Seto Kaiba

Yes, actually they did... in Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles. Lisa's originally an Admiral, and Rick's a Major General, but Rick takes over command (I know not how) after Lisa gets horribly injured (how, exactly is a mystery) when Edwards and the Regent attack the SDF-3 in 2043. She spends a year recovering from her injuries (which cause her to miscarry, so no Roy Hunter like in the old comics), and after that she resigns her commission, leaving Rick to command the REF, and joining the Sentinels Council as Earth's representative.

Just for yuks, I fired up WinDVD and fast-forwarded thru Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles and took some screen captures that best illustrate the movie's juvenile obsession with tits and ass. Those folks at Harmony Gold know their target market frighteningly well... the 30-something die-hard Robotech fans who've never seen a naked women without paying for the privilege, and the pocky-garling 12-17 year old Naruto fans who'll be in the same boat in a decade or two. So, with no further mucking about... enjoy my montage entitled "Let them eat (cheese)cake.. EDIT: I just noticed... the "boob windows" in Janice and Ariel's uniforms get bigger and bigger as the movie goes on...

When Alex died, nobody cared because it was so painfully obvious that he'd been marked for death that most of us were surprised he'd lasted almost the entire movie. He's like that guy in every horror movie who dies right after saying "Everything's going to be OK", or a red-shirted ensign beaming down to a hostile planet with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy... you just KNEW he was going to die. Yeah, Tommy's background in the American comic book industry really shows in the character and mecha designs of Shadow Chronicles. All of the men, regardless of age, are absurdly buff and handsome. All of the women, regardless of age (or species), have perfect hourglass figures and improbably large, gravity-defying breasts. The aliens are all your standard DC/Marvel fare... evil robots, anthropomorphic animals (dogs, bears, etc.), amazons, rock people, coneheads, etc. The mecha and ships are all boxy, with Star Trek-style touchpad controls. I could go on like this for ages...

Yeah, they certainly did arrange a lot of the shots to better show off the "assets" of Janice, Ariel, and Maia. My favorite by far is the one where Louie and Janice are talking in Louie's lab and Maia comes in to see him, and he peeks out around Janice's ass (which takes up like 2/3 of the screen). True to form, despite having essentially copied the movie's tone, several plot elements, and many of the mechanical designs from Battlestar Galactica, those elements taken from Carl Macek's Robotech II: the Sentinels are still imitating Star Trek. Did anyone else notice that Janice is a fairly obvious carbon copy of Data, right down to the way she talks? Heck, they even hired an actress from Star Trek to voice her. I really can't say that she's the most interesting character, since 99% of her purpose was sex appeal (note the slurmty dress from the lounge scene, and the multitude of T&A shots of her throughout the movie... more than any other character). Still, that she easily ranks in the top three doesn't bode well for their staff of writers. Take note, as with many other characters who are "new" in Sentinels and Shadow Chronicles, an arbitrary relation to a more important, pre-existing character is crucial to that new character's appeal. Here's a breakdown of several of the more blatant ones: Vince Grant: Originally created for Robotech II: the Sentinels, as the father of Masters Saga bitch-boy Bowie Grant, and brother of Macross Saga bridge bunny Claudia Grant. In his first appearance, a two-dimensional cardboard cut-out of a character, and time has not improved him. Marcus Rush: New character created for Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. Brother of Marlene Rush, the dead girlfriend (and motivation du jour) of New Generation leading whiner Scott Bernard. Maia Sterling: New character created for Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. Sister of Masters Saga leading lady Dana Sterling, daughter of Macross Saga characters Max and Miriya Sterling, and de facto replacement for Sentinels character Aurora Sterling. Janice M2: Nominally a new character created for Shadow Chronicles, more accurately a literal reincarnation of Janice Em, a character from Robotech II: the Sentinels. Which was, of course, entirely the point of having them there... to give the movie some kind of appeal for the fans of the original. If they hadn't done that, 9/10ths of the fanbase wouldn't give a toss.

Yes, but as indicated by the site polls and the general content posted before, during, and after the Shadow Chronicles release, the vast majority of the remaining fans are quite hung up on Rick Hunter. Finding out what happened to him is one of the major selling points of the movie, and features prominently in the marketing blurb. No chance of that happening... Tommy Yune knows full well how much the majority of the fanbase is hung up on Rick. He went out of his way to absolve Rick of the potential guilt of having ordered the destruction of Earth in Symphony of Light by having him become the unwitting pawn of the Haydonites. They'll NEVER let him die, because when he dies, they're all out of ideas. You'd be a fool not to. Just look at the shitstorm we got when McKeever accidentally said the Shadow Chronicles sequel was on hiatus... he had to publish a retraction in half a dozen places and he's STILL trying to convince people they haven't put the movie on the back burner. They clearly have come to expect that the fans will wait however long it takes for them to squeeze out another feeble installment of Robotech. Why bother? The fan-service will make the movie more appealing to the demographic they're aiming at than a well-written plot with excellent character development will. They're aiming for the 13-18 pocket-mining demographic, that much is perfectly clear. As has been pointed out many times already in this and other threads, why should Harmony Gold bother putting the effort into making something good, when something mediocre will still be snapped up eagerly two or three times over by the die-hards who form Harmony Gold's main consumer base. They've demonstrated beyond dispute that their strategy for Robotech's future is to make new products with the minimum possible expenditure of effort and money, and then sell them at a premium to the content-starved fans.

Wham's quotin' me, he just didn't use the quote button for some reason... I can't imagine why Wanzer would clam up about Macross II... he's the one who helped me find most of the old Palladium books, and helped get the ball rolling on the project of fixing the errors in them that eventually mutated into my comprehensive reference for the entire Macross alternate universe continuity. Okay, yeah... usually it stops being criticism and starts being trolling right around the time they dust off the ad hominem attacks. Still, best to just report them to a moderator and ignore them thereafter. "Don't feed the troll" as the saying goes. I hope you fully appreciate just how rare sentiments like these are in the Robotech fanbase. These days, the few remaining vocal fans of Robotech generally adopt the pretense that Robotech is a flawless masterpiece which exceeds the potential and quality of the original works in every way, and that anything based on it must therefore also be a flawless work of art, and react with extreme hostility whenever anyone challenges that assertion. Well, yes, but all indications are that Harmony Gold set the bar astonishingly low for Shadow Chronicles. The budget was minuscule, so sales were virtually all profit.

This much is laudable... 's not really a section... it's just the one thread, which is only grudgingly tolerated by the administrators. Yes, but can you say with absolute certainty that those users who you had an issue with on Robotech.com were there for the sole purpose of bashing Robotech? After all, every now and again even I get accused of going over there to bash Robotech (albeit, the ones doing the accusing are usually the ones who think Robotech is somehow above criticism by mere mortals like myself), and yet I spend most of my time there helping people, answering questions and the like. Also, what you may consider "bashing" of the series may just be your interpretation of something that was intended as legitimate criticism (which my criticisms of Shadow Chronicles often are). I say this because there's been a recent, SEVERE upswing in Robotech fans labeling anything they don't agree with, and particularly anything that shows Robotech as somehow less-than-perfect as "bashing", "trolling", etc. I'm all for keeping an open mind, but coming here JUST for the Robotech legal thread kind of defeats the point of it being a Macross site. It's good to know that you're not going to limit yourself to just this thread. Since I've never given King of the Hill the time of day, I had to look the character up to see what you were talking about... and I'm not sure if I should be offended or not. We're working on it... problem is I can't translate fast enough to keep up with the queue of incoming stuff. I've got a bunch of new material on the VF-2SS put together though, and I'm working on the CSS-based layout for the main articles. (Finally figured out why the heck the Super Armed Pack can cram so much stuff into such a small space) Y'know, I didn't even notice until you'd pointed it out to me the other day... lol, surely you jest... the fact that Macross Frontier is one of the most heavily-torrented fansubs in the world right now can't possibly have anything to do with it. I don't think Wanzerfan belongs in that group... I know for a fact he's a Macross II fan. In fact, he's one of the original members of my Macross II site, from way back in '03 when it was just an attempt to fix the screw-ups in the Palladium RPG.

Good luck with that... you'll probably have an easier time convincing the entire Harmony Gold "creative staff" to commit seppuku. There wasn't much original about the "original" series, for the obvious reasons, and most of what came after just imitated whatever mainstream sci-fi series was popular at the time. Robotech II: the Sentinels was modeled on Star Trek, Robotech 3000 was modeled on the generic CG action shows of the late 90's (Roughnecks, ReBoot), and Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles was modeled on the reimagined Battlestar Galactica. Even many of the comics stole stories, characters, and mecha from other shows. The only parts of Robotech that can honestly be called original with a straight face are probably the McKinney novels... and we all know how much the majority of the fans love them. Wanna bet? When Rick Hunter dies, that will be the end of Robotech. A great many fans only bought/watched the Shadow Chronicles movie because they were promised that Rick Hunter would return and somehow become relevant to the story again. Take him away, and you take away the reason most of the fans were still watching.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if that were the case... It's common knowledge that the "Macross Saga" is far and away the most popular installment of Robotech, and that many of those who want to see Sentinels or the Shadow Chronicles continued feel that way because they want to follow the adventures of the "Macross Saga" cast, rather than the less-likable berks who came after. If the fans found out that Harmony Gold and Warner Bros couldn't use much of the "Macross Saga" for future works, it would almost certainly mean a massive drop in interest in future Robotech shows, and possibly a massive drop in interest in Robotech itself. Just look at the distribution of products produced since 2001... well over 3/4 of it is Macross-related... toys, apparel, comic books, statues, you name it. Southern Cross is almost nonexistent in their merchandise line, and Mospeada is a token handful of products compared to the huge amount of Macross stuff they've made. Even the sole New Generation comic "Robotech: Invasion" had to have a Macross-related mini-comic about Mars Base and the Zentradi in each issue to make sure it would sell. For all the empty talk about how Robotech is a whole greater than the sum of its parts, the reality of the merchandising indicates that Robotech has largely been coasting on the success of Macross, and that without it, they have little in the way of future prospects. I wouldn't go so far as to say that Steve, Tommy, and Kevin are lying... their remarks are, as far as I can tell, truthful. Deliberately misleading, yes, but still truthful. Remarks like "we have all the international rights" and "we own everything Robotech" give the average fan the mistaken impression that Harmony Gold has the right to do whatever they want with all the content of the original works as well.

You're probably in the wrong place then... this IS MacrossWorld after all... Feel free to stop me when I lose the plot here... You didn't like that a few, belligerent fans of the original works criticize the Robotech adaptation on a site which also caters (albeit minimally) to fans of the originals, so you left there and came to a site devoted exclusively to the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series and its sequels, which you say you don't even like very much, to defend Robotech from perfectly legitimate observations, criticism, and legal discussion? Forgive me, but your logic seems to be horribly screwed up. I can't imagine why you telling the marketing director how to do his job didn't go over well... Still, that's par for the course as far as Harmony Gold is concerned. Their three great business strategies are to answer questions with an deliberately vague statement that only superficially appears to answer the question, to deny that criticism is legitimate or widespread in any way, and to shift the blame elsewhere when they can't simply write it off as the muttering of a few malcontents. Yes there is. The reasons why not can be found here, and in copyright law: http://www.macrossworld.com/mwf/index.php?showtopic=29850 For what it's worth... welcome to MacrossWorld.

I think I threw up a little bit reading that... Wasn't that Carl Macek's alleged grand plan? To try and make some kind of point by having Minmay/Minmei be incredibly obnoxious, selfish, and stupid? Well, there is the outside chance that someone WILL finally provide something that adds to the body of information we have on the limitations of Harmony Gold's claim on Macross outside Japan. Of course, as we discovered recently, to our scorn, many of those claiming to have such information were blowing smoke.

What a waste... it was clearly far too optimistic of me to think that they could put aside their fanaticism and discuss the limitations of Harmony Gold's rights to Macross rationally. Too many of the remaining Robotech.com members are entirely too willing to indulge in self-delusion to escape the impending disappointments of the live-action movie and the Shadow Rising movie. I guess it's a coping mechanism for those who've been following a franchise that's been going nowhere for the last 23 years. I'll still be keeping an eye on the other legal thread there, at least in the short term, because I'm quite curious to see what Maverick_LSC concluded after doing his own research. Assuming, of course, that he posts it at all. From the sound of it, he was trying to support MEMO, and ended up forming the very conclusion he was arguing against. Other than that, I really have no interest in the goings-on over there anymore. There's nothing new or newsworthy happening now or in the foreseeable future, and even the flow of "ask the expert"-type questions has slowed to a trickle.

Shhh... they'll have a goddamn coronary if they ever figure that out... better that they stay ignorant. You gotta judge that one by different standards... it wasn't that Xake didn't want to keep it going, it's just that he didn't know HOW, because I was the one doing ALL of the behind-the-scenes work and coordination. I got busy with my own projects (the genesis of my Macross II site) and he just didn't know how to keep it running, so it fell apart. It's the ONLY piece of documented evidence that even comes CLOSE to supporting MEMO's belief that Harmony Gold owns everything from the original Macross series outside of Japan. Of course, as I illustrated previously, it does not mean quite what he believes it does.

Your confusion is understandable... as to whether the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross TV series or DYRL is the correct adaptation of Space War 1, Kawamori essentially ducks the question by saying that the "true" Space War 1 (if such a thing could be said to exist) is a middle ground between the various depictions of the war (possibly one very similar to Macross: the First). While DYRL is nominally a "movie-within-the-universe", it would probably be more accurate to call it a pseudo-canon depiction of Space War 1 as well (at least, for the main timeline, for the alternate universe of Macross II and its prequels, DYRL is the correct version of Space War 1). Anyhoo... after DYRL, Kawamori and co. seem to have decided that they liked a lot of the DYRL designs better than their TV series counterparts, and so they simply substituted the DYRL designs for the original designs, and only occasionally justified the change with an in-universe rationale... For Exsedol Folmo/4970, it's really not clear if his DYRL or TV appearance is meant to be the correct one. It's mentioned that he WAS micloned at one time, but returned to his giant Zentradi stature and realtered his body makeup because he was afraid of losing his cerebral capacity and memories. It seems likely that he may have altered his body makeup to a more human-like TV appearance when micloned, and changed back to his DYRL appearance when at full Zentradi size. In Macross Frontier, an unnamed records officer similar in appearance to the DYRL Exsedol design is seen serving with the New U.N. Spacy's 33rd Marines under Major Ogotwhai (who also looks suspiciously similar to DYRL Vrlitwhai, and may be related to Vrlitwhai 7018 by cloning according to Macross Chronicle). DYRL stuff crept into a few other places... in Macross 7 and Macross Frontier, DYRL-style Zentradi commanders (ala Vrlitwhai 7018) are seen, as does Vrlitwhai's DYRL apperance, the DYRL pilot jumpsuits, the DYRL-style Meltrandi ships (Fleet of the Strongest Women), the Block 6 version of the VF-1 with squared-off hands, and, of course, the DYRL-style Macross-class SDF (which seems to be the mass-production type).

Wouldn't matter anyway, I'm not gonna be able to start on it 'till February 2010 at the earliest. Sad but true.

Yeah, I know... when I heard MS IGLOO 2 was going to be about the Earth Federation Ground Forces, I was kind of disappointed to hear they weren't going to figure the RX-79[G] Gundam Ground Type or the RGM-79G... still, I didn't expect the M61A5 MBT and RTX-440 Guntank to be as kickass as they were.

I've never heard anything to that effect... I've seen a fair few Robotech websites fall apart because their webmasters stopped caring, or their community members turned on each other and tore the site to pieces tho. Most of them seem to have come down because their webmasters got sick of spending years and years for the next Robotech whatever with nothing to show for it.

Actually... you hit on something I was thinking of doing. The suggestion that I and the other knowledgeable, productive folks should give up trying to convince Tommy Yune to let us fix the Robotech.com Infopedia and devote our attention to a separate, comprehensive website for Robotech was originally tabled by chrisk a while back. It sort of took on a life of its own after talking to a bunch of people over on Robotech.com and RobotechX. A lot of fans seemed really interested in the idea of a site that gave fair coverage to things like the McKinney novels and old comics, instead of focusing almost exclusively on the animated features. Kinda gave up on the idea of revamping RobotechX, since MEMO came out in favor of trolling Macross fans... so we're thinking of either getting a separate site for it, or doing it as a subdomain of my current site. Gotta find some writers who know more about Southern Cross and Mospeada tho, since my knowledge of both is limited. Oh, don't worry... the rate of questions there has fallen off to practically zero, so I don't do much there anymore.

Yeah, she rode along in the cameraman's seat in Hibiki's VC-079 twice.

It's quite sad, really... the people who, these days, are routinely being attacked as "not real fans" or "Macross purist trolls" are often the people who've done the MOST for the Robotech fandom. I've done just as much for the fans of Robotech as I have for the fans of Macross over the years, answering questions, helping people with websites, helping people find rare collectibles... but the Robotech fanbase has been so thoroughly neglected and mistreated by Harmony Gold that most of the rational, reasonable fans have been driven away. More than anything else, this is a study in the long, slow death of a franchise. Harmony Gold's hamhandedness in handling Robotech kept the franchise from producing anything original or of quality for DECADES. That, plus the general attitude of many American animation enthusiasts towards Robotech (condemnation as "anime crap") and the general attitude of many anime enthusiasts who started on newer and more sophisticated fare (condemnation as a poorly-executed rewrite) has led the fanbase having a bizarre sort of persecution complex. Even more perverse is the apparent desire of franchise staff at Harmony Gold (like Kevin McKeever) to keep the hostility the Robotech die-hards feel towards Macross as strong as possible. Why? We can only guess... but the logical conclusion would be that they want to keep their meal ticket from jumping ship to another franchise by any means necessary, even if it means maintaining a strawman enemy for them to rail against. Just look at how they stir up their fans at panels in that video MEMO posted... gabbing about how Robotech had been fansubbed in Japan as though it were a news report about how they were winning "The War on Macross". Actually, I'd say it's a matter of who gets screwed over the least, really... As is so often the case, it's the Robotech fans who are getting it in the shorts. Yeah, we Macross fans have to pay a bit extra for our fix, and watch our stuff in fansubs, but we at least get something of quality every few years. All they get is a feeble squirt of low-quality swill every decade or so, and the fanworks people come up with... but they're driving the creators of the fanworks away too. Speaking of being totally comfortable with adding useless and irrelevant information to Robotech, I got to reading through some of the old Robotech comics when a friend of mine posed me a question about them (he's new to anime, just cutting his teeth on Full Metal Panic!) since he'd heard about Robotech on 4chan. So we dug them out of the bin I keep them in and flipped thru a bunch of them. I must confess, I had forgotten just how often the authors tried to inject originality by stealing characters, mecha, and often whole stories from other books. There was a lot of tracing of DYRL VF-1 art, a lot of derivatives of the DYRL VF-1 flightsuit, and strangest of all... what appear to be cameos of a bunch of characters from Macross II: Lovers Again, Macross Plus, Independence Day, and Gundam in various books... the most blatant of which being Captain Higgins from Macross Plus.

Definitely Sheryl... she actually has a bit of flight training (sorry Misa) so the odds of her crashing the Valkyrie into the first horizontal surface she sees are pretty slim, and is a lot less obnoxious than Ranka (a useless little moepanda who's always seeking approval). 'course, if I had my say, it'd be Ishtar in the back seat instead... but she didn't make the list somehow (shame on you!).

I know... it's like looking into /b/...

I was forwarded the link just a little while ago, and thought it was both amusing and highly illustrative of exactly what's wrong with the Robotech franchise these days. Thanks to the years of having nothing worth speaking about, and their sole, lackluster sequel, the only serious Robotech fans left are the fanatics who can't comprehend why anyone would criticize Robotech. Shadow Rising is still in production limbo, as far as I can tell. Kevin McKeever said it was on hiatus, and then came out and tried to quell the resulting brouhaha by saying that he meant they were working on other parts of it, not that it was on hold. No release date has been announced, vague or otherwise.

Eh, that's just a fan-film that'll never be completed. It's not like it's a sanctioned work of Harmony Gold's. In other news, it looks like the incredibly rude and cowardly man-children of Robotech Factor, a spanish-speaking Robotech fansite, have also been following the legal debate on Robotech.com, and are determinedly badmouthing those of us who are arguing the facts. http://www.robotechfactor.com.ar/foro/viewtopic.php?t=465 I'm going to have to have words with WDKaiserV1 next time I see him...

Yeah, that link doesn't give useful information at all... it says nothing we don't already know... that the court rulings have not changed the disposition of the rights in such a way that Harmony Gold has lost the ability to use the footage for their "Macross Saga" or to produce toys based on it. Under the law, the copyright on Robotech only covers those parts of Robotech which did not exist in the original work... so basically, only the altered story. The only way MEMO's absurd claims will ever become correct will be if the fundamental operating principles of copyright law are changed dramatically.