Seto Kaiba

Okay, thanks to OneSixMedia I've checked the Mikimoto book off my checklist.

I'm still waiting to hear back from my overseas seller on B-Club 73 and B-Club 74, but for all intents and purposes I've got every book I was looking for now!

Even though they cannot legally do so?

That's why it's billed as a "reimagining", and not a straight-up adaptation of the Macross Saga. It'll bear as much resemblance to Macross/"The Macross Saga as Michael Bay's Transformers did to the G1 Transformers series.

I always assume that any huge conglomerate could crush anything like a small anime production studio, but I could be wrong.

Not if they have a decent copyright lawyer they can't...

Gubaba, I do consulting work in the auto industry... I've seen tiny research groups crush huge multinational corporations in court over patent infringement cases. I have no doubt that if Warner and/or Harmony Gold started abusing Big West's intellectual property, they'd take 'em to the cleaners and win.

Is there any info or update on the live action Robotech movie by Toby?

Would ask in the original thread, but it's been closed...

Aside from the fact that one of the producers was reassigned to a different project by WB, the only tidbits that've come out are that Maguire Entertainment got the rights to the live-action movie, and that it was a "re-imagining".

Personally considering that the last time WB spend millions to stay as loyal as possible to look of the source material they got Watchmen which was an utter failure with the mainstream audience I think that WB will either shoot for a readaption of Robotech to avoid legal conflict or pack up rather then continuing to fight for rights.

Yeah, that'd be in line with what little official information has been made available... Maguire Entertainment and Warner intend to make a "re-imagining" of the Robotech story, not a faithful adaptation.

Can anyone just get a:

"yeah the LAM, it's proceeding but we know little else at this time"

OR

"looks like things have stalled on the LAM for now"

Well, if you talk to Kevin McKeever, about all you'll get is "yeah, they're working on the live-action movie" followed by "you can tell they're working hard because we don't have anything to show for it".

In retrospect, it seems like Harmony Gold and 3DRealms must've been following the same marketing strategy... here's hoping they'll meet the same fate.

Well according to Mr. Kevin Mckeever everything is proceeding smoothly (despite the fact that there's no new news about the RLAM's current state)

McKeever's word isn't worth the kilobyte of so of database space it took to post it.

Wow. If that story's true (no offense...I'm just a natural skeptic about these things), that could actually be good for Big West. Renegotiating the deal could work in their favor.

No offense to you, Freiflug, but it sounds like BS to me... similar rumors, all started by fans who "heard it from a friend", have been flying around ever since Harmony Gold announced that Maguire Entertainment got the rights to make a live-action Robotech movie.

We have it, from no less a person than Tommy Yune himself, that Harmony Gold approached Big West not too long ago to talk about Macross rights and licensing, and that Big West told 'em to go pound sand. I very much doubt that they'd change their minds just because Harmony Gold is asking indirectly through Warner Bros. I can't imagine them having any possible incentive to want to see the movie succeed... especially when you consider their long-running squabble with Tatsunoko, and the fact that we've yet to see a live-action anime adaptation that could be called a success with a straight face.

As for the VF-1R, I think it was called the YF-1R for Robotech. Don't quote me on that. I never understood why it was even made as a Robotech canon veritech. What they should've done is simply redo the fastpack armor or even do something like the Platypus Valkyrie custom.

Nope, not anymore.

Right around the time Robotech: Battlecry first came out, the Infopedia listed it as the YF-1R, which is what the game calls it too. Right around the time the Jack Archer MPC was released, it was changed to "VF-1R" in the Infopedia.

Funny. I considered the novels the second best. After the better comics, of course.

's why I said "most", not "all". There are some fans out there who actually like the McKinney novels, and some who prefer them to the TV series itself. All the same, they're a fairly small minority, and one with a savage persecution complex, due in large measure to the fact that the majority of Robotech fans (and Robotech's "creative staff") hold the novels in such low regard.

(Usually starting a sentence with "In the novels..." in a debate over there is enough to make sure most people don't even read the rest of your post)

I'm still amazed that they made the VF-1R as a variation based solely on one appearance in the original series. I don't even recall ever seeing it in my various re-watchings of SDF:M.

Yeah, I was too... it only appeared for a few seconds (one scene) in Ep32 "Broken Heart". The entirety of the footage showing it (a short .gif sequence) is in the Robotech.com Infopedia article on it.

I find it particularly obnoxious, since the branch of Macross I'm researching (the alternate universe) already has a "VF-1R", and every time I talk about it I have to qualify it with "no, not the Robotech one".

That solves the mystery of why Lisa wasn't in Shadow Chronicles. HG at least had enough sense to not show the redesign Tommy Yune made of Lisa as a three armed freak after watching "Force of Arms" (Ep 27).

If only it were that simple... or that amusing.

Lisa DID appear in Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles. The Haruhiko Mikimoto design (Misa Hayase) was replaced by a hopelessly generic-looking woman with her hair done up in a simple ponytail. I guess they decided that she wasn't worth the effort, so she gets seriously wounded early in the comic and spends most of the miniseries recovering, only to quit the military and become a member of the "Sentinels Council" instead, neatly getting her out of the way so they'd be able to minimize the number of VAs they'd have to call back.

As far as the VF-1 is concerned, what has the rt world done differently with specs on it compared to the Macross canon? I'm curious, cause I simply never researched this in depth.

Robotech's tech specs for the VF-1 Valkyrie are basically just the Macross specs with most of the details boiled out.

The only real departures from the original Macross specs for the VF-1 Valkyrie are two animation goofs that were canonized, and the whole tossup over the fuel. That one animation error where the sensor blisters on the nosecone were animated as laser cannons was made official, which is flagged as a technology upgrade unique to units aboard the SDF-1. When the developers at Vicious Cycle were looking to pad out Robotech: Battlecry, they turned the VF-1A mistakenly animated with three head lasers from "Broken Heart" (Ep32) into another variant of the VF-1, the VF-1R. The whole fuel debate is still unsettled... initially Tommy Yune didn't specify what VF-1's ran on when he did the new comics with Wildstorm, but when the new RPG rolled out, he decided that the VF-1 runs on thermonuclear fusion (based on vague dialogue from the series).

No, the "End of Circle" of Robotech is a Stable Time Loop: "Through Applied Phlebotinum, Functional Magic, or some other means, our heroes travel back to the past. In the past, they wind up being responsible for the very events that underpin their own "present." This creates a chicken-and-egg scenario, in which the looping sequence of events has no clear beginning." http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StableTimeLoop

Fortunately, that's a McKinneyism, and even the fans gave up trying to shoehorn that crap into the continuity. Most of them treat the McKinney novels as borderline fan-fiction, due to their often nonsensical departures from the TV series.

Initially, members of the Robotech "creative" team made some remarks that they were considering a looping story for future Robotech TV shows (Robotech III: the Odyssey, Robotech IV, etc.) and speculated at an ending in the future where a retired "Commodore Hunter" would start to tell a batch of cadets about how it all began, using that to loop the story around into a self-repeating narrative.

Song Energy, man. Song Energy.

Really? I was assuming he's temporarily gone so hotblooded that the sudden change in temperature shattered the glass of his helmet.

Damn. That sh!7 is dangerous!

If you think that's bad... go read Macross 7 Trash, where they actually succeed in weaponizing spirita...

Contrary to my expectations, Chronicle's been paying a lot of attention to Macross II lately. Color me surprised.

I figured that issue 21 was gonna be a one-shot, but they've had one or more Macross II pages in each issue since (except #22). Sylvie, the VF-2SS, the Mardook fleet, the U.N. Spacy officers, Hibiki, and now Ishtar...

That must be a very time consuming job.

Not at all... the time-consuming job is trying to keep an IT consulting business afloat while the local economy spirals toward oblivion.

There's so little activity on Robotech.com these days that it rarely takes more than five or ten minutes effort to break up all but the worst of the fanwankery threads. Occasionally there's someone who asks an intelligent question, or someone who starts an intelligent debate, and on those rare days it doesn't feel much like a job at all.

You have become that which you have fought against.

Nah, far from it.

All I've become is one of several volunteer zookeepers in the primate house.

We could get some more dimensions, masses and weapons. That's really all we need. But you're right of course, there really isn't much to say about them. I just like having something to fill in the profiles

Dimensions? I already got at least part of that. The only dimensions I've seen for them are their lengths, which are repeated over and over again in multiple publications. (There's something to be said for their consistency, I guess...) As far as weapons, we're gonna get "many x guided beam cannons", and for a few ships, converging beam cannons. I'd love to find out how many mecha those ships are carrying, but odds are we won't get that much. At least the Gigamesh article cleared up the vague statements about Feff's being one of a kind.

My guess would be the sheet will cram all four main classes of Mardook ship onto a single sheet, though I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Feff's scoutship and Ingues's mobile fortress got mecha sheets of their own.

MII UN Spacy People - on the brass/senior base command staff. Looks like there *may* be some new info in the text. I'll leave it to Saito to clarify.

Are you EVER going to get my name right? Seriously, just call me "Mike" if it'll help you remember.

I'd like to add TheNightclerk to the Straight Shooters list... one of the best non-eBay sellers I've ever had the pleasure of working with. He got back to me quickly on my questions, settled the transaction and got my purchase out to me in record time.

Well...you DO post there more than most of us...which, by analogy, is kind of getting into the cage with the monkeys.

Yeah, but that's really more like marching into the cage to stop the monkeys from trying breathe water...

Funny about Treiz...I first heard about him when he tried to argue with DougBendo about whether or not the SDF-3 would in reality have fallen into the black hole or not (can't recall who won, though...the whole thing was pretty painful) and then as the guy who posted a negative review of every episode of Frontier. Some of his points were valid, most were negative for negativity's sake.

Treiz is one of those special children who believes that Robotech is a wildly successful and popular sci-fi franchise to rival Star Wars or Star Trek, and he usually tries to support his arguments with some pretty tortured logic that usually relies on throwing the "canon" sources aside and creatively reinterpreting a bunch of disjointed scenes out of context.

Interesting that he's moved on to whether the Japanese specs "work" for RT. I hope he wins that little argument. It would make me feel a little safer about Macross Chronicle translations not being pilfered to bolster RT.

No such luck, I'm afraid. Turns out even that "Art of the Shadow Chronicles" book reprints P. Thomassen et. al.'s OSM-derived mecha specs word for word... even the spelling and transposition errors.

I don't think we'll have to worry about Chronicle translations being pilfered to bolster RT, they seem content with what they already have, and what they can steal from RobotechResearch and SteelFalcon where the VF-1 is concerned.

Don't get your hopes up...it seems to me that most of the character sheets don't go through the character's backstory much...and how many pages each character gets seems to depend less on how important they are and more on how many outfits they wear (I'm a-lookin' at YOU, Mylene!).

I know, I know... but hope springs eternal, even for this jaded Macross II fan.

Since I'm really not too enthused about the current offerings in #22-24, I'm probably gonna wait 'till #25 before I order again.

Trust me a lot of Robtoech fans take pleasure in screwing with Seto. I actually joined Robotech.com first and figured Seto as a know it all jackass who liked to toy with Robotech fans.

Nah, most of the ones who enjoyed screwing with me seem to have all gotten the banhammer at one time or another and haven't been back to vex me since. The only one left is Treiz, who really isn't specifically targeting me, he's just using the message boards as an outlet for his stupidity. Oddly enough, there are quite a few members there who respect and value my opinion... made even stranger by the fact that many of them even LIKE me, despite my best efforts to offend them.

I'd take umbridge at that remark about me being a know-it-all jackass who likes to toy with Robotech fans... I most certainly do not like toying with Robotech fans! I prefer to regard them from a distance... like watching monkeys fling poo from behind the plexiglass windows at the zoo.

Mardook Warhsips? Oh, oh! Can I threaten violence too? I'm really hoping they include some additional information for the Mardook warships. There's so little about them currently available. *crosses fingers*

I really find it hard to get worked up about this one... there's really not a lot worth saying about the ships, and what little worthwhile information there is, I already have.

What's got my attention is the Hibiki Kanzaki character sheet... which will hopefully confirm some of the details about how he got hired into SNN (reportedly he covered a BIG scandal, but they don't say what) and maybe even mention the 2082 Zentradi invasion that inspired him to become a reporter.

They must rely on people like Seto in gathering/translating material about Macross so that they can give it the Robotech treatment or some strange association with Robotech and take pride in keeping it relevant.

Nah, these days they've gone back to the old standby of trying to divorce Robotech from its origins. Just look at that damn fool Treiz... trying to claim that even Harmony Gold's official line on the mecha of the series is wrong because it's based off of the Japanese specs.

You could say they're just using you to get all the "inside information" they're too lazy to find themselves, because Harmony Gold and Palladium aren't as reliable anymore.

Wait, they were reliable once?

Seto, if the mods decide to ban you, that'd be a travesty for them. Sefrette and Maverick are just mods who have the job cause they do as Steve and Tommy do, and support the franchise to a fault. I don't think there's anything in the TOU there that says you can't be annoying.

Eh, it's pretty much common knowledge that Steve and Tommy select moderators based not on who was best suited to the job, but who kissed the most ass and toed the company line the closest.

Really, between the asinine behavior of most of the moderators, the complete and utter lack of anything like new content, and the increasingly restrictive Terms of Use, it's no wonder the intelligent and knowledgeable people abandoned the site in droves starting in 2003. These days, if you take me out of the equation, you're left with a few occasional contributors who know what they're talking about, and a lot of frothy-mouthed baboons like Treiz, who couldn't spell his own name if you spotted him the T and the Z.

Bump for acquired B-Club #79 and tentatively acquired B-Club #73 and #74.

Now all I'm looking for is that Haruhiko Mikimoto book...

Eh, it's bound to start repeating itself a little bit eventually... usually they're not shamelessly ripping each other off, it's just repetition of common themes and plot devices, some of which have existed in stories since before we even had a written language.

If Max real rank was "colonel", he was still not a FLAG officier and consequently giving him the command of a FLEET is illogical.

Illogical it may be, but that didn't stop the U.N. Spacy from giving Misa Hayase command of a ship and its escort fleet at the rank of Major...

And hey! Are you banned yet?

Oddly... no, my account is still fully active.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall for THAT discussion...

Mod A: "Seto's getting annoying. Let's ban him."

Mod B: "But...but...he's one of the only members here who actually KNOWS anything!"

Oh, the moderators there haven't kept it a secret that they want to get rid of me.

Seifrietti Weisse told me flat out that he considers me the site's worst troublemaker, and that he thinks the site would be a lot better off without me. I'm fairly sure Maverick_LSC is in the same camp, which means the only moderator who's really not actively looking for an excuse to ban me is MEMO1DOMINION.

Nope, the article is incorrect at best. HG has no copyright on Macross. Copyrights cannot be licensed under Japanese law. HG cannot have those rights, period. HG can have a license to distribute SDFM and has merchandising rights to SDFM and (supposedly) on DYRL at most. HG copyrighted the name Macross in several countries.

The article doesn't say anything about copyrights... all it says is that Harmony Gold wasn't affected by the outcome of the lawsuits over the intellectual property rights to Macross. Since they never had those rights to begin with, that's actually a true statement... the lawsuit did not affect the film distribution rights or the merchandising rights.

I am not even sure if HG can edit the footage of the Macross saga at will without permission of the copyrightholders. Altough in HG's defence they can always claim that RT is a rather inacruate dub attempt.

So long as they have the film distribution rights, they can release it outside of Japan and edit it at their discretion.

I'm sad... they locked my post after I got in my parting shot at Maverick_LSC.

people around talk about the improvements of design in DYRL, but I don't really see any dofference other than fast/ attack packs or paint schemes. Am I missing something?

As far as the VF-1 goes, the cockpit was significantly changed, the hexagonal three-panel main screen was replaced by a single-panel main screen, the controls were simplified (including eliminating the two extra joysticks for battroid mode, moving the transformation controls onto the throttle lever, etc), the HUD went from being a projection on transparent panels to being a holographic projection on the canopy, the hands were redesigned, etc. etc. etc.

You DARE to question the official story that Tatsunoko losing a major legal battle over ownership of those the whatever-the-heck-HG-licensed could in any way have repercussions for HG? YOU SHALL BE DESTROYED!

Oh yes, I've no doubt that the more deluded fans will make a huge fuss that I've dared to inject common sense and fact into the proceedings, and Kevin McKeever will probably try to publicly chew me out for daring to question the legitimacy of his claim that Harmony Gold flat-out owns Macross.