Seto Kaiba

Okay... this is actually a matter of interest now... MEMO is claiming that Harmony Gold has made official statements at conventions and the like that they have the ability to use anything out of the "original 85 episodes". He hasn't provided any evidence to back that one up though. If he does, it could be a very interesting breakthrough. Anyone who goes to their panels... have they ever actually discussed their rights to the original Macross series, or is MEMO just blowing smoke?

You bet. Pizza the Hutt's already over there throwing a fuss-fit too. I get such a kick out of seeing him call anyone who argues based on the facts a "Seto fanboy".

Good grief, he posted the same mess in that thread on Robotech.com too.

Unfortunately, with people like MEMO around who are simply unwilling to believe the truth, or don't understand the situation but won't shut up anyway, there's very little that can be done. Your one argument is bullshit based entirely around wishful thinking and a complete inability to understand the evidence. Also, turn your damn caps lock off already... it's not cruise control for cool. Harmony Gold only acquired the film distribution and merchandising rights. That does not give them the right to use those copyrighted designs in their live-action movie, and it does not give them the right to use those designs in future animated works. We've seen proof of that already in Shadow Chronicles, with the deaths and disappearances of the entire Macross cast. Rulings on copyrights apply internationally under the Berne Convention, one of the cornerstones of international copyright law. Not if, as is the case, Tatsunoko never had the rights you're alleging they licensed to Harmony Gold. Of course, there is no proof they ever gave Harmony Gold those rights, and a mountain of evidence saying they didn't. The situation with Catalyst concerned a violation of Harmony Gold's MERCHANDISING rights to Macross's original series. Nothing more. Harmony Gold was entirely correct in stating that the legal battles in Japan didn't affect their Robotech franchise, because they never had the intellectual property rights to begin with. In short, this "information" of yours comes from people who in all likelihood had little-to-no access to any of the relevant documentation, and were simply going by the few, incorrect details you gave them.

That Harmony Gold hasn't produced a Robotech continuation the industry noticed or cared about certainly hasn't stopped the delusional die-hards from rambling on endlessly with petitions to get Robotech: the Untold Story released on DVD, or to get Robotech II: the Sentinels and Robotech 3000 finished. Yeah, threads like that do tend to bring out the crazies... particularly those who can't cope with the idea that Robotech failed spectacularly and Macross is successful. The average Robotech fan is quite a bit calmer and more rational. It's my brother's pet... his girlfriend hit him with the doe-eyed attack and got him to adopt it from the humane society last year. It would be more accurate to say that he hates me in part because I don't find Bobby's homosexuality offensive. As he put it on RobotechX: "On a sad note,it is a shame that a homosexual was piloting the Macross quarter.I guess that means the homosexual plague will have a place in the future.I mean Alto was also a kabuki female dancer..Jeeze that is sad" and after we told him to drop the bigotry and explained the cultural context of both characters: "Sheesh!,I did not know that there was that many gay huggers out there.I can tell by all the gay huggers who supports homosexuality it will be required by law for everyone to be gay by the year 2018." I do recall him saying something about having an account here that he said he was using to spy on this thread (as though it were some secret, clandestine affair). If he really does have an account here, he's probably too afraid to post himself, since if he came out swinging like he does on Robotech.com and RobotechX.com he'd probably be banned pretty swiftly.

I'm gonna try to keep my reply here short, since my hands hurt like blazes after being scraped and smashed and gnawed on by a rabbit while helping my brother move into his room at the frat house today. Yeah, I guess I'm just a glutton for punishment... these days, I only go there when someone points out a thread of interest or a question that falls under one or more of my particular areas of expertise. Of late, I just seem to be on the target list of some of the more deluded fanboys who just can't accept simple truths. They've taken to hounding me across multiple sites, and get smacked down by the moderators of those sites most of the time. It'd be amusing if it weren't so pathetic... and it is sorely tempting to simply say "to hell with it all" and let them run the community there into the ground. A few of the more reasonable RT fans and I were actually talking about that in a chat not too long ago. Pizza's problem with me doesn't even really seem to be Macross-related. He's got his nose out of joint because I and a bunch of other people took him to task for his horribly bigoted behavior on RobotechX (he's a HUGE homophobe, and took great offense to a gay character being in Macross Frontier), and he's been hounding me for revenge ever since. I think that's probably at least 90% of why he's acting like such a twit lately. He's got big issues with cultural context too... Pizza the Hutt had this to say on Robotech.com: That's the thing... there are a LOT of people on Robotech.com who do appreciate my input and openly seek my help and involvement with various projects and threads. Yeah, I know the Macross fanbase (or at least part of it) appreciates my work on Macross II, but there're people there who appreciate what I do as well. It doesn't feel right to cut a bunch of good people loose just to spite one or two trolls. That's EXACTLY what MEMO is trying to accomplish. He's been trying his hardest to take what little evidence he can muster and twist it to support the unsupportable. MEMO, Pizza, and sanman are examples of that tiny lunatic fringe of the fanbase who have just been so devoted to the franchise for so long, that they've lost their objectivity completely and don't want to believe their waiting and efforts have been a waste. They don't want to believe that Harmony Gold can't do whatever it wants with Robotech... because it doesn't bode well for Robotech's future... so they simply deny the truth so they can go on believing that their hideous, malformed goose of a franchise may one day lay a golden egg. The best way to deal with denial-based arguments like MEMO's is to crush it under the sheer, unrelenting weight of the facts. Once it comes out that they have virtually no evidence to support their claims, or that their arguments are based on half-truths and misunderstandings, they usually shut up pretty fast. It's not that MEMO doesn't understand the situation, it's that he doesn't want to understand the situation. If he accepts the truth, then he has to also accept that Robotech is, for all practical purposes, doomed... because the most popular saga is off-limits for future movies and TV shows.

Whoops-a-daisy... posted a half-finished reply.

They're WAAAAAAAAAAY ahead of you there... almost all of the surviving Macross cast is either dead, incapacitated, or missing. The one or two who are left have been redesigned to be unrecognizable. Just business as usual... what's more obnoxious than MEMO's ill-informed denials (he seems to think the archived court documents and official statement from Big West are fanmade for some utterly insane reason) is that he's allowing the worst of the RT fascist fanboys to troll freely since they kiss his ass. To quote Spider Jerusalem... lies are news and the truth is obsolete.

Yeah, Tommy and company kind of wrote themselves into a corner by giving Ariel near-godlike powers, and then sending the party of one-dimensional idiots we're allegedly supposed to care about off in a barely-armed colony ship. It's shoddy writing like that which got me thinking that there might be something to the theory that Harmony Gold is putting off making Robotech: Shadow Rising so they can broom the whole "Shadow Saga" for a reboot TV series if the live-action flick's a hit. Can I get back to you on that? I'm not sure where to begin. (just kidding) In other, much more relevant news... it looks like our little How-is-Battletech-using-Macross-designs conundrum has finally been brought to light. http://catalystgamelabs.com/ It looks like the idiots who own Battletech and MechWarrior now (Catalyst Game Labs) were aware of the whole Harmony Gold et. al. v. FASA Corp. et. al. case, but not the details of the settlement. So they went ahead with making new products containing the Macross designs, and got pretty far with it before Tommy Yune found out about it (I have it from reasonably reliable sources that he found out when a fan told him at a convention booth) and sicced the Harmony Gold company lawyers on 'em. Apparently Catalyst agreed not to use the designs without having to go to court over it, and pulled the art from their new products (presumably the Tomahawk-like design will be pulled from the pending MechWarrior game as well).

The Zentradi and "Robotech Masters" mecha all still use protoculture as fuel, as do ALL of the ships (even those used by the Earth forces). As far as what protoculture DOES these days... your guess is as good as mine. From what little was released about the failed Robotech 3000 project, it seems that Carl's eventual plan was for protoculture to become the galactic standard fuel until the flowers of life evolved and became sentient (in 3000) and started trying to kill everyone. 'course, Luceno and Daley made it even more magical than Macek intended. Tommy's playing the "Regent/Regess" angle from a literal perspective. One of the definitions of Regent and Regess is "someone who rules a country of people while the monarch/soverign is underage, disabled, or absent". The common sense answer based on that is that Ariel/Marlene is supposed to be the new Invid queen, and that's why she has haxx superpowers.

While it's true that Tommy recently established that all of the Earth Forces mecha from the Macross Saga and Masters Saga run on nuclear fusion, it's not actually a retcon. You see, at no point is it ever actually established that any of those mecha ran on protoculture... the fans just assumed that they all did. I talked to Tommy about it at length back when it was first announced, and he seemed pretty annoyed at the fan reaction to his decision. The other reason he gave for the change was that he wanted to impose some semblance of technological continuity on the original series. From what I can see, Tommy wants to erase all the stupid, contradictory crap that came out during the late 80's and the 90's from the Robotech universe, and one of the major bullet points of his plan seems to be to get away from the pseudo-magical protoculture envisioned by Macek, Luceno, and Daley.

Well, Tommy Yune has always maintained that Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles was a resounding financial success, and once he gave us an approximate figure for the show's budget, it wasn't hard to see why. If Tommy can be taken at his word, Harmony Gold spent less than $1 million (USD) on Shadow Chronicles. It's the business model many have come to see as typical of Harmony Gold... develop the product as cheaply as humanly possible and then turn around and sell it to the devoted (read "fanatical") fans with a ridiculously huge markup. That, combined with the forced scarcity of many of their products, means that their sales are almost all profit. From an objective standpoint, it shows that they understand their target audience perhaps a little better than they should...

Ever since Harmony Gold announced the existence of the live-action movie project, they've been focusing on that and nothing else. In the resulting brouhaha, Robotech: Shadow Rising seems to have fallen off the fanbase's radar until recently. Now, one of the most popular topics of speculation on Robotech.com and elsewhere is WHY Harmony Gold seems so reluctant to get Robotech: Shadow Rising done and out the door. Perhaps the most interesting theory yet proposed, and the one which seemed to offend Kevin McKeever the most, was the suggestion that Harmony Gold put Shadow Rising on the back burner with the intent to broom it along with the rest of the dated, legally-problematic "original" continuity in favor of a new animated series only loosely based on the original if the live-action movie is a success. (In short, the Transformers Animated business model)

Eh... another issue I really can't get worked up about. From the coverart it looks like this's gonna be the VF-17S Nightmare. Too much Macross 7 and Macross Dynamite 7 stuff lately... I want some more DYRL/FB2012/II stuff... especially after they dared tease me with new information in the VF-2SS sheet.

Yeah, that's pretty much the conclusion I arrived at. Oddly, about half of RobotechX's regulars ALSO arrived at that conclusion, said FGSFDS, and started building their own "by the fans for the fans" type site. More and more people are starting to notice the gaps in Harmony Gold's argument that they outright OWN the original Macross series. It's really putting McKeever and company in an interesting spot, because they have a choice between giving a straight answer, or coming back with more doubletalk and continuing to lose face.

The common sense answer to why they'd want them would be to keep any competing SW1-era Macross toys outta the US. Somehow, I figured you guys would find that eventually. In the beginning, I was trying to be helpful. I was nice. I was patient. I explained everything in small words that even an imbecile like Kevin McKeever could understand. The problem is that MEMO, like so many other die-hard Robotech fans these days, is determined to live in a fantasy world where Robotech is wildly popular and Harmony Gold owns everything Macross-related. I had a little bit of help from Maverick_LSC near the end, but then he bought into the bullshit and started an argument in Tatsunoko's favor where every assertion depended not on evidence, but on you accepting the previous unprovable assertion as the unimpeachable truth. Once I saw what was the wind was blowing, and that MEMO was prepared to continue acting like an ass in any thread that disagreed with his rose-colored fantasy of Robotech, I gave up trying. Fortunately, it wasn't a total loss. Most of the RobotechX membership are the reasonable, intelligent folks, who left Robotech.com because they got sick of Harmony Gold's bullshit, and they saw MEMO's Harmony Gold company line bullshit for what it was almost right away. Some of them are so annoyed with MEMO's obnoxious attempts to defend the Harmony Gold company line from legitimate criticism, and his attempts to excuse the asinine behavior of several die-hards who attack any criticism of Robotech as the work of "Macross purist trolls" that they're building their own site. (Somehow, I've once again been asked to recreate the Robotech.com Infopedia... does this surprise anyone?) In related news... there's a very interesting thread here: http://www.robotech.com/community/forum/re...&forumid=31 It looks like the natives are getting restless. I predicted that the fanbase was going to get fed up with waiting for the live-action movie and Shadow Rising, but I didn't think they were going to start heckling the powers that be THIS SOON. More and more people are taking a good, hard look at the legal status of Harmony Gold's claim to Macross, and how it's going to affect their future properties, and it's producing some interesting results. We may see a concrete statement of the situation from Harmony Gold in the near future. It would probably be a very smart move, as it would stop a lot of the uncomfortable questions they keep having to try to shift aside, and the last time they tried was back in 2002.

Um... if I remember right those missile pods do appear in some episodes of the Macross TV series. It's still a non-issue tho, as Harmony Gold does have the DYRL merchandising rights.

No thread, I'm afraid... chatroom on RobotechX. I manifest my evil self there from time to time on the request of some very optimistic friends of mine who are holding out hope that Robotech isn't completely dead.

Had a VERY interesting chat with one of the RT.com moderators, and got a very interesting fish story out of it. According to this rumor, which was implied to have originated from Tommy Yune, Warner is courting Big West for some toy licensing to go along with the live-action Robotech movie. Raised a fair few eyebrows in the chat, and then he went a-rambling with some longwinded fantasy wherein Warner Brothers buys Big West to get their hands on Macross.

Robotech Defenders what?

From Harmony Gold? Nah. They just keep repeating their same old line about how the litigation over Macross in Japan didn't affect them. MEMO was parroting it over there too.

Oh there's no doubt that he is... he's over there on his site preaching about how Harmony Gold OWNS Macross. That Roven's an idiot? Isn't the Voltron live-action movie project still tied up in the courts because the US distributor doesn't have the IP rights to GoLion?

I just got back from seeing it with some friends not too long ago... it did not wow me. If I had to pick one word to describe it, it would be "Schizophrenic". It can't seem to decide if it wants to be a mediocre fantasy/action film or a depressingly bad teenage romance comedy. The end result of trying to mash those two conflicting storylines together in cliffnotes form left me feeling like Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had originally been two movies, filmed separately and spliced together. I'd really say this movie was a failure of editing, because so many scenes from the novel that should've been included because of their importance to the plot were left out, and so many scenes that did bugger all for the actual story were included. The "new" scenes, like the destruction of the Burrow, kind of leave you wondering if they were added just to get rid of surplus pyrotechnical supplies leftover from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

According to Tommy Yune, Harmony Gold wants to work with Big West to release the rest of Macross in the US, but Big West doesn't want to work with them (specifically, doesn't want them getting a cut of the profits just because they trademarked the name "Macross" in the US and abroad). I'm sure Kevin McKeever has his own spin on things, where Big West are big, evil tossers who want the still-beating heart of Carl Macek on a silver platter before they'll consider working together. I'd go so far as to say it's the LEAST vital topic here... Robotech is a shambling corpse of a franchise that has yet to produce anything new or interesting to realize the promise that its creators editors continue to claim it shows. If I had to ascribe one particular function to this thread, it would be trying to form a decent theory about why Tatsunoko is content to prolong the current state of affairs, rather than trying to mend fences, brooming the tired anachronism that is Robotech, and releasing Macross on a worldwide scale.

The only time I've ever been banned from an internet forum was back in 2004 or so, for posting several choice remarks about Doug Bendo, who at the time was doing his damnedest to draw me into a flame war. I got a temporary ban that was lifted after only a couple of hours, and Doug Bendo got a permanent ban. (I still say that's possibly my greatest service to the Robotech fanbase)