Seto Kaiba

So Richard Bilrer wants to build a galatic highway, yes? When does he say that it was "all for minmay"? I read that in another post and I've watched the series twice adn still can't find it. Also, in what series does it say Hikaru is lost in space?

I can't remember if they actually CONFIRM that. I remember Luca saying something to Leon about suspecting that Bilrer wanted to use the advantageous properties of fold quartz-based fold drives to monopolize interstellar commerce. I know his involvement in that whole cybernetic conspiracy was supposedly to find Minmay and the Megaroad-01.

Well, it's Macross: Flashback 2012's related publications that say that Hikaru was assigned to the SDF-2 Megaroad-01, which was captained by his wife Misa. It's the Megaroad-01 that got missing (with the entire original love triangle aboard).

Seto, I haven't been keeping track of HG's works, but what exactly have they done in 2009 so far for Robotech? Is it just toys and an RPG book and can they sustain a business with their quality of work without the fans with money to burn?

There really hasn't been a lot of motion from Harmony Gold this year.

The only major development in Robotech since Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles failed to set the world on fire was their December 2008 announcement that Robotech's original series would be sold on iTunes on a per-episode basis. There's been precious little from the Robotech front this year, with the only noteworthy things being the hype about the live-action movie (which even die-hard fans are starting to get sick of) and a few more shoddily-built additions to the Masterpiece Collection... namely, more color-matching Betas and another Cyclone.

Can they sustain business without the gullible fans who've buy every repainted toy and re-released DVD box set? Probably not. Of course, they do have the backing of the main corporate office, which does something with real-estate. If the fans do finally get tired of it all and stop buying, the main office'll probably shut the Robotech franchise down and go do something else.

If they somehow gain a profit from this practice, I'd like to know what they're doing with the money. They're probably not making shows or anything with plot with it. Reinvesting it in new crappy toys? Paying off licensing fees and lawyers for a future comeback?

Oh yes, they profit from that practice.

The way they made Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles and trumpeted it as a huge success ought to be a clear indication of exactly HOW they do it too. They put very little money into the development and production of new products, then price them as though they were made by a much more competent company. That way, even if sales are mediocre (and they often are) the initial investment will still be covered, and the rest is all profit.

Exactly what they're doing with it is anybody's guess... since they don't seem to be investing it in more or better products (given the recent decline in the quality of the Masterpiece Collection and the phenomenally low budget of the RTSC movie). They probably spend a lot of it keeping their staff paid, and the rest on constantly renewing their trademarks.

I still think it would interesting though if HG/WB some how acquired the Live action rights for the mecha designs that are unique to Macross II.

And in one sentence, you have completely redefined my vision of hell.

Everyone knows HG doesn't have the creativity to redesign VFs, and as for WB after looking back at what they did with the Batmobile I almost get the feeling they will be making VFs out of a F-117 Nighthawks.

Well, Harmony Gold may not have the creativity to redesign the VFs, but then again the final say on mechanical design belongs to Maguire Entertainment and Warner Bros, who DO know how to do that. I get the feeling what we'll be seeing are transforming F-22s and F-35s, just like Bayformers did.

Needless to say I think the VF-2SS and other M II designs are much better design than what HG/WB would likely come up with and I could list about a dozen different reasons for using them.

Yeah, they're much better than what HG/WB/ME could do, but they're still Macross IP, and thankfully off-limits to all three parties of idiots. As much as I'd love to see a high-quality CG VF-2SS Valkyrie II, the last place I'd want to see it is a Robotech movie.

Oh man that's great. Limited print run and hungry fans makes for an instant success you can brag about even if it sucks.

and that, my friends, is the secret to Harmony Gold's "success".

Harmony Gold gives the illusion that Robotech is popular by producing merchandise in very limited quantities, and then bragging about it when it sells out. The cornerstone of their toy sales, the Masterpiece Collection, are all limited to production runs of 10,000 units. Considering that the Robotech fanbase, while small, is still an international one, the limited 10,000 unit run isn't going to go very far, especially not with fans buying 2 or 3 at a time, and comic shops buying them in even larger numbers. The comics books are on the same model... extremely limited print runs that are totally inadequate to satisfy the small, but devoted fanbase.

Huh, I had always heard that it was an unofficial production. Its probably just confusion over the fact that Shoji Kawamori, the creator of Macross wanted nothing to do with it though.

Nah, Macross II was an official production done by Big West, it's just that Studio Nue wasn't involved with the project (though some other Macross creators were, like Haruhiko Mikimoto), the studios who did the animation were AIC and ONRIO. Kawamori's never really said he wants nothing to do with Macross II, just that it's an alternate universe story because it doesn't line up with his vision for the ongoing story (which was, at the time, Macross Plus). It was made back when he was still loudly professing that he didn't want to do another Macross show.

What made them worth so much back in the day, were they printed in limited quantities or something? People are still trying to sell the complete set for $20-$50 on eBay with no buyers.

Because Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles had an extremely limited print run, and sold out fairly quickly, so right around the time Robotech fans thought that this was the start of a new, major story arc, they were fighting to snap up copies of the magazine, which supposedly contained key details about the plot. After scans were leaked to the net, most people realized that the magazine was just a rehash of several old Sentinels books with some redesigned ships and characters, and that was the end of their interest in it.

Speaking of running into Macross in the weirdest places...

On a whim, I was watching Akane-iro ni Somaru Saka just a few minutes ago when the sudden appearance of Macross Frontier's Captain Wilder caught me by surprise. Attached is the screen capture from episode 8 of the show (about 4:17 in).

* 8-Winged Giant Bomber [...the hell? ]

I know what it is now... it's the pirate ship from Macross Dynamite 7.

I know the plot of the movie... it came to me in a flash, and now the hiring of Tom Rob Smith makes sense.

The movie's going to be a murder mystery! It'll star Tobey Maguire as a Detective Rick Hunter, a rookie trying to figure out who murdered Minmei after the Earth forces and the Zentradi got sick of her stupidity, and the fact that listening to her singing is the auditory equivalent of unanesthetized dental surgery. It'll be a tough case, with lots of twists and turns (from over 50,000 suspects, all with motive!), and at the movie's climax, Rick finds out that HE is the murderer, and turns himself in, only to be given an official pardon, a medal, and a three-rank promotion by a grateful Captain Gloval.

Whatever, my point wasn't about what was retconned the birth years or the timeline, it was that in DYRL Hikaru and Minmey were made to be the consenting age of 18 unlike the series.

Considering the age of consent is lower over there, I think that was probably more to facilitate the changed backstory, where Hikaru was already a soldier and Minmay already famous when the two met, rather than a way to dodge accusations of them being too young.

huh? Is that supposed to be Minmay? Asian girls have no muscle definition and generally couldn`t be in a female body building contest.

Yep, that's what Minmei looks like in the Sentinels comics. Ugly, isn't it?

Unfortunately, she's not alone in having been turned from a slender woman into some buxom bodybuilder... pretty much all the women in the Sentinels comics looked like that.

I believe it's because Robotech RPG players live in a bubble, sealed from the rest of humanity.

Eh, I'd say Robotech fans live in a sealed-off bubble away from the rest of humanity... Robotech RPG players doubly so.

While we are at it lets ask WB to make a Live Action adaption of the Robotech Sentinels Winter Wonderland Comic

My eyes! THEY BURN!

Here's something that's bugged me recently; what's the fandom's impression on characters with mixed genetic ancestries like Dana and Maia Stirling or good aliens in general?

Honestly, it's hard to say exactly what the Robotech fanbase thinks of characters of mixed ancestry. The problem is that, aside from the Sterlings, there really aren't any mixed-species couples who have produced children. The Zentradi are nearly wiped out, the survivors pack up and leave with the Expeditionary Forces and suffer heavy losses, leaving the species all but extinct by 2044. The Tirolans who attacked Earth are apparently wiped out at the end of the war, so they never mate with humans, and all but two of the human-form Invid are dead by the end of their war with humanity, and they haven't been around long enough to mate with anyone. Unless Scott and Ariel or Lancer and Sera pop out a kid in the near future, the only mixed-ancestry characters around are Dana Sterling, who is almost universally loathed, and Maia Sterling, who is too new and unestablished for the fans to give a hoot about.

For now, it doesn't look like the Robotech fanbase gives a toss about mixed-ancestry characters. The show and expanded universe material have always been kind of anthropocentric, pitting the all-human forces against the evil, cardboard cutout alien villains.

The subject of "good aliens" in Robotech is a particularly odious one, because there's no way to approach it without bringing up the monumental stupidity that is Robotech II: the Sentinels. Really, there are no "good" aliens in the original Robotech series. There are always one or two "good" characters among the evil alien hordes, but other than them, the aliens are essentially all malevolent, and bent on humanity's destruction. Robotech II: the Sentinels tried to introduce the subject of friendly alien races by having the Expeditionary Forces of the Pioneer Mission liberating worlds that had been invaded and occupied by the Invid Regent's forces. Unfortunately, the friendly aliens who appear in Robotech II: the Sentinels are a pack of sci-fi cliches... anthropomorphic animals, sentient robots, coneheads, rock people, and space amazons. Even hardcore Robotech fans have a hard time taking the Sentinels aliens seriously, and the general consensus is that the whole lot of them were a stupid idea to begin with. Robotech fans don't do friendly aliens... it's always humanity versus the alien menace.

* 8-Winged Giant Bomber [...the hell? ]

Okay, so I'm not the only one who did a double-take and then couldn't figure that one out.

My first thought was the SB-10 Starwing, but that clearly doesn't have 8 wings... could this possibly be the first of the ETC sheets, featuring one of those wacky terrorist mecha from the Macross Digital Mission VF-X games? Like the Annabella Lasiodora mobile weapon?

Technology Sheet

* Variable Fighter / History and Development (1)

For one wild moment, I thought this might include a reprint of the VF History article from Macross II...

Because if they didn't put "subtle" references to the other parts of the Robotech saga, pandering, fans wouldn't know if Shadow Chronicles was really a continuous sequel to the rest of it. This is especially true if the copyright really forced elements coming back to look completely different from what they were before.

Considering the entire movie revolves around the only unresolved plot point that the majority of the fans still give a damn about... the whereabouts of a Macross character Harmony Gold can't legally use... is it any surprise they had to load the movie down with useless references to previous Robotech sagas to present viewers with the illusion of continuity with the rest of Robotech? If they hadn't, the only way you'd be able to tell it was a Robotech sequel and not just a generic-looking direct-to-DVD sci-fi movie with dodgy animation, substandard writing, lackluster editing, shoddy voice acting, piss-poor music, and boring, dated mecha designs would be the title on the box.

I just realized how important a role slapping people in the face plays in macross.

I guess Bright Noa got bored after the One Year War and started teaching at the U.N. Spacy's Officer Candidate School.

There's something I don't get though... Why are many "casual" Robotech fans insisting that Miley Cyrus or Vanessa Hudgens play Minmei??!

Maybe they're hoping that, if nothing else, having a reasonably attractive woman on the cast will keep the fans coming to conventions. Or maybe they're hoping for a Zentradi style lolicon attraction with Miley?

They had a director? Chuck Roven was one of the producers before he bailed on the project.

Did Roven actually bail from the project? Harmony Gold's official position is that he was reassigned.

Macross II merged both human and Zent technology from fighters, battleships to how the cities were rebuild. The VF-2SS is both technologies merged together since two races lived decades together and both military forces would be merged into one. Makes perfect sense that the SAP does not cosmetically match the Valk. Raise all the points you want against the series you want, most of us would buy the VF-2SS, some of us more than two.

Odds are I'd probably end up buying at least four. Five or six if they release the color-stripe decals to do each character's version.

I don't have the picture handy, but there is a Valkyrie in the OVA, all of 3 or 4 seconds in Episode 5. But its a hybrid Zentradi-Human built variable fighter. Looks cool.

That's all the time it gets... that's the VF-XX Zentradi Valkyrie, 's the VF-2SS's predecessor. But for that one scene, it exists only in lineart and history snippets. It's a neat design, but there's virtually no information about it.

The VF-2JA & VF-2SS are definitely Earth design!!

Both are Earth-designed, but the VF-2SS has a lot of Zentradi hardware under the hood.

The SAP is all Zentradi in shape and color, plus it also has the three assist laser pods that fly around the VF-2SS when the SAP used.

Nitpick patrol... five auto-attacker bits, not three.

Seems like most of the negative design remakes are all based off a 90's Bandai model kit, and not the actual line art.

That was pretty much my take on it... a lot of the hate for the VF-2SS that's getting voiced here is either based on the 1:100 transforming model kit (which is not a fair representation of the mecha), or without any perspective on the worse "big gun" offenders in recent shows.

In all honestly there is no way to know for sure how the execs at WB perceive Robotech's a popularity as a franchise.

Somehow, when I ponder this, all that comes to mind is Maguire Entertainment filing a lawsuit against Harmony Gold for fraudulent misrepresentation of the Robotech live-action movie license. I can't help but think that Harmony Gold might've... exaggerated... Robotech's popularity and the live-action movie's prospects a bit, in much the same way that Robotech.com moderators and staffers like Maverick_LSC and Kevin McKeever do on the message boards.

Then again, Cerberus Capital Management let the Daimler group off the hook after they supposedly misrepresented the state of Chrysler, so who knows? If it's one of those things where you have to prove deception and/or malice, it'll be in court forever, since Harmony Gold's employees and volunteer staffers have started believing their own lies.

I doubt the real issue is lack of money for the registration fee for exhibition booths, its the fact that they barely have anything original to show and license out to interested parties at the expo.

Isn't it really a matter of them having nothing at all to show and/or license out to interested parties?

With the live-action Robotech movie still very much a "what if" rather than a certainty, and Robotech: Shadow Rising mired in pre-production, I can't quite see them having anything new to peddle. I suspect that they probably signed over the merchandising rights to the live-action movie to Maguire Entertainment in exchange for royalties, and this early in the game, there isn't even a script, let alone mechanical or character designs to peddle to the toymakers. They're not known to be working on any new comics, novels, etc. and it's unlikely that they'll part with their usual toy manufacturers for the Shadow Rising toys, if any are ever produced.

Are you busy yet ?

when will i get those scans of the this is animation 10 southern cross ????

I guess the simplest answer would be "when I get around to making them".

I'm working my way through the massive stack of Macross stuff squatting in my in-tray at a pretty good pace, but please remember that I'm doing this stuff in my free time as a hobby, and I've got precious little free time these days thanks to the economic recession.

Y'know... people wonder why I prefer Macross the way it was before Kawamori got involved with the franchise again.

The next time somebody asks me why, I can just point to this thread and say "that's why".

wait and see??? Good thing there's so many good things coming out, the waiting will be easy.

No kidding... even just within Macross II there's still plenty of good stuff coming... Macross Chronicle's actually publishing new information about the characters and mecha, we've got the promise of at least one VF-100 series toy, and more...

If MacII was exactly the same but had SK's name on it; it would still be an unispired mess and I'd still hate on it.

If Macross 7 was exactly the same but had SK's name taken off of it, it would still be a train-wreck of horribly ugly mecha designs, bad music, unlikeable characters, and imbecilic storytelling, and I'd still hate on it.

If you don't like Macross II, that's your own business, but the OP asked if we were going to see any toys of the Macross II valkyreis in the near future, and the answer is unequivocally YES. If you don't like that, too bad. It's not like someone's holding a gun to your head until you buy one.

Whoever designed the Valks of MacII has clearly been studying at the import bodykit school of design aesthetics; i.e. substituting actual aesthetics with a metric ton of superfluous fins and intakes.

If you replaced "MacII" with "Macross 7" or "Macross Frontier", you would have my complete agreement. Kawamori clearly had Gundam on the brain when he was doing Macross Frontier, and the only way you could make the Sound Force valkyries look more like the VF equivalents of the sort of cheaply souped-up rice-burner you see high school kids driving is if they fitted big, gaudy chrome spoilers behind the cockpits.

The VF-27's beam gun is no worse than say the Zeta Gundam's Hyper Mega Launcher, L-Gaim MK II's Buster Launcher, or a Zaku's Magella top cannon.

And it's no better than any of them either... thank you. :3

It's a big weapon but most of that is the hollow front barrel and it is meant to be wielded with two hands.. [...] The VF-2SS pack is the only one that's essentially trying to balance a serving plate on its head :3

Fancy that... the VF-2SS's railgun is pretty much all hollow barrel... hell, the barrel isn't even sealed, a full side of it is open to space. The weapon's placement on the mecha is essentially a non-issue anyway, since it's a dedicated space fighter, and the weapon is essentially recoil-less. Even if it was, it's not like it's up there unsupported, being on a massive support arm that looks to be bigger around than the VF-2SS's actual arms. In its intended operating environment, it's a less cumbersome weapon than the front-heavy, over-long rifles used by the VF-25G and VF-27.

I stumbled upon this thread at Robotech.com:

LINK: http://www.robotech.com/community/forum/re...&forumid=24

Keep up the good PR work, Seto!

Same guy in both cases...

Pizza the Hutt, formerly known as Wraith_Knight, was hating on Macross because he'd had some bad experiences with Macross fans criticizing Robotech, and he didn't know anything about Macross beyond the existence of the original series and DYRL. I filled him in on what he was missing, explained some of the more common reasons why Macross fans criticize Robotech, and hooked him up with DYRL. He numbers among the Macross faithful now. I totally misjudged him, when he's not all defensive, he's actually a pretty cool guy too.

*puts down his bazooka*

I am the great communicator...

I was gonna post this over a week ago, but I forgot...

A big thank you to OneSixMedia for a lightning-fast sale.

I think the only new materials are the Haydonites and their ships and mecha and the Ark Angel. The rest are carry over from Mospeada and Sentinels.

Nah, there's a few more... there's the Haydonite ship, their two mecha ("Wraith" and "Infiltrator"), the super parts for the Shadow fighter and Shadow beta, the VR-057 "Super Cyclone", the Icarus, and the Ark Angel.

But seriously, like all the other characters introduced in Shadow Chronicles it would help if we knew more about who she is. Sheryl got an entire series and Maia got an incomplete film, tie-in comic, and a paragraph in an art book.

Actually, she didn't even get that much.

Maia Sterling appeared in two, maybe three, panels of the Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles comics, and only then in the epilogue of the final issue. All she really has to her credit is the incomplete film and that one short paragraph in Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles.

Unless THAT ass is one of the only things the crew wanted us to pay attention to while we waste time and money watching the thing.

That's exactly it... it seems they expect that, if nothing else, the sex appeal of Maia, Janice, and Ariel will endear them to the movie's target audience... teenage anime viewers. The Shadow Chronicles movie was never targeted at the fanbase in general, the stated goal was to use it to bring new, younger fans into the franchise. So of course, since the average anime fan has nothing but contempt for Robotech, they had to try and appeal to the next best thing... the teenagers with holes in their pockets.

Just to balance things out, there are also a lot of ugly men in Shadow Chronicles. I can't tell if they wanted to make almost every man in the RDF chunky or buff in those spandex uniforms.

Remember... prior to Robotech, Tommy Yune's chief credentials were drawing for Superman and Danger Girl... that's just what he does...

I heard rumors that fans worked on it, which was strange because I thought professionals are usually called in to work on official material like that.

Prior to finding a copy, I'd assumed that Tommy Yune was the main author, and that Vincent McHenry had "consulted" on the book. When I actually got around to reading it, I was surprised to see that virtually none of it is by Tommy Yune, and most of it is copied wholesale from the Robotech.com Infopedia.

While the cover may proclaim that the book is by Tommy Yune with a foreword by Carl Macek, the truth of it is that there are four "contributing authors" who aren't mentioned except on the inside cover and at the back of the book, authors who appear to have been the ones to actually get the work done... Vincent McHenry (McHenry), Dr. Kenneth Olson, Jonathan L. Switzer (Captain JLS), and Pieter Thomassen... four fans whose devotion to the franchise eclipses their common sense.

Anyway, how much of the material mentioned in the art book was entirely new and not rehashes from Mospeada and etc.? Was there anything regarding cut material or stuff that the crew wanted to do with the film that could give hints about future works? Just wondering what they were trying to accomplish with Shadow Chronicles and where they wanted to go from here before the backlash(es).

A lot of the stuff in Carl Macek's foreword on the "creation" of Robotech is obvious stuff that you could find pretty much anywhere. Apart from some minimal details about the new characters and modified mecha, virtually none of the content is new or in any way original. A lot of it is content copied almost word-for-word from the Robotech.com Infopedia, and what little isn't copied from the Infopedia is all blindingly stupid statements of the obvious about stuff from the movie and the Prelude comics. Except for the excessive use of screen captures in the foreword, almost all of the art is new. The only sections that use Mospeada production lineart are those for the mecha and ships, which use the existing lineart as a reference point, and then show the 3D art (based on/modified from) it.

There is literally NOTHING in the book about cut material from the movie, or about the future direction for the series.