Seto Kaiba

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.

Slight misunderstanding on your part... they can use the designs from that series for merchandise only... they can't use those designs in new animated or live-action motion pictures. Because, at some point (somewhere ~2004 by the look of it) Harmony Gold acquired the merchandising rights to DYRL... again, JUST the merchandising rights. They can't release DYRL or use DYRL designs in animated or live-action motion pictures, but they can make and/or distribute merchandise for it. That's how we got that horrible, cheaply-made atrocity they're calling the Stealth Valkyrie. No, they can't use those designs to make a new series... they only have the film distribution and merchandising rights to SDF Macross and only the merchandising rights to DYRL. It's not just you... MEMO claims that he wore the videotape out rewinding and replaying that section for whatever purpose. It seems highly suspicious, since that's the only part of the tape affected, and it's affected in highly convenient spots. Not only is the first part of the statement ambiguous, but there's another reason it doesn't support MEMO's claims... Since the term "international rights" is at best a vague one, I called up a broadcast arts professor of my acquaintance and asked him what the typical definition of "international rights" was... surprise surprise... it means exactly what I'd thought it meant... international film distribution and merchandising rights... something we know Harmony Gold does have. Par for the course... Tommy makes a generally truthful but deliberately ambiguous statement, MEMO interprets statement to mean something that supports his personal opinion, MEMO argues his point, citing vague remark as irrefutable evidence and trying to push aside such mundane concerns as court documents and copyright law. Yeah, that's how I read it as well. Possibly the most telling indicator that we are in fact correct is the recent behavior of Harmony Gold. In 2002-2004, they churned out a few Macross-derived comic books, some DYRL toys, and a game, but when the time came to make the new movie, they killed every recognizable Macross character and redesigned the only plot-critical one, then went out of their way to avoid any and all references to Macross in the dialogue... to such a degree that it became painfully obvious. Even in Prelude, which was a pretty blatant recycling of Robotech II: the Sentinels Book IV, they avoided showing the Battle of Tiresia, where a horde of those goofy "Invid Inorganics" square off against squadrons of Spartas hovertanks and VF-1 Valkyries in the middle of the city... they avoided showing Minmei's face, made Rick unrecognizable from the start, and most of the other supposedly familiar characters were already mostly unrecognizable. But perhaps the most blatant dodge of a Macross reference came in the movie itself, when whiny main character Marcus Rush is bitching about how he wants to kill all the aliens, and Maia Sterling (supposedly the second or third child of Max and "Miriya") pops up and says "If it weren't for an alien, you'd be dead right now" and then points out that she is "half-alien". Note, not "half-Zentradi"... "half-alien". They went out of their way with potentially confusing dialogue to avoid even using the word "Zentradi". As pointed out by other users on RT.com, there were also many other occasions where they passed up some obvious chances for some fanservice references to the "Macross Saga", which would almost certainly have gone over well with the fans. What's more, they've mysteriously avoided quashing that legal debate thread on Robotech.com's message boards... if I and the other users arguing that Harmony Gold can't use the intellectual property of Macross were wrong, you can bet Kevin McKeever would've showed up almost right away, told us to shut up, that we were dead wrong, and locked the thread, as is his usual pattern when someone challenges the company line... and then crowed about it later in the officer's forum. Instead... the thread has run for nearly 300 posts of multiple users arguing that MEMO is full of crap, and that HG can't use the designs of Macross in the live-action movie or any other sequel, without so much as a single post from McKeever. Yes gentlemen, I think we're spot-on with our interpretation of the rulings and the law..

Too true... most of the die-hards I've met have been in their thirties, and the mere suggestion that Robotech might not be perfect sends them into the sort of nerd rage normally only seen when Trekkies debate whether Kirk or Picard was the better captain, and most of them are firmly convinced that Harmony Gold is doing an awesome job with Robotech. MEMO's the one who posted the video... as part of his desperate, last-ditch attempt to prove me wrong on Robotech.com. It goes without saying that he failed spectacularly... made even more amusing by the fact that the crucial section of the video he claimed proved Harmony Gold had all the rights to Macross proved the opposite, and most of the rest was just a hilarious attempt to make Robotech appear more popular than it actually is. He probably disabled the comments to stop Macross fans from laughing themselves silly and telling him he's a twit.

SMS is field-testing the VF-25 Messiah prior to its adoption by the New U.N. Spacy.

If you're going to bash MEMO, at least bash him for something he can control... like his constant, obnoxious, parrot-like repetition and provably-wrong interpretation of the Harmony Gold company line. His physical appearance has nothing at all to do with what he posts. And highly illustrative of the Harmony Gold mindset... "so long as we're not the crappiest thing out there, we're doing great!" They have the same mindset as the guys who sell imitation brand speakers out of the back of a van. Hey Big West... you readin' this? Good ideas here...

Isn't that how fanatical Robotech die-hards like Pizza and MEMO see us? Based on the accusations the fanatics have leveled at me just in this past month or two, they seem to regard me either as an agent of some sort of sinister, subversive, Illuminati-like group headed up by Big West with the sole aim of bringing Robotech down to make way for Macross, or as the sort of cardboard cutout villain you might find in a black-and-white sci-fi serial from the 50's... bent on destroying Robotech because I'm pointlessly evil. (While I admit I do the maniacal laughter thing from time to time as a joke, I don't think the local zoning would permit me to build a doom fortress, and I certainly can't afford the upkeep on an army of witless minions.) Still... it's a good example of how some Robotech fans are more comfortable denying the truth because it doesn't fit into their strange worldview where Robotech is wildly popular and of the highest quality. Glad you enjoyed it.

I was talking to Talos just a minute ago when it struck me... that legal debate on Robotech.com is playing out like something out of Star Wars: the Empire Strikes Back... SK: If only you knew the power of the court documents. Tommy Yune never told you why HG can't use Macross. PTH: He told me enough! He told me Robotech owns it! SK: No. Big West owns it. PTH: No! That's not true! That's impossible! SK: Search the evidence, you know it to be true. PTH: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! If only we had a bottomless pit handy...

Contents of 30... if I'm screwing anything up, feel free to correct me. I'm doing this one on the fly at the office, so I don't have my dictionary and whatnot on hand... Mechanic Sheets VB-6 Konig Monster Zentradi Troop Battleship City 7 Commercial Vehicles Character Sheets SMS Crew(?) Nanase Matsura Lynn Minmay Lynn Kaifun Timeline Sheet Fire Bomber and Rapid Advance(?) History Sheet Formation of Sound Force Worldguide Sheet Birdhuman Technology Sheet Variable Fighter / Basic 3-form Glossary Sheet MDE (bullet/warhead?) ~ Ozma Lee Goods Sheet Bandai 1/72 VF-25S Messiah Valkyrie Song Sheet My Boyfriend is a Pilot / Shao Pai Lon

Doesn't look like it. He's back to taking anything and everything he can get his hands on out of context to make it look like his argument isn't completely and totally wrong.

"Captain Caps-Lock" is keeping a low profile lately... maybe he's just too embarrassed to show his face after his ridiculous claims that Harmony Gold owned Macross and could use it in any way they saw fit were proven false. Or maybe Steve got on his case for excusing Pizza's trolling on the grounds that Pizza was the only one who believed the garbage he was spewing. ROFL!

Yeah... that's McKinneyist claptrap right there. It's a matter of public record that Robotech started its horrible, mutant life as an english dub/rewrite of Macross, and that the rest of the content, including the heavier rewrites, were added later to facilitate the addition of Southern Cross and Mospeada to get the show long enough to syndicate. That Carl Macek had some grand vision for Robotech is a load of bull... he didn't start having delusions of being a great writer until he started to work on the monumental turd that was Robotech II: the Sentinels. The McKinney novels were trying to plug the massive plot holes and fix some things that the writers thought were unreasonable, and in the process made the story even more ridiculous, and exacerbated the plot hole problem. Oh that's easy... you abandon any pretense of a coherent plot or character development in favor of incomprehensible battle scenes, toilet humor, and throw in some T&A to get the attention of the teenagers. Then you just run commercials showing the obligatory eye candy leading lady running away from explosions in slow motion. In short... the Bayformers formula.

No, they started well before that... it just became more widespread as time went on. The earliest example of that I can think of was the Unofficial Robotech Reference Guide, which used a lot of Macross OSM in its creation, and included several mecha which don't exist in Robotech, like the production model VF-4. It became more widespread once the fans began making internet supplements for the Palladium Robotech RPG in the late 90's. You'd do well to check a dictionary then... because I'm using it correctly. The Robotech novels written by Luceno and Daley under the pseudonym "Jack McKinney" treat the entire established setting and continuity of Robotech as a series of polite suggestions which can be ignored at will, rather than the foundations of the universe, which is why they contained garbage like the "shapings of protoculture", the so-called "thinking cap", and all that nonsense in End of the Circle. An irreverent adaptation is one that does not respect the original source material, and the McKinney novels are a textbook example of such an adaptation. Yeah, parasitism is probably a better word for that period where Robotech fans were adapting anything they could get their hands on for the Robotech RPG.

I'm talking about something which accurately reproduces the design aesthetics and viewing experience of Macross, even if it doesn't reproduce the designs entirely faithfully. Something that is, in all likelihood, well beyond the range of legal options Harmony Gold and Warner Bros can take, and certainly beyond the creative capabilities of Tommy Yune. The few Macross-like sound effects which made it into Shadow Chronicles were generic beam weapon sound effects ("pew" lasers) which which can be found in most any sci-fi or action show from that period. Frankly, I can't see a scenario wherein the general public has anything other than apathy towards yet another bland, generic robot movie. Robotech will be just another squirt in the crowd, just like it always has been. It has zero name recognition outside of its rapidly shrinking fanbase, and that doesn't bode well for the live-action movie's prospects. It was not always thus. Even in the 90's, when the only thing keeping Robotech alive was a steady dribble of piss poor comic books and irreverent novelizations, the fans had standards. Quite a few series met their premature ends because the fans found the low quality of their work insulting, and would not buy it. Because there was the promise of something new in the immediate future right up until Robotech 3000 went over like a lead balloon, the fans never got quite as desperate as they are today. The failure of Robotech 3000 was the final straw for a lot of fans... a production that made it abundantly clear exactly how poor Harmony Gold's understanding of its target audience really was. When Robotech.com opened in 2001, the fans who'd remained with the franchise were overjoyed, predicting a Robotech renaissance, and for a while there it looked like they might actually get their wish. Then, of course, the supposed revival turned out to be nothing more than a couple fairly weak limited series comics and a mediocre game. The promise of Shadow Chronicles came along just as the fans were starting to get desperate for new ANYTHING, and that desperation only got worse in the three years between the initial announcement and the actual release. By that time, the few fans who were left were just so desperate for new Robotech ANYTHING that they threw out all considerations of quality. Shadow Chronicles whetted their appetites, and thanks to some misleading remarks from Tommy Yune, got them thinking that the next feature was looming large on the horizon already. Of course, when that turned out not to be true, they lapsed right back into their desperation... obsessing over each and every little re-release, toy release, and vague announcement about future products.

Why yes, yes I am. It's a different business model than the conventional one used by the American comic book industry. Instead of printing as many copies as you need to meet the demand, you do an inexpensive and extremely limited print run insufficient to meet demand for the book, and that forced scarcity not only lets you run the price up for the initial sale, it also guarantees that you'll meet your sales targets, which, all other things being equal, means you turn a profit on the book. Of course, any reprintings after that, you only have to cover the printing and binding costs, so that's almost all profit if your target audience is still willing to buy. Like everything else Shadow Chronicles, Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles looks like it was done on the cheap, which, like most of the RTSC merch and the movie itself, it probably was. Tying in to what I said above, that seems to be Harmony Gold's business model... producing new products as cheaply by sacrificing quality wherever possible, and putting only minimal effort into the creative process. Rather than develop new characters and stories, they just keep recycling old ones, which served two purposes... keeping production costs down, and appeasing the most fanatical fans... those who thought Robotech II: the Sentinels was something other than a massive turd. Does that make Robotech.com Bizarro World from the old pre-crisis Superman comics?

Since all of the "new" comics published by Wildstorm have all been done as limited series with extremely limited print runs to make sure they sell out, there's no doubt that if they did another comic on that business model, it'd still be profitable. Heck, some of the dumber and more devoted fans would happily buy it twice... once on a per-issue basis and once as a trade paperback. I'm betting the reason they aren't trying to fill the void between Shadow Chronicles and Shadow Rising with comics is because they don't have a damn clue what the story of the Shadow Rising movie is going to be. It looks like they realized they've exhausted the potential of comics based on the "original 85" too... they're trying to stay away from Macross (which is the most popular), most of the fans HATE the Masters Saga (Southern Cross), and they've exhausted the few interesting characters in the New Generation (Mospeada). Unless they want to re-do the Robotech II: the Sentinels comics, they've run out of ideas.

I think so, yes.

It's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation for Warner Bros and Harmony Gold. If they make the live-action movie Macross-y, they run the risk of being sued into next week by Big West, and if they don't, the fans will crucify them with big, blunt, rusty nails shaped like the SDF-1. It's not like he didn't TRY... I mean, we have that spectacularly ugly, unused VF-13 Gamma Fighter design of his, and that equally hideous transforming jeep with the big railgun on top, and it looks like he took a stab at trying to come up with his own transformation for the VF-X-4 but couldn't make it work, so he had to weasel out of it. I don't think so... one of the biggest bullet points in Tommy's powerpoints these days is that they're releasing a trade paperback version of Prelude, and that was a Wildstorm release.

Don't give them ideas... they'll do it. (and some of them already HAVE) I don't think so... MEMO was excusing his personal attacks left and right because Pizza was the only one buying into his bullshit. It took a LOT for the admins to act on the ROBOTECHFANPLUS issue... mainly a lot of angry complaints about his racist behavior, and several e-mails sent to Steve's everyday-use inbox instead of the problem-reporting one. Pizza hasn't gone that far overboard yet. Yeah, though I don't think he realizes that. He seems to actually think they're valid evidence that Harmony Gold flat-out owns all the rights to Macross. RobotechX is falling to pieces as a result of MEMO and SIGHUP's unwillingness to put their foot down on the trolls who attack other users and accuse them of being "Macross purist trolls" or tells them they're not real fans whenever anyone criticizes Robotech and/or its creators in any way. Because they didn't act on it in that thread, they continued their little witch hunt outside the licensing thread, and succeeded in driving most of the site's active members away. I'd say it's a pretty shitty time to be a Robotech fan... bugger-all's coming out, and there's nothing newsworthy. It's an even worse time to be a Robotech fansite... it's not that the Robotech fanatics are becoming more numerous, it's just that the declining numbers of rational fans are making the fanatics a larger and larger proportion of the fanbase, which in turn drives away more rational fans, and the cycle begins again.

Doesn't look like it. Just yesterday he was over in that part of the boards explaining why it takes Harmony Gold so damn long to turn out each mediocre sequel. No... that's one of the weirder things about the thread. Not only did McKeever NOT close it with the "we own everything Robotech" parting shot, when Pizza started a second thread to try and troll, claiming that the use of terms like "Skull squadron" and "protoculture" were proof that HG could use any Macross IP they wanted, McKeever shut Pizza's thread down and told him that if he couldn't debate civilly, he wouldn't be allowed to debate at all. A "Twilight Zone" moment if ever there was one. Thread would've ended ages ago if MEMO hadn't been convinced that his "discussions" with unnamed "lawyers" using only his hypothetical scenarios wasn't ironclad proof that Harmony Gold can do whatever it wants with Macross. It probably would've just petered out after one or two more posts, after people realized that WB won't be using the original desigsn or derivatives thereof in the movie.