The History of Robotech by Toy Galaxy

[TheLoneWolf]

On 4/6/2018 at 4:53 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Perhaps not an actual lawsuit in court, but it's possible there was a sealed arbitration or an exchange of cease-and-desists.  The "production bible" used by the staff of the Transformers cartoon mentions that Jetfire's design was changed for "legal reasons", but no specifics are given as to what the "legal reasons" were...

Or Hasbro just had a dutiful legal office (what a concept!) that sent out a staff reminder saying "We heard you all want to give the Autobots an aerial transportation vehicle. Just a reminder that we only paid for Jetfire's toy rights, not its film rights, so don't include it in any way, name, or form in the cartoon."

In the absence of reliable evidence, I tend to find that the more mundane explanation is usually the correct one. Because otherwise...

[renegadeleader1]

The safe bet would be that HG did send Hasbro a cease and desist back in the 80s given what we know from the 90s Playmates/HG vs Fasa case. In that case Fasa had tried to claim HG didn't do due diligence in defending its rights until HG produced evidence of them sending cease and desist letters since 1985 and having a long term correspondence about not using the designs.

 

If they had been going after Fasa since 1985 there's little doubt in my mind they went after Hasbro in the same time period.

[JB0]

12 hours ago, TheLoneWolf said:

Or Hasbro just had a dutiful legal office (what a concept!) that sent out a staff reminder saying "We heard you all want to give the Autobots an aerial transportation vehicle. Just a reminder that we only paid for Jetfire's toy rights, not its film rights, so don't include it in any way, name, or form in the cartoon."

They forgot to tell the ad team. Jetfire was animated toy-accurately for his TV commercial.

[Old_Nash]

17 minutes ago, JB0 said:

They forgot to tell the ad team. Jetfire was animated toy-accurately for his TV commercial.

 

[TheLoneWolf]

1 hour ago, JB0 said:

They forgot to tell the ad team. Jetfire was animated toy-accurately for his TV commercial.

Excellent point! But there are certain defenses to copyright infringement. That commercial has a lawful purpose: to market a legitimate product. Second, Jetfire only appears for mere seconds, so it would probably be considered de minimus (ie: trivial) infringement. A de minimus appearance with a lawful purpose wouldn't be a cause for concern. If it was an indisputable infringement, don't you think that commercial would've been, ya know, banned?

[JB0]

1 hour ago, TheLoneWolf said:

If it was an indisputable infringement, don't you think that commercial would've been, ya know, banned?

I don't actually know how long that commercial was aired for. I assumed it was pulled relatively swiftly.

[Seto Kaiba]

11 hours ago, JB0 said:

I don't actually know how long that commercial was aired for. I assumed it was pulled relatively swiftly.

Just in case this wasn't confusing or frustrating enough, available records indicate that commercial first aired in 1985... after Hasbro and Toei/Sunbow redesigned and reintroduced Jetfire as Skyfire "for legal reasons" (in "Fire in the Sky", which aired on 8 Dec 1984).

 

EDIT: Which, in hindsight, would tend to rule out the theory that Hasbro went into it with foreknowledge that they couldn't use the Jetfire design in animation.

Edited April 9, 2018 by Seto Kaiba

[peter]

 

[no3Ljm]

First post on Page 1 updated with Volume 3 video.

 

[no3Ljm]

Posted by @HardlyNever in the Harmony Gold suing Tatsunoko thread.

Also updated first post on Page 1 with the latest Volume 4 video.

 

 

[no3Ljm]

First post on Page 1 updated with 2021 Edition video.

Finally! Everything IS About To CHANGE

 

 

[Dynaman]

Ending is a form of change...

[Seto Kaiba]

4 minutes ago, Dynaman said:

Ending is a form of change...

Being less relevant than ever is also a form of change.

Mind you, I'm not sure it's a form of change that merits being acknowledged in a video... 

[Dynaman]

I guess it is more like Calculus.  Getting closer and closer to zero but never actually going away.

[Einherjar]

Heard HG got into the NFT business with Robotech.  Is that the kind of change people are thinking about?

[kajnrig]

Unfortunately, that video didn't provide any substantial new details that we haven't already discussed to death on this forum. I was hoping it would have some leaks on the legal statuses of this and that, or future distribution plans, or even merchandising strategies. Something new.

Ah well. Still just waiting patiently for proof of the supposed good tidings this way to come.

[Sgt Nate V]

I just want to be able to get a 1/55 at a reasonable price, that's all

[Einherjar]

11 hours ago, kajnrig said:

Unfortunately, that video didn't provide any substantial new details that we haven't already discussed to death on this forum. I was hoping it would have some leaks on the legal statuses of this and that, or future distribution plans, or even merchandising strategies. Something new.

Ah well. Still just waiting patiently for proof of the supposed good tidings this way to come.

You pointed out the fundamental problem with youtubers I have these days, or at least why I have a low opinion of most making a living off the platform.  They put so much effort trying to sound smart/funny/worth the 10 to 15 minutes of your time and are good at summarizing stuff that happened in the past, but when it comes to the future they might as well stop recording.  Besides, when it comes to Robotech when was the last time a big change was announced and what actually followed was genuinely worth getting excited for?

[Old_Nash]

The return of Robotech Academy' ghost...

Edited May 15, 2021 by Old_Nash

[Big s]

I just look at this as another toy galaxy video to bring everyone up to speed with what has been announced. For the die hard Macross fans here, it’s not going to be enough, but for the basic fans or even somewhat newer fans it’s somewhat interesting and a good way to kill a few minutes while getting ready to go to work or something.

[no3Ljm]

Toy Galaxy releases a compilation of their Complete History of Robotech with a small 2024 update at 1:27:30.

The Whole Dumb Story.
 

 

Edited January 14 by no3Ljm

[Spark-O-Matic]

Well my local television station way back in the early 1980's aired Robotech but only a few episodes. It really was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen in my short life having been on earth. after that Transformers and even Voltron just seemed inadequate. I'll never forget how the Valks just blew me away !then they were gone!  only years later once the internet came around I was able to understand what I lost all those years ago. 

I don't care if people think Robotech is lame, somewhere in the fabric of time passed was a child seeing something on TV so profound that it changed the very fundamental way they would see the world the rest of there life.

[Big s]

1 hour ago, Spark-O-Matic said:

Well my local television station way back in the early 1980's aired Robotech but only a few episodes. It really was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen in my short life having been on earth. after that Transformers and even Voltron just seemed inadequate. I'll never forget how the Valks just blew me away !then they were gone!  only years later once the internet came around I was able to understand what I lost all those years ago. 

I don't care if people think Robotech is lame, somewhere in the fabric of time passed was a child seeing something on TV so profound that it changed the very fundamental way they would see the world the rest of there life.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved it when it was on. It wasn’t until years later that I actually saw the original series and it’s tough for me to go back. I think it’s probably a similar reaction to fans of Dragon Ball or Sailor Moon. I don’t think the majority of the fans would’ve existed if not for those adaptations. The thing I think is lame is Harmony Gold putting so many roadblocks for Macross and the rest of it’s sequels, side stories and products

[tekering]

On 1/15/2024 at 4:14 PM, Big s said:

It wasn’t until years later that I actually saw the original series and it’s tough for me to go back. I think it’s probably a similar reaction to fans of Dragon Ball or Sailor Moon.

Dragonball featured some significant digital alterations to censor content for North American audiences... Sailor Moon was slightly edited (and at least one character was gender-swapped in the dub)... but neither example compares to Robotech.  I mean, forget cuts or name changes; Southern Cross was set on a whole 'nother PLANET!

A more accurate comparison would be Battle of the Planets, or the infamous Captain Harlock and the Queen of a Thousand Years.

[Lolicon]

This is coming from someone who hasn't given a crap about Robotech since the 80s ended and absolutely loathes Harmony Gold.

So in the 21st century it's easy to look back at Robotech next to the OG Macross and think "bleh WTF" but context is important. Forget Southern Cross and Mospeada; I'm just talking about the Macross Saga of Robotech.

Side by side with the OG Macross, Robotech Macross is nearly identical to the original, aside from the name changes and a few scenes snipped due to being too racy/violent for children's TV (and a few baffling scenes inserted in later episodes to connect it to Southern Cross). Getting a faithful anime translation is standard practice today, but for the early 80s it was the norm to chop up anime to pieces in order to sanitize it for "sensitive western audiences" (Battle of the Planets, Voltron, Tranzor Z, etc).

So getting a pretty faithful anime translation in Robotech's Macross Saga where people actually died on screen (rather than getting injured and sent away on "medical leave" never to be seen again) and the conflict not really being sanitized in any way made Robotech an outlier in early 1980s anime here in the states.

Alright, that's my stream-of-consciousness-while-in-the-shower thoughts for the day. 

[pengbuzz]

9 minutes ago, Lolicon said:

This is coming from someone who hasn't given a crap about Robotech since the 80s ended and absolutely loathes Harmony Gold.

So in the 21st century it's easy to look back at Robotech next to the OG Macross and think "bleh WTF" but context is important. Forget Southern Cross and Mospeada; I'm just talking about the Macross Saga of Robotech.

Side by side with the OG Macross, Robotech Macross is nearly identical to the original, aside from the name changes and a few scenes snipped due to being too racy/violent for children's TV (and a few baffling scenes inserted in later episodes to connect it to Southern Cross). Getting a faithful anime translation is standard practice today, but for the early 80s it was the norm to chop up anime to pieces in order to sanitize it for "sensitive western audiences" (Battle of the Planets, Voltron, Tranzor Z, etc).

So getting a pretty faithful anime translation in Robotech's Macross Saga where people actually died on screen (rather than getting injured and sent away on "medical leave" never to be seen again) and the conflict not really being sanitized in any way made Robotech an outlier in early 1980s anime here in the states.

Alright, that's my stream-of-consciousness-while-in-the-shower thoughts for the day. 

In all fairness: Voltron was an improvement on King of Beasts GoLion. The original's music stank,  the story was way too dark and violent, and it never achieved much popularity over in Japan. A jump across the ocean, some name changes and story tweaks, and a much better soundtrack and it took off.

(just my opinion; your mileage may vary)

Edited January 20 by pengbuzz

[Seto Kaiba]

Eh... when you get right down to it, a big part of the reason that more "mature" content escaped the editors in Robotech is because the series was slapped together in an indecent rush and on a hair-shirt budget.  Macek's weird priorities WRT character ethnicities didn't help matters either.  The best they could do was to cut out the most objectionable content like the nudity, rotoscope out a few extra moons, and haphazardly splice some footage together while the writers weren't even given enough time to check that their scripts were consistent with each other.

It's more by accident than design that Robotech retained more "mature" content like that... though it had unintended benefits in that it reduced the damage the rewriting inflicted to the original shows and subsequently saw its fans mistakenly attribute the quality of the original works to Robotech.

[M'Kyuun]

For whatever reason, I never saw Robotech (nor Voltron) on tv as a kid; almost certainly, the Macross Saga portion would have captivated me. I was TDY in England in the early 00s and the BX (Air Force's version of a convenience store) had the entire RT series to rent. I still hadn't seen the og SDF:M at this point, so I went in with tempered expectations having known all the vitriol it received from Macross fans. I managed to finish the Macross portion and got a couple eps into the Southern Cross portion, but SC was losing me with its lackluster mecha and story. Let's face it, Kawamori's VF-1 set a pretty high bar and SC seemed a serious downgrade despite its supposed existence in the future relative to the Macross portion. At that point, I quit, so I didn't see the majority of the SC portion or any of the Mospeada portion.

I ended up buying the ADV Macross Saga DVD set, so I've at least seen the og show as it was intended. The voice work, including Mari Iijima reprising her role as Miss Macross herself, Lynn Minmay, was decent. I've also seen Mospeada , which I enjoyed. While I'm sure Robotech would have had an incredible impact on me as a kid, I'm thankful that I didn't see it until later in life, and that I have seen the original shows, which IMHO, are superior to the edited versions that were cludged together to make RT. That is, except for Super Dimension Calvary Southern Cross, which I've not seen and honestly have no interest in seeing- the mecha designs are less than inspiring, and that erodes the appeal for me. Yeah, I'm a mecha snob.

[Jeff J]

 I've been meaning to watch Toy Galaxy's videos, but not sure I have the... energy... for it. Reading or watching about HG just gets me so irrationally fired up. I could do that in the late 90s, but today? Not so sure I want to open that can of worms. It's on my YT "Watch Later," but so are about 300 other videos... 😁

On 1/20/2024 at 10:24 AM, Lolicon said:

Side by side with the OG Macross, Robotech Macross is nearly identical to the original

Is there such thing as Uncanny Valley for adaptations? Probably not; I'm guessing that the core of my complaint is really that they weren't close enough... Regardless, I still wonder if the general proximity of HG's iteration to the Real McCoy makes things worse... would it have been less frustrating for many of us if HG changed the show more dramatically? I fundamentally agree that RT's "Macross Saga" captures 90-something percent of SDF Macross, but that kind of description bothers me because it generally comes across as sounding like the shows are functionally equivalent or equally as good. Moreover, that description glosses over the quality issues stemming from the loss of fidelity while incentivizing people to watch RT (or worse, pay HG to watch...) to experience the story and not bothering to seek out the source material. If HG's iteration was so much more substantially different, it would've greater emphasized the value in watching the show as it was originally intended to be.

On 1/20/2024 at 2:44 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

It's more by accident than design that Robotech retained more "mature" content like that... though it had unintended benefits in that it reduced the damage the rewriting inflicted to the original shows and subsequently saw its fans mistakenly attribute the quality of the original works to Robotech.

Yeah, my general take is that HG priotized simplicity over nuance. Anything "mature" about RT comes from the originals, whereas a lot of nuance got ironed out for the sake of a streamlined (pun intended) story that's easier to digest, especially for kids from 1985 who might not've been prepared to watch such a plot-driven cartoon. Take out content that's surpasses the threshold of complexity, or add a lot of narration/exposition.

[tekering]

12 hours ago, Jeff J said:

a lot of nuance got ironed out for the sake of a streamlined (pun intended) story that's easier to digest, especially for kids from 1985 who might not've been prepared to watch such a plot-driven cartoon. Take out content that's surpasses the threshold of complexity, or add a lot of narration/exposition.

Ironically enough, that's exactly the approach Nihon TV took when adapting The Transformers for the Japanese market.  The Japanese dub edited over a minute of content from every episode, cut two episodes entirely, and simplified the content for Japanese kids... and just as Robotech is infamous for added dialogue and constant narration, Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers is even worse.  The narration is RELENTLESS. 🙄

[Jeff J]

11 hours ago, tekering said:

Ironically enough, that's exactly the approach Nihon TV took when adapting The Transformers for the Japanese market.  The Japanese dub edited over a minute of content from every episode, cut two episodes entirely, and simplified the content for Japanese kids... and just as Robotech is infamous for added dialogue and constant narration, Fight! Super Robot Lifeform Transformers is even worse.  The narration is RELENTLESS. 🙄

Interesting!

If they edited out more than a minute of content from each episode, then how'd they fill the standard Japanese TV time slot? 🤔

[CollectorCanine]

8 minutes ago, Jeff J said:

Interesting!

If they edited out more than a minute of content from each episode, then how'd they fill the standard Japanese TV time slot? 🤔

They cut a minute of content from each episode specifically so they could have a longer opening theme, longer ending theme, and "next episode" previews. That's how they made it fill Japanese TV time slots.

 

Edited March 1 by CollectorCanine

[Big s]

2 hours ago, CollectorCanine said:

They cut a minute of content from each episode specifically so they could have a longer opening theme, longer ending theme, and "next episode" previews. That's how they made it fill Japanese TV time slots.

 

That opening makes me feel like taking a nap. It’s such a snoozer, it should have been the ending 

[CollectorCanine]

8 minutes ago, Big s said:

That opening makes me feel like taking a nap. It’s such a snoozer, it should have been the ending 

I honestly feel the opposite. lol

[Lolicon]

On 2/29/2024 at 11:10 AM, Jeff J said:

Is there such thing as Uncanny Valley for adaptations? Probably not; I'm guessing that the core of my complaint is really that they weren't close enough... Regardless, I still wonder if the general proximity of HG's iteration to the Real McCoy makes things worse... would it have been less frustrating for many of us if HG changed the show more dramatically? I fundamentally agree that RT's "Macross Saga" captures 90-something percent of SDF Macross, but that kind of description bothers me because it generally comes across as sounding like the shows are functionally equivalent or equally as good. Moreover, that description glosses over the quality issues stemming from the loss of fidelity while incentivizing people to watch RT (or worse, pay HG to watch...) to experience the story and not bothering to seek out the source material. If HG's iteration was so much more substantially different, it would've greater emphasized the value in watching the show as it was originally intended to be.

Wasn't making a value judgment about Robotech. Just simply putting Robotech in its proper context in time. As I already prefaced I do not care for Robotech. It isn't 1985 anymore. Why watch any inferior anime adaptations today when you can access the originals without much hassle?