Seto Kaiba

You're preaching to the choir dude... and you're entirely right that the Robotech fandom has a lot of fans who are pushing their own personal agendas. If it hadn't come from a trustworthy and reasonably well-connected guy who used to be a convention organizer, and been corroborated by a number of other fans who I trust, I would've immediately thrown it out as hearsay. I'll say this much, it's certainly plausible enough given Palladium's history of tracing art for their books and mixing stuff in that doesn't belong... the DYRL lineart in the first Robotech RPG book being just one example... and after a cursory examination of the artist's work on Palladium's games and Battletech, it beggars belief.

It's one thing to be laid off because the company you work for has fallen on hard times or is overstaffed, it's quite another to be fired for defying your employer and endangering his business. Unless it's a discrimination thing, nobody's gonna talk about the former, but the latter is almost guaranteed to cause a scandal. Considering what Kevin Long allegedly did, that the reasons for his dismissal were not made public is probably more than he deserved. What I've heard from the oldest of the old-time Robotech fans is that the reason for Kevin Long's dismissal from Palladium Books was that while working on one of their licensed properties, he was caught tracing copyrighted art from publications the management had told him were entirely off-limits and couldn't be used. I've also heard that he was later dismissed from another job (which I believe was doing art for a Battletech rulebook) because he had been caught tracing copyrighted art instead of drawing his own material.

Let's not split hairs here hulagu, for all practical purposes the "original" Robotech series is little more than a legitimized bootleg with a really bad Hong Kong translation, and every sequel attempt with the possible exception of the Robotech 3000 series has had all the artistic integrity of Space Gundam V, relying almost exclusively on stuff from shows they don't own (esp. Macross), altered JUST enough to avoid a copyright infringement lawsuit. Oddly, I had that exact same situation in reverse when a Japanese friend of mine in grad school saw someone with a bad Shadow Chronicles desktop background and thought it was Mospeada.

I know we've been over this in this thread a few times, but I guess once more wouldn't hurt... I've talked to Palladium and gotten a fairly reasonable explanation for exactly why there's so much completely ridiculous and wildly inaccurate stuff in the licensed Robotech and Macross II Palladium RPGs. It's not that they didn't TRY, it's mainly a lack of support from the owner of the licensed property in the case of RT, and a case of inadequate source availability in the case of the Macross II game. HG basically fobbed them off with a highly inadequate packet of information and left them to pay out-of-pocket to have official Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada artbooks translated, and go frame by frame through the footage looking for clues. In the case of Macross II, they had almost no artbooks to work from, so they had to go almost exclusively on the animation. I'd guess since there was no animation for the Sentinels series beyond the "movie" made from what little footage they had, it was likely entirely down to whatever they could scrounge from Harmony Gold's notes. More like rejected monster designs from A Pup Named Scooby-Doo. Let us not forget Dr. Lang's amazing Robot unicorn/pegasus.

Since the show's main theme is failure, does that mean 21's failure has come full circle and now he's a failure at being a failure? This is some seriously Zen poo now. I missed the episode when it went to air because the cable was out, but I caught it on adultswim.com when they posted it the following Monday, and I was pleasantly surprised. A lot of season 4 hasn't really thrilled me, but I liked "The Better Man" and this latest episode was IMHO the best of the season so far. Brock's back, that business from the first episode of the season is explained, and they've finally stopped fixating on jokes about Sergeant Hatred being a pedophile.

Well, the whole business with the more advanced VF-1 in DYRL being a block revision of the TV series VF-1 implementing controls developed for the VF-4 is a main continuity issue only... I've never been able to find anything to suggest it also holds true for the Macross II continuity. Rather, since the parallel world continuity treats DYRL as the only correct version of Space War 1, the TV series version of the VF-1 probably doesn't exist at all in that timeline, or if it does, likely only as an early-generation prototype or something. (The continuity makes note of small numbers of VF-1As being built specifically for evaluation prior to mass production) On mechanic sheet SDF:M UNS 01A, Macross Chronicle gives the TV series version of the Macross in storm attacker mode, which shows it as being pretty much exactly 1,200m tall to the top of the spikes on the main cannon, whereas the Battle-7 is given explicitly as 1,177m tall, which is so close as to make no odds. The back side of mechanic sheet MF Civ 01A gives the exact height of the Macross Quarter's storm attacker mode as 316m, which agrees nicely with the front side size comparison showing it as almost exactly the same height as the Eiffel Tower (324m).

In hindsight, it really is a shame that Robotech II: the Sentinels got canceled as early as it did. If the reception the various other incarnations of the series got and the fanbase's general antipathy for it are anything to go by, it probably would've been the final nail in Robotech's coffin... a series so piss-dribblingly awful that even the hardcore fans of Robotech often have nothing but scorn for it. One could argue that what's kept Robotech alive these last 20+ years has been that Harmony Gold's various failed sequels all crashed and burned either in development or the earliest stages of production, which allowed fans to look back on those projects and see an ideal of the show that might have been rather than the show that was actually made, and continue to hope that Harmony Gold would one day deliver a sequel that would meet their increasingly ridiculous expectations. Had one of their earlier attempts at a sequel survived production and made it to release before going down in flames, Robotech probably would've died with it. Kabarrians, actually...

If you consider the scope of the larger debate, it already has... several times, albeit not quite in the way you're expecting. For a while there, the belligerent and overly-defensive in the Robotech fandom were finding all sorts of colorful ways they could call people with dissenting opinions "Nazis". I remember back before I got banned from RT.com I was hounded across the boards by this one guy who apparently took umbrage when he posted his own take on what the Robotech continuity should look like in someone else's timeline question and I politely pointed out that there was already an official continuity and that the handful of unrelated "real robot" shows he'd worked into his take on the timeline had no business being there because they had nothing to do with Robotech, which was apparently news to him. So of course, he hounded me across the boards for like two weeks calling me a "posting Nazi" and all sorts of other amusing permutations on "<something> Nazi" until people started telling him to STFU. I've heard a fair few comparisons drawn between the administration stylings of Steve Yun, Tommy Yune, and Kevin McKeever and those of Joseph Stalin... particularly in terms of their philosophy that "man is the root of all problems, get rid of the man, get rid of the problem", but no Nazi parallels drawn yet.

IMHO, locking this thread won't really achieve anything that couldn't be achieved just as easily by enforcing a change of subject. Some people just don't want to let it go, so they quote the posts by the belligerent few and post big, long, wordy responses that provoke further belligerent behavior... lather, rinse, repeat. Best solution is to address the ones who'll at least try to debate in a civil and logical fashion, and ignore the rest outright instead of trying to make them see sense. A lock on this thread is no guarantee that the ones determined to start a fight won't just start a fight elsewhere on the site. After all, this thread exists to keep the Robotech-related malarkey confined to one part of the site. So long as we don't sink to their level, I'm happy. Let them come here if they want... we'll give them plenty of rope and if they choose to hang themselves with it rather than make something useful of it, that's their own business.

Yeah, I remember seeing that movie in high school too... of course I went to private school and had a Latin teacher who decided to slack off during homecoming week and show Austin Powers movies in class instead of teaching. Unfortunately, the license under which Harmony Gold obtained the rest-of-world distribution and merchandising rights for Macross is perfectly valid, though their usage of it is nothing short of an ethically-questionable embarrassment. Because they have neither the numbers nor the organization to pull something like that off. They're far too busy with their witch hunts for "Macross Purists", persecuting each other for having different opinions, and indulging in elaborate delusions about how Robotech is wildly popular and Macross is a hopelessly obscure title nobody cares about. Also, it'd have to be the 5th Robotech Bore War, they already have a fourth one.

I think just about everybody is going to agree that this is a phenomenally bad idea that would end up being downright offensive. While rewriting dialogue and characters to conform to ethnic stereotypes might have been an acceptable practice some twenty-five years ago, but for well over a decade now rewrites have been considered bad practice. The primary goal of any good dub is to produce dialogue that flows naturally in its new language and conforms as closely as possible to the original dialogue of the series. After all, these days most anime viewers don't want to receive a dumbed-down or edited version, they want something that resembles the original work as closely as possible... which is one of the main reasons many modern anime fans consider Robotech unwatchable. I'd say there's a pretty good chance that that's true, though I think the main purpose of Edgar was to provide another tie-in to the original series. The show's creators did engage in the same prank on a much larger scale in Macross Frontier, spending an entire episode making it look like Ozma Lee was going to die the exact same way Roy Focker did, and then at the very end of the episode revealing that he was still alive. Luca might be an example of the same gag on a smaller, more persistent scale, since he was the Kakizaki-analogue of the group, and even wore Kakizaki's green colors from DYRL, which had a lot of people marking him for death... yet he lived through the entire series while the Max-analogue (Michel Blanc) got offed. In that light, it doesn't strike me as unreasonable for Edgar's gag about failing to die being a case of subverting the usual trope of the expendable ethnic sidekick.

I would be the Untold Story movie, because I make Robotech fans RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE.

Yeah, I'd say just the issues with music licensing would be enough to put most potential licensees off of the idea of distributing Macross 7 and Macross Frontier stateside. Didn't someone at AnimEigo (I think it was Robert Woodhead) say something to that effect... that music licensing was likely going to be the main stumbling block with licensing Macross 7 for distribution outside of Japan?

Eh, I'll pass thanks... on those rare occasions I spring for a non-book collectible I usually aim for new or like-new quality unless it's absolutely dirt cheap like all those Robotech comics I picked up for $0.25 an issue at a garage sale a few years back. Ever since I first started digging into it, I've always thought that it was a mixture of Big West not wanting to work with Harmony Gold because of their past encounters and Big West seeing the American anime industry as too insignificant, in terms of the potential profits, to warrant either taking Harmony Gold to court or forming a partnership with them. I remember hearing one of the RT.com moderators (I forget which) saying something about Warner having also gotten the toy rights to the live-action movie in the bargain, though that may just have been idle speculation. As to whether they have exclusive rights to produce toys based on the animated Robotech series, I don't know if they actually have an exclusive contract or if they're just consistently the cheapest possible option. In terms of their product quality, the latter seems likely.

Just my luck there'd be another commonly used acronym for CMS... I'm looking for a content management system for a website, though I won't say no to a Legioss either. Basically, I'm building a replacement for the now-essentially-defunct RobotechX, and I'd like to give it a decent set of features including support for fanfics and fanart galleries and blogs and whatnot.

If only... if only... I find myself pleasantly surprised by how the mere mention that a RT community free of the censorship and spin that seems to be a standard feature on the mainstream RT sites has brought the reasonable fans out of the woodwork. I've mentioned it all of twice on two different websites and I've already received no less than a dozen e-mails asking me when it'll be open. O_o

If I'm not much mistaken, you've already asked this question over in the newbie thread, and you already received an answer. If you need to hear it again, so be it. No, there is no official English dub of Macross Frontier, and there likely never will be. About the best you can hope for at this point is a fansub with English subtitles. There is at least one fandub of the series in the works, but the quality's not going to be stellar due to the limitations in the equipment available, and they've only done a few episodes so far. You're really better off with the subs.

Exactly... now, lol, anybody got any leads on a good, free CMS for that Robotech fansite project I'm helping out with? Seriously... those jerks at phpNuke are charging for their software now, so my best option's gone.

Hey, we were all happily ignoring him until you and Einherjar brought him back up.

Now if that's true then it's just downright WEIRD. I've never seen ANY publication use that color scheme for the VF-2JA except the covers of the Micron Conspiracy comics.

Since this is (at least tangentially) related to Robotech... does anybody know of a good, stable, free CMS? I'm shopping around for one for that Robotech fansite project I'm helping with and not having much luck.

And therein lies the chief problem in getting him to understand that nobody gives a damn... he'll try to spin anything as a victory. Just the other night he was hopping up and down proclaiming what a victory it was for him that I wasn't a bigshot among Macross fans like he was trying to make me out to be on RobotechX and his podcast. I'm sure he'll be loudly proclaiming that he won by default when we refused to acknowledge his ridiculous claim that Macross Frontier is CP. Point is, he's such an egomaniac that he has to try and spin everything as a personal victory so that he can continue to delude himself into thinking he matters. Bendo claims that he gets between 500 and 900 downloads of his show per episode... a dubious claim if ever I saw one. I can personally vouch for the fact that the average number of live listeners on his show does not exceed 2. So far, the largest live audience I've seen him with is 6 people (two of which were myself and Robelwell), which was an entirely hostile audience that spent the entire two-hour episode mocking him. He once tried to claim in one episode that he'd had 20+ live listeners, not realizing I had anonymously attended the show along with Viper, and that we took care to note not more than 4 live listeners (ourselves included) had been present at any one time. He does, but he's the only one... and maybe his "girlfriend".

Indeed... this thread is somewhat lacking in Ishtar, so I will provide. Not sure of the source on this one, but it's definitely newer than the material in the official artbooks. Might belong to the Viz non-canon manga sequel Macross II: the Micron Conspiracy, since that's the only place I know of where that particular white and red VF-2JA paintjob appears. I'd check it myself, but I'm posting from the office.

Either that or it finally dawned on him that nobody here is going to take him seriously. I sure hope that was intentional... otherwise... Ah... that's more like it.

's okay, I've actually got a bunch of Fire Bomber albums on my Zune... it's a shame some of that good stuff didn't get used in the show itself, or I might've viewed it more favorably. I know... it's a weird little paradox that they expected the Shadow Chronicles movie to attract new viewers who've never seen Robotech before and probably haven't heard of it either, yet the incredibly stilted and awkward writing is clearly aimed specifically at preexisting fans, which would make it very difficult for the movie's intended audience to even untangle what's going on and why they should give a damn... a problem exacerbated by the fact that the totally nonsensical motivations of the new big bad (the Haydonites) are only explained in a limited-printing comic book series which has been unavailable for ages. Well... I certainly didn't burn down any houses or kill any dogs, but I make no guarantees on the "women" front. I'm more inclined to suspect that it's because my frequent use of logical, well-reasoned arguments based firmly on the facts is ultimately detrimental to their desire to continue viewing Robotech through rose-tinted glasses. I expect this is why they're so determined to come after me and try, however pathetically, to discredit me. I guess they think if they can silence me, it'll make all the bad thoughts about how Robotech might not be quite as good as they remember go away. Now there's a safe bet... he's already done it like four times... I once came up with a Robotech drinking game where you were supposed to take a drink every time you found a plot hole, but we realized pretty quickly that we'd all be in detox by the end of the first five episodes if we did. Totally. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the exact reason we've always been given whenever we ask why Robotech fans still prefer Robotech? Between that and the promise of more VF-1 mechanic sheets in Chronicle, poor Azrael's probably having nightmares. Ah holy crap! You actually posted! I wish we could say that it was blind ignorance and that there's a chance they could get better, but for far too many it's willful ignorance. It's not that they don't know there are better things out there, it's that they don't want to know, or perhaps don't want to acknowledge that they know, because they're afraid of admitting they've wasted 20+ years of their lives clinging to a show that's going nowhere. An excellently executed AMV to be sure, but I find its lack of Macross II disturbing. *force chokes the author*