Darkwater

On 5/2/2024 at 11:44 AM, CodeDanEXE said:

The youtuber Quinton Reviews is a big Jetfire and/or Robotech fan

He actually provided and edited some of the extras on the Robotech DVD sets when he was a teenager 10 years ago, using old convention footage his dad recorded. He jumped into Robotech forums and Facebook groups with this extreme enthusiasm for the franchise and wasn't prepared for the onslaught of bitter old fans that came with it.

If anyone wants to check it out, I finished the video.
 

Well, I got a little too obsessed and found this one thing mentioning 1995 in an Anime Guide for retailers. 

The second thing I found was the repacking of the tape, which for some reason they thought was a good idea to mention "Clash of the Bionoids" despite the tape being uncut.  This was from a comic shop wholesaler catalog in 1996.

Appreciate the memories, this helps!
 

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It probably says on the back of the sleeve.

You'd think so, but unfortunately, no info on the sleeve or in the film itself anywhere.  They just slapped the year 1984 on it.  Likely the result of these smaller video distributors just getting their hands on anything they could at the time and pumping tapes as fast as possible before the company went bankrupt (which they did in droves in the 80's and 90's).

Hi there.  I barley post here, but don't worry it's not you, it's me.

For reasons, I was looking into the history of the Clash of the Bionoids release (believe it or not, there there's some weird, wild stuff with it), and one thing I can find almost NO info on is the later uncut release. 

It's this one right here:


I actually have the video, so I know how it looks and sounds and what the credits say and all of that, I just can't figure out when it was released exactly.

• The tape only says copyright 1984, but obviously that's the copyright date of the film, not the tape itself.  And it has to be after 1984 since the company on the box, Century Media, didn't get the movie until 1989 or 1990.
• The only place I can find a release date for it is on Amazon saying it was on April 17, 1995, but that info wasn't updated until 2006.
• Amazon reviews only go back as far at 1998 (but that might have been when they first started doing reviews). 
• Any mentions on the old Alt.Fan.Macross posts only go back as far as 1998 as best I can tell

Can anyone confirm this  was released in 1995?  Or was it maybe 1998?  Also, can anyone remember where it was actually sold?  I never saw it in any of the retail stores or rental stores I went to in the US.  I heard rumors of maybe it was at Suncoast?

I've checked newspaper listings, Diamond Previews back catalog, as well as Archive.org, and I can find almost nothing on it.  No articles, no solicitations.  Any info on its release that anyone has would be appreciated.

Thanks!

So, I finally finished this.

This IS missing the last 8 pages, so I would LOVE TO SEE THOSE! (hint, hint!) 

It's basically DYRL with a prologue.  A prologue that was obviously written with the first four episodes of Robotech as a guide.  You can tell that because not only is some of the dialogue directly lifted from Robotech's opening narration on Boobytrap, it also uses the key element that the SDF-1 crash stopped all governments from fighting rather can cause pockets of armed resistance.  As far as DYRL, there are scenes clearly lifted shot-by-shot, including when Hikaru gets a call from Minmay at the restaurant and meets her in the park wearing disguise consisting of a floppy hat.

Hikaru is now basically Maverick from Top Gun, and a total a-hole, Roy is a steady straight-shooter.  Claudia is sleeping with the Captain (who has the name Gloval) and expresses regret for not going after Roy while he was alive.  Max and Millia are totally absent.  The Zentradi have no real clear motivation, but they're shown on their home planet wanting to destroy everyone on Earth, and the Meltlandi are alluded to but never seen.

The Battloid mode is shown, but there's no real clear reason why.  They don't learn about the size of the Zentradi until after the first Battloid transformation, which, like SDFM, is only done so that Hikaru doesn't crash.  So why make it?  The Battloid mode is also never used again (Maybe in the last 8 pages it was?), not even when the Zentradi capture the humans, make them kiss, and they escape.

Like what's been alluded to in the DYRL Blu-Ray opening title card, the Macross was first and foremost a colony ship, not a battleship-turn-colony ship like we saw in SDFM.  And it just so happens that any and all people we see in the Macross are those who were attending the Minmay concert at the opening ceremony and had to evacuate.  It's not clear if there was an actual city built around the ship or not.

There are a few other little plot differences.  The Macross was worked on for 60 years instead of 10 while on Earth, and was never really intended to be ready to launch.  It's also somewhat sentient as its the one that raises its own shields and folds away then the Zentradi attack earth, which is kind of odd since it's referenced as a Zentradi drone sent by the "ancient ones," so it'd have no real reason to escape its own makers.  Most notably, Minmay is somehow possessed, leaves behind glowing footprints, and starts to sing in a non-human, electric tone.  She's basically the "The chosen one," whatever that means.

There is a lot of cringe-worthy dialogue.  When Hikaru rescues Minmay and they're trapped in the bowels of the Macross, she says she'd need a change of underwear if she wore any.  Misa mentions the doctor working on their captured Zentradi is a Nobel Prize winning Jewish Eskimo.  And when Minmay if first introduced, one of the bridge officers mentions how Snoop Dog, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Nirvana were REAL music (this was written in 1994). 

There are also just a lot of weird inconsistencies.  In the beginning, the Zentradi mention they're dying and the only way to save their race is to seek out the humans.  Britai then says "We're fighters, we'll kill them all!!" for no reason, to which the Zentradi chant "Save the race! Save the race!"  I literally read the scene like 5 times to make sure I wasn't missing something, but that's basically it.  It makes no sense.  There are also minor inconsistencies, like Misa saying it's been a week since Minmay and Hikaru have gone missing, then cut immediately to them trapped and Minmay says "It's been three days..."

Honestly, this script feels hastily written, and like I said, it feels like the screenwriter just watched the first four episodes of Robotech and a bootleg of DYRL (possibly Clash of the Bionoids) and went from there.  This doesn't feel like a first draft, if feels more like rough draft you'd sit on for a few weeks before revisiting.

That said I AM SO HAPPY I finally got read this, if just for the history alone.  Now if I can only see the last 8 pages!!!

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Didn't Save (Adrian) post this as well? I know they talked about it on the speaker podcast at some point. 

That was just the initial 10 page outline, not the fleshed out script.

Big thumbs up.  Would love to see the rest of this!  Thanks for sharing!

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There are news threads that people would look to well before the front page. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has the forums bookmarked, not the front page.

For long-time posters such as yourself, that seems like the norm here.  Again, not knocking that AT ALL, but it does seem to reiterate my thoughts that that's all this site seems to be for these days; a place for for long time friends to hang out rather than be an actual site to promote the franchise it chooses to represent.  An entirely new series came out in 2016!  Love it or hate it (and honestly, I wasn't totally in love with it myself), someone who may have been introduced to Macross through that series may have come here only to be left scratching their heads, because other than the podocasts, there was NOTHING about it on the front page.

Hell, last year I was the first person to find and publish Kawamori's live-action Macross treatment from the 90's on this very site and no one really seemed to care.   I was happy with it, I got to satisfy a decades-old curiosity that I had, and I wanted to share it.  Maybe I was expecting more people to be just as excited as I was about it, but that obviously wasn't the case.  To each their own, but if someone else can't be excited about it here, where else can they be?

From mostly a lurker perspective, I'm just kind of wondering.

For a few years, it seemed this site had a ton of news pouring out of it.  The front page was updated regularly, I'd get to see some cool photos of trade shows and stuff going down in Japan.  But over the past year, it's been nada.  I mean, over the past 12 months I see only updates for the Speaker Podcast, which I do enjoy (mainly because personal friends have been doing it, so they'll give me crap if I don't listen) and cosplay photos which honestly hold no interest to me (and I know they themselves have been the cause of some drama, which I mostly avoided).

And even on Facebook there seems to have been a splinter, MacrossWorld is now "Macross Fan Central" and/or there's been another spin-off group, I honestly can't tell.   I've attended MacrossWorld Con for the last 9 years or so, and now that's something else, apparently  The forums here are obviously plenty active, but at this point it seems like a lot of old friends who just connect via a message board. I'm not knocking that, I do the same thing myself on other sites.  But, is that all this place is now?

I guess I'm wondering why the updates here seem to have been all but abandoned.  For the one or two of you who recognize my username, I was big Robotech blogger for a few years back around 2004 - 2007.  Small timeframe, I know, but I managed to keep up to date with all of the Robotech news on a daily basis, and as we all know, Robotech and Harmony Gold have done next to nothing in the last 30 years.  Even then, I found daily updates to give.  Macross, on the other hand,  has done SO MUCH in the past decade that the updates should be abundant.  Why no front page update of the new series announced at the Walkurie concert?  Or the new Sheryl Nome video supposed to be announced in a week?  Shouldn't this be the one-stop shop for all thing Macross?

Like I said, just a lurker wondering...

Asking questions here is 100% useless. We do not have the answers for you.

Wait a sec - this is the INTERNET. Ask a question on a forum and you'll get 100% certain answers, regardless of qualifications of the person posting. INTERNET!

Total speculation on my end, but I have to wonder if this is related to the Veroninca Mars / WB Kickstarter.

Kristen Bell and Rob Thomas (the series creator), were looking to make a VM movie with their own money, but WB owned the IP and wasn't willing to take the risk (they'd still be spending money on marketing, distribution, financials, etc). WB and/or Rob Thomas came up with the Kickstarter idea purely to guage interest and it obviously worked.

Not knowing how long the Live Action term is, its obvious that there's less and happening with it. Maybe Harmony Gold is hoping WB will get a new sparked interest in this liscense they have? I mean, it worked for Veronica Mars...

Also, not to get off-topic, but this makes me wonder about the oddity that is Shadow Rising. A (very brief) recap going off my memory:

• Tommy annoucnes publicly that they's started production on it in 2007, shows a trailer at Comic-Con and/or Anime Expo. Around the same time Kevin McKeever says its "greenlit" on the Space Station Liberty podcast
• Tommy says (again publicly) in 2008 at Comic-Con that the Shadow Rising trailer was made to mainly gain investor interest, and goes into the live action movie
• Years go by with super-vague answers about it. No real implication of it being worked on or if its on hiatus
• Anime Expo 2013, Tommy states that they've "never stopped' working on it and teases it yet again, showing the trailer.
• Anime Expo 2014, it becomes completely moot. No mention whatsoever.

When Tommy first said it was mainly to gain investor interest, I felt like it was a huge slip-up on his part when I heard it. When Tommy showed the trailer again last year, there Lionsgate reps in the audience, so he could have been playing that up to them? Has this been purposefly planned as vaporware the whole time?

I've met and gotten to know a number of other people involved in Robotech Academy who are pretty great people, so I actually hope they get decent paid gig out of it. It's all just really, really bizarre and feels like there's an ulterior motive. Maybe I'm wrong, who knows?

They're not actually showing Love Live Alive, they're showing the Carl Macek documentary that was an extra on the A+E DVD from a year and a half ago. It contains about a 3-second preview of LLA

I'll be in Tokyo starting this coming Friday for a week, do you guys know if there are any events going on? I've browsed the thread and didn't see anything, but I might have missed something. Looks like I'm just going to miss the art exhibit. thanks

Question for anyone who may know. I'm going to be in Tokyo at the end of August, will it be likely that I can pick up the deluxe box set at that time? Or will it have likely sold out at that point?

As I read not a word of Japanese, is there any word on a release date? I'm going to be in Japan in August and would love to pick up the Hybrid pack without paying shipping fees.

I mean a REAL hiatus. No product/ mention, etc. Not the passive; oh its that time of our contract to utilize our licensing.

Personally, Robotech can stay or go, but if it stays, fire all three knucleheads and hire new people with some real gusto. If not, then HG can go f*** off.

Keep in mind, that for 99% of the people who actually buy Robotech, they've been on hiatus since they first saw Shadow Chronicles on the Best Buy shelf 5 years ago. A majority of the audience doesn't follow what's being said at every con, forum post, etc. When they see it, they'll be like "oh yeah, I remember that show"

Suit yourself...

From my perspective, Robotech can go.

What has it ever done for itself?

As I said before, it can and does bring in $$ when stuff actually gets produced.

It's just stupid to assume that Carl and Greg wrote an

entire script without the Japanese version, then got it later,

only to redo it with corrections and similar references.

I think more than likely, they followed Macross's script and deviated more and more when it came to Southern Cross and Moresopedia in order to to shoehorn it in as a continuation.

But also, let's think about it realistically. This was one project Greg Snegoff worked on starting 28 years ago and probably hasn't seen since. Obviously, his memory is going to be fuzzy. The guys who work on these shows don't act like fans and talk and analyze it for years afterwards. Most conspiracies that arise can usually be attributed to people who are overworked and underpaid, and just got something out the door in a tight deadline. I've worked in TV for 12 years and I can't believe the amount of conspiracy theories that pop up about hidden agendas people have. At the end of the day, we're just people doing a job wanting to go home and crack open a beer.

I just came here to meet chicks.

Keep in mind that Greg Snegoff also didn't specify if he was talking about Macross, Moresopedia, or Southern Cross, when it came to translations. Like I said, I wouldn't doubt if a lot of the translations were crap. I think Sandy Frank said the same thing when he did Battle of the Planets, he just made up a lot of crap (and added R2D2)

I've heard that horrible English translations can kind of be the norm in Japan. When I went last year, a lot of English text looked like it was dumped into Google translate and spit out.

Just to feed the flames (this thread has gotten amusing), from my interview with Greg from 7 years (holy crap!) ago on 5/30/05:

SCN In regards to the way you translated the original Japanese dialogue, were you given the original scripts or translations? How close did you choose to stay to the original Japanese dialogue?

GS This is not going to make hardcore anime' fans happy but frankly the original Japanese dialogue was not up to our standards. In fact, afterwards, we received compliments from the Japanese who thought our dialogue and stories were better than the original. Things have changed since then but the animators tended to pay far more attention to visual aspects than to sound, including dialogue.

The translations of the original dialogue were nearly useless for two reasons, the main one being that, since Carl had basically ripped apart the original three series to use them as raw material, creating something entirely new and different, the translations ended up not being much good to us. He'd hand them out but they often caused more problems than they solved. And many episodes had no translation whatsoever. We wrote from scratch to a silent copy-try that as an exercise in concentration and story structure! Anyway, our stories have little to do with the originals for the reason that we tied together three disparate series that had nothing to do with each other.

There were also cultural differences that made us decide to change certain things-including editing out the usual snot bubbles, blood spatters and gratuitous panty shots.

But, but Greg Snegoff said that the original dialogue sucked

I remember when I interviewed him like 5 or 6 years ago, he said that, and said it would piss off a lot of fans. More than likely, though, the translations they received were bad. RT was done for so little money, and anime dubs were pretty new at the time, so I'm sure they didn't hire a top-notch translator for the dialogue.

Besides, like all anime, they'd have to change words around to match the mouth movements.

Edit: You can also tell they had some fun with the dub, as is apparent from dialogue additions to this scene:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7Q8GxIW16I&t=7m3s

From the dawn of time, moving silently down through the centuries.

I'd rather be on the side with a thousand Sheryl Nome cosplayers.

That's another thing, and I'm not saying this to flamebait or troll, or start a fanboy war in any way, but are there really "sides?" Is it one vs. the other? I know what you said specifically isn't said literally, as if when the apocalypse comes all those will be judged by Babylonian Gods on which they like better, but the attitude of some fans feeling there has to be one or other gets kind of pointless when you realize how insignificant it is the whole scheme of things.

It was like during the HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray days, I was discussing on a forum the benefits of HD-DVD (not over Blu-ray, just the benefits it had) when some guy on the forum got all pissed and started to tell me how he was going to "win" with Blu-ray and leave me in the dust. When I told him I owned both players, he started accusing me of being a traitor. When I asked him why he was getting upset over a piece of plastic, he stopped responding.

Also, there was a time when Bendo came into RDF-HQ and would tell us to come here and defend Robotech (he would literally say it was our duty). We were like "dude, shut up, we don't care." He was genuinely preplexed and then proceeded to accuse of not being real Robotech fans, and would then do three hour shows on our posts as retaliation.

Again, VF5S, I'm not saying your statement is the equivalent to those examples in any way, but it just brought up the point to me that a lot of fandom feels they have to choose "sides"

Something that I've kind of realized, and I'll kind of play devil's advocate here. From a financial point of view, a lot of Robotech product is a success when it's actually released. For better or for worse, regardless of the product quality.

Obviously, I don't have hard numbers to back it up, but if you look at the history of it, you can kind of tell. Toynami's had the license for over 10 years, and while the amount of products they've made lately has lessened, there's no way they would have kept producing stuff if they didn't think it would make money. With the exception of a few years, there was a company licensing Robotech comics from 1985 - 2005. Even when there was no interest for them after 2005, they still went back and published the last series as a graphic novel after there was an increased demand. The novels have been re-printed ad nauseum since their first publication, and Palladium came back to publish the RPG. And notice how HG has been able to milk the soundtrack for the last 10 years? Last but not least, you have to take into account that Tom Bateman himself said Shadow Chronicles was a financial success.

Granted, not everything's been successful. The video games were pretty bad (especially the second one). The Matchbox toys were horrible back in the day, and there's a lot of weird licensed crap that I'm guessing is just sitting in storage not moving (messenger bags, keychains, luggage tags, etc.) Also, a lot of this stuff is based on the Macross portion, which is probably was resonates the most in the minds of the casual, nostalgic fan.

But the point is, regardless of quality, the Robotech name still has some selling power to it. When stuff gets produced, it tends to get sold, otherwise the licensees wouldn't keep coming back for more. It appears that in the last few years, since nothing has been produced, it's just fading away from the consciousness of the masses (who are where the real money is, not the hardcore, message-board posting, blog writing, fan).