outer solar system colonies and whatnot. So the Alpha/Legioss makes the most sense for that particular endeavor. At the time they left (2022) they had state of the art mecha with them, which they later revised with improved technology (shadow fighter). Now, Tommy has tried to come up with new mechanical designs of his own, but they never work out well. The best he could do for an all-new design was the VM-9L Silverback, a transforming jeep with a battroid mode SO topheavy and so precariously balanced on a miniscule pair of legs that there's a virtual guarantee the damn thing can't move... and the transformation doesn't work out anyway. His other two attempts never made it to footage. In Robotech: From the Stars, he briefly (in the background of ONE panel) introduced the "VF-X-6 Genia", a supposed Alpha fighter early prototype... which looks like a bog standard AFC-01H Legioss with the normal delta wing replaced by the ones off the VF-0D and a Macross-style Skull Squad paintjob. One of the leaked sketches was an unused design for the "VF-13 Gamma Fighter" from Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles... which on even casual examination is revealed to be a transforming AF-03 Combat with a battroid mode that looks suspiciously similar to Macross M3's VF-9 Cutlass. Unfortunately untrue, thanks to the abundantly unoriginal stylings of Tommy Yune... which recanonized many elements of Carl Macek's Robotech II: the Sentinels draft, and ties DIRECTLY into the events of Robotech II: the Sentinels Book IV... going so far as to re-draw entire scenes in the new style. Many of your other suggestions would also require extensive revision of the Robotech continuity, making it virtually impossible to gracefully tie this new Sentinels into the existing body of work as a canon story. You'd introduce far more plot holes than you'd fix.

Now that there's a losing proposition no matter how you slice it. In the final analysis it doesn't really matter what you do if you're revisiting Robotech II: the Sentinels, since the majority of Robotech fans tend to consider the whole Sentinels story arc to be goddamn stupid... and that's on a good day. Admittedly, if you actually sit down and read what Carl Macek intended for the story of Robotech II: the Sentinels, you'll probably end up conceding that they've got excellent grounds for saying so. Essentially, what Carl Macek had planned for Robotech II: the Sentinels was that Exedore and co. filled the United Earth Gov't in on the Robotech Masters and what they were after. In response to this new threat, the REF builds a fleet headed up by a new SDF done up to look like a Zentradi warship in hopes of putting one over on the Robotech Masters long enough to open a dialogue. Of course, nothing is ever simple for these people, so when they actually arrive at Tirol they find it occupied by the Invid Regent's forces, who're looking for the protoculture matrix there despite them having already been informed by the Regess that the damn thing isn't there. So the REF launches a mission to liberate Tirol, wherein they meet Cabell and Rem, who placidly inform them that their whole mission is a waste of time because the Masters are probably most of the way to Earth by now, and the SDF-3's fold drive is a wreck. So they piss away a lot of time liberating alien homeworlds instead of fixing their ship and getting home to save Earth... all the while being busily backstabbed by some of their alien allies AND one of their own senior officers (General Edwards), both of whom couldn't possibly make their evil intentions more obvious without wearing a sandwich board that reads "HEY! SERIOUSLY EVIL DUDE HERE!". The moral of the story? That going to talk with the Robotech Masters was a farting waste of time that didn't accomplish dick and left the Earth open for two more alien invasions. Let me sum up why revising Sentinels is a bad idea in just a few choice words from the original concept: Robot Unicorns, Space Rome, Invid Inorganics, "The Brain", T.R. Edwards, Jack Baker, The Sentinels Council, SDF-3 Pioneer. It's with good reason that petitions to revive Robotech II: the Sentinels usually never get more than the same two dozen signatures... most fans immediate reaction to anything Sentinels-related is "KILL IT WITH FIRE!". Why would they react that way? Because, just like in Prelude, Sentinels makes fan favorite Rick Hunter out to be an idiot with a malformed three-inch-thick skull, a frankly unhealthy level of naivete, and a grasp of tactics that would've embarrassed a toddler. When you take all that in context with the Shadow Chronicles, which IS, regardless of what anyone else might tell you, a continuation of Sentinels, you have to realize that Rick Hunter isn't just gullible... the boy has barely any mental activity at all. After some of the judgment calls he makes you'll be amazed the boy hasn't been sectioned on the grounds that he's too stupid for normal society. Aside from the obvious legal problems stemming from the fact that the entire core cast of Robotech II is populated by designs that Harmony Gold can't legally use... the Zentradi issue is moot because they pretty much don't exist except for a brief panel or two in Prelude, where they're all blue eight-foot-tall giants. Well, there's always the Sentinels aliens... they're the only aliens in RT who aren't part of the OSM. All the same, without the stories and characters of the OSM, Robotech's story really has no redeeming values. Macek's story is rather bland and samey.