Seto Kaiba

And in one sentence, you have completely redefined my vision of hell. Well, Harmony Gold may not have the creativity to redesign the VFs, but then again the final say on mechanical design belongs to Maguire Entertainment and Warner Bros, who DO know how to do that. I get the feeling what we'll be seeing are transforming F-22s and F-35s, just like Bayformers did. Yeah, they're much better than what HG/WB/ME could do, but they're still Macross IP, and thankfully off-limits to all three parties of idiots. As much as I'd love to see a high-quality CG VF-2SS Valkyrie II, the last place I'd want to see it is a Robotech movie.

and that, my friends, is the secret to Harmony Gold's "success". Harmony Gold gives the illusion that Robotech is popular by producing merchandise in very limited quantities, and then bragging about it when it sells out. The cornerstone of their toy sales, the Masterpiece Collection, are all limited to production runs of 10,000 units. Considering that the Robotech fanbase, while small, is still an international one, the limited 10,000 unit run isn't going to go very far, especially not with fans buying 2 or 3 at a time, and comic shops buying them in even larger numbers. The comics books are on the same model... extremely limited print runs that are totally inadequate to satisfy the small, but devoted fanbase.

Nah, Macross II was an official production done by Big West, it's just that Studio Nue wasn't involved with the project (though some other Macross creators were, like Haruhiko Mikimoto), the studios who did the animation were AIC and ONRIO. Kawamori's never really said he wants nothing to do with Macross II, just that it's an alternate universe story because it doesn't line up with his vision for the ongoing story (which was, at the time, Macross Plus). It was made back when he was still loudly professing that he didn't want to do another Macross show. Because Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles had an extremely limited print run, and sold out fairly quickly, so right around the time Robotech fans thought that this was the start of a new, major story arc, they were fighting to snap up copies of the magazine, which supposedly contained key details about the plot. After scans were leaked to the net, most people realized that the magazine was just a rehash of several old Sentinels books with some redesigned ships and characters, and that was the end of their interest in it.

Speaking of running into Macross in the weirdest places... On a whim, I was watching Akane-iro ni Somaru Saka just a few minutes ago when the sudden appearance of Macross Frontier's Captain Wilder caught me by surprise. Attached is the screen capture from episode 8 of the show (about 4:17 in).

I know what it is now... it's the pirate ship from Macross Dynamite 7.

I know the plot of the movie... it came to me in a flash, and now the hiring of Tom Rob Smith makes sense. The movie's going to be a murder mystery! It'll star Tobey Maguire as a Detective Rick Hunter, a rookie trying to figure out who murdered Minmei after the Earth forces and the Zentradi got sick of her stupidity, and the fact that listening to her singing is the auditory equivalent of unanesthetized dental surgery. It'll be a tough case, with lots of twists and turns (from over 50,000 suspects, all with motive!), and at the movie's climax, Rick finds out that HE is the murderer, and turns himself in, only to be given an official pardon, a medal, and a three-rank promotion by a grateful Captain Gloval.

Considering the age of consent is lower over there, I think that was probably more to facilitate the changed backstory, where Hikaru was already a soldier and Minmay already famous when the two met, rather than a way to dodge accusations of them being too young. Yep, that's what Minmei looks like in the Sentinels comics. Ugly, isn't it? Unfortunately, she's not alone in having been turned from a slender woman into some buxom bodybuilder... pretty much all the women in the Sentinels comics looked like that.

Eh, I'd say Robotech fans live in a sealed-off bubble away from the rest of humanity... Robotech RPG players doubly so.

My eyes! THEY BURN! Honestly, it's hard to say exactly what the Robotech fanbase thinks of characters of mixed ancestry. The problem is that, aside from the Sterlings, there really aren't any mixed-species couples who have produced children. The Zentradi are nearly wiped out, the survivors pack up and leave with the Expeditionary Forces and suffer heavy losses, leaving the species all but extinct by 2044. The Tirolans who attacked Earth are apparently wiped out at the end of the war, so they never mate with humans, and all but two of the human-form Invid are dead by the end of their war with humanity, and they haven't been around long enough to mate with anyone. Unless Scott and Ariel or Lancer and Sera pop out a kid in the near future, the only mixed-ancestry characters around are Dana Sterling, who is almost universally loathed, and Maia Sterling, who is too new and unestablished for the fans to give a hoot about. For now, it doesn't look like the Robotech fanbase gives a toss about mixed-ancestry characters. The show and expanded universe material have always been kind of anthropocentric, pitting the all-human forces against the evil, cardboard cutout alien villains. The subject of "good aliens" in Robotech is a particularly odious one, because there's no way to approach it without bringing up the monumental stupidity that is Robotech II: the Sentinels. Really, there are no "good" aliens in the original Robotech series. There are always one or two "good" characters among the evil alien hordes, but other than them, the aliens are essentially all malevolent, and bent on humanity's destruction. Robotech II: the Sentinels tried to introduce the subject of friendly alien races by having the Expeditionary Forces of the Pioneer Mission liberating worlds that had been invaded and occupied by the Invid Regent's forces. Unfortunately, the friendly aliens who appear in Robotech II: the Sentinels are a pack of sci-fi cliches... anthropomorphic animals, sentient robots, coneheads, rock people, and space amazons. Even hardcore Robotech fans have a hard time taking the Sentinels aliens seriously, and the general consensus is that the whole lot of them were a stupid idea to begin with. Robotech fans don't do friendly aliens... it's always humanity versus the alien menace.

Okay, so I'm not the only one who did a double-take and then couldn't figure that one out. My first thought was the SB-10 Starwing, but that clearly doesn't have 8 wings... could this possibly be the first of the ETC sheets, featuring one of those wacky terrorist mecha from the Macross Digital Mission VF-X games? Like the Annabella Lasiodora mobile weapon? For one wild moment, I thought this might include a reprint of the VF History article from Macross II...

Considering the entire movie revolves around the only unresolved plot point that the majority of the fans still give a damn about... the whereabouts of a Macross character Harmony Gold can't legally use... is it any surprise they had to load the movie down with useless references to previous Robotech sagas to present viewers with the illusion of continuity with the rest of Robotech? If they hadn't, the only way you'd be able to tell it was a Robotech sequel and not just a generic-looking direct-to-DVD sci-fi movie with dodgy animation, substandard writing, lackluster editing, shoddy voice acting, piss-poor music, and boring, dated mecha designs would be the title on the box. I guess Bright Noa got bored after the One Year War and started teaching at the U.N. Spacy's Officer Candidate School. Maybe they're hoping that, if nothing else, having a reasonably attractive woman on the cast will keep the fans coming to conventions. Or maybe they're hoping for a Zentradi style lolicon attraction with Miley?

Did Roven actually bail from the project? Harmony Gold's official position is that he was reassigned.

Odds are I'd probably end up buying at least four. Five or six if they release the color-stripe decals to do each character's version. That's all the time it gets... that's the VF-XX Zentradi Valkyrie, 's the VF-2SS's predecessor. But for that one scene, it exists only in lineart and history snippets. It's a neat design, but there's virtually no information about it. Both are Earth-designed, but the VF-2SS has a lot of Zentradi hardware under the hood. Nitpick patrol... five auto-attacker bits, not three. That was pretty much my take on it... a lot of the hate for the VF-2SS that's getting voiced here is either based on the 1:100 transforming model kit (which is not a fair representation of the mecha), or without any perspective on the worse "big gun" offenders in recent shows.

Somehow, when I ponder this, all that comes to mind is Maguire Entertainment filing a lawsuit against Harmony Gold for fraudulent misrepresentation of the Robotech live-action movie license. I can't help but think that Harmony Gold might've... exaggerated... Robotech's popularity and the live-action movie's prospects a bit, in much the same way that Robotech.com moderators and staffers like Maverick_LSC and Kevin McKeever do on the message boards. Then again, Cerberus Capital Management let the Daimler group off the hook after they supposedly misrepresented the state of Chrysler, so who knows? If it's one of those things where you have to prove deception and/or malice, it'll be in court forever, since Harmony Gold's employees and volunteer staffers have started believing their own lies. Isn't it really a matter of them having nothing at all to show and/or license out to interested parties? With the live-action Robotech movie still very much a "what if" rather than a certainty, and Robotech: Shadow Rising mired in pre-production, I can't quite see them having anything new to peddle. I suspect that they probably signed over the merchandising rights to the live-action movie to Maguire Entertainment in exchange for royalties, and this early in the game, there isn't even a script, let alone mechanical or character designs to peddle to the toymakers. They're not known to be working on any new comics, novels, etc. and it's unlikely that they'll part with their usual toy manufacturers for the Shadow Rising toys, if any are ever produced.

Y'know... people wonder why I prefer Macross the way it was before Kawamori got involved with the franchise again. The next time somebody asks me why, I can just point to this thread and say "that's why".

No kidding... even just within Macross II there's still plenty of good stuff coming... Macross Chronicle's actually publishing new information about the characters and mecha, we've got the promise of at least one VF-100 series toy, and more...

If Macross 7 was exactly the same but had SK's name taken off of it, it would still be a train-wreck of horribly ugly mecha designs, bad music, unlikeable characters, and imbecilic storytelling, and I'd still hate on it. If you don't like Macross II, that's your own business, but the OP asked if we were going to see any toys of the Macross II valkyreis in the near future, and the answer is unequivocally YES. If you don't like that, too bad. It's not like someone's holding a gun to your head until you buy one. If you replaced "MacII" with "Macross 7" or "Macross Frontier", you would have my complete agreement. Kawamori clearly had Gundam on the brain when he was doing Macross Frontier, and the only way you could make the Sound Force valkyries look more like the VF equivalents of the sort of cheaply souped-up rice-burner you see high school kids driving is if they fitted big, gaudy chrome spoilers behind the cockpits. And it's no better than any of them either... thank you. :3 Fancy that... the VF-2SS's railgun is pretty much all hollow barrel... hell, the barrel isn't even sealed, a full side of it is open to space. The weapon's placement on the mecha is essentially a non-issue anyway, since it's a dedicated space fighter, and the weapon is essentially recoil-less. Even if it was, it's not like it's up there unsupported, being on a massive support arm that looks to be bigger around than the VF-2SS's actual arms. In its intended operating environment, it's a less cumbersome weapon than the front-heavy, over-long rifles used by the VF-25G and VF-27.

Same guy in both cases... Pizza the Hutt, formerly known as Wraith_Knight, was hating on Macross because he'd had some bad experiences with Macross fans criticizing Robotech, and he didn't know anything about Macross beyond the existence of the original series and DYRL. I filled him in on what he was missing, explained some of the more common reasons why Macross fans criticize Robotech, and hooked him up with DYRL. He numbers among the Macross faithful now. I totally misjudged him, when he's not all defensive, he's actually a pretty cool guy too. *puts down his bazooka* I am the great communicator...

Nah, there's a few more... there's the Haydonite ship, their two mecha ("Wraith" and "Infiltrator"), the super parts for the Shadow fighter and Shadow beta, the VR-057 "Super Cyclone", the Icarus, and the Ark Angel. Actually, she didn't even get that much. Maia Sterling appeared in two, maybe three, panels of the Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles comics, and only then in the epilogue of the final issue. All she really has to her credit is the incomplete film and that one short paragraph in Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. That's exactly it... it seems they expect that, if nothing else, the sex appeal of Maia, Janice, and Ariel will endear them to the movie's target audience... teenage anime viewers. The Shadow Chronicles movie was never targeted at the fanbase in general, the stated goal was to use it to bring new, younger fans into the franchise. So of course, since the average anime fan has nothing but contempt for Robotech, they had to try and appeal to the next best thing... the teenagers with holes in their pockets. Remember... prior to Robotech, Tommy Yune's chief credentials were drawing for Superman and Danger Girl... that's just what he does...

Prior to finding a copy, I'd assumed that Tommy Yune was the main author, and that Vincent McHenry had "consulted" on the book. When I actually got around to reading it, I was surprised to see that virtually none of it is by Tommy Yune, and most of it is copied wholesale from the Robotech.com Infopedia. While the cover may proclaim that the book is by Tommy Yune with a foreword by Carl Macek, the truth of it is that there are four "contributing authors" who aren't mentioned except on the inside cover and at the back of the book, authors who appear to have been the ones to actually get the work done... Vincent McHenry (McHenry), Dr. Kenneth Olson, Jonathan L. Switzer (Captain JLS), and Pieter Thomassen... four fans whose devotion to the franchise eclipses their common sense. A lot of the stuff in Carl Macek's foreword on the "creation" of Robotech is obvious stuff that you could find pretty much anywhere. Apart from some minimal details about the new characters and modified mecha, virtually none of the content is new or in any way original. A lot of it is content copied almost word-for-word from the Robotech.com Infopedia, and what little isn't copied from the Infopedia is all blindingly stupid statements of the obvious about stuff from the movie and the Prelude comics. Except for the excessive use of screen captures in the foreword, almost all of the art is new. The only sections that use Mospeada production lineart are those for the mecha and ships, which use the existing lineart as a reference point, and then show the 3D art (based on/modified from) it. There is literally NOTHING in the book about cut material from the movie, or about the future direction for the series.

That wouldn't hurt my feelings any... I'd probably buy a few. (Says the man with about a half-dozen unbuilt 1:72 VF-2SS SAP Valkyrie II kits)

Without Macross designs, Robotech probably never would've made it in the first place, and those same Macross designs are pretty much all that kept the franchise afloat for the twenty years between the failure of Robotech II: the Sentinels and Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. Hell, the only thing keeping Robotech afloat now is the promise of finding out what became of the few remaining Macross characters. I wouldn't go so far as to say they're "sexier" than RTSC's. It's true Sheryl does have a bit of sex appeal, but it's not her defining characteristic like it is for Maia Sterling, Janice M2, and Ariel/Marlene. The character designs are a lot closer to real human forms too... rather than the Barbie-doll-like women and superhero-esque men of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. Badly. I bought a copy (used) at a garage sale for $1.00 just a few days ago. It's easily the worst anime artbook I've ever laid eyes on. I actually feel like I overpaid. The book was written in large measure by fans (Vincent McHenry, Jon Switzer, and Pieter Thomassen), though the cover bears only Tommy Yune's name, and the announcement that the foreword was written by Carl Macek. The content of the foreword is basically a history of the Robotech franchise as viewed through rose-colored glasses. Parts of it read more like a love letter from Carl Macek to himself. That agonizing bullshit goes on for a full TWENTY pages, complete with reprints of Tommy's various posters and screen captures. They piss away about 12 pages on settings and locations, most of which is wasted on corridor cross-sections, room layouts, and for some stupid reason... VENDING MACHINES. 26 pages are devoted to character art, which pretty much consists of a one-paragraph blurb about each character, an early sketch, a mid-development sketch that looks like something out of 90's DC Comics, and the completed design. 21 pages are devoted to the mecha designs, which are also one brief paragraph, plus some Mospeada lineart, one or two images of the completed design (movie screencaps) and occasionally a mid-development view. No multiple angles, nothing even remotely useful. Even if they are multiple pictures of the same mecha it's always from the same angle. 20 pages are devoted to ships, pretty much the same damn thing as the mecha pages, a waste of time. At the very end, there's a 10 page article on actually MAKING the damn movie, and then a brief two-page glossary of terms, a brief mecha stats section made mostly of reprinted Infopedia data, and a two-page Index.

Yeah, the old Bandai 1:100 transformable kit leaves a bit to be desired, accuracy-wise. The mecha itself is fairly accurate to the art and animation, but the backpack of the Super Armed Pack system is about twice as thick as it's supposed to be, and sits much higher up on the airframe than it's supposed to. Presumably there's some kind of hinge or other retaining mechanism holding it in place besides that one large retaining arm, but it isn't shown in the art. I suppose it IS possible that large arm is the main structural element holding the rail cannon in place. It's rare for a toy to be 100% accurate to the mecha seen in the show... it's just too difficult most of the time. I am hoping that the VF-100 series VF-2SS (if a SAP version is released for it) will be more accurate to what's shown in the lineart and the animation.

Are you sure you're talking about Macross II, and not, say, a far worse offender called Macross Frontier? The VF-2SS Valkyrie II's rail cannon is far and away the largest VF-mounted weapon in Macross II, and it's only about 7 meters long. I seem to remember the VF-27 lugging around a beam rifle that's well over 14 meters long... longer than the entire VF-2SS WITH THE RAIL CANNON. I also seem to recall the VF-25G lugging around a railgun that's at least 10 meters long, significantly larger than the one on the VF-2SS. Of course, if you want to talk disproportionate weaponry, you can't do better than the VF-25 Armored Messiah. So we're left with two conclusions... you're either misinformed, or you're projecting so hard I could point you at a wall and use you to show the Powerpoint presentation at my next meeting. There's already been one... Bandai did a 1:100 scale transforming VF-2SS w/ SAP parts kit back in the 90's, and they're releasing a VF-2SS toy as part of the VF-100 series. I'm hoping they'll also cover the VF-2JA Icarus and maybe even the Metal Siren eventually. I'd be over the moon about it if they released a 1:60 VF-2SS.

Yeah, they've said a few times that they were perfectly willing to bring Macross to the world, and that the problem was Big West not wanting to deal with them. It doesn't look like the actions of a company acting in good faith at all... it looks more like the actions of a company that wants to keep a stranglehold on a potential competitor and continue profiting from someone else's work.