Robotech and REMIX by Titan Comics

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, anime52k8 said:

In the same sense you reboot a computer when it crashes before it even gets to the welcome screen.

Nah, Robotech 3000 was such a complete non-starter that it was more like it failed to pass POST.  Can't reboot what never booted.

 

2 hours ago, Einherjar said:

What do you call a reboot that unnecessarily tries too hard to address a whole bunch of real world mistakes from past iterations of itself when it does not have to?

A cop-out.

Or a "take that", if they're deliberately taking the piss out of it... this godawful Robotech comic honestly felt like a bass-ackwards attempt at self-parody for a while.

Doubly so when you consider that all of the references to the various past failures of the Robotech franchise like Robotech II: the Sentinels, Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, Robotech: the Movie, and Robotech 3000 (but surprisingly not Robotech Academy) were done specifically so that the comic could write them AND the Masters Saga and New Generation out of existence entirely in favor of a new Macross-focused story.

 

1 hour ago, jeniusornome said:

Agreed. They literally could have just ignored all previous media, done a whole new story and not bothered with all of... this. If they wanted to do a new take on the story, just do a new one.

It was a piss-take, and a setup to write that garbage out of their canon the way HG was progressively writing it out of the official one.

 

 

[Brofessor]

I agree Robotech 3000 is not a reboot. It is funny to think of this Titan Comics Issue rebooting it. I reworded the sentence as...

11. The Regess penetrates the future reality of the quasi-in-universe failed Robotech 3000 franchise restart/reset/reboot set in the year 3000.

The Sentinels was released in the year 1988 and Robotech 3000 was teased in the year 2000. It is a serial chronological continuation of the series as a sequel but it was also an embarrassing attempt at a restart/reset/reboot of the franchise.

[Einherjar]

15 hours ago, jeniusornome said:

Trying to tie them together was a neat idea, and the whole time loop thing was ambitious and one of those "if done right would be awesome" ideas, but there was no follow-through. At least, none worth speaking of. There still hasn't been.

I stand by what I said months ago - forget this garbage and watch Orguss instead.

[Seto Kaiba]

39 minutes ago, Einherjar said:

I stand by what I said months ago - forget this garbage and watch Orguss instead.

Yeah, no kidding.

[jeniusornome]

@Einherjar you know, I saw Orguss back in the 90s, in the dark ages of US Anime availability, and assumed no one had ever gotten around to finishing a US release of it after US Renditions tanked. I know Manga re-released it and an OVA I think. But those were VHS times. And I remember like 15 years ago someone tried again to release it in the US but it never finished.

But I decided to check, since this is the second time it has been brought up, and much to my surprise there was a complete release a few years ago that I missed, because now I have kids and can barely keep up with anything. So, that's going on my watch list like, yesterday. Can't wait to see what the idioblast comes up with!

[peter]

On 9/12/2019 at 5:08 PM, Gerli said:

Even Valkyrie Project? 

(Maybe there is an Argentinian pilot somewhere  )

But in reality we all are especting this guys to appear...

 

M7 and everything in it is the stuff of nightmares, second only to all things Robotech, lol!

[JB0]

4 hours ago, peter said:

M7 and everything in it is the stuff of nightmares, second only to all things Robotech, lol!

That's not from Mac7.

[peter]

1 hour ago, JB0 said:

That's not from Mac7.

What's it from?

[azrael]

1 hour ago, peter said:

What's it from?

He doesn’t know?????

That overgrown teddy bear is from Robotech: Sentinels. 

[TehPW]

3 hours ago, azrael said:

He doesn’t know?????

That overgrown teddy bear is from Robotech: Sentinels. 

specifically from the palladium RPG book. Idk if the creature was ever animated or not but that imagine is lifted from one of those 90's era books...

[JB0]

38 minutes ago, TehPW said:

specifically from the palladium RPG book. Idk if the creature was ever animated or not but that imagine is lifted from one of those 90's era books...

The animation attempt collapsed before they got that far. As I understand things, the TV movie is most of what was drawn.

[Bolt]

Yep. That's just an  RPG illustration from palladium books , way back when. 

Give M7 more credit! 

[tekering]

6 hours ago, Bolt said:

Give M7 more credit! 

No.

[azrael]

Don’t mess with the furball. 

[Gerli]

No one talks sh*t about Gubaba on my watch.

[Knight26]

22 hours ago, peter said:

M7 and everything in it is the stuff of nightmares, second only to all things Robotech, lol!

OOhh look how edgy I am, I make fun of Mac7 without any good basis to work from, and think something from RT-Sentinels is from it.  Have you even watched Mac7 dude?

[Seto Kaiba]

16 hours ago, TehPW said:

specifically from the palladium RPG book. Idk if the creature was ever animated or not but that imagine is lifted from one of those 90's era books...

IIRC, it's actually a piece of concept art produced for the cancelled Robotech II: the Sentinels series that was reprinted/traced for Palladium Books's RPG in the publisher's usual manner.  Robotech Art 3 had a bunch of line art material from the unproduced majority of Robotech II: the Sentinels.

 

15 hours ago, JB0 said:

The animation attempt collapsed before they got that far. As I understand things, the TV movie is most of what was drawn.

Virtually all of it, yeah... they only completed enough material for ~3 episodes of the planned 65.

Apart from the godawful "Jack McKinney" novels, the only place the Karbarrans appeared was in the comics.  They used that same design in the Waltrip bros Sentinels comic book series, but were reworked into something that looks less retarded for the Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles tie-in comic Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles (in which that same character, L'Ron, looks more like a fairly generic anthropomorphic bear in a maroon robe.)

(And yes, the character's name is horrible too... it's a reference to L. Ron Hubbard, which shows how fantastic Macek's taste in sci-fi was... )

 

 

5 hours ago, Knight26 said:

OOhh look how edgy I am, I make fun of Mac7 without any good basis to work from, and think something from RT-Sentinels is from it.  Have you even watched Mac7 dude?

Not gonna lie... I can kinda see the resemblance between the godawful Sentinels aliens and the equally goofy-but-in-a-different-way kaiju-by-another-name from Macross 7, and I most definitely HAVE seen the series many times.  Admittedly, I've always felt like the designs for Robotech II: the Sentinels looked like rejects from the short-lived Star Trek animated series... which did have a LOT of very silly alien designs in it.

[Old_Nash]

Trying to understand what it was published...

 

[Mazinger]

15 minutes ago, Old_Nash said:

Trying to understand what it was published...

 

The mind reels!?!?!?!

[Bolt]

These were an easy pass in 1990..

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Old_Nash said:

Trying to understand what it was published...

Robotech II: the Sentinels was, to be brutally honest, a fantastic example of how creatively bankrupt Carl Macek and co. really were when it came to developing new IP for the Robotech brand.  The Sentinels aliens really shone in how lazy and derivative they all are and how little effort was made to hide exactly whose homework Carl was copying.

One can hardly blame Tommy Yune for going the obvious route with Carl's store brand classic Cylons... he even subtly threw a bit of shade at Macek by making their fighter look like a classic Cylon Raider.

 

1 hour ago, Bolt said:

These were an easy pass in 1990..

They're an easy pass now too... but the Robotech fandom is not exactly renowned for it discernment or taste, that being 90% of the reason Robotech still has a fandom at all.

Edited October 2, 2019 by Seto Kaiba

[DewPoint]

That thing always reminds me or this for some reason...

[TehPW]

1 hour ago, DewPoint said:

That thing always reminds me or this for some reason...

welp, since Pedobear did make its appearance in the early 2000's... the Sentinel Bear probably needed the work...

[Graham]

19 hours ago, Knight26 said:

OOhh look how edgy I am, I make fun of Mac7 without any good basis to work from, and think something from RT-Sentinels is from it.  Have you even watched Mac7 dude?

Mac 7 is awesome

[jeniusornome]

Heh. I loved Robotech and all of its supplementary material when I was little and into the early 90s. Sentinels included. The Palladium RPG books were practically always open. I nearly lost my mind when I found their Macross II books, and had them all memorized long before actually seeing the series (on VHS, from US Renditions, I think?)

Macross II seemed to be about in line with the quality and cheesy dubbing I was used to from Robotech, so even when that show came out I still thought it was all the best thing ever.

looking at it now, without the nostalgia lenses on, it’s past even the usual 80s cartoons ludicrous and right into plaid. But at the time, before we actually had unaltered anime readily available in the US (barring the occasional run of Akira, Venus Wars, and a few others on early Sci-Fi channel), it was awesome.

 

(I know there’s a lot of hate for it now, but my suspicion is that it’s mostly from people who discovered Anime first and Robotech second. Or people who don’t want to admit that Robotech introduced them to Anime, specifically Macross. Or people who are unable to separate what they thought was cool when they were 6 from what they think is cool at 36.)
 

I keep thinking there were good, if derivative ideas in there, but the execution was always so poor it never took off. Survivors from half a dozen planets that suffered in the Invid wars banding together to take on the Regent? while, after what was essentially an Invid civil war, the Regess occupies Earth and ultimately finds a peaceful solution thanks to a Romeo and Juliet story with Scott and Ariel? The irony of the REF going to preemptively deal with the Masters, only to be trains passing in the night, leaving the underprepared Army of the Southern Cross to deal with them? Etc? On paper it all sounds fantastic.
 

 

I have all the McKinney novels sitting on a bookshelf here and remember them being pretty good... 25 years ago. Tempting to read them again, but I don’t know that I want to ruin that last bit of nostalgia I still have for the franchise. Everything else I’ve gone back and watched has been much more disappointing than I’d expected. 
 

Maybe it would be fun to read the novels again and post about it all here, since they keep getting brought up...

[Keith]

The hate comes from it being a garbage job that has become an international cancer on the Macross franchise.

[Knight26]

14 hours ago, Old_Nash said:

Trying to understand what it was published...

 

It was produced as a last ditch effort to cover the development costs of the series, and possibly convince another animation house that it could be successful.  Fortunately, people saw what a garbage fire it turned out to be, and the McKinney novels, (which I did read a young one, before learned better) further confirmed that.  
That being said, I think I had the artbook at one point and some of the new designs were "interesting."  The SDF-3 wasn't a terrible concept, wrapping it in a "Zentraedi" shell, but again, showed the creative bankruptcy, as even their earlier comics, showing Zor with the battle fortress showed a far different design.
The Cat Aliens, if fleshed out better, weren't a terrible concept, especially that they couldn't breath Oxygen.  Not many sci-fi shows did that back then.
Those horned aliens were also an interesting concept, but were never properly explored, no two were alike due to extensive genetic modification.
The Crystal aliens were also interesting, but lazily handled, giving them humanoid form.
There were just highly derivative, worse they were lazy, taking concept that existed before and "Reimagining" them in the simplest of fashions.

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, jeniusornome said:

(I know there’s a lot of hate for it now, but my suspicion is that it’s mostly from people who discovered Anime first and Robotech second. Or people who don’t want to admit that Robotech introduced them to Anime, specifically Macross. Or people who are unable to separate what they thought was cool when they were 6 from what they think is cool at 36.)

Part of it is certainly people looking back at Robotech and coming to the realization that what they'd thought was a deep, sophisticated TV show as a kid was really a pathologically lazy, hastily slapped-together mess that compares unfavorably even to the blatant toy commercial kid's shows it ran opposite of.

Most of it, however, is down to a mixture of Robotech's "creators" being pathological liars who simultaneously badmouth the creators of the original shows and take credit for their work, Robotech itself being a joke of a franchise that lacks any significant redeeming qualities thanks to it having evolved into little more than a commercially unsuccessful Macross mockbuster, and of course Robotech's owners doing everything in their mortal power to hurt the Macross franchise in the name of protecting their teaspoon-shallow derivative.

The hate Robotech gets is, for the most part, richly deserved.  

About the only unjustified hate for Robotech comes from the BattleTech fandom.  They're salty because FASA were even more creatively bankrupt than Harmony Gold, and managed to also be even worse at hiding the fact... leading to lawsuits for copyright infringement that dog the franchise to this day.  Those lawsuits are one of the rare moments where HG is actually in the right.

 

4 hours ago, jeniusornome said:

I keep thinking there were good, if derivative ideas in there, but the execution was always so poor it never took off. Survivors from half a dozen planets that suffered in the Invid wars banding together to take on the Regent? while, after what was essentially an Invid civil war, the Regess occupies Earth and ultimately finds a peaceful solution thanks to a Romeo and Juliet story with Scott and Ariel? The irony of the REF going to preemptively deal with the Masters, only to be trains passing in the night, leaving the underprepared Army of the Southern Cross to deal with them? Etc? On paper it all sounds fantastic.

No, there really weren't. 

In fact, when it came to Robotech II: the Sentinels, a big part of why it ended up in development hell before its sponsored bailed and the exchange rate crash administered the coup de grace was that Macek's "vision" for the series was such an unholy mess the consummate professionals on Tatsunoko's side of the project couldn't get their heads around his godawful mess of a story and set out to turn it into something general audiences might actually want to watch.  Macek took this rather personally, and had one of the anime industry's finest writers removed from the project in favor of a low-rent hack he picked.

The Robotech material derived from it was bad not (or not only) because the people working on the comics and novels were bad at their jobs, but because the source material wasn't so much a dumpster fire as a landfill coated in white phosphorous.  As we programmer types say, "garbage in, garbage out".  

Take out all of the context and some of it doesn't sound completely terrible, but the minute you attempt to actually accurately communicate the essence of the story it becomes an obvious mess.  To wit:  A cuckolded royal space lobster (yes, really) decides to vent his frustration with a little good ol' fashioned genocide for no real reason while his wife was out trying to score more space drugs.  Off-brand Wookiees, knockoff Cylons, Space Amazons, The Coneheads, generic rock people, and mystic cat-wolves decide it's easier to use their new human friends as meatshields than actually defend themselves or doing anything to help, while a human mission to forestall a second alien invasion of Earth fails epically when everyone forgot to check if the people they were headed to meet were going to be in the office that week.  So Earth is invaded and conquered TWICE because the military sent the competent soldiers into deep space with vague directions on a poorly planned errand and left Earth in the care of a rabidly xenophobic tyrant of a general who used to be an anti-government terrorist and saboteur commanding the spacefuture equivalent of MacNamera's Morons, troops deemed too incompetent and undisciplined to be worth trusting with real assignments and meant to mainly be cannon fodder.  The occupation of Earth is finally ended when Cuckold King Space Lobster trusts a man who is so obviously untrustworthy that his leitmotif would be Voltaire's "When You're Evil" and is almost immediately killed by him as a result.  The real military decides that the most expedient solution to recapturing Earth is to just blow it the f*ck up and plant their flag on the rubble when the smoke clears - never mind all the civilian casualties - and the Invid Regess comes down from a decade-long prog rock space drug binge to conclude the space fuzz are absolute madmen and she'd better leave before her people get eight warning shots in the back.  Then the space robots who made the bombs decide that the people they gave the bombs to after promising to use them for genocide are bad people for wanting to use the bombs for genocide and decide the only appropriate response to this revelation is genocide.

Even on paper, it sounds more like a parody than a serious story.

 

4 hours ago, jeniusornome said:

I have all the McKinney novels sitting on a bookshelf here and remember them being pretty good... 25 years ago. Tempting to read them again, but I don’t know that I want to ruin that last bit of nostalgia I still have for the franchise. Everything else I’ve gone back and watched has been much more disappointing than I’d expected. 
 

Maybe it would be fun to read the novels again and post about it all here, since they keep getting brought up...

Encouraging someone to commit acts of self-harm would be illegal, immoral, and a violation of the forum's terms of service.

 

 

 

2 hours ago, Knight26 said:

The Cat Aliens, if fleshed out better, weren't a terrible concept, especially that they couldn't breath Oxygen.  Not many sci-fi shows did that back then.

Nah, they could breathe oxygen just fine IIRC... their gimmick was that there was some other substance in their atmosphere that was lethally addictive.  They had to breath it or die, and anyone who visited their planet without proper protective gear who breathed it wouldn't be able to leave.

 

2 hours ago, Knight26 said:

There were just highly derivative, worse they were lazy, taking concept that existed before and "Reimagining" them in the simplest of fashions.

Well, what were you expecting from a fan of L. Ron Hubbard?

[Einherjar]

Some creators are secure about themselves and their universe to include space whales, space vampires and space sloths without any regrets whatsoever (7). They’re even okay with salvaging ideas that really didn’t make the cut, like mind controlling singers (II) and songstress controlled doomsday weapons (zero) and make them work, even if it takes years of development to payoff.

[TehPW]

Salty doesn't even cut it close how I feel right now...

The Unseen, as purists call the original 20C imagines provided the initial imagery used. All the rest of the designs created in the long ago TRO-3025 maybe have been created using those poses from the Unseen but they have grown to be designs unique and all their own. Not to mention the back story of Battletech (from the Age of War, The Succession Wars, Operation: Revial, The Jihad/Wars of Reaving and the current ongoing Dark Age). How about characters like Kenyon Marik, Ulric Kerensky or Horse? That's nothing like what Robotech brought to the table, sir.

Back the F away from Battletech in the future, SIR.

Edited October 2, 2019 by TehPW
clarification

[JB0]

7 hours ago, jeniusornome said:

 

(I know there’s a lot of hate for it now, but my suspicion is that it’s mostly from people who discovered Anime first and Robotech second. Or people who don’t want to admit that Robotech introduced them to Anime, specifically Macross. Or people who are unable to separate what they thought was cool when they were 6 from what they think is cool at 36.)

Most of the hate comes from HG's war against Macross in the 90s. It is one thing to be an incompetent bunch of hacks, it is another to actively try to crush all attempt by fans to enjoy their interests unmolested.

Sending unenforcible legal threats to fan-run businesses didn't do them any favors either.

[jeniusornome]

O.o

@Seto Kaiba that is AMAZING.  It reads like a Futurama movie. I’d watch it. If it also played out like a Futurama movie. 
 

/shrug. One man’s dumpster fire is another man’s “Better than freezing to death in the middle of winter.” And back then we weren’t exactly rolling in readily available, unedited anime. Robotech left me hungry for more, and for a while there wasn’t very much to choose from. 
 

I totally get the hate for HG though. I tried to figure out their business model a long ways back, which is, near as I can tell, still “try to sell stuff based on a brand name that fewer and fewer people even know about, don’t do anything to try renewing interest in that brand name, and be spiteful jerks to Big West.” I honestly wonder how they are still in business.

 

to this day whenever people talk about modern miracles, I will bring up the US release of Macross Plus. How HG let that one sneak past, I’ll never know, but I’m forever grateful to the Zolan cosmic whales that it happened. 

[tekering]

8 minutes ago, jeniusornome said:

to this day whenever people talk about modern miracles, I will bring up the US release of Macross Plus. How HG let that one sneak past, I’ll never know, but I’m forever grateful to the Zolan cosmic whales that it happened. 

As I recall, the situation was a lot simpler back in the '90s.  Macross II (and Plus) were safe because they didn't use any characters or mecha that had appeared in Robotech... whereas Macross 7 had Max, Miriya and Exedore (and later, Zero featured Roy Fokker), so Harmony Gold had some legal clout there.

[Seto Kaiba]

6 hours ago, TehPW said:

The Unseen, as purists call the original 20C imagines provided the initial imagery used. All the rest of the designs created in the long ago TRO-3025 maybe have been created using those poses from the Unseen but they have grown to be designs unique and all their own.

And yet, they keep coming back to the Unseen because those are the designs that BattleTech fans consider the franchise's most iconic... which is also why the franchise ends up in legal hot water every few years when they try to reverse course and make the battlemechs look more like the Unseen. 

Much like Harmony Gold, FASA built a brand on "borrowed" IP that turned out to be more popular than anything they came up with themselves and have spent the intervening decades desperately trying to recapture that fleeting high instead of making a clean break.

 

 

5 hours ago, JB0 said:

Most of the hate comes from HG's war against Macross in the 90s. It is one thing to be an incompetent bunch of hacks, it is another to actively try to crush all attempt by fans to enjoy their interests unmolested.

Sending unenforcible legal threats to fan-run businesses didn't do them any favors either.

I'm not sure I'd say that was in the 90's, given that it was basically '99 and beyond.

HG claims it was an innocent misunderstanding on their part WRT their claims to having the exclusive worldwide rights to every part of Macross... but nobody really buys that.

 

1 hour ago, jeniusornome said:

@Seto Kaiba that is AMAZING.  It reads like a Futurama movie. I’d watch it. If it also played out like a Futurama movie. 

Have you ever noticed that Claude Leon from Southern Cross seems to go to the same tailor as Zap Brannigan?

Seriously, because I can't unsee that... or that his relationship with Emerson is basically a less comedic Zap and Kiff.

 

1 hour ago, jeniusornome said:

/shrug. One man’s dumpster fire is another man’s “Better than freezing to death in the middle of winter.” 

Yes, but after the weather warmed up one would typically want to put as much distance between themselves and the dumpster fire as humanly possible...

 

1 hour ago, jeniusornome said:

I totally get the hate for HG though. I tried to figure out their business model a long ways back, which is, near as I can tell, still “try to sell stuff based on a brand name that fewer and fewer people even know about, don’t do anything to try renewing interest in that brand name, and be spiteful jerks to Big West.” I honestly wonder how they are still in business.

Oh that's an easy one... it's because it's not their main or even their secondary business.  Robotech's basically the company hobby, like knitting socks to sell on Etsy.

 

1 hour ago, jeniusornome said:

to this day whenever people talk about modern miracles, I will bring up the US release of Macross Plus. How HG let that one sneak past, I’ll never know, but I’m forever grateful to the Zolan cosmic whales that it happened. 

53 minutes ago, tekering said:

As I recall, the situation was a lot simpler back in the '90s.  Macross II (and Plus) were safe because they didn't use any characters or mecha that had appeared in Robotech... whereas Macross 7 had Max, Miriya and Exedore (and later, Zero featured Roy Fokker), so Harmony Gold had some legal clout there.

Nothing miraculous about it... Harmony Gold had no legal power to block Macross releases prior to registering trademarks on the original Macross series's title, logo, and associated key art ~1999-2001.  They had no more power to stop Macross II and Macross Plus from being released worldwide than I do to stop the Earth from turning.  Those trademarks are all HG has to stop Macross's expansion into the west, and while Big West will likely never win a trademark challenge in the US due to the way trademark law is written here, they've been challenging and beating Harmony Gold in other key markets and taking back the Macross trademarks.

Harmony Gold also didn't have any exclusive rights to the characters apart from their likenesses from the original SDF Macross series, so since Max, Milia, Exsedol, etc. all looked different to their TV series versions, HG would not be able to raise any complaints regardless... (and they only had merchandising rights to those likenesses anyway... so it wouldn't have stopped them from distributing the show.

Robotech was, at the time, effectively dead save for a trickle of incredibly sh*tty comic books from bottom-tier hacks... they were, for once, apparently being honest when they admitted that nobody was "minding the store" in that period.  They didn't start to take any kind of active interest in anime again until about 1998 when they started trying to revive Robotech with Robotech 3000's laughably ill-fated series concept.

[Knight26]

@Seto Kaiba is right.  IIRC the biggest thing that prevents Mac7 coming over wasn't so much HG, but the music licensing costs.  None of the US distributors wanted to shell out for that.