Live-action Robotech Movie

[Sir Galahad®]

I've heard about that thinking caps thing, and it is weird.

Current Macross Technology has BDI/BCS for use with Cyborgs as it takes too much concentration and stress for non-cyborgs to use it properly. I remember that Guld needed to empty his thoughts first before he could fly the YF-21.

 

I never watched the Shadow Chronicles, but were there Macross terms used in that movie? Like Macross, UN Spacy, Zentradi, the UN Spacy Logo?

[jenius]

No, no Macross terms in Shadow Chronicles. You also can't use the notion that BDI/BCS is difficult in the Macross universe to say it shouldn't be a thing in Robotech... of course that works both ways. Personally, I think the notions that the battroids do the things they do WITHOUT some direct brain link is just as far-fetched. I mean, you would have to say the valks all have very sophisticated AI and the pilot essentially just offers suggestions which is a fairly natural evolution of fly-by-wire anyway.

[Sir Galahad®]

Well from that they tried to distance themselves to anything Macross, that ended in less than the expectations they set.

Well I think they could still use the Mospeada Mecha instead, although when comparing spec by spec it is much slower and less powerful than the VF-1.

The warship could be generic.

The race of humanoid giants who also pilot mecha is a stretch though as that is a Macross idea.

[kajnrig]

28 minutes ago, jenius said:

Personally, I think the notions that the battroids do the things they do WITHOUT some direct brain link is just as far-fetched. I mean, you would have to say the valks all have very sophisticated AI and the pilot essentially just offers suggestions which is a fairly natural evolution of fly-by-wire anyway.

Exactly what I was thinking, too. VF AIs must be very specifically-tuned to each pilot in order to appropriately interpret pilot inputs, but that doesn't seem to be the case, what with all the civvies stumbling into cockpits and saving idols with them and all...

I'm surprised that neither canon has toyed with the idea of having master-slave systems to supplement the traditional fighter controls. The closest that come are the foot pedals you always see being used to control the vector nozzles, but my suspension of disbelief was strained when Hayate used them to breakdance out of trouble. I'd have thought that they would be introduced with the advent of EX Gear in Macross, though maybe they're not needed in Robotech with the use of brain control systems.

3 minutes ago, Sir Galahad® said:

Well I think they could still use the Mospeada Mecha instead, although when comparing spec by spec it is much slower and less powerful than the VF-1.

The warship could be generic.

The race of humanoid giants who also pilot mecha is a stretch though as that is a Macross idea.

I think they could get away with making everything, even the Zentraedi, generic. Giant space aliens aren't unique to Macross. I'd love to see mecha based on something like the Ball from Gundam, though. A Ball pod that transforms into a mecha, with maybe a crawler form for hovering in atmosphere?

[Old_Nash]

Really,

What dificult they have to make a script for the movie?

[jenius]

So the difficulty more recently being alluded to is the idea that Harmony Gold and everyone touching Robotech now will want to distance themselves from ALL the original Japanese works, not just Macross, so that they are no longer dependent on their relationship with Tatsunoko. So like when I said "Just replace the Zentraedi with the Invid" earlier that would be problematic as well. You'd have to replace the Zentraedi with an original new alien that was neither Zentraedi, Master, or Invid (though the Masters are pretty generic and the Zentraedi are just bigger versions of people which is a concept from stories before writing). I don't think there's going to be any problem with developing mecha or transformations but the story will take some consideration to keep it, at its core, Robotech while simultaneously removing it from 95% of what it was and replacing it with generic content (though some % of that 95% was already generic content).

[Sir Galahad®]

46 minutes ago, kajnrig said:

I think they could get away with making everything, even the Zentraedi, generic. Giant space aliens aren't unique to Macross. I'd love to see mecha based on something like the Ball from Gundam, though. A Ball pod that transforms into a mecha, with maybe a crawler form for hovering in atmosphere?

Giant Space Alien Military that doesn't mix genders and Ride Mecha? Hehehehe... Riding Battlepods or Power Suits? 

That would already scream lawsuit I think

[Chronocidal]

8 hours ago, jenius said:

...I don't think there's going to be any problem with developing mecha or transformations but the story will take some consideration to keep it, at its core, Robotech while simultaneously removing it from 95% of what it was and replacing it with generic content (though some % of that 95% was already generic content)...

Problem in the legal sense, maybe not, but if the "creative" team in charge of the franchise had half the imagination of a sack of rocks, they wouldn't have been milking the same 1980s cartoon designs for 30 years now.

Part of me thinks the reason they're such copyright trolls with anything even remotely resembling mecha from the original cartoons is because they're fully aware that they don't have a snowball's chance in hell of ever coming up with an original design, and they're going to cling to those designs for dear life, just in case the writing team ever comes up with something to use them in.  

[Seto Kaiba]

11 hours ago, kajnrig said:

Why and how? From what I remember of the show, both the original SDFM and the Robotech version, the technology wasn't gone into all THAT much, definitely not enough that a brain-control/assist system couldn't plausibly be integrated as well...

Partly, the sheer number of times helmetless people are shown operating mecha... but a favorite counter-argument to the "thinking cap" is Roy's dialog to [Hikaru/Rick] when he's patching up the VF-1D, which establishes pretty well that the controls are thoroughly conventional and that it isn't any more difficult to operate a battroid than it is to fly a jet.

 

11 hours ago, kajnrig said:

Call me crazy, but it seems like Robotech fans hate a lot about Robotech...

OK, you're crazy.   

You're also completely correct, though.  An awful lot of Robotech fans dislike, if not outright hate, a lot of what's come out under the Robotech brand.  You could swap some terms around in the Tom Lehrer song "National Brotherhood Week" and it'd be a fair description of the Robotech fandom and its various mutually hostile factions.  (That's a project for later, I think.)  As I used to be in the thick of it, I'll explain.

The dominant viewpoint was the "Purists", the fans who saw the animated Robotech as the one true series and dismissed the comics and novels on the grounds of their poor quality and their deviations from the animated Robotech's setting.  Fans of the Luceno/Daley novelization ("McKinneyists") held the novels up as a superior version of Robotech, on the grounds that it wasn't limited by the show's secondhand animation - a contention that caused a lot of fights, since the original ideas most of the fandom thought were paint-drinking stupidity were what they saw as its virtues.  The comics kinda got marginalized, but the fans of the comics Bill Spangler worked on (sometimes self-described as "Spanglerists") were often at loggerheads with fans of the Sentinels comics by the Waltrips.

They were the fandom of "They changed it, now it sucks" even before Tommy Yune took over and rebooted things.  The purists were basically the last group standing by that point, but they were a split constituency over whether Tommy Yune's reboot and establishment of an official canon was a good thing.  Some fans supported it on the grounds that it would make for more consistent work in the future.  Others were against it, partly because it was a change and partly because they did not like Tommy disposing of so many cherished fan theories.  (A rare few saw Tommy's work as some kind of Macross favoritism, since he did kind of kick the Southern Cross dog.)

 

11 hours ago, kajnrig said:

I mean, it's not like they COULDN'T make something decent out of the franchise - you can get blood out of anything, even a stone! - but given what's been revealed above... I think any adaptation would have to be a very loose one.

After over three decades of failures, I would be prepared to say that it is EXACTLY like they couldn't make something decent out of the franchise.

 

 

 

10 hours ago, Sir Galahad® said:

Current Macross Technology has BDI/BCS for use with Cyborgs as it takes too much concentration and stress for non-cyborgs to use it properly. I remember that Guld needed to empty his thoughts first before he could fly the YF-21.

Yeah, the system had a hard time distinguishing between intention and imagination, and shock could disable the system entirely.

 

10 hours ago, Sir Galahad® said:

I never watched the Shadow Chronicles, but were there Macross terms used in that movie? Like Macross, UN Spacy, Zentradi, the UN Spacy Logo?

Nope, the closest they got was the new "United Earth Expeditionary Forces" emblem looking vaguely like a kaleidoscope rendering of the UN Spacy logo.  Despite having a new daughter of Max and "Miriya", her background was only described as "half-alien" and they didn't use the term "Zentradi", "UN Spacy", or anything like that.  They did have a Skull squadron, but that's generic, and a ship designated "SDF-#", but that's all.

Tommy Yune and co. had a comic book prequel to the "movie" (really the first episode of a failed OVA project) that was entirely for the purpose of putting every non-essential Macross-derived character on a bus or in the ground.  "Rick" got redesigned so that he looks like Hideo Kuze from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd Gig, "Lisa" retired to become a diplomat, Minmei was taken prisoner and tortured then sent off somewhere for treatment, "Breetai" and all of the remaining Zentradi except "Exedore" were killed in an (un)friendly fire incident by a traitor, "Exedore" was killed testing the neutron star matter warheads, and both Max and his wife were Sir- and Lady-Not-Appearing-in-this-Film.  The only ones who came out of it with their jobs and lives intact were "Rick" and "Dr. Lang".

(Some of the other character reworking they did was funny by accident... [Louis Ducasse/Louie Nichols] is a white version of Geordi LaForge now.)

 

 

8 hours ago, kajnrig said:

Exactly what I was thinking, too. VF AIs must be very specifically-tuned to each pilot in order to appropriately interpret pilot inputs, but that doesn't seem to be the case, what with all the civvies stumbling into cockpits and saving idols with them and all...

The control responses are standardized, like on AMBAC systems in Gundam.  

They can be custom-tuned to a particular pilot, however, and the VFs in Macross Frontier and beyond have additional onboard systems to aid in personalizing the control responses to a given individual (tied to their EX-Gear). 

 

8 hours ago, kajnrig said:

I'm surprised that neither canon has toyed with the idea of having master-slave systems to supplement the traditional fighter controls. 

As someone with a bit of a background in robotics via embedded control systems, master-slave motion trace is a PAIN IN THE ASS to work with.  For a four-limb trace system, they'd need to either make the cockpit prohibitively large to enable a 1:1 trace using motion capture (think G Gundam) or the controls would be incredibly sensitive because the motion trace would have to magnify the amount of movement by the pilot by a scale factor to enable the cockpit to remain small (as in Full Metal Panic!) which makes the controls incredibly finicky and a sneeze or cramp can throw the whole system for a loop (like Tessa did in "A Cat and Kitten's Rock & Roll").  There's also a fair bit of lag-time in most motion trace setups.

 

8 hours ago, kajnrig said:

I think they could get away with making everything, even the Zentraedi, generic. Giant space aliens aren't unique to Macross. I'd love to see mecha based on something like the Ball from Gundam, though. A Ball pod that transforms into a mecha, with maybe a crawler form for hovering in atmosphere?

... so, a scaled-down version of Shredder's Technodrome?

[Gerli]

I always thought "Purist" was the name Robotech fans call us the Macross fans in a despective way... he.

[SuperSenpai]

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The dominant viewpoint was the "Purists", the fans who saw the animated Robotech as the one true series and dismissed the comics and novels on the grounds of their poor quality and their deviations from the animated Robotech's setting.  Fans of the Luceno/Daley novelization ("McKinneyists") held the novels up as a superior version of Robotech, on the grounds that it wasn't limited by the show's secondhand animation - a contention that caused a lot of fights, since the original ideas most of the fandom thought were paint-drinking stupidity were what they saw as its virtues.  The comics kinda got marginalized, but the fans of the comics Bill Spangler worked on (sometimes self-described as "Spanglerists") were often at loggerheads with fans of the Sentinels comics by the Waltrips.

It's been years since I read the novels, but from what I remember, the Sentinels novels were where things really went off the rails.  Perhaps because the story at that point was unknown to the general public, so the authors felt like they had a lot of license to crazy things.  While there were a lot of completely unnecessary ideas added to the story in the novels based on the regular TV series, there were some things that I thought were good.  I liked the little excerpts from fictional publications at the beginning of each chapter -- they added some depth to the story.  And it seemed like the authors were making some attempts to address some of the inconsistencies and plot holes in the show with additional dialogue or narration that attempted to explain things. 

 

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

 

As someone with a bit of a background in robotics via embedded control systems, master-slave motion trace is a PAIN IN THE ASS to work with.  For a four-limb trace system, they'd need to either make the cockpit prohibitively large to enable a 1:1 trace using motion capture (think G Gundam) or the controls would be incredibly sensitive because the motion trace would have to magnify the amount of movement by the pilot by a scale factor to enable the cockpit to remain small (as in Full Metal Panic!) which makes the controls incredibly finicky and a sneeze or cramp can throw the whole system for a loop (like Tessa did in "A Cat and Kitten's Rock & Roll").  There's also a fair bit of lag-time in most motion trace setups.

 

 

You have more expertise so feel free to correct me, but the impression I get is that these technologies could adequately explain how a battroid/battloid would perform gross movements -- walking, aiming a gun, picking up large objects, etc -- but it wouldn't be sufficient to explain the natural movements that we see them engaging in on the show.  For example, getting dressed in an enemy soldier's uniform, slinging a rifle over the shoulder, picking up a girl without crushing her.  These movements require fine control and tactile responses that would be hard to duplicate on such a massive scale.

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Gerli said:

I always thought "Purist" was the name Robotech fans call us the Macross fans in a despective way... he.

That's a more recent development.  Robotech's fans were giving each other hell over preferences in media long before the internet, but the flame wars they had over it on Usenet were what drove lots of Robotech fans away from the franchise.  

The whole "Macross purist" thing came along in the 2000s, when the Robotech fandom was looking for something to distract itself from the way Robotech's second coming turned out to be something of a damp squib.  It was fueled by the "Macross Saga" dominating Robotech merchandising and by some Macross fans observing that Robotech was pretty much just coasting on Macross's popularity even in its new developments.  Once Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles and Macross Frontier came out less than a year apart, it turned into a full blown witch hunt over the obvious disparity in talent, skill, and quality between the two.

 

 

 

33 minutes ago, SuperSenpai said:

It's been years since I read the novels, but from what I remember, the Sentinels novels were where things really went off the rails.

Even in the Macross Saga novels they took a LOT of liberties... like the "thinking caps" and the VFs having energy shields, or Dr. Lang becoming a genius-level technological savant and having visions of the Invid after coming into contact with the SDF-1's main computer.

The Sentinels novels were just where it abandoned all pretense and didn't so much jump the shark as ramp off a stack of burning sharks in a tutu while on fire and singing Asia's "The Lie is Over".

 

Quote

 Perhaps because the story at that point was unknown to the general public, so the authors felt like they had a lot of license to crazy things.

I still maintain they were just replacing terms and names in drafts of Star Wars novels that Lucasfilm decided to pass on.

The books lost the plot so hard that making a movie based on them would be sheer, gun-eating insanity that would make Plan 9 from Outer Space look like Academy Award material.

 

Quote

You have more expertise so feel free to correct me, but the impression I get is that these technologies could adequately explain how a battroid/battloid would perform gross movements -- walking, aiming a gun, picking up large objects, etc -- but it wouldn't be sufficient to explain the natural movements that we see them engaging in on the show.

As seen on several occasions in Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Macross Frontier, pilots can also take direct, manual control of a limb or multiple limbs if a particularly delicate task is required.  The TV version of the VF-1 had dedicated joysticks just for the arms.  What I'm given to understand WRT hand/arm maneuvers is that they're sort of "flying" the hand through three-dimensional space and using the buttons in the grip on the joystick or throttle lever to control the position of the fingers and palm.

Slinging a rifle, I would imagine is probably an automated routine for "stow gunpod" in battroid mode without returning it to the hardpoint.

Edited September 14, 2017 by Seto Kaiba

[slide]

7 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

sheer, gun-eating insanity that would make Plan 9 from Outer Space look like Academy Award material.

Lots of that going around these days 

[Gerli]

The McKinney novels are good Fanfiction

[Chronocidal]

On ‎9‎/‎14‎/‎2017 at 0:34 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

As seen on several occasions in Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Macross Frontier, pilots can also take direct, manual control of a limb or multiple limbs if a particularly delicate task is required.  The TV version of the VF-1 had dedicated joysticks just for the arms.  What I'm given to understand WRT hand/arm maneuvers is that they're sort of "flying" the hand through three-dimensional space and using the buttons in the grip on the joystick or throttle lever to control the position of the fingers and palm.

Slinging a rifle, I would imagine is probably an automated routine for "stow gunpod" in battroid mode without returning it to the hardpoint.

The thing that I always wind up coming back to when trying to imagine how people can control a giant mech?

Think of video games, and how much complexity can be accomplished with a few buttons and thumbstick.  I mean, I don't want to downplay the complexity that much, but exactly like that "stow gunpod" move you mention, a vast majority of motions could be pre-programmed, and designed to be adaptable to various situations.  Working out walking, running, jumping, etc. is probably not that different from generating procedural animation routines for game characters, albeit while using gyros and thrusters to keep balanced, and advanced terrain mapping sensors to deal with finding proper footing. 

Same for picking up objects.. you sight in on an object, get in a heavy duty sensor scan to determine size, density, and other characteristics, and then perform an adaptable computerized routine to reach and grip the object.  Hand to hand combat could be as simple as directing a targeting reticle, selecting a power setting, and mashing the "PUNCH" button, with the computers filling in the rest of the details.

The only time you'd really need direct control of fingers and such would be for extremely delicate operations, like picking up extremely small and fragile objects, like people, and in most cases we've seen, it's more that they're shaping the hand to let them climb in, and then closing just enough to hold them safely.

[Gerli]

Muschietti was in Argentina ComicCon last sunday and still says he want to make the movie...

I think nobody tells him the whole story yet and he's still in the cave. 

 

[kajnrig]

Resurrecting this zombie because really that's the only apt metaphor to use.

https://heroichollywood.com/jason-fuch-teases-robotech-film/

[Gerli]

I read something about Muschetti's sister taking the job while he's filming It II so... not really a big development in the saga...

[Old_Nash]

1 hour ago, kajnrig said:

Resurrecting this zombie because really that's the only apt metaphor to use.

https://heroichollywood.com/jason-fuch-teases-robotech-film/

[Dynaman]

And yet another writer/director combo announced.  Hard to keep track of them as they go by.  On the plus side there is a new RPG on the way from a different company - can't be WORSE then the Palladium game (I hope).

 

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/robotech-unveils-fleet-of-updates-for-comic-and-live-action-movie-at-wondercon

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Dynaman said:

And yet another writer/director combo announced.  Hard to keep track of them as they go by.  On the plus side there is a new RPG on the way from a different company - can't be WORSE then the Palladium game (I hope).

Yeah, the usual fake news and announcements of some fourth-rate garbage from their bottom-of-the-barrel licensees and licensed bootleggers.  HG announces every schmuck they approach about the film as if they had agreed to direct, and every writer who turns in a story treatment for a quick buck as if they're writing the final screenplay.  It's all BS.

Here's hoping the new RPG licensee gets their sh*t together before HG loses the license in a bit under two years time, because if the draft they published for their game is any fair indication of final quality they're making Palladium Books look positively on the ball.

Edited March 31, 2019 by Seto Kaiba

[RavenHawk]

3 hours ago, Dynaman said:

And yet another writer/director combo announced.  Hard to keep track of them as they go by.  On the plus side there is a new RPG on the way from a different company - can't be WORSE then the Palladium game (I hope).

 

https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/robotech-unveils-fleet-of-updates-for-comic-and-live-action-movie-at-wondercon

Looks like most of their big exciting announcements... are things that have been out for anywhere from 6 months to a couple years now.

[Gerli]

In Spanish but... you get the idea...

[505thAirborne]

41 minutes ago, Gerli said:

In Spanish but... you get the idea...

My Spanish is a bit rusty but I still laughed 

[Seto Kaiba]

58 minutes ago, RavenHawk said:

Looks like most of their big exciting announcements... are things that have been out for anywhere from 6 months to a couple years now.

SOP.  They were desperately trying to hype Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles like it was new for like eight years after it came out... though I guess their current record for twisting the truth until it resembles a slinky would be when they attempted to advertise the then-28 year old MOSPEADA OVA that'd had fansubs in circulation for over a decade as "new" and "never before seen" in 2013.

[kajnrig]

1 hour ago, Gerli said:

In Spanish but... you get the idea...

Paraphrasing:

1) "Why would a fly land on something like that?"

2) "Rats should be ashamed [of themselves] for falling for something like that."

3) "...Bears, this is ridiculous."

4) [Robotech movie trap]

[Keith]

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

SOP.  They were desperately trying to hype Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles like it was new for like eight years after it came out... though I guess their current record for twisting the truth until it resembles a slinky would be when they attempted to advertise the then-28 year old MOSPEADA OVA that'd had fansubs in circulation for over a decade as "new" and "never before seen" in 2013.

I would just like to point out how insane it is that "The Shadow Chronicles" came out almost 12 years ago.

[JB0]

6 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

SOP.  They were desperately trying to hype Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles like it was new for like eight years after it came out...

In fairness, so few people saw it that they could probably tell people it was a new release for several years before anyone caught on.

[TangledThorns]

Can't we just get a Netflix style reboot instead? 

[TehPW]

2 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

Can't we just get a Netflix style reboot instead? 

w...hy? We're waiting on pins & needles just in hope that common sense rules and HG is shown the door in 2021... why would we ever want a reboot of something that arguably should have never been created?

[sh9000]

There will probably be a movie about fidget spinners or pretty much anything else before this movie ever comes out.  If it even comes out.

[technoblue]

5 hours ago, sh9000 said:

There will probably be a movie about fidget spinners or pretty much anything else before this movie ever comes out.  If it even comes out.

Too late. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyblade

[Bolt]

6 hours ago, TehPW said:

w...hy? We're waiting on pins & needles just in hope that common sense rules and HG is shown the door in 2021... 

Haha. Yes we are , aren’t we!

 

 

[Einherjar]

Hmm, jumping the gun with April Fools news this year.

[Seto Kaiba]

10 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

Can't we just get a Netflix style reboot instead? 

With what IP?  How do you do a Netflix-style reboot of a property that doesn't actually own - and thus can't use - most of its story or any of its design works?

That's the eternal sticking point for Robotech.  Copyright law with respect to derivative works being what it is, Harmony Gold can't claim ownership of 99.9% of what's in Robotech and thus 2/3 of it is off the table for future adaptations without the written blessing of Tatsunoko's lawyers and a hefty check for royalties owed and the remaining 1/3 is just plain off the table permanently.

They can't pull a Voltron: Legendary Defender and make new designs based on the existing ones because that'd be copyright infringement if they did it without permission.

 

6 hours ago, sh9000 said:

There will probably be a movie about fidget spinners or pretty much anything else before this movie ever comes out.  If it even comes out.

49 minutes ago, technoblue said:

Too late. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyblade

Seems like they'll make a movie about anything these days... except Robotech.

 

22 minutes ago, Einherjar said:

Hmm, jumping the gun with April Fools news this year.

They'll never recapture the magic of that one year where the April Fool's joke was a report stating they'd fired the Yunes and had security walk them out of the building, complete with a photograph of (IIRC) Tommy hauling his crap out of the building in a cardboard box.