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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    The footage is included, IIRC, in the Super Dimension Fortress Macross release on blu-ray... so it's available on home video, at the very least.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    ... isn't Shadow Rising already dead? I know they said they were going to resume work on it since the LAM was all kinds of not happening, but they've done nothing with it as far as anyone (VAs included, AFAIK) knows. The LAM was a goner the moment they started publicizing that even Sylvain White had passed on it. Obviously I can't say for certain, but their sudden all-or-nothing focus on the Robotech Academy Kickstarter says to me that the LAM's dead in the water and that Shadow Rising is either on the back burner or canceled (again). Updating the aesthetic to appeal to a more modern audience... and to be more in line with the Shadow Chronicles uniforms and so on. Harmony Gold doesn't consider the footage of the Sentinels "movie" to be canon, so technically they're free and clear here in that the Prelude comic didn't use them either. It's just as well, since the Masters Saga is the fandom's un-favorite (according to HG and Toynami, anyway) and the old Sentinels uniforms are Southern Cross-based and VERY 80s. To me, from a practical view, it's actually a sensible decision. As far as "why not set it 20 years after the 3rd Robotech War", the answer is the same as for Robotech 3000... because the big draw is "the continuing adventures of Admiral Rick Hunter and friends", and without that they really don't have an audience that would be big enough to justify doing anything at all. (I'm sorry to keep harping on that, but that's the reality behind every "why didn't they do something new" story question.) You'd be wrong there, friend... I'm told there are some real nasty ones on certain Robotech facebook groups. A buddy of mine admins one, and he's had to roll out the banhammer for a few unpleasant lads who seem to have nothing better to do than bait Macross fans. (I won't get into the details, but what's been shown to me via that friend is profoundly unpleasant.) I don't really count the ones on Robotech.com, because the mods there are actually spurring them on, and without their agitation most are actually decent enough folks. The ones I'm aware of are mostly die-hard Southern Cross/Masters Saga fans who are embittered by the way Harmony Gold focuses on Macross and the Macross Saga above all else.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    I fear you may have missed the thrust of my thought, though I guess that's on me for not being my usual blunt self about it. You look at what the vague synopsis of Robotech Academy they've been circulating to their backers says and it's clear that they've bowed to the fans' insistent requests for something analogous to a continuation of Robotech II: the Sentinels. The fans have been very vocal, both on Robotech.com and elsewhere, about how what they want is the continuation of the Macross Saga cast's story. Harmony Gold has stuck with the line that a revisit of Sentinels is off the table, so this Robotech Academy project seems to be their attempt at a "next best thing" solution. Perhaps that's why Harmony Gold itself didn't want to fund this... it's a stealth continuation/side story of Robotech II: the Sentinels, a story the management doesn't seem to think is worth revisiting. They're clearly making an effort to try and recapture both those distinctive Sentinels designs and the Macross-y flavor that Sentinels did actually manage to have on some levels... though that, oddly enough, doesn't seem to be enough to sell the idea to a lot of the fans. Actually, reflecting on that, the fans grumbled a fair bit about how Shadow Chronicles went snooker loopy after branching off from the comic book conclusion to the Sentinels story arc (Prelude Vol.1's first half was basically a panel-for-panel revisit of the comic's last issue). This looks to be a lot closer, so why do so many of them seem unhappy with it? (Apart from the ugly ship that was the first "big reveal", anyway.) EDIT: I suppose, in that light, one could almost say that this was following the spirit, rather than the letter, of Carl's general "wish" for the series... revisiting the Sentinels period in a roundabout way.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Your guess is as good as mine, but if Frank Agrama is now unwilling to finance further Robotech development the way we (and now Tom) have speculated in this thread then it certainly bodes ill for Robotech's future. Perhaps they'll put the franchise into another ten-year coma while they sh*t out feeble comics the way they did in the 90s. Perhaps they'll just throw in the towel and either seek out Big West hat-in-hand over Macross licensing or sell the rights. It's impossible to say, because their actions are often at odds with what most of us would consider good business sense. It's harsh, but for the vast majority of Robotech fans it's also absolutely true. If you ask most of them what part of Robotech was what drew them in and captured their imaginations, they'll tell you "the Macross Saga". That's why Robotech Academy is really playing up the Macross connection in its pitch and its iconography. Most of them could care less about the Masters Saga or New Generation, they want a Star Wars EU-style continuation of the story of Macross's original cast. From Tom's account up there, it seems like they were in good company... that apparently being Carl's own wish as well.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Just remember, there has historically been a pretty big gulf between Tommy Yune's "early concept" art the final product. What he did for Shadow Chronicles started out looking like a credible imitation of MOSPEADA, and mutated into something that looked like American superhero comics. It would be a bad idea to assume this art has more than a remote, tangential connection to what it'd look like in the finished work. What do you mean resemble? That IS the SDF-3 in their video... the "red turd" Sentinels version, no less... since Prelude did keep that design before the Invid Regent shot the bow off and they rebuilt it into something MOSPEADA-esque. EDIT: Looks like this might be the worst day yet for the Kickstarter, with just two hours left in the day and the net take being just $1,547 spread across 10 backers.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    *impressed whistle* The trend-line predictions on Kicktraq just keep getting grimmer for Robotech Academy... the estimated likely pledge total is now at 69% ($345,651), and the estimated high-low projection cone now sits at 49-74% ($246,189 to $370,970). They're losing about 3% off the top every day, and there's still 19 days to go and they're almost to single digits in terms of the number of new backers being added daily. If the current downward trend is arrested where it sits now (about $3,400 a day), they'll reach approximately $228,000 (45.6%) of their goal at the end of the 35 day funding period. The natives appear to be restless, as well, and some of them are brave enough to call a spade a spade: (emphasis mine, but the quote belongs to user david lacina on Kickstarter, from his post approximately 12 hours ago at time of writing) It doesn't come as any surprise that, even thought Academy logo is already a tissue-paper thin ripoff of the UN Spacy roundel from pre-Frontier Macross, their main draw is unashamedly Macross-derived material for, you guessed it, Skull squadron. Why it bears "UN Spacy" is questionable at best, since even if we put aside that this a clear attempt to play the Robotech fandom's nostalgia for Macross, in Robotech Skull squadron's not attached to the Defense Forces anymore by this point (it's part of the Expeditionary Forces). With a tiny input of extra effort this could almost have been something that could masquerade as original in bad light at fifty paces... something blatantly UEEF would've gone a ways towards giving the illusion that this isn't just the latest attempt to shake the closet Macross fans in Robotech's fanbase down for some dough.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    That makes two of us... as I'm a ten-thumbed artistic cripple whose stickmen come out malformed. I was thinking more along the lines of the difference between cinematography for documentary/educational purposes and cinematography intended for use as entertainment. It's a whole different school of thought, though you make an excellent point that compositing CG with animation is going to be quite a different working environment than CG alone or CG and live-action. It's gonna be a real tall order for them to produce something satisfactory after all the criticism leveled at Shadow Chronicles for its conspicuous and lazily-done CG (I think most of the folks I knew harped on the antialiasing failures, which led to every vehicle being surrounded by a slight haze of white pixels because they screwed up the textures). Probably not. The Harmony Gold of thirty years ago might have been on board with an idea like that, but ever since 2001 they've been indulging heavily in revisionist history to make themselves look better. Carl Macek went from being "that guy with that show" to, in their eyes, a science fiction innovator/visionary on par with Niven, Heinlein, Roddenberry, or Lucas. Unless the third party was basically parroting the company line and only allowed to print the borderline hagiography that is HG's press packet, they wouldn't allow it. There'd be too much chance that third-party reportage would make them look incompetent (which they generally are). Most of that nonsense is Cafepress press level easy, and the art book will probably be the same amateur-hour bull as The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles (if it gets made). This is minimum-effort quick-burn garbage, for the most part. (AotSC was, in large part, just a bunch of grainy, low-def screen captures dominating two-page spreads with a few scattered pieces of production color sheets or untextured CG models.) I dunno, Macek was supposedly a consultant on RTSC, and that mess was made on a budget of under $1 million, most of which Harmony Gold claimed went to animation and voice actors. (Mark Hamill doesn't come cheap, apparently, though they claimed it was because the original VAs are now SAG members, and thus commanded higher pay.) The more they talk about it like that, the more I think this is going to be a retread of the Star Trek: Deep Space 9 episode "Valiant", where a ship of cadets tries (unsuccessfully) to take the fight to the enemy after the supervising officers are killed on their training flight.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Wow, slow room. Still, I imagine the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will still be a bigger draw than Robotech, so a lot of the room's population for Harmony Gold's presentation will probably be TMNT fans looking to grab a good seat. Remember, I'm not wondering who will ACTUALLY be at fault... just who Harmony Gold will blame and what their accusation will turn out to be. Creavision has shown that they're reasonably competent in producing animation when they're working with known quantities like familiar IP or real-world military hardware. Producing stock combat footage for documentaries is considerably different from the skillset necessary to produce compelling and exciting action sequences for entertainment purposes. What they've shown us on the Kickstarter page thus far would've been impressive fifteen years ago, but now is honestly no better than what we'd see from cinematics in a video game with a fairly modest budget. It's certainly nowhere close to the standard we've come to expect in the anime industry in the past eight or so years. Would Harmony Gold blame Creavision if Robotech Academy fails? I don't think they're the most likely target, but they're not the least. If they don't want to blame Macek posthumously, the next logical port of call for the blame (assuming they won't just break character and blame themselves for once) would be Creavision for "failing to execute Carl's glorious vision". (Crap, the more I think about it, the more Harmony Gold's efforts to find a guilty party sound like something we'd get from North Korean government officials.) Dark, but likely. I'm not trying to be humorous, I'm seriously musing on who the scapegoat will be once this fails. They might well blame Carl Macek, since this whole project is allegedly his idea and being executed in a manner faithful to his artistic vision for a new Robotech series. They won't want to blame themselves, and unless Tommy and co. are actually on thin ice the way Macek was with Robotech 3000, they own't accept the blame themselves. The last time they admitted the idea was bad was Robotech 3000, and if this spins in so hard that they have to admit the concept itself was bad, then it's all on Carl's head because they've pushed this as being Carl's visionary concept. I don't think for a second that this was actually Carl Macek's idea... except on the most basic, conceptual level. Yeah, at the most basic level, the explanation we're going to get when they don't reach $500,000 is "the stars were not right". The same explanation they've been giving for almost thirty years now. The fans will likely get some of the blame too, for not ponying up enough scratch to make this work.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Whether they'll keep using those designs is another matter entirely... since they were not well-received by the fans. I'm definitely curious to learn why they felt it necessary to radically redesign Emerson to the point of jettisoning any visible references to those ugly Southern Cross Army uniforms. After all, Harmony Gold established that the Southern Cross Army was a thing even before the destruction of Earth in their reboot comics and that the uniform or something very similar was in use by their brass circa '08. Copyright law can be a pretty f'ed up field sometimes... and doubly so where derivative works are concerned. As Harmony Gold's sequel development basically amounts to unauthorized derivative works, they have to be extraordinarily careful. It might feel like they're making a mountain out of a molehill, but the law and common sense don't overlap as often as they should. Harmony Gold has to be especially careful because they're working with IP they don't own, and so these extreme measures might be considered "playing it safe", since they seem to believe that almost anything could provoke a lawsuit from Japan. *impressed whistle* They're losing about 3-4% a day off their projected endpoint... and the projected upper bound is now below $400,000. I wonder if the record low from yesterday is, in part, due to the entirely-predictable "Rick might appear in this" update. By now, I think a lot of folks who would attend the convention panel are pretty well conditioned to think that Harmony Gold won't be bringing anything new or interesting to the convention. They're not exactly known for being great or entertaining presenters... but there is always the chance that it might catch the attention of the people using their panel to cadge the good seats for whatever's got the room next. There might be a brief uptick, but I very much doubt SDCC will arrest the slow plunge toward oblivion. They pointed the finger at the Tatsunoko-supplied writers working for them in Sentinels via the Robotech Art books (their original official account of what went wrong), and sort of pointed the finger at The Idol Co. (though I don't think they've ever indicated who hired 'em, HG or Cannon) over Robotech: the Movie. There's a fun little admission of guilt from them when they blamed all of the bad female character design from Shadow Chronicles on Tommy via a terrible joke at one of the small early screenings that most people misinterpreted as a racist condemnation of DR Movie. Since it's looking like Robotech: Academy is potentially going to miss its funding target by as much as 50%, I have to wonder who they're going to blame. Will it be: Creavision, either for preemptively poisoning the well by publicizing the fact that they'd received a cease and desist notice from Harmony Gold over their fan-film or for not doing a "good enough" job of the animation in the trailer to get attention. Palladium Books, for the ill will they've stirred up with their unapologetic mishandling of the Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter, which is an ongoing mess with all the bitterness over broken promises to backers about receiving goods before they went on sale to the public. Carl Macek, because he's too busy being dead to defend himself, and they've pushed this as being his brainchild. Tommy Yune, because he supervised the execution of Carl's alleged vision, and he seems to be the man who can do no right where many of the long-time fans are concerned. The fans themselves, for not digging deeply enough into their pockets to fund this.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Where that matters for projects like Robotech Academy is that it can't be chalked up to simple coincidence... because there IS a demonstrable link to the original designs. Copyright law with respect to derivative works is a bit of a mess when it comes to there being provable violations, but it's not something a company in Harmony Gold's situation wants to take chances with. It's actually something Carl Macek identified as a significant problem with Robotech sequel development in an interview he did for Robocon 10 that was published in the Summer '95 run of Robotech comics. Trying to make the characters separate and distinct from the copyrighted source material while also preserving some semblance of connection to who they're supposed to be isn't an easy balancing act for properties built on someone else's IP. Harmony Gold's non-answer as to why they totally redesigned all of their returning characters that weren't from MOSPEADA made no sense, but it makes perfect sense if you look to Macek's candid explanation from '95, and factor in the souring of relations between Harmony Gold and Big West. If it wasn't an issue, why did they even give a facelift and new uniform to Emerson when the ASC is still a thing and he doesn't survive the 2nd war?
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... my read of it was essentially a (brief) acknowledgement of what Macross II's prequels suggested. Namely, that the Zentradi (and Meltrandi) military hardware isn't necessarily uniform across the entire galaxy. Some fleets have slightly different variants of the same designs (like the Nousjadeul-Ger and Queadluun-Rau), or even whole families of mecha other fleets don't get. In short, that both versions exist and are in service at the same time, and what version a fleet has depends on what factory they're getting them from.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Copyright-wise, it's all a question of how close his appearance is to the original Macross designs by Mikimoto. They redesigned him once for Robotech II: the Sentinels, but there were still some visible cues to who it was supposed to be (his crestlike hairdo), even though his wardrobe was different. Ever since their legal slip-up in the early 00's, they don't seem to think even that major redesign from Robotech II is far enough from the original to be "safe", hence the use of Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles to go dispose of anyone too familiar to use and present totally new, nothing-in-common redesigns of the ones who were too important for them to dispose of. The familiar-but-distinct thing is ALWAYS a legal minefield. The problem is that, given the overwhelmingly negative reaction to those redesigns on Robotech.com and elsewhere, their new look didn't go over well. It left them in a pretty awkward place, so they have a choice between taking a risk and making him look more like his Mikimoto origins or keeping his Hideo Kuze-clone look and alienating the long-time fans who are the ones doing all the funding of the project. Looking at what they've done with Emerson, their attempt to Macross-ize the design (or at least his uniform), it definitely makes me think that "Rick" won't put in much of an appearance. All to the better, the fans'll feel less betrayed if Harmony Gold doesn't go for bait-and-switch again and focuses mainly on the new cast. They tend to miss the characterization when it comes to the holdovers from the show. EDIT: On a related front, why aren't they trying to create an original ship design based on the Southern Cross aesthetic the way they did for the Shadow Chronicles movie with a MOSPEADA-esque ship? That seems like a no-brainer, but instead they made that ugly mess...
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I've noticed that as well... there's been some noise on a few sites about Harmony Gold saying some of the money was going to be used for a feasibility study for a series, which has apparently spiraled into awkward questions both on Robotech.com and on the Kickstarter page about how the money will be used and why they're asking for so much. That one estimate that only $150k was actually needed to produce an episode gets quoted a lot in those discussions. I'm not sure if it would actually affect the pledge rate... the Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter seems to have done a LOT of damage on that front.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    That's the fun part... they're ALL Harmony Gold's. Just at varying levels of "revisionist history" over the years. The one that I'm referring to is the oldest version, back before they started in with the retroactive arse-covering. Their original claim was that the Tatsunoko-supplied writers couldn't get their heads around the Robotech version of things, and tried to address the problem by relating everything to the original shows instead. Every version of every failure story ultimately gets progressively revised by them to make them look better and displace blame to other parties. A few years ago they changed their tune from "Robotech: the Untold Story did poorly with test audiences" to "the test audiences loved it but the distributor didn't". Kinda makes me wonder how they're going to try and dress the Robotech Academy failure up. They almost always tart the flops up with something about how it was a fantastic idea brought down by circumstance. It's gonna be hard to put a bow on a lack of support from the backers in the likely event they don't break $500k (and projections suggest they might not even break $300k!). Will they blame Creavision for not faithfully executing Carl's vision? Will they blame the backers for not supporting it enough? Or will they actually admit fault on their part for once?
  15. Seto Kaiba
    That would explain why SideKick's chart has so many ups and downs... the metrics they use there are supposed to be based, in part, on the way the individual backers have contributed on Kickstarter campaigns (their ability to "pick a winner"?) as well as the exposure they give to the project on communities like Twitter. Considering how many Kickstarter campaigns fail, it might be fair to just lump them under "suckers". *sigh* What part of "Harmony Gold's own account" didn't sink in? Having to constantly correct you is getting tiresome and largely isn't relevant to this thread (and thus is irking the OP). Let it go, man. You don't know what you're talking about.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Since a lot of this is being rehashed on the Kickstarter's comments page, complete with all the vitriol and half-truths that Harmony Gold usually brings to such discussions, they're not likely to stay ignorant for long. The hostility on the comments section is very likely helping drive down the number of backers AND discourage backers from increasing their pledges.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Back then, Harmony Gold was making a concerted effort to revamp Robotech and the public perception of same to make it into a moderately credible mecha anime franchise. Now that they've realized they're no damn good at creating original material and the general public is smart enough not to mistake their nonsense for real anime, they're backpedaling somewhat. They're trying for a "By the fans, for the fans" sort of vibe now, which is generally seen as a bad sign for a franchise. Robotech: Love Live Alive is not a stand-alone release, in order to sell it they had to package it with RTSC. Case closed. Also, what you heard is wrong. Even Harmony Gold's own account from the 80s indicated that the writers supplied by Tatsunoko couldn't get their heads around the Robotech plot and, in frustration, tried to relate everything to the original three shows. Yeah, that seems likely... after all, Rick Hunter is probably the most dangerous character they could use, legally-speaking. This is exactly the kind of bait-and-switch routine they pulled with Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. They advertised it as being the "big reveal" of Rick Hunter's fate and his return to the series, then had his only role be to have a few seconds of dialog via a viewscreen and then promptly disappear again so the fans desire to know what happened to him wouldn't be sated, robbing the franchise of one of the few questions keeping the fans watching. The best part is that the backers are likely wise to this game in the wake of RTSC, so it won't improve things much. Robotech Academy will likely have Rick say a few words over the radio, and then sail off to parts unknown... which is probably for the best, because Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles' comic flanderized him into a naive dumbass. I remain amused that the Kicktraq projections continue to trend downwards while Harmony Gold is acting like this is already a done deal... they're estimated to only make about 75% of their target now, as opposed to 80% just two days ago. The projection of the backer contributions has them potentially barely breaking $250k. Part of me suspects that the Robotech fanbase is actually a lot wiser to Harmony Gold's game than Harmony Gold thinks, and every subsequent update is giving them progressively colder feet about putting more money into it.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Debatable, but I would be inclined to agree with it... on the following grounds: Honestly, this is the one case where I honestly think that Robotech did something other than sh*t all over the source material. No bones about it, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross was an OFFENSIVELY awful show, and shouldn't have even been allowed to run as long as it did. (What information exists suggests it got canned a little more than halfway into what was down to be a 39 episode run.) Robotech didn't really "improve" the story, but they did manage to make the characters more tolerable by eliminating or glossing over some of the more egregiously awful characterization choices by the original creators. Jeanne was a complete airhead who shamelessly admitted to having no goal beyond "Marriage is a woman's happiness". She tells the viewers she joined the army purely because she thought it'd be a good place to snag a good husband, and would quit as soon as she'd done so. Her acting out was simply because she was an ass. The rewrite made her more tolerable by tying her into characters people didn't loathe (Max and Milia Jenius from Macross) and giving her a REASON for her acting out and the lenient treatment she got from the military police (abandonment issues courtesy of her famous parents). It also minimized her sudden and total loss of competence once they brought over Seifreitti (RT: Zor Prime). Southern Cross made its female characters into chauvinistic stereotypes of women... you have the good little housewife-in-waiting (Jeanne, for whom this is apparently meant to be a positive trait), the man-hating career woman (Lana, for whom this is clearly meant to be a BAD thing), and the amazonian woman who loses her edge because she falls in love (Marie). These were toned way the hell down or eliminated, and they even applied a motivation to the Zor Lords, who had never really got the chance to properly explain why the wanted the protozor so badly in the original show. Macek didn't make it better, but he did spackle over a lot of the plot holes left by the show's cancellation and a lot of the offensive idiocy in the series on the part of its leading ladies. That's something, at least. Didn't help it much though, since the Masters Saga is still the Robotech fandom's un-favorite (something Harmony Gold readily admits, and Toynami has used as a reason to not make Southern Cross-based merchandise). This, of course, poses a problem for them with projects like Shadow Chronicles and Robotech Academy... because people expect some of these Masters Saga characters to still be around. They don't want to actually USE them, but they have to throw a nod or two that direction or the fans'll bite them in the ass over it. In this case, they're throwing one of the least offensive characters from the Masters Saga at this project... General Emerson.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Indeed there are... in fact, you can find a good one on this very site.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Then apparently you never read his Robotech.com fan interview... because in there, he talks at some length about how Macross is such a flawed series, and proceeds to claim that Macross's creators think Robotech is superior to their own work to the extent that they allegedly base future Macross sequels off Robotech instead.* It's pure horseshit, but as inconsistent as he is about the views he has on the originals, you have to wonder whether that's his honest (deluded) opinion or he's simply a sockpuppet for what Harmony Gold was trying to do to discourage Robotech fans from exploring Macross more. * That claim of his, that Macross is taking pointers from Robotech and de-emphasizing the role of music and so on is rich in comedic irony once you notice the most recent titles at the time he wrote that were all from the Macross 7 story arc. Perhaps you're confused as to the definition of "stand-alone"... because what you just described is not stand-alone, it's a paired release with the Shadow Chronicles garbage. Stand-alone would be if it was release... well... on its own. Not everyone, but it's more common with the Robotech Masters Saga than anywhere else... probably because Southern Cross is not a show that many people have any love for, and therefore there's no pressure to make a distinction between the two like they do for Macross and The Macross Saga. These days, fans seem to make a conscious effort to differentiate between Robotech's Macross Saga and Macross proper, which leads to a lot less confusion now that awareness of Macross is on the rise thanks to Macross Frontier and the ready availability of fansubs. Admittedly, the abbreviations can get confusing... since they sometimes shorten the Robotech Masters Saga to "The Masters Saga", but abbreviate it RMS, and use TMS for "The Macross Saga".
  21. Seto Kaiba
    I doubt they'd permit it... that would be dangerously close to making the fan film copyright infringement instead of fan works, now that Creavision is on Harmony Gold's payroll. To be entirely fair to Tommy, probably ninety percent of the people I know who have seen Genesis Climber MOSPEADA can't say "MOSPEADA" correctly either, and many of them are avid anime hobbyists. Tommy is, at least from my own interactions with the man, what you'd call a "casual" anime fan. A lot of what you say there IS things Harmony Gold have said, but most of them have come from the pen of Carl Macek (who claimed Macross et. al. to be flawed and inferior to Robotech). As far as calling the Robotech Masters Saga "Southern Cross", Harmony Gold has been deliberately trying to muddy the waters regarding the difference between Robotech and the shows used to make it since Robotech.com went live in 2001. Actually, you're wrong about this. Practically every failed or aborted Robotech project has seen Harmony Gold blame one of their business partners for the failure, usually in the form of "so and so screwed up, so the project failed due to circumstances beyond our control". For instance, they laid part of the blame for the failure of Robotech: the Movie on Cannon Films, the distributor, for insisting on changes to the film because they thought it had a "downer ending" and had "too many girls, not enough robots and guns" and their decision to toss the finished product because the test audiences hated it. When the Robotech II: the Sentinels project collapsed, they blamed it not just on the exchange rate crash, but on Matchbox withdrawing its sponsorship of the project and the problems they had with writers supplied by Tatsunoko (who thought Robotech was a confusing mess). After Robotech 3000's trailer flopped, Harmony Gold canceled the project and then blamed its cancellation on financial trouble at the studio, Netter Digital... before admitting it was actually a pretty terrible idea on their part too. The Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles "movie" was delayed, and Harmony Gold pointed the finger at the distributors they were talking to, omitting that the reason distributors were reluctant to take it was Harmony Gold was asking a lot more than they had any right to. When the negative fan response to the film cropped up, they initially tried to blame it on DR Movie, and then turned to the boogeyman of "Macross purist trolls". They haven't pointed any fingers at anyone over LLA, but I'd suspect that's because it's a glorified DVD extra and didn't have a standalone release. You'd be hard pressed to find a Robotech release where they didn't throw SOMEBODY working for/with them under a bus when things got hairy. Harmony Gold disowned almost all licensee-produced material back in ~2003, and blamed EVERYBODY for a parade of poor-quality garbage that even they didn't consider fit to be called Robotech. Hell, they even used that as an excuse to keep Palladium Books on a short leash when they renewed the Robotech RPG license... citing the crap job Palladium did with the old game as reason to grant themselves a supreme editorial veto and review power over all content, much to the dismay of the Palladium Books gamers. Palladium, meanwhile, publicly WTF'd and explained that they'd missed the mark so hard because of a near-total lack of support from Harmony Gold. EDIT: They keep slipping... SideKick's all over the map, but Kicktraq's steadily trending downward, it's now projecting they'll just barely break 80% in the best-case scenario, with a projected finish of just 75%.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    If we were to count all of the impossible stuff that goes on in Robotech, like powering giant robots with a plant's frustrated libido*, we'd likely end up with more problems than seconds of footage. It does seem like a rather dangerous place to live, since it does look like it's far too close to the ring system to be healthy. *Yes, this is actually how it generates power according to Carl Macek. Honestly, I feel bad for them. This might look like a dream come true for them, but this project is destined to be a failure... and it's going to turn into a nightmare for them when the inevitable happens and Harmony Gold needs someone to blame. These guys're really passionate fans, and they're likely to end up being blamed for the project's failure and the inevitable decade-long wait for a new title in the best-case scenario. At worst, they might end up being blamed for Robotech finally being abandoned by Harmony Gold. That's going to be a bitter pill to swallow, being publicly blamed for doing grievous harm to the thing you care about.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Considering the quality of the demo footage, and the massive fiscal irresponsibility that will no doubt occur in the "feasibility study" phase, I'd say expect something that'll look like an all-CG version of Shadow Chronicles. That is to say, like a video game cutscene from the early 2000s.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    It doesn't say on the page there, but the "About" link at the top of the page says that it's a weighted algorithm based on the size of donations over time, the number of posts on Twitter containing links to the project, and some unspecified metric regarding how the backers relate to each other. I think I prefer the Kicktraq projections, since those are based purely on financial trends rather than metrics may not have any direct connection to the amount contributed to the campaign. It's not even clicks they're tracking, it's all posted links regardless of whether or not anyone actually uses them. Neither one is painting an especially rosy picture of Robotech Academy's chances of success either... Kicktraq is projecting total failure for the project, with the projected mean backer contribution of less than 80% of the target, and their most optimistic picture of backer contribution still has them missing by almost $40k (and that's been steadily trending downward DAILY). The low end is also diving, but estimated at about $275k. Sidekick's projecting a mere 8% chance of success, which is definitely in the "hell will freeze first" tier.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Offhand, I'm not aware of anything that gets any more specific than that the Protoculture were modifying the local fauna on Earth to ensure the development of a sub-Protoculture species (presumably meaning "humanoid") adapted to the local environment to start preparations for future colonization. Since the Humans (and presumably Zolans) were modified local lifeforms, presumably any differences between sub-Protoculture species would be down to whatever the "seed" species was that was being modified. Aries Turner in Macross Zero had that hypothesis that it was being done retrovirally. For humans, it was homonids. For the Zolans (though I don't recall anything that explicitly said they were sub-Protoculture too), it's something like a marsupial (since they have pouches?).
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