Seto Kaiba

... ok, I might have to look that one up later because that actually sounds kinda funny. FWIW, I've been enjoying The Mandalorian as well. The visuals are basically flawless, and while the show's writing does have some issues none have been enough to impair my enjoyment of the series in a significant way. It was definitely a "by fans for fans" sort of production, but through the end of season two its presentation has remained accessible enough that casuals like me aren't shut out of the story in any meaningful way. I'd say its biggest weakness is that its protagonist is almost always masked and the stakes in his story thus far haven't really been his. It is, but I feel like even that could have been handled better. Setting up a final confrontation between Din's rescue party and Moff Gideon's Dark Troopers only for a character who had, up to that point, never even been mentioned in the series to show up uninvited and unannounced to demote the season's final threat to an afterthought feels a bit cheap. I kind of suspect that it gets a pass mainly because the Jedi who shows up is Deepfake Luke Skywalker. If it's been anyone else, would fans have been as excited to see the show's protaognist demoted to spectator for the final fight of the season?

Two reasons: Design. The Quel Quallie was designed to be a reconnaissance/electronic warfare/signals intelligence platform and equipped appropriately. Its armor is heavy to protect the specialist crew and sensitive electronics, but its armament is light for its size and mainly defensive. Most Zentradi equipment is engineered with a specific purpose or role in mind, so presumably the role of a larger attacker would be given to something like the heavy attack craft seen in DYRL?. Cost. Presumably due to its multitude of high-precision, high-sensitivity sensor systems and the high degree of automation necessary to support them, the Quel Quallie is said to be expensive enough that each (branch) fleet only has around a dozen of them.

OK, that would have been a useful detail to have in the series... given that the previous exposition in The Mandalorian only indicated that the Mandalorians regarded the Jedi as an ancient and sorcerous foe, it did strike me as odd that what is for all intents and purposes Mandalorian Excalibur would be a lightsaber. That their legendary founder-king WAS a Jedi... that at least explains why the key to their entire civilization is the signature weapon of their ancient enemy. I figured as much, given that Bo mentions it was taken from her and is a legendary relic of her people there'd have to be some involved backstory to that. He did and he didn't... yeah it pummeled his head into a wall and he's mysteriously concussion-proof now, but armor really does seem to still be useless unless it's beskar as he stabs it to death(? deactivation?) with a spear and that works where no amount of fire or gunfire did. Though, admittedly, that's beside the point in my opinion. If the droids are a major threat that's fine... but it's kind of bad form, narratively speaking, to have an outside-context solution arrive and neatly resolve the problem without your characters actually having to do anything. Having a character who's never even been mentioned up to that point show up in the nick of time and do all the heavy lifting is a bit cheap, y'know? Wouldn't it have been more thrilling if the Mandalorians fought their way out, or Luke at least showed up mid-fight to save them in their daring last stand. It's not as exciting for the heroes to just sit there and watch someone else have all the fun. At the very least, maybe be a bit more proactive about his own defense? Come to that... Mandalorians have an in-story reputation as basically the most feared and respected elite warriors in the galaxy, right? Isn't it kind of weird how ready even randos off the street are to take a swing at Din? It's one thing for bounty hunters looking for a big payoff to do it, but a pack of fish-man fishermen who apparently live near enough to the Mandalorian commune on their world to eat with them and ought to be aware of how stupidly dangerous they are... Yes, I have been well and repeatedly warned about the series. Thus far, it really hasn't lived down to the warnings I've been given about how it'd become more difficult to follow and probably put me off the series. The areas that have actually required outside exposition that I was warned would be more common in season two never really materialized... or whatever it was was clear enough from context that I failed to properly notice most of them. What little needed explaining thus far could probably have been addressed with ~5 minutes of additional exposition spread across the whole show thus far. Either way, I'm gonna give it a fair shot and see.

So... I've finished season two of The Mandalorian, and all in all I didn't really have many issues following the storyline even though there was clearly some required reading involved. I feel like the second season had more of a sense of direction to it, if only because the second season manages not to forget about the main quest for multiple episodes. Mando's quest pivoting from keeping the child safe to delivering it to the Jedi makes it a bit more focused when he then has to go looking for other Mandalorians who could possibly know where to find a Jedi. Mando's still kind of an idiot protagonist though. A lot of his problems are caused by the fact that just blindly trusts everyone he meets even though he gets betrayed and mugged with monotonous regularity. It does help a bit that the ridiculous honor code Mando lives by is revealed to be an extreme version adhered to only by a small group of regressive crazies. Considering how often it gets brought up this season, it seems like the showrunners looked back at their season one concept and decided "Wow that sounded way cooler in my head". This season did a much better job with character development, albeit again almost entirely for secondary/supporting characters. Bringing Boba Fett back from the dead was a mistake, IMO, and from what I've seen of The Book of Boba Fett previously I stand by that remark. Talk about character derailment. Orange Rosario Dawson I gather is an older version of a character from an old cartoon, and there's horrifying deepfake Luke Skywalker at the end reenacting a heroic version of Vader's hallway rampage from Rogue One. While I'm sure that was a huge moment for fans, I can't help but be annoyed by how Mando and crew are saved at the last minute by someone who literally wasn't involved in any part of the plot up until that moment. It's the most blatant kind of deus ex machina short of involving an ACTUAL god. Moff Gideon kind of takes one on the chin in this season. Previously he'd been made out to be a really competent and effective Imperial leader. Here, he's... well... he's got great intel but it's really obvious he's what happens when you order your Imperial boss from Wish. He goes everywhere dressed like Great Value Darth Vader, his ride is a regular TIE fighter, his flagship is a tiny and understaffed light cruiser, and his evil secret weapon is... a slightly less terrible version of the Confederacy's battle droids, that are so inefficient he's unable to field more than a platoon of them? Dude should just give Bo Katan her glowstick... er... I'm sorry... the Darksaber... back. The Mandalorians consider the Jedi an ancient foe... and Mandalorian Excalibur is a lightsaber. I know it's probably from some expanded universe novel from the 90's or something, but wow does "The Darksaber" not hold up as the amazingly cool artifact it's supposed to be.

In a word, "messy". Long story short, the specs for the YF/VF-19's engines have been presented very inconsistently over the years. Originally, the YF-19's two models of engine had separate specs listed and even slightly different designations. This is Animation Special: Macross Plus OVA Edition lists the YF-19's engine as "FF-2200" was provides its output only as 56,500kgf. This is Animation: the Select: Macross Plus Movie Edition conflicts with itself over what the YF-19's engine is called and offers two separate ones. Page 36 mentions a "FF-2200B" rated for 56,500kgf and a "FF-2500E" rated for 67,500kgf... but page 37 refers to the first engine only as the "FF-2200" at 56,500kgf and mentions the FF-2500E not at all. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur and Macross Chronicle decided to be as unhelpful as possible and ignore one engine or the other while effectively treating both of those numbers as valid for the same engine at different regimes. So instead they listed the 56,500kgf figure as the engine's output in atmosphere and listed its performance in space as 64,700kgf but either ignore the FF-2500E altogether or treat it as functionally interchangeable with the FF-2200 or FF-2200B. Master File also invents several types of engine that weren't in the original spec that are used for things like the VF-19A. Then there's Macross Plus: Game Edition and the Macross Plus Blu-ray booklet, which offers a THIRD interpretation where both the "FF-2200B" and "FF-2500E" have the same atmospheric operating output of 47,200kgf and their maximum output in space is 56,500kgf for the FF-2200B and 67,500kgf for the FF-2500E. So... now that we've established that, and let's not get into the mess that the 2nd mass production type is thanks to Master File and Macross Chronicle... The VF-19A Excalibur specification comes to us initially from the Macross Digital Mission VF-X Flight Manual, which lists the engine used as "FF-2200" and lists the only output as 56,500kgf, similar to This is Animation Special: Macross Plus. It's possible that, somewhere along the way, some of these differing interpretations got mixed together in the writer's head and produced that questionable statement. TL;DR: That article may need revisiting/revision.

So... I've been poking more at Variable Fighter Master File: VF-22 Sturmvogel II. This time in the section about the FF-2450B engine. Project Super Nova's requirements initially called for both the YF-19 and YF-21 to use the FF-2200 thermonuclear reaction burst turbine engine, and the section basically starts on that topic. Rather than focusing on refining previous generation engine designs, which according to this book owned some of their issues due to a short development cycle and a decision to adapt existing turbofan jet engine designs, the developers of the FF-2200 decided to go back to the drawing board and start from scratch. The new engine design that team came up with prioritized efficiently extracting the energy from the thermonuclear reaction and emphasized ease of assembly and maintenance. This same situation is also described in the Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur book, which goes further into the idea that previous-gen engines were essentially the same design just scaled up or down depending on the application with occasional improvements in materials and the like. While the FF-2200 proved adequate for the YF-19's needs, the YF-21 was heavier and had greater energy requirements due to its size and the new technologies it adopted and the design team opted to tweak the design to increase its output. The tweaked design became the FF-2450. The basic structure of the FF-2450 is the same as the FF-2200, though the performance of the reactor's GIC has been improved slightly with additional fold carbon to allow the reactor to run hotter and the body of the engine has been lengthened 50cm to accommodate a longer thrust-increase section where the reaction plasma is allowed to mix with intake air. The end result is a 15% increase in total output, paid for in a 33% reduction in operational lifespan. This is followed by an interesting note that the non-standard systems like the Brainwave Control System and various stealth measures leave the YF-21/VF-22 needing twice the power generation capacity of the YF/VF-19. This need is apparently addressed by doubling the number of Hamilton X-Ash 4 thermoelectric converters in the turbine body from four to eight, which has the side benefit of further reducing the exhaust temperature and thus the fighter's infrared profile.

That particular tidbit comes to us from Macross Chronicle's DYRL? Mechanic Sheet 02A for the Zentradi.

Whether she's a pure Star Singer clone or Xaos's illegal clone lab had to fill in some gaps Jurassic Park-style we don't know. Mikumo Guynemer may not be engineered specifically for combat like the Zentradi, but she is a clone (of the Star Singer) that Xaos created specifically for combat use to support their PMC Division's Var suppression operations. Until the end of the main story, she was treated like company property and kept in a lab most of the time when not on duty so no prolonged socialization wouldn't reveal the defects in her implanted knowledge and out her as a clone created just three years ago. It's not really explained properly. "Runes" are sense organs that contain biologically-produced fold quartz and fold receptors, which seem to have been designed into the Windermereans by the Protoculture to give them a very mild, short-ranged empathic ability based on biologically-produced fold waves. My guess would be that, given that resonance between fold wave sources has been a theme in Macross Delta, that runes "blooming" is some kind of resonance effect that occurs when large numbers of Windermereans are broadcasting the same strong emotion at the same time causing constructive interference (amplification). Given that using Var-like effects to boost physical ability was shown to be "Cast from Hit Points" even for Windermereans, causing them to age rapidly, that was probably never in the cards. For Humans, it seems to be similar to hysterical strength and has all kinds of nasty physical consequences resulting from exceeding the structural limits of the body. Hulking out like that just a few times was enough to put Messer Ihlefeld at death's door until Keith mercy-killed him (TV) or he just straight-up died (movie).

In hindsight, I suspect a fair part of that is the changes that were made in the movie's story to accommodate the passing of Ernest Johnson's voice actor Unshou Ishizuka. They likely retooled the story quite a bit when they opted not to recast Ernest Johnson and settled on the retired Maximilian Jenius as a suitable substitute. There's a fair amount of Max-centric moments in the movie that probably weren't a part of the original story concept, and a lot of the more out-there exposition about Lady M is delivered by Max's right hand man Exsedol. It probably incentivized the particularly contentious connection the film ended up drawing WRT Lady M since both Max and Exsedol have got some personal connections with the notorious missing persons on that ship. You're close. In 2060, a government agent named Sydney Hunt stole Star Singer cell samples from the shrine on Windermere IV and traded them to the Epsilon Foundation in exchange for a high-ranking position in the megacorporation's management. He used his new position to sponsor research into biological fold waves and fold wave resonance effects with the goal of applying the results to Lady M's theories regarding songs as weapons in order to weaponize cloned Star Singer cells. The Siren Delta System was the end result, a next-generation quantum AI virtuoid system that could excite the cloned Star Singer cells to produce extremely powerful biological fold waves for a variety of purposes including the remote operation of large numbers of Ghosts (the unmanned Sv-303 Vivasvat), boosting the performance of systems that use fold waves, and even traversing fold faults. It is essentially a better/more stable version of Sharon Apple with more abilities. The bloke in the rose pastel suit and pince-nez hanging around on the Battle Astraea's bridge is Sydney Hunt... or at least one of his remotely-operated cyborg bodies. Like Grace O'Connor in Macross Frontier, he's heavily cyborged and has a bunch of spare bodies he can operate from afar. He's the one responsible for arming Cromwell's anti-government organization and using them to test the Siren Delta System in the field, and late in the movie when the Siren Delta System starts misbehaving he tries to take it and go home but Cromwell's men take violent exception to him bailing on them at the 11th hour. The movie puts a different spin on Wright's actions. Instead of being the thief who stole the Star Singer cell samples for Lady M, he tried and failed to recover the cell samples that Sydney Hunt stole and the one sample that he was able to recover from Sydney ended up in Xaos's hands after relations with Windermere IV soured too much for him to be able to return it. Xaos then used that stolen cell sample it obtained from Wright to illegally create clone soldier Mikumo Guynemer as their trump card against Var syndrome. (There's a remark from Berger Stone that suggests both the Siren Delta System AND Mikumo Guynemer were experimental weapons concepts of Lady M's.) Exposure to Walkure's songs and the accompanying biological fold waves interacted with the Siren Delta System's self-learning functions and the Star Singer cells in some weird ways throughout the film, resulting in the creation of Yami_Q_Ray and the cloned cells developing into a baby. Presumably the influence of Walkure is why it looks like Freyja. That would've made him look too much like the hero instead of a minor supporting character. It also wouldn't have meshed with the other Delta Flight color schemes, since the VF-31 had a more subdued color scheme and the VF-31AX went even lower key with it. (Also, red was already taken... that's Mirage.)

I don't think so. Harmony Gold USA hasn't partnered with anyone to release a Blu-ray of Super Dimension Fortress Macross in its original form, AFAIK. Just the Robotech version. The Japanese domestic market's got it in Blu-ray, but that didn't have English subs IIRC. Last I heard, the only options for the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross were the Animeigo and ADV Films releases on DVD. In the Japanese domestic market, but same as the above... no English sub. Only one or two of the Frontier movie box sets had English subs, and then all the Macross Delta stuff.

Thanks for the head's up there. I watched some chunks of The Book of Boba Fett back when it was coming out, but didn't think much of it. For now I think I'm gonna stick with it. It's not a bad show by any means. I'm enjoying it, I just periodically feel like I'm missing some important context esp. with respect to the Mandalorians as a people. The series really clearly expects the viewer to be already familiar with, and invested in, them. AFAIK, the only ones that showed up in the movies were Boba Fett and his clone-father Jango. My read of them was basically that they were the "hero" version of a Stormtrooper similar to Cpt. Phasma. Aligned with the bad guys, but basically a miniboss at best. Yeah. Four was, at least, engaging in that it offered a little exposition about Mando and his part-time partner the drop trooper. It actually felt like there were stakes in that fight. Six... six is just a mess. The acting was absolutely goddamn awful from all of the members of the "rescue" team. There's hammy, and then there's that. I spent the entire episode wondering to myself what street corner they pulled those four actors off of. The betrayal was absolutely no surprise not just because the client was shady AF and every member besides the droid was presented as a complete psychopath, but because every every one of Mando's clients who isn't a regular civilian tries to betray him. It's telegraphed on an episode level AND a series level, and the whole thing is a veritable tornado of cliches. The worst is when they tried that lame horror cliche where Mando's only visible advancing on them when the lights flicker... if they were playing him as an unstoppable badass that could've built some tension, but he gets the sh*t kicked out of him more often than not so it loses a certain je ne sais quoi when his ambush just leads to him getting beat up again. (It also took me a distressingly long time to realize the droid's voiced by Richard Ayoade.) Season two jumped right onto my biggest pet peeve for Star Wars. Tatooine is supposed to be the middle of ****ing nowhere and home to nothing important. Why does every Star Wars story feel compelled to go there? This is Mando's second visit.

Yeah, you can't blame that one (entirely) on Robotech's indie comic book licensees. When Robotech II: the Sentinels was in development, it wasn't possible to use the original Haruhiko Mikimoto designs from Macross due to copyright and the project's budget from Harmony Gold and its partner Matchbox wouldn't stretch far enough for the studio to hire outside designers. The task of coming up with new, non-infringing character and mecha designs for Robotech II: the Sentinels was handed off to Tatsunoko's internal design team at Studio Ammonite. You may remember them as the masterminds of Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. Presumably because Robotech was an "American series for Americans", many of the male characters picked up the stereotypical square jaw and a more angular face in general. The indie publishers who acquired the comic book license used the designs Ammonite produced for the cancelled series, so Rick's lantern jaw made its way into the comics and became much more associated with the comics because the comics lasted exponentially longer.

Is... is that the alligator from Happy Gilmore? Having just finished season one, to be honest I would call the episodic nature of the series up to the point I'm at its single biggest flaw. It's visually very impressive and the choreography and editing work is quite well done. Starting with a three episode setup and then switching to "villain of the week" just felt like the writers went "bored now!" and decided to do something else. IMO, it really hurt the season's conclusion because the idea that the Imperials were constantly hunting the child found itself on the back burner for entire middle of the season and then a greater scope villain rolls up basically unannounced for the denouement and kills everyone who's been driving the plot so far. If they'd been more serial with it, like Andor, they probably could've done a better job foreshadowing that. Big ol' exposition dump in the final episode notwithstanding, Mando's still pretty thin on character development too. Even that IG droid got more. A taciturn badass character works as a supporting cast member, and if you're going to make that the main character you have to have some other person or plot device to pick up the slack expositionally. IMO, the low point in season one is absolutely episode six "The Prisoner". Every aspect of the plot is telegraphed so hard that it was actually kind of exasperating. That may have been intended to be part of the joke, but IMO they didn't land it becuase Mando can't emote in a face-obscuring helmet.

To be fair, that's not even that far off the pretty poor-quality animation reference for Sentinels...

No worries. I'm watching the series as the suggestion/insistence of a friend, so I have a feeling bailing out now is probably not an option without enduring some reproachful glares. (That's kind of a theme with me and Star Wars... reading the Thrawn trilogy was done after enduring some arm twisting too.) The difficulty I'm having with the story is not so much what's in the story as what's not. The titular Mandalorian is just a taciturn guy in a mask who gets into a lot of fights. They haven't done anything to really explore why this cold-hearted contract killer decided to go on a John Wick-esque murder spree to rescue the child, or why the child was worth the apparently princely sum that was paid to the bounty hunter to bring him in. Or why the child's safety was more important to him than the safety of his foster family. There's not even really a sense that he has a goal right now. I assume at least some of these questions will be answered eventually, but it's rather frustrating to The story is very action friendly, but as of S1E7 I feel like it lacks a sense of direction. Mando's just kind of traveling from one fight scene to the next like the story mode of a fighting game. (I also have this repeated weird moment... Mando keeps holding scopes up to his helmet as though he were wearing a bucket with tinted glass on the front, but in other scenes he's got heat vision or something like it seemingly built in. It just seems odd to me.)

This is another version of the same fallacious argument you were making earlier about the number of comics... The number of countries your show's in doesn't matter if nobody's watching. Think of it this way, since this is a comics thread... if you're a publisher and you have orders for a total of 7,000 copies of the next issue of your comic, it doesn't matter of those orders are from one country or fifty because that doesn't change the total number of orders you received. This is why I'm looking at things like broadcast ratings/viewership shares and merchandise sales. That's much more useful and reliable data than "It aired in X-many markets with a total reach of Y-many people", because there's no guarantee that any of those Y-many people in those X-many markets (never mind all of them) tuned in. On a lark, I fact-checked this... and the only search result for "Robotech" that referred to the series as a "hit" was from the Robotech fandom wiki. Not exactly an impartial source, y'know? But yes, if you'd like I can share some articles about how network executives are struggling to come up with actual criteria to define "hit". Back in the day, it meant that a series had a dominant ratings share either in a competitive time slot or on the network's total broadcast schedule... but that was not the case for Robotech. "Critically acclaimed" and "award winning" are two others that have lost all meaning due to Exact Words, which is why they and "hit" are favorites of marketing. As long a you've got one critic willing to praise it, no matter how minor or unheard-of and even if they're on the studio's own payroll, it's still "critical acclaim". Winning an award by default as the only entrant in a category is still an award won, which is why RTSC can advertise itself as "award winning". As long as the statement is technically true or at least non-falsible, it's fair game for marketing. I would hesitate to use search engine result counts as more than general guidance. It's easy to get sites that do not actually contain relevant content (e.g. random tags in comment fields) and multiple results for a single webpage that infliate numbers.

Well, it is basically an otome fantasy series... so it's less about the conflict and the stakes of the world than Sei being surrounded by a crowd of distressingly pretty men who are all interested in her for one reason or another. It's a different kind of power fantasy from ones aimed at a male audience. (It is pretty darned tedious, yeah.)

So... I've finally found the time to sit down and watch The Mandalorian in its entirety, and I am just absolutely bewildered by this series. TBH, I feel like I missed some required reading along the way. The production quality is absolutely amazing and the action sequences are fine, but the story itself feels so thin that I'm left to wonder if part of it is missing. I'm almost done with the first season, but the protagonist and his young ward don't even have names. The child is an orphan and Mando was one, but that seems to be the totality of their relationship. Lots of shooting, but not much character development. The series also seems to kind of... expect me to not only know who the Mandalorians are but be invested in their struggle. As a casual Star Wars viewer, I'm just lost on the whole topic. They're refugees or something?

OK, that's a fair point. I had thought it was relatively self-evident given that I'm looking at quantifiable benchmarks of performance. Marketing has all but completely devalued the term "hit", but what I'm looking at in terms of Robotech's performance relative to its facing competition... that is to say, relative to the other merchandise-driven animated kid's shows that were active at approximately the same time as Robotech in the mid-1980s. The likes of GI Joe, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Challenge of the Go-Bots, Transformers, Voltron, M.A.S.K., Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, ThunderCats, Jem, The Real Ghostbusters, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and so on. Robotech isn't at the absolute bottom of that pile, but it's pretty close. As I mentioned previously, it really is just awful luck that Robotech was running opposite basically every memorable kid's show of the mid-80's. That is Nightmare difficulty for an attempt to launch a series. In terms of impact, I'm looking at both short and long term. Did it create trends? Did it spawn copycats? Did other existing titles pivot to copy it? DId it spawn spinoffs, sequels, and/or movies? Was it referenced by other works at the time? Is it a household name? What companies picked up licenses? How established are the licensees and what is the total customer base they have? Has it had (successful) revivials? Is it still being referenced now? The answer to most of these questions for Robotech are unflattering to say the least. Again, your conclusion here really doesn't stand up to scrutiny and isn't supported by the evidence. You're presuming that because there is still a fandom now, that the fandom must have been MUCH larger in the past. What you're not account for is that Robotech's following was always a "cult" one. A small number of very devoted fans who were supporting the franchise even when what it was putting out was, to use your own word for it, crap. If you look to things like sales figures for things like comics, you see that Robotech had a small but devoted following that gradually shrank over time. At its peak, orders for the best-selling comics Robotech had were less than half what was being placed for its competitors. Still very respectable numbers by indie standards, but small enough to easily be considered "niche". Those orders got smaller and smaller as time went on and the license changed hands. Folks who were there for the Usenet days and the like attest to the same... that Robotech had a small but fanatical fanbase that gradually drifted away as discontent grew over a variety of issues like the declining quality of the comics, the difficulties reconciling licensee-created material with the TV series, Robotech 3000, and so on. We've already touched on why the volumes of merchandise don't mean anything and why the profusion of comics doesn't mean the audience was large, so I see not reason to go revisiting those points. When it comes to development by Harmony Gold, well... you also have to account for the fact that Robotech is basically a company hobby not a primary revenue stream. Harmony Gold is a rental property management firm that dabbles in television production on the side. If Robotech had been owned by a toy company the way many of its competitors were, it would have met its end in 1987 when the toy line was determined to be beyond saving. Mattel's Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors was in a similar position, with the underperformance of the toy line causing plans for a new season of the series and a movie to be scrapped. Robotech's saving grace was Harmony Gold's not being dependent on it for operating revenue, so they let it limp along when anyone else would've pulled the plug in order to make those quick grabs for some extra cash from a variety of tiny indie licensees. That's how we got the comics, the novels, the RPG, and so on. Those WERE cash grabs, and the license revocations came because they weren't producing said cash as declining quality dragged sales down with it. That's part of why, when Harmony Gold publicly disowned them in the early 2000s, they freely admitted that nobody was overseeing this licensing. Robotech 3000 was a cash grab attempt to jump on the 2000s reboot bandwagon, and that cash grab actually killed some of their other licenses (like making acquiring the Robotech 3000 rights a condition of renewing the RPG license). Where it gets really painfully ironic is the 2000s reboot of Robotech that threw out the old comics, novels, etc. and gave us the actually-not-bad DC/Wildstorm comics and later the Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles "movie" was done on the understanding that Robotech was a niche series with a very small following that needed to rethink its setting and story and business practices to become mainstream and garner a large following. Because they took it seriously and tried to do a professional job, it actually worked for a time. Funding for Shadow Chronicles was explicitly contingent upon it bringing in a large following that would draw sponsors to fund subsequent installments. If they'd funded it well they probably could've succeeded too... but they tried to do it on a hair shirt budget to maximize profits (AKA a "cash grab") and the consequences that had for the project were disastrous. With no money to hire a writer, the script was a mess and the subject of infighting among the creative team. With only minimal market research, the effort to make their new OVA appeal to mainstream anime fans amounted to little more than a cynical attempt to appeal through fanservice. The animation budget was pathetically small so quality suffered, esp. after spending big on hiring supporting voice actors with Star Trek and Star Wars credits (Mark Hamill and DS9's Chase Masterson) to their names to hopefully raise the film's profile. The end result was received incredibly poorly, and the backlash against criticism of it from Harmony Gold directly led to many remaining fans leaving the franchise for greener pastures. Robotech Academy was another cash grab... a Kickstarter cash grab inspired a failure to understand pledge metrics from Palladium's RPG Tactics game. They saw the fans cough up $1.4 million and failed to notice that was from less than 5,500 people worldwide. They (like Palladium) thought they'd found a foolproof way to print money, and it blew up in their faces almost immediately with less than 2,300 people worldwide being willing to sink even a dollar into the prospect of a new Robotech series. That's what landed us back where we are now with Robotech, with the pool of licensees reduced to outfits that are small and questionable even by indie standards (with one earning an unprecedented double cease and desist) and a comic licensee so disinterested in Robotech that they devoted an entire 24 issue series to taking the piss out of it.

I think that 7's music has been bettered since by Frontier... but I absolutely agree with the second half that they did it a huge disservice by overplaying just a few of their songs, esp. in the show's first half. It's real easy to get sick of Planet Dance when it's all you hear. It'll be interesting to see what we get, music-wise, from the next series. I think Delta's music fell down a bit because it was trying too hard to be like Frontier's instead of finding its own identity. Hopefully the next show's music will opt for more originality.

That's your opinion, but the objective benchmarks paint a somewhat more modest tale of a niche series that acquired a small but fiercely loyal following while otherwise kind of flying under the radar. I'm saying that back then not many people cared about it, and that that number is smaller now. That much is clearly indicated by the sales numbers for merchandise like the comics. What you doing here is generalizing from your own experience, without considering if the experience you had was atypical. Generating a lot of merchandise doesn't mean anything if the merchandise only reaches a very small and isolated audience or doesn't sell at all. I feel like that's a key stumbling block in our discussion here. Those small independent publishers working on the Robotech license turned out a large number of titles, but the majority of them seldom lasted more than a few issues and the circulation of even the best selling of them was never more than a few thousand copies. They did well by the relatively low standards of the small independent publishers, but not in absolute terms. Your criteria here are vague, nebulous, or just downright impossible to define. Bigger than average just begs the question of what you're using to determine average and how, the idea of a robust fandom is somewhat counterindicated by the steady decline of the Robotech fandom during the period when the comics were the dominant form of the series as measurable via the decline in sales, and this bit about inspiration is entirely subjective.

Yup... though when you think about it, the idea probably goes back even farther in production terms. When Boddole Zer's mobile fortress started "decaying" at the end of DYRL?, the explanation given is that the fold systems were running out of control after the living command computer died and were teleporting chunks of the ship into fold space. It's not even a joke... I am that bad.

Kind of disappointed with how Tearmoon Empire has turned out. The first episode definitely made it seem like it would be a more serious series, but it's every bit as goofy and comedy-focused as My Next Life as a Villainess. Definitely enjoying The Family Circumstances of the Irregular Witch, though it is some pretty generic slice-of-life/comedy fare. I'm Giving the Disgraced Noble Lady I Rescued a Crash Course in Naughtiness is... pretty unremarkable. I'm gonna give it a few more episodes to find its feet, but it doesn't feel like it's headed anywhere noteworthy.

Hm... if that's how you feel, I'm probably not doing a fantastic job of explaining the connections in my thinking. The sales numbers don't bear out the idea that there was huge demand for Robotech. They initially sold reasonably well for indie comics, but we're still talking a per-issue circulation in the thousands rather than the tens or hundreds of thousands. This was not huge demand by any objective standard. It was the biggest title that Comico, Eternity, and Academy's catalogs had, but that's an incredibly low bar to clear for such small independent publishers. (Especially ones that were already shedding titles for various reasons.) You don't need to run out a dozen separate titles if your main title is selling well. That's something you do when you've reached saturation in your market and the book isn't bringing significant numbers of new readers in anymore and/or your existing titles aren't making ends meet. If you need to boost sales and bringing in new readers isn't an option, you produce more titles under the same banner in order to get that limited customer pool buying multiple books. None of these books were selling more than a few thousand copies, so even if readership was mutually exclusive demand wasn't substantial. It's the same thinking behind the massive crossover events the superhero comics do so often. If you can't bring in new readers, make the existing readers buy multiple books. I think what we're looking at here is fundamentally a difference in scale. Robotech may have been very impactful on a personal level for some members of the community here, but this is a small fan community and even here Robotech is a niche interest within our already niche interest in Macross. This community would almost certainly still exist without it, esp. given that Macross made it to the west in other forms than Robotech in the 80's and 90's both legitimately and in bootleg form. What I'm looking at, and what I feel most of the people here understood me to be talking about, is the bigger picture. Robotech was quickly forgotten by general audiences outside of its small "cult" fandom, pop culture rarely acknowledges its existence, it didn't really make a lasting mark on the anime industry, and what little it has in name recognition stems mainly from the legal problems it caused over the years rather than any part of its story. Acknowledging that Robotech has always been kind of an obscure, niche series is by no means a criticism of it... nor should it impinge upon your enjoyment of it.

Not really, no... but then, the term "large" is also rather subjective. If there had been a large audience hungry for Robotech, well... its ratings would have been better than the middling-at-best numbers it got, its toy line would have sold better, and that first comic book license would have gone to a more upscale publisher able to do a far better job instead of struggling indie publisher Comico Comics because the projected return on investment would've been better. This potentially could've saved Robotech II: the Sentinels from cancellation... leading to all kinds of other consequences. It's not the "sheer volume" that's telling... it's that that sheer volume of Robotech material is crap. Even when it was new, the Robotech license wasn't valuable enough to attract a major publisher. That's why the license ended up in the hands of one troubled indie publisher after another. Those indie publishers did cheaper, lower quality work because they were only expecting to sell a few thousand copies of any given book. Multiple concurrent titles was a way to wring a few more bucks out of those few thousand customers who were already buying one book. Every penny counts when your total circulation could fit into a high school football stadium, y'know? If Robotech had the kind of following that'd move 100,000+ copies a month like Superman or X-Men, the license would've been picked up by a competent publisher who could've done quality work. Because it only had a following big enough to move maybe 7,500 copies in a really strong month it ended up in the hands of indie publishers Comico, Eternity, Academy, and Antarctic Press, who did kind of mediocre or rubbish work. The same is basically true for the RPG license. Because interest in the brand was quite low, the license ended up in the hands of a small independent publisher with noticeably backwards business practices who did their best... but their best was still a pretty amateur-hour job. Actually, having the license end up in the hands of a struggling indie company with financial problems and questionable management seems to be a franchise-wide theme with Robotech now that I think on it... 🤔