Seto Kaiba

For Europe, it remains to be seen... HG lost a lot of its trademarks in the EU to challenges from Big West, so it may be possible there. It's a hard "No" for US fans though.

Nothing has been published on that front yet. If we assume that Macross production at Sunrise will follow a similar timeline to what's been done at Satelight, they'll announce the new show's title in September, do a first promo event around the end of October, and run out the teaser version of the first episode in late December prior to a start of broadcast in April of the following year.

's probably just the same loophole that has existed ever since export sellers in Japan first realized there's a market for Macross stuff in the west... and that Big West itself has been exploiting for a few years now. Harmony Gold's exclusive license is only valid outside of Japan. They have no standing in the Japanese domestic market, so as long as seller's in Japan Harmony Gold can't do a damn thing about those sellers carrying out transactions with buyers outside Japan. It would be up to Big West to contact the seller and insist the product not be made available for export. If there were some kind of agreement that Big West would halt export sales, I'd have expected to see a crackdown in other areas like home video already... but sellers based in Japan are still cheerfully offering JDM editions of new and old Macross media for direct export sale as we speak. I'd guess, based on that, that this is just a corner case where the expected volume of direct importers is too low for anyone to really be bothered with since the expectation where games are concerned is that folks'll get it from their FLGS or the console eshop.

The main decisions the Tokyo courts handed down in the Big West v. Tatsunoko copyright confirmation proceedings from the early 2000s essentially upheld the status quo ante... Big West and Studio Nue own the Intellectual Property of Macross's original series and therefore the franchise, the right to produce and exploit derivative works, etc. Tatsunoko Production owns the copyright on the physical animation of the original Macross series that it paid to produce and the rights delegated to it as payment for same (the rest-of-world distribution and merchandising for the original TV series that they licensed to Harmony Gold USA). They didn't touch on the merchandising rights to Macross: Do You Remember Love? that Tatsunoko had likewise received as payment from Big West in exchange for bankrolling the animation production for the movie, which are presumably what's in play here WRT the removal of the DYRL? characters from this video game (merchandise) since they licensed those rights to Harmony Gold in 2001. There was one other quasi-related filing and decision that touched on the subject of sequels, but that was Tatsunoko's claim that they were owed royalties from Macross's sequels because of their involvement in the original's production process. That claim was rejected based on the prior finding that Big West and Studio Nue jointly owned the IP, and thus all the rights pertaining to future exploitation of the property. The million dollar question regarding those newer designs based on older ones would have to be how transformative the update is. Older Max is clearly visually different... but is the VF-1EX with its different paintjob? Or the Queadluun-Rhea? It's very difficult to say.

Which is pretty much what we'd concluded earlier... that this restriction on the first Macross's design works could only really apply to the original appearances of those characters and mecha that were within the scope of Harmony Gold's rights-under-license. Aged up versions of the characters that appeared later seem to be just fine, which you'd expect as they're legally distinct from the original designs and outside the scope of HG's license. The real test would be whether Big West could get away with using Flash Back 2012 versions of the first Macross's characters in the game, a new VF-1 variant as long as it has some distinctive paintjob not reminiscent of the originals and/or a new head, or whether the DYRL? version of the Macross-class used in subsequent Macross titles is exempt. Distribution rights wouldn't be the issue here... this is a video game, which is considered merchandise because the original is a film work. We know Harmony Gold has had the merchandising rights to DYRL? since 2001. They picked them up from Tatsunoko at that time to close a loophole in their attempt to block toy imports because their exclusive rights-under-license originally only extended to the Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series. Had they not done so, toy importers would have been able to continue importing DYRL?-branded VF-1 toys with impunity.

Yeah, that's the most likely outcome... Macross loves to go to new places and tell stories with new people. It leaves the details of inter-series connections and returning characters largely to secondary works like light novels, manga, and video games. (Like how Macross the Ride draws connections to Macross VF-X2, Macross 7, Macross Plus, Macross Frontier, and a few other titles in obsessive detail.)

Considering that it sailed uneventfully for four years and then... ... kinda, yeah. One of the issues with how fold navigation works - which is kind of a blessing in disguise for Humanity as they try to keep their burgeoning interstellar civilization "under the radar" when it comes to the massive and massively destructive Zentradi main fleets and whatever's left of the Supervision Army is that when you're traveling by space fold you can't see what's in the space you're circumventing. With most detection systems being lightspeed or slower (RADAR, LIDAR, etc.), the detection range of individual ships is not high, so the chances of actually running into someone or something out there by accident or coincidence are extremely low. Not zero, but extremely extremely low. (That and the strategy of choice for emigrant fleets dealing with the occasional, very rare, cases of blundering into the vicinity of a potential hostile force is to de-ass the area with the quickness to avoid being spotted. That is to say, "Perhaps it would confuse them if we ran away faster?".)

If they can recreate the macguffin that allowed them to be found in the first place, maybe? But since it's illegal tech, probably not?

When all's said and done, given that nothing exciting has happened to it... I'd expect a story set aboard Megaroad-01 to basically be a Macross version of Red Dwarf. A terminally bored crew trying to find SOMETHING to do to stay sane.

So I did some checking, and it appears that...

As mentioned in a few previous posts, we can be fairly certain that isn't in the cards because... Flash Back 2012 was the epilogue to their story. Per Kawamori, their story is over and they've sailed off into the (metaphorical) sunset aboard Megaroad-01. Not revisiting those characters in future works is apparently a stipulation of the new global distribution agreement with HG. There's really no story to tell... the Megaroad-01 sailed interstellar space uneventfully for four years and then lost contact with the New UN Government...

Not going to lie, that sounds awesome and I want to see it.

Eh... on the one hand, yeah there are characters who have a "happy" ending. On the other, even in the happiest endings in Gundam the world is still ****ed explicitly or implicitly so if it's a happy ending it's one with a very narrow scope. TBH, even as disappointing as I found Delta's writing... I would LOVE to see someone else continue the Immelmann style and be a "dance battler" with their Valkyrie. That was some wild stuff, and made for some really impressive choreography when they actually used it. We're probably stuck with the skinny VFs... just because it makes the transformations more realistic and easier to replicate in toy form. More worldbuilding is always welcome. FWIW, they built an amazing playground for Delta and then just underused it. TBH, when it comes to the Zentradi I kind of like how once they got past the "recovering adrenaline junkie" phase they were just normal folks. It really brings home the "not so different" message in the original series to see them so integrated into human society that nobody bats an eye that their neighbor's cucumber green or has pointed ears. They're not being pigeonholed based on their species like they might be in so many other sci-fi titles and stuck in quasi-military roles... there are Zentradi artists, executives, research scientists, athletes, musicians, doctors, stay-at-home dads, any occupation that a human would have is open to them. I'd like to see more of them in non-military capacities in future stories because they really are just "my green neighbor" by the time of Frontier or Delta. Not really... his motives become clearer in hindsight with Macross 7. Even in the original, he was a concerned commander looking at an enemy who was seemingly causing a large-scale mutiny among his forces and frightened by that. With 7 in mind, we know he was probably quietly terrified looking at what appeared to be his forces succumbing to a mind control attack similar to the Supervision Army's. (Something that frightened even the likes of Exsedol.) Leon... well... he varies by the adaptation from "useful idiot to the Galaxy fleet" to the movie version's capable but (properly) paranoid right-hand man to Howard Glass. Yeah, those are all familiar titles... 😉 (Funnily enough, the Kzinti are in Star Trek too... thanks to Larry Niven scripting an episode of TAS based on "The Soft Weapon". Apparently something similar happened in Trek too, since there are Kzinti in Starfleet as of Lower Decks.) 'course Star Trek is kind of the poster child for "yesterday's enemy is tomorrow's friend" in western sci-fi... if only because, as a TV series, it has broader exposure than many classic sci-fi novels. Every new series tends to feature the previous one's recurring baddies becoming allies.

My good chum, you've missed my point completely... and mischaracterized a bunch of the antagonists in question. The point being made there is that, in Macross, the antagonists are not bad people. Their methods may be questionable, or even abhorrent by regular Human standards in a few cases, but all of them are trying to do what they believe is right and best for their people. They're not cruel or malevolent or causing harm because they like hurting people, they're motivated by a desire to survive, by fear, by past trauma, by perceived injustice, or by a desire to prevent a calamity. They're not evil, just misguided. (Sharp contrast to Gundam, where so many antagonists are motivated by ruthless will-to-power, racism, classism, or other beliefs that make other people in some way "lesser" in comparison to themselves.) Poor shark's probably wondering WTF is going on by this point. It's something I hope Macross continues to do. In much the same way that Strange New Worlds is a breath of fresh air after the relentless depressing darkness of Discovery and Picard, Macross is that much needed optimistic break from the relentless misery of Gundam and so many other titles out there right now that emphasize the negative. With so much emphasis on how polarized things are these days, a story about how people can bridge divides in worldview and find peace together feels like it's needed more than ever.

Well, Undead Girl Murder Farce has turned into a veritable who's who of late 19th century fictional Europeans... ... and two historical domain characters who've gotten quite the glow up in popular fiction... Thanks to their enduring popularity and adaptations featuring their descendants some of them could reasonably be expected to be recognized... but there are a few there that I'm kind of expecting would sail over the heads of some viewers who didn't have to read a lot of late 19th and early 20th century literature in school.

So, I found an unexpected gem... Undead Girl Murder Farce has thus far proved to be a surprisingly compelling story. It's set in the last few years of the 19th century, and initially makes you think it's going to be a sort of an action series about a monster hunter chasing the man who turned him into a half-oni and stole the body of an immortal woman who was decapitated by another manufactured half-oni. Instead, it pulls a heck of a bait-and-switch and it's a detective series instead. With the decapitated immortal's severed head solving crimes against other supernatural beings on their way to London to find the man who stole her body. It's surprisingly well-done character drama that roped me in so expertly I hardly saw it coming.

That'd be pretty inaccurate to what's in the actual stories, though... the systems are rotten to the core because the people in those systems are rotten to the core. So much so that one of the recurring points in the ending of various Gundam titles is that lasting institutional change is effectively impossible. Whereas in Macross, the institutions themselves can be and are reformed in ways that prevent a recurrence of the problem. For instance, the Second Unification War the led to a major reform of the government and armed forces between the events of Macross 7 and Macross Frontier. That's the kind of difference I'm talking about. In Macross, things can and do get better. There's too much grimdark BS floating around as it is... a lot of it coming from Sunrise itself... we need some aspirational good vibes from the next Macross series, which should be as much a breath of fresh air for Sunrise's staff as it is expected for us. The co-creators of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series were/are Gundam fans. The original aim was for a serious space opera, but the project's original sponsor Wiz Corporation (Artmic during a short-lived rebranding attempt) didn't think it would sell and pushed for the project to be a Gundam parody series instead. The series was briefly developed along those lines until Wiz rebranded back to Artmic and Studio Nue bought the rights back and shopped it around until they found a sponsor willing to develop it as a serious story (Big West). Kawamori et. al.'s love for Gundam does show up in many places in the original series. Several of the character designs like Hikaru, Roy, and Quamzin are loosely modeled on the cast of Gundam's original series and various nods to Gundam show up here and there. The Macross's bridge callsign "Gunsight One" is a nod to the Gundam fanzine published by the Gundam fanclub Kawamori, Mikimoto, and Oonogi belonged to at Keio University, you can see RX-78-2 written on the back of Misa's overhead display, and in one or two shots there's a Haro running around. It's not a "take that" so much as a "this inspired me, but I'd like to put my own spin on the concept". The problem is, the series itself would disagree with you there... it's made explicit from the outset that the inexperienced Amuro strikes terror into the Zeon forces because of the specs of the Gundam, not because he's any good. Far from inexplicably mastering the Gundam, Amuro spends the entirety of his first few battles rummaging around in the suit's operations manual and about the entire first third of the series doing a pretty lackluster job. It takes him most of the series to come up to the level of a properly trained pilot. ... the series doesn't agree with you there either. It's established right in the first episode that Hikaru is a brilliant stunt pilot and air racer whose skills had won him multiple awards despite being just 16. He shows up in a custom air racing plane and the first thing he does is steal the show from the UN Spacy's flight demonstration squadron. What happened on his first outing in a VF-1 is hardly surprising, given that he was a civilian trained for stunt flying in propeller planes being dropped into what is by our standards essentially a 6th Generation jet fighter without any training and then given a flight path directly into an ongoing dogfight. ... I'm not sure being the second or third-best pilot on a ship big enough to be home to three entire carrier airwings counts as "not all that special". (Never mind being picked to be the next commander of the most celebrated space fighter squadron in the service.) ... would now be a bad time to point out that Alto and Michael are a year older at the start of Frontier than Hikaru and Max were for their respective introductions in the original? That's not how that term is used... But also, this wouldn't qualify since in order to "jump the shark" it has to be a poorly-received significant and out-of-character change that results in a significant decline in, and the ultimate demise of, a long-running series. That was a completely in-character and extremely well-received moment from one of the highest-rated Macross titles ever made. It is the polar opposite of "jumping the shark".

Yeah, conflicts in Macross typically end with the realization that the fighting was unnecessary and a move towards peace... or at least mutual tolerance. Even the Unification Wars, which were the closest Macross has come to a Gundam-style civil war, ended not with the destruction of the Anti-Unification Alliance or the imprisonment of its leadership... but in a "This isn't what we're fighting for" Heel Realization by the Alliance's backers after the Alliance soldiers perpetrated several notorious massacres. Macross believes that people... even when they're space kaiju, giant bugs, or tentacle-headed feudalists... are inherently good. Conflicts in Gundam typically end with one side being effectively wiped out, the survivors either resorting to terrorism or being imprisoned for treating the Geneva Conventions like a war crimes checklist, and a restoration of the inevitably horrid sociopolitical status quo ante replete with discrimination and overt bigotry because humanity never ****ing learns anything ever. Gundam believes that people are inherently arseholes. There's so much dark, depressing fiction out there that I'm really glad that Macross continues to take the high road and believe in a better, more hopeful future. We need more of that in our media these days. Hopefully Sunrise won't dilute that any. It's easy to forget becuase it's tarted up with cheesy national stereotypes and over-the-top martial arts nonsense... but the Future Century is nearly as hellish as many of Gundam's other eras.

Incidentally, calling it right now at the start... My Tiny Senpai is just gender-flipped My Senpai is Annoying. EDIT: And what psychopath decided English dub should be the default audio for this on Crunchyroll? That's just evil. EDIT 2: I was wrong. It's just a flat, lifeless office romcom with none of the wit or charm of My Senpai is Annoying. It's just two people repeatedly overreacting to things.

Also, a random thing I heard I'm wondering if someone can confirm for me regarding Fire Force...

... it probably could stand to be redone by a competent mechanical designer, but then it'd probably look completely different. Even if the crash-and-burn failure of The Price of Smiles hadn't soured Tatsunoko Production on the idea of an original mecha IP once again, Southern Cross is probably the last title they'd ever consider a revisit for given how badly it did in its original airing and its localization's status as Robotech's least-loved installment. (It probably doesn't help that the people agitating loudest for more Southern Cross merch... don't buy Southern Cross merch when it gets made. The Robotech fandom is weird like that. It came as part of a set, but even I have the Southern Cross Army mug from way back when.) It might've not have been an expectation at the time, but nowadays if a mecha anime has a transforming mecha that the toy for same will also transform is practically a hard requirement. If they're gonna do it and make it look good, partsforming is probably the way to go. Otherwise it's just gonna look chunky and clunky like the Robotech toy from the 80's because of how much anime magic was required for that transformation.

I got into it back around the same time, because the gal I was dating was a big fan of it... IMO, it was fine up through OVA 3 but the cracks were starting to show in Tenchi Muyo! GXP when Shinichi Watanbe took the series in a direction that started to involve a good deal more fanservice and crude humor. There are now a couple of characters who are uncomfortably upfront about their willingness to pursue a relationship with an underaged partner, which was played for laughs back in the day but is increasingly creepy now. Though the weirdest twist was that it pivoted to try to become a mecha series for a while. GXP ended with Seina taking possession of a giant robot, and that figured prominently in the light novels that followed to the point that Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari is predominantly a mecha anime albeit with harem and ecchi themes.

Rampaging through my backlog again, now that it's the weekend... getting caught up on the Tenchi Muyo! OVAs. I've had OVAs 1-3 on home video since college, but Crunchyroll posted OVAs 4 and 5 a while back and I got genuinely curious. That said, I have to say they've been a bit disappointing overall. There's ten episodes between the two OVAs and the animation quality's pretty good across all ten. The main problem is that, collectively, they're an excessively elaborate and downright disjointed prequel to Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari and Tenchi Muyo! Paradise War. If you've only seen the animation, you have little-to-no chance of figuring out who many of the new characters are because they're from the light novel continuation of Tenchi Muyo! GXP and from the Paradise War spinoff of same. The studio seems to be on a mission to have absolutely every significant OVA and GXP character show up at least once... to the extent that it feels like the only ones who missed out who aren't dead are Dr. Clay, Seiryo, and Kyo Komanchi. Even Tarant Shank gets at least a mention. Unfortunately, this is also problematic for a few reasons. It's hard to keep all these characters straight, especially when so many of them are related, and the updated art style has a lot of them looking near-identical except for their haircuts... which would be OK if not for the fact that most of them have dark hair. Tenchi's almost been demoted to a background character in his own series, with much of the ten episodes being devoted to his younger brother Kenshi who becomes the protagonist of Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari. OVA 4 focuses heavily on Tenchi's father getting remarried and having another kid, and the reveal that his wife is an artificial person from Geminar (the alternate world in question). The end of OVA 4 and almost all of OVA 5 revolves around the entire extended Masaki, Kamiki, and Yamada families ensuring that Kenchi ends up crazy prepared for his mission to Geminar. The bits relevant ot the other characters are mainly in the background, like: Otherwise, it's mostly just watching Kenshi grow up to become the goddamn Terminator he is in Isekai no Seikishi Monogatari training under the most insane members of the Masaki extended family, and trying to remember who all these characters even are.

Don't get me wrong, you're making a good point here... but there are some recurring themes and plot points that undermine it a bit. Despite frequently using wars and minor armed conflicts as a backdrop for its stories, Macross is a fundamentally upbeat and optimistic series. In Macross, there are no real "bad guys". That is to say, both sides of any given conflict in Macross are typically good people doing what they believe is right and necessary and the conflict stems from the failure to communicate and understand each other. That failure to communicate is always ultimately transcended (typically by music) and in the end the two sides come out of the conflict ready to pursue a lasting peace instead. None of the antagonists are "evil" or hurting people for the lulz... they're motivated by fear (Zentradi, Mardook), desperation (Protodeviln), the anxiety of a rapidly-changing world (Anti-Unification Alliance), the desire to protect their own kind (the Vajra), trauma (Havamal, Windermere), or a desire to save as many lives as possible and uplift all of humanity (Galaxy, Heimdall). When the dust settles, yesterday's enemy is usually tomorrow's friend. Macross, essentially, is an argument that war is unnecessary. The reason we joke that "if you want a dark and gritty Macross, go watch Gundam" is that Gundam is fundamentally a depressing and pessimistic series. With the exception of the toy-centric Gundam Build series, Gundam's "War is Hell" message ultimately means that in most stories there are no "good guys". The leadership on both sides is all but inevitably thoroughly infested with complete arseholes motivated by the various "-isms": racism, classism, nationalism, and so on. It varies, but the war in any given Gundam series typically borders on unprovoked aggression or just outright revenge for some past slight (whether real or imagined). The protaginists are typically associated with the side that is callous, but at least pretends to care about its people, while the antagonists vary from punch clock villains to murderous psychopaths to genocidal madmen. But what REALLY makes it misery porn is that Gundam makes no bones about the fact that humanity learns no lasting lessons from any of the wars and that history will continue to repeat itself even after their genocidal despot du jour is defeated. Not just in terms of tediously fighting the same war with the same people forevermore like in the UC, but in broader terms too. That's the essence of Gundam's Black History:

Even the most skilled designers relied on no small amount of "anime magic" to make elaborate transformations work back in the day. That they were able to get as close as they did with the original Takatoku VF-1 toys shows Kawamori's related skill set as a toy designer. Southern Cross's Ammonite staff didn't have the talent or the experience to pull off work of that level, so they did they best they could with the minimal resources they had. As a result, an attempt at a "perfect transformation" Spartas is probably always going to look like crap. It'd probably work and look far better as a partsformer.