Seto Kaiba

lol, we got Valks with bits and funnels back in Macross II and its tie-in Macross: Eternal Love Song in the early 90's. Though the number of dockable drones in Macross Delta is certainly veering back into that territory. Gundam-y Macross has been done before. Does nobody remember that Lord Feff is a Char, complete with horned red mecha that's three times faster? Then rejoice and be glad... because that's what we're getting. Opinions... and questionable ones at that. The Witch from Mercury was a thinly written mess with a barely-there plot that frequently forgets what the hell it's doing and why, and can't even present a consistent vision of its own setting despite being just twenty-four episodes long. Beautifully animated, tho. ... OK, as critical as I am of G-Witch, now I'm just questioning if y'all actually watched the same series I did because there is NOTHING like that in there. Which, more than anything, reflects the difference between older Macross fans in the west and the rest of the Macross fandom. Macross Plus and Macross Zero may be beloved by older fans in the west, but among the majority of Macross fans they're considered middle-tier at best. When Big West polled the fans in '19 shortly after Passionate Walkure came out, Macross Frontier was the #1 ranked series overall and had a strong showing in every category of voting. Not a surprise, given that Macross Frontier is the most successful series to date. Macross Plus ranked 7th and 8th, and Macross Zero ranked 11th (out of 16). I have a feeling that the older fans in the west are going to be somewhat disappointed with the next series, given that the darker and more action-centric titles like Plus and Zero got ranked well below the brighter and more character-focused titles like Frontier, DYRL?, 7, SDF, and Delta. They might be bringing Macross to the west, but it's a safe bet that they'll be prioritizing the Japanese audience's preferences while making it.

As far as we know, Zentradi clones are produced in an adult state. Moaramia Jifon was part of a Zentradi rebel group, so she was probably born rather than cloned. The organization that raised her is just described as Zentradi guerillas, so presumably their motives were not as political as Latence's.

I'm relatively certain that's just a convenience for the kit. Not that I'm aware? I think it's all standard HD (1080p) so far.

Well, let's hope it turns out better than The Witch from Mercury... that one limped to a finish today. Not surprised that show only lasted two cour... a very weak offering. It was, however, a bit surprising that it soured its own unearned happy ending when the epilogue snuck in a jab about how the protagonists didn't actually accomplish anything and how the status quo ante would quickly reassert itself despite Miorine's token gesture. After the series pulled a whole pantheon's worth of deus ex machinas, I wasn't prepeared for that bit of reality ensuing. IMO, UC's kinda played out though. They've got an uphill battle to make a Zeon protagonist sympathetic or interesting though. MS IGLOO proved it can be done, but... well... they've got Thunderbolt proving it ain't easy either.

True that, some authors have gone to pretty extreme lengths to get out of their own work... like Tite Kubo spending the entirety of the final two arcs of Bleach essentially burning his own story down by openly mocking the audience and killing as many characters as he could. Considering how much in-story time is spent on analyzing the Titans and trying to figure out why they didn't make scientific sense, IMO it's not entirely unreasonable that a lot of fans are upset they never got ANY real explanation. It was THE mystery for much of the first half, even moreso than "what's in the basement?". I do worry a bit about die-hard AoT fans though... not just because it's so bleak and replete with total bastards, but because the second half is all kinds of worrying for ideological reasons.

There are a multitude of reasons, depending on the reader... but most of them revolve around the final story arc just being a bit of a mess in general being all kinds of unsatisfying with its rushed and inconsistent pacing, the extended divergence to attempt to justify Eren's campaign of global genocide, the often problematic and ill-defined motivations of both Eren and Ymir, the unresolved implication that Ymir is the true greater scope villain, the many forced-feeling epiphanies about man's inhumanity to man, the excessive use of New Powers as the Plot Demands, the attempt to depict Eren's death as sad, and the conclusion being Eldia remaining a fascist ethnostate under Jaegerist rule and an ongoing threat to the rest of humanity while the state of Eren's grave implies that the Titans will return in the near future to attempt to finish what Eren started. All that and they never did get around to actually explaining the Titans themselves... the whole ontological mystery might as well just be "it's magic, I ain't gotta explain sh*t", which is unsatisfying to say the least.

Yeah, I'd like to see them get away from that again too... Granted, Macross II technically started it with Lord Feff having a custom Gigamesh in full Char Custom style. Macross Frontier: The Wings of Goodbye and Macross Delta ran a bit far with it. The YF-29's a straight-up super-prototype ala Gundam, the YF-30 retroactively became one thanks to the introduction of the economized version in the VF-31 Kairos, and of course the VF-31 Custom Siegfried and VF-31AX Kairos Plus were very much Gundam-style Ace Custom versions.

SlashFilm's plaudit for Strange New Worlds is... well... technically correct. "The best Star Trek show in decades". It's not wrong, it's just... not exactly great praise consider how the other Star Trek shows of the last 25 years did. Voyager ended on a ratings low note. Enterprise got cancelled due to poor ratings caused by audience fatigue, Discovery flopped, Picard flopped, Prodigy didn't perform up to expectations, and Lower Decks is just sort of... present. It's way better than just "the best of a bad lot". It stands head, shoulders, knees, toes, eight Enterprises, and a whole rogue planetoid above everything that's come out since Voyager ended. I picked it up on digital library instead of physical media, but I've been enjoying the hell out of rewatching it. Probably the best fourteen or so bucks I've spent all year.

There is definitely some bromance there on Q's side. ... wait, does this make Q Jack's atemporal stepfather? ... on further note, was the reason Q hit Janeway up for help with family planning because Jean-Luc had already shot him down? I feel like this could veer into some dangerous fan-fiction territory VERY quickly. Yeah, I know... it's a shared universe and all, but even in shared universes some protagonist/antagonist pairings just feel proprietary y'know? When the Joker's the big bad, everyone expects Batman. It's the same thing here. Yeah, Jean-Luc has history with the Borg... but it was Kathryn Janeway who was the Wrecker of the Borg's sh*t on a repeat basis for three entire seasons and a series finale which resulted in an offscreen Borg genocide that set up the entire third season of Picard.

I don't disagree... but in a long-running series or franchise like this, there's always going to be That One Enemy who has more chemistry and screen time with a particular member of the cast and becomes "their" villain. Jean-Luc Picard's signature antagonist has always been Q. Q was TNG's first AND last villain, and he had more face time with Picard than any other character. Even when he was on other Trek shows, Q always found a way to work Picard into whatever he was doing. The Borg Queen might've been introduced in a TNG movie, but almost all her appearances were in VOY, it's Janeway's name she was snarling in frustration in most of her appearances, and it's VOY that brought the Borg so low. It's not that they're exclusive, just that the Borg Queen's way more associated with Janeway than Picard... esp. since we're seeing the Borg Queen in the aftermath of what the two Janeways did to her. It doesn't really feel like a final showdown for Picard because he only ever fought the Borg Queen once, and even then Data did all the heavy lifting. It lacks a certain je ne sais quoi when it comes to a main character's final showdown, y'know? I mean, they kinda did in a way. The TNG writer's room considered the Borg to be Too Awesome To Use, which is why they appeared so infrequently in the series and only had two direct confrontations with the crew of the Enterprise prior to First Contact. It was VOY's writers who decided to use the Borg as a recurring antagonist in a similar vein to the Klingons and instigated the villain decay that landed them in the mess they're in in Picard. The Borg are in the state they're in not because of anything Picard did, but because of EVERYTHING Janeway did. There is that, yeah... but the Dominion War was largely fought by the Jem'Hadar, the Breen, and the Cardassians. The Enterprise crew fought in the war, but it was Sisko's lot who had most of the contact with the Founders because they had Odo and proximity to the wormhole. If you're doing a big finale for one of the franchise's most iconic characters, you'd want the final villain to have some serious personal resonance for that character right? Picard's never had any involvement with the Founders and, well, the Borg Queen's less his nemesis and more an annoying ex who's spent more time at loggerheads with Janeway than him. Q's the one who bookended Picard's entire experience, and they wasted him on season two.

He kind of is, though... While Jean-Luc Picard was the first Starfleet Captain to encounter the Borg and he did suffer at their hands and might even consider them his most bitter enemy, that feeling was never mutual. The Borg Collective's villain decay might've started on Jean-Luc's watch in Star Trek: First Contact with the reinvention of the Borg as cyber-zombies controlled by a Queen, but it was Star Trek: Voyager that really put them through the wringer when they were coopted as recurring antagonists. Janeway made enough of a nuisance of herself in her encounters with the Borg for the Queen to be her signature antagonist and for the Borg Queen to absolutely loathe her after the first few run-ins. Janeway was also the one to put the Borg in the dire state we see in Star Trek: Picard. Future!Janeway from "Endgame" infected the Borg Queen with that neurolytic pathogen that wiped out almost the entire Collective and left the Borg Queen cannibalizing drones to stay barely alive on the one remaining functional Borg cube. Likewise, it was Benjamin Sisko who was really the nemesis of the Founders. He made first contact with the Dominion. He was the one the Dominion used to benchmark the Federation's reactions to the Dominion, the commander of the most important military installation in the entire Dominion War, and commanded several key offensives that led directly to the Dominion's defeat. He was also basically Starfleet's expert on changeling infiltration. Sisko's true nemesis was Gul Dukat, but the Founders and Dominion were something of an overlapping interest after Cardassia joined the war and Dukat became the Founders representative governing Cardassia. Jean-Luc Picard's nemesis was, if anyone, Q. But they wasted Q on that god-awful second season and quite honestly Picard's relationship with Q came to a more logical end in "All Good Things". Significantly watered down... it's actually a bit of a plot hole. Whatever changed about how the rogue Founders shapeshift that allowed them to pass undetected despite the anti-changeling measures from the Dominion War, it left them with the weaksauce weaknesses that were previously unique to Odo and attributed to him being an inexperienced shapeshifter. The Founders used to be undetectable and able to hold their shape indefinitely. These new ones need to return to their liquid state for several hours a day and when they go too long between rests their disguise starts to slip.

Yeah, season three is pretty much pure nostalgia-fodder. The Borg... yeah... and it doesn't help that, because Star Trek: Voyager did so much more with the Borg and the Borg Queen than The Next Generation and its movies ever did, Picard's third and final season feels like the coda of Jean-Luc's adventures is him on janitorial duty cleaning up the crumbs of Sisko and Janeway's adventures. The Dominion War was Sisko's thing and and Janeway's the one responsible for the dire straits the Borg found themselves in. It almost feels like the Borg Queen came back to get revenge on the wrong person... future!Admiral Janeway is already dead, but she and now!Admiral Janeway are the ones who wrecked the Borg Collective's sh*t so comprehensively they're down to a single barely operational cube. It could've been handled better, but at least it was better than the two previous seasons. We'll take what we can get, right? Pretty much the entire reason they cast her, if you take their press releases at face value.

Then why come here and whine about it to us? Like I said, this ain't a hatedom site... contemporary anime is enjoyed here and Macross is a thriving franchise with new shows and movies on a regular basis. Got another one in the pipeline for later this year and early next, in fact. Not nearly as much as you'd like to think... there are plenty of moments of levity, goofiness, and fanservice in even titles as old as Space Battleship Yamato and Mobile Suit Gundam. Like Kai messing about with a pistol and it coming apart comedically in his hands, Frau Bow chasing the kids around the ship during bathtime, the entire White Base corps simping for Matilda, full or partial nudity on the part of Char, Sayla, and Mirai, Amuro's many tantrums, pratfalls, and the sheer amount of buttmonkey antics Zeon grunts go through... the kids are a vehicle for a bunch of just full-on late 70's cartoon physical comedy. The simple reality is that things really haven't changed that much. That content was pretty typical from that entire era. The prototypes of everything you're complaining about are from that very time. Those occasional lighthearted moments are pretty essential to the darker shows, to avoid darkness-induced audience apathy and viewer burnout. And FFS that Full Metal Panic! clip you picked as an example is literally from a comedy-focused spinoff and not the actual series proper. It is over-the-top goofy ON PURPOSE. The problem with your argument here being that those older shows you're putting on a pedestal had the same kind of fanservice and cringeworthy behavior from their teenaged characters as the shows you're complaining about. You seem to have just mentally edited those moments out. You'll find a fair few of them in here, for instance... especially once it gets to the Double Zeta section. It shouldn't be a surprise that teenage characters in shows for teenagers occasionally do cringeworthy things... teenagers do cringeworthy things. Find something new to take pleasure in. It's a big world. Lots of good stuff out there worth being passionate about. I'd imagine if you stopped putting these old shows on a pedestal, took off the rose-tinted glasses, and watched them for what they really are you'd have a Not So Different realization about them and find the newer stuff easier to enjoy. A lot of good stuff is getting made both by established franchises and new properties. Dude, we're literally using Gundam as an example here... the quintessential "war is hell" series. The one where half a dozen spinoffs seem to exist to do nothing except break the hearts and souls of the viewer. It is all about hammering home the dread of war and senseless death. It was engineered to maximize the sense of dread to get its message across. Also, everything was competing for eyeballs back then too. That has NOT changed. It's arguably less cutthroat now than it was back then thanks to streaming and on-demand that supplements or has supplanted broadcast and home video rentals. Shows lived and died by their viewership shares, and several major titles like Gundam nearly bit the bullet before becoming sleeper hits in reruns. Put bluntly, this isn't the venue for it. Like I said before, some people might find your position a bit relatable but the angst you're freighting it with looks pretty silly as others have already told you. I think your problem might be that the anime you remember never really existed... I see this a lot in Robotech fans who, as they've gotten older, have mentally edited out parts of the shows and reinvented them in their minds with things that weren't even in them to begin with. These old shows had blatant fanservice and goofy moments of comic relief and characters doing dumb stuff. It's just a part of the Japanese sense of humor and, yes, a part of what made them enjoyable in the first place. There are absolutely folks from that era here, but by in large their memories of what these shows were like is a lot closer to the objective reality of them. So, yeah... you have two problems: You have to contend with your own skewed and inaccurate recollection of what those older shows were like. This happens, it's a normal part of aging. What you're looking for is stasis in a changing market... which is not something you're going to get anywhere. You were never in the target audience to begin with, and even if you had been you've been out of that demographic for decades. Anime has LOTS of feel-good, mindless entertainment... cute romances, funny romcoms, heartwarming and hilarious slice of life shows, unsettling horror, heart-pumping action, unusual rethinks of classic stories, bizarre premises, the kind of variety you just can't get anywhere else. It's one reason I love it so dearly... it always has something new to show me. I could bury you in recommendations if you'd let me. Thanks to streaming services like Crunchyroll and HiDive, we have an embarrassment of riches now. A little objectivity about those old shows you remember so fondly and you can unlock a world of enjoyment in the here and now. To give you a couple examples of the diverse tastes on offer that I'm currently sampling: Mashle - a comedy series riffing on Harry Potter about a magic-less young man attending a wizard school who has to fake it 'til he makes it using his supreme physical fitness in order to settle a bet with a man blackmailing his father. My Love Story with Yamada at Lv.999 - a cute little romcom about a girl whose boyfriend dumps her for a girl he met online, who then falls for a taciturn pro gamer she met at a live event. Birdie Wing - an absolutely insane sports anime set in a world where golf is Serious Business starring a golf prodigy who made a name for herself in underground mafia-run golf gambling. Requiem for the Rose King - a drama that reimagines the story of Richard III with the titular king being male-presenting intersex. (Where but anime do you get a premise like this?) Zombie Land Saga - an idol anime about a deranged producer who, by means unexplained, revives five dead young girls from different eras of Japanese history as zombies in order to form a regional idol group. Saiyuki RELOAD Blast - a continuation of Gensoumaden Saiyuki, a warped retelling of Journey to the West in which a chainsmoking, gun-toting monk Sanzo and his party of demons make a trip to India to prevent the ox demon king from being revived. Sengoku Basara: End of Judgement - an over-the-top take on Japanese history based on the musou game series. Kongming of the Party People - legendary chinese military genius Kongming is revived in modern Japan and uses his strategic nous to help a young girl make it big in the music industry. Lupin Zero - a prequel to Lupin III about the titular character in his youth.

Then you have come to the wrong place. While some older fans here might not find new titles entirely to their taste, this is not a community that hates new anime. Anime, like any other artistic medium, develops and changes with the times... both stylistically and thematically. It sounds like the issue here is that anime as a medium has simply left you behind as it grew, developed, and adapted to the changing times and new audiences. "Cute", "cool", and "hot" are all subjective... so is "mature looking" considering the massive variance in art styles. "Heroic adventure" is a bit vague, but there are plenty of action/adventure type shows out there even today, though stylistically and thematically different from what was popular in the 80's and 90's because the times and tastes of the primary audience have changed as people age into and out of the primary (teenage) demographic. Several of the industry's very biggest titles are "heroic adventure" type stories (e.g One Piece), though the distinctive art styles can be somewhat hard to get used to. Your choice to compare Gundam and Code Geass to complain about teenage cringe is an odd one to say the least, given that Gundam's Universal Century (and many of its other timelines) seem to have a mandatory policy of the protagonist being an angsty, moody, occasionally cringeworthy teenager who is (rather realistically) not exactly thrilled to become a child soldier and is frequently accompanied by several other awkward teens. Code Geass was very much a spiritual successor to Gundam not just overall, but in that specific sense as well. The TL;DR here is that you might find more to enjoy in modern anime if you removed the rose-tinted glasses you're clearly wearing while talking about "the old stuff". There's plenty of compelling entertainment on offer from the anime industry today. Of course, it's also possible that the medium is simply no longer for you. So you have watched literally every anime title to verify this claim? Admittedly, there are a lot of titles that do feature a "bad future" and that's been true since at least the late 70's. Yamato and Gundam are two excellent examples there, both being long-runners with consistently pessimistic futures and they set the tone for their genres for decades into the present. Macross is kind of the odd child of that family in that it's consistently optimistic. Of course, if we want to examine why media is less optimistic about the future... well... look at the present. There is a reason that reading the news online is called "doomscrolling", the ugliness of the world has a much better press agent than it did in the 80's and 90's and that's reflected in contemporary entertainment. On the plus side, that also means there are a lot more people taking notice of the world's problems and agitating to fix them, even if it's negativity that's driving clicks and views. Granted, Star Trek has put more emphasis on spectacle since the failed 2009 attempt to reinvent the franchise as a generic sci-fi/action series. This is partly a product of it being a streaming exclusive now, and streaming properties are competing very heavily on visual presentation. Its politics really haven't changed, though... and yes it was always political and it was frequently EXTREMELY unsubtle about it. Quite a few of the topics in older Trek that might not seem partisan now still are, and quite a few more were HEAVILY partisan at the time the show was made. TOS was conceived as a sci-f spin on the kind of morality tales that westerns were infamous for. What's changed is that, in Discovery and Picard, the writers shifted from the franchise's usual MO of making alien cultures the vehicle for the sociopolitical allegory and commentary to the Federation being the vehicle for the allegory and commentary. This, combined with current events, led to a certain dark tone. Strange New Worlds is very much a course-correction back towards the older, more successful formula and optimistic outlook. I suggest you give it a try, you will likely find it a very welcome breath of fresh air. Have you considered that might be a "you" problem? Especially if you're searching for like-minded people on the basis of what you hate.

At the very least, it's more or less a given it'll land on a few digital library-type services like YouTube, Prime Video, and so on... they already have the first season. That said, I'm less than surprised that Prodigy is following Picard and Discovery into cancellation. It's a well-executed bad idea. Star Trek and the TV-Y7 demographic just aren't a good match. Star Wars works for that demographic because it's morally straightforward and action-focused. Star Trek likes to live in the shades of grey and get into themes that'd go over the heads of a TV-Y7 demographic. Wherever it lands, if it gets renewed for a third season hopefully it'll get retooled for the audience that's actually watching it,.

A bit... but, in context, it's not exactly surprising either. Not only were the Eugenics Wars/WW3 the most destructive conflict in human history by an enormous margin, but Humanity's had a lot of conflicts that validate their decision to ban genetic augmentation in the time since. Pre-Federation Earth had a couple run-ins with groups like the Suliban cabal and its genetically augmented soldiers, or Dr. Arik Soong's rather foolish attempt to prove that augments were evil psychos by nurture not nature that resulted in multiple massacres and nearly started a war with the Klingons in Enterprise before the doctor conceded it was nature after all and began attempting to engineer it out of them. Or Kirk's USS Enterprise finding Earth's greatest dictator floating around in Star Trek: the Original Series and his misguided revenge in the Wrath of Khan. The Federation's own attempts to do benign genetic enhancement (e.g. TNG "Unnatural Selection") unintentionally led to mass death. So it seems that every time human attitudes have started to thaw towards genetic engineering, they've run into a situation that's made them say "Oh yeah, that's why we don't do that." Like they said at Bashir's trial, for every benevolent augment there's the possibility of a non-benevolent super-intelligent madman. The various Doctors Soong couldn't even seem to solve that problem in their switch to AI development, with any Soong-type android or bio-android having at best a coin-flip's chance of being either a saint or card-carrying genocidal villain.

This. A big part of what sets Strange New Worlds apart from previous Secret Hideout Trek offerings is that the abject misery that defined Discovery and Picard has been replaced with good humor. Star Trek's trademark optimism and idealism is back, and instead of being miserable bastards who hate themselves and/or each other the characters all clearly like their jobs and they people they work with. That easy camaraderie and the sense of humor they have about the situations they find themselves synergizes nicely with the lighthearted tone and writing style to make the whole series just great fun.

Not really. Because Discovery's second season ended with an in-universe "and let us never speak of this again, on pain of death" on Starfleet's part, the references to Discovery are few and either kept deliberately minor or intentionally vague. Strange New Worlds does make occasional references to the events of Discovery's second season, but anything important enough to be more than fanservice is explained in context in the series well enough that watching Discovery is not necessary to understand it. Pike's character arc is driven by an event he experienced in Discovery's second season, and there are some allusions to the Discovery being recorded as lost with all hands in the battle at the end of its show's second season. That aside, it's mainly just nods to the official story that the USS Discovery was lost in battle at the end of Discovery S2 and Spock at one point acknowledges the existence of his "sister" but goes no farther than that. The end of Discovery's second season and the start of Strange New Worlds's first season are separated by somewhere around a year of in-universe time, with the former ending in 2258 and the latter starting in 2259, a bit over five years before the start of James T. Kirk's tenure in Star Trek's original series in 2265. I was rather guarded about it, since Discovery was such a mess and Anson Mount's Captain Pike was the one bright spot in its second season... but Strange New Worlds has exceeded even my wildest expectations to the point that I'd call it a worthy addition to the prime timeline and quite a bit better than many of that timeline's later offerings. It's full on "I came expecting copper and I found gold".

Still rewatching season one... and I am still blown away every single episode by how much better this is than anything else the franchise has produced since Enterprise went off the air. I am not merely enjoying this, I am having a fantastic time with this. This is everything new Trek should have been from the start. It looked great on a 1080p computer monitor, but it looks amazing on a proper QLED set. The set design is amazing, the characters are engaging, the stories are fun and exciting... in almost every respect this really did feel like the show that could do no wrong.

I... I... what in the actual **** did I just watch? I just finished watching this trailer a minute ago and it already feels like a fever dream or a hallucination. Like... this cannot be a real thing that exists in the world we live in. It's clear that Netflix learned absolutely nothing from the failure of their Cowboy Bebop adaptation... and I'm not sure if that means this is going to be completely unwatchable or a beautiful disaster. My need to see this goes beyond Bile Fascination. I don't just want to see how they're going to **** this up. I need to see how they're going to **** this up. This is potentially a watershed moment that will redefine the entire field of ****ing things up. I cannot express how very badly I want to see the inevitable edit of this show's opening with the rap song from the aborted 4Kids dub of One Piece.

Eh... I can see why you might think so, but it's misleading. Yes, Harmony Gold has been involved in quite a number of "legal disputes" related to their Robotech franchise over the last 24 or so years... if we paint with a very broad brush. In truth, most of those "disputes" were little more than exchanges of Cease and Desist notices like the attempts to stifle the import of Macross toys in 1999. Those have supposedly come from a document prep service rather than an actual attorney. They've only had a few actual court sessions or binding arbitrations since 1999 and it's abundantly clear from the publicly available records of those that Harmony Gold is just as miserly when it comes to their legal representation as they are with Robotech's development and production. Also, one thing we learned a while back was that Harmony Gold wasn't paying for those days in court out of pocket either. They were deducting those court costs and attorney's fees from the royalties they were paying to Tatsunoko for the three shows because the license allowed them to do that in exchange for being required to take legal action on the behalf of the Japanese IP owners in certain cases.

Yeah, nobody knows for certain. The one potential explanation that we have that makes logical sense is that WB and Sony each independently picked up the Robotech rights for no reason other than its incidental relationship to Transformers... with neither having any intention to actually produce such a film, only to deny the rights to others. Like I said, the money and the talent to develop original material were just never there for Robotech. The whole thing was a minimally funded fly-by-night operation from the outset and its unremarkable ratings and poor merchandise sales did not inspire anyone to make significant capital investments in it even in the '80s. They did the best they could with what they had, and what they had was a pittance, a bad reputation, and a showrunner who was quite frankly a hack. Which is probably another reason it's never getting made...

It's doubtful Sony had a plan at all. The only reason WB picked up the movie rights was because Transformers was making serious bank for Paramount, and Robotech just happened to be a contemporary of the original Transformers cartoon that also had giant robots. The same is almost certainly true for Sony, given the Robotech license's only real value is its tangental relationship to the cash cow of one of their major competitors in the event that giant robots became a major trend somehow. Otherwise, the license is worthless because it doesn't grant any access to the actual content of the show. They're paying for a name and nothing else, but they're not paying much. Probably not. If there was a financial argument for the Robotech movie, it wouldn't have spent the last 15 years in development hell with nothing to show for it but a handful of story treatments and possibly some extremely dodgy concept art. As it stands, if they were to somehow convinced Big West to agree to let them use the Macross designs, they'd have to pay quite a bit for a license and presumably pay some pretty significant royalties to Big West for the use of that IP. It'd be a fairly safe bet that Big West would make far more money on the movie than Harmony Gold would... to the point that it would probably be cheaper to cut Harmony Gold out of the loop entirely.

Well, yes... but Big West isn't making it, and by all accounts Harmony Gold doesn't want them involved either. The movie proposal is for a reimagining, not an adaptation, because Harmony Gold wants to use it to launch a new Robotech metaseries that isn't dependent on licensed IP. It's all about making something truly original so they can stop living in fear of Big West and Tatsunoko's lawyers the way they've been doing for the last 23 years.

It doesn't use the word "script" at all... it just mentions that there are things in the pictures that were not in the animation of Macross, Southern Cross, or MOSPEADA. It's just sloppy reportage jumping to assumptions in order to make this nothingburger seem like something to meet a word count. Simply put... because they can't legally do that and because that is counter to their intended purpose of getting away from "you can't legally do that" scenarios. Harmony Gold's license to Macross, Southern Cross, and MOSPEADA only grants them the distribution and merchandising rights to those shows outside of Japan. All they can do with that material is release those shows on broadcast/cable/streaming/home video, edit them for distribution (e.g. dub, cut out objectionable material), and produce merchandise based on the contents of those shows. The intellectual property rights to those original shows - the ownership of the original stories, concepts, designs, etc. AKA the copyrights on that material - belong to the creators of the original shows. Harmony Gold cannot use any of that material in new film works without first obtaining permission to use that material in the form of a license. In the past, they have been able to obtain limited licenses to use the designs from Southern Cross and MOSPEADA in their own original works (e.g. Sentinels, Shadow Chronicles) because those shows are owned by Tatsunoko Production and the cost of the license is peanuts because those shows are old and forgotten and were never commercially successful to begin with. Using designs from Macross has always been a bridge too far because Macross is a popular and successful series with its own much more successful franchise and isn't owned by Harmony Gold's longtime partner Tatsunoko Production. They would have to get a license from Big West and Studio Nue, which would not only be prohibitively expensive but also a difficult proposition due to relations between the HG and Macross's owners being bad. No matter how much money is offered, Big West/Studio Nue can just say "No" if they don't want to dilute their brand by letting HG use part of their IP or take a risk on whatever HG has planned. Harmony Gold's goal for the proposed live action movie was specifically to get away from that legal rigmarole of having to get licenses and approvals and send absolutely every decision through multiple rounds of legal review as they've been doing since ~2000 by making a clean break with the Robotech animated series and starting over from scratch to develop an all-new, all-original Robotech they could capitalize on without needing to buy licenses from, and pay royalties to, Tatsunoko or any other party. The catch, of course, being that Macross is the only part of Robotech that the vast majority of Robotech fans care about and the only part that has any brand recognition. Bereft of the original Macross series, Robotech doesn't have any brand recognition to speak of that would drive audiences to see a Robotech movie so why would any studio actually make a movie if all they're really getting for the license is the title. They could make exactly the same all-original sci-fi movie and pay Harmony Gold nothing just by not using the title, so why bother? That Harmony Gold can't, and never planned to, use Macross in their proposed live action movie also makes it profoundly unlikely that this alleged concept art is legitimately from the project. Why pay for concept art for something you literally cannot do?