Seto Kaiba

Well, duh... it's Carl Macek. Once he got it into his head that he could convince people that it wasn't his fault his entire contribution as Robotech's creative director was a sequence of embarrassing failures by hyping himself as a creative visionary whose great plans were constantly undermined by cowardly executives and bad luck, he'd tell just about any lie to make himself look good. If he didn't lie about the extent of his involvement and contributions to Robotech and the anime industry, the only people who would know who he was or give a toss what he'd done would be Robotech fans and the people whose fandoms suffer the occasional inconvenience at Harmony Gold's hands. It's kind of pathetic that the only way to get a halfway honest answer out of Carl Macek was to look up what he'd said about that particular subject over twenty years ago, before he became a habitual liar.

Eh... the stuff you quoted is almost certainly bullshit. Even Macek himself was (initially) quite open about the fact that they couldn't have missed the mark harder if they tried. He himself said that the test screening had a decent percentage of the audience walk out partway through because the parents present thought the movie's mature themes inappropriate for the age group the movie was targeted to, and their children in particular. He cited that, executive meddling on the part of Cannon Films, and the success of the G1 Transformers movie as being the major factors that killed Robotech: the Movie and caused it to be canned and never see a theatrical release here in the states.

lol wut? Nope... as a point of fact, he's not even allowed on most of the Robotech fansites out there. He received a permanent ban on Robotech.com way back in like '04, and he got a permanent ban on RobotechX.com last year. He's attempted to come back to both under a few alternate screen names, but he gets found out pretty quickly and banned again. About the only person who supports his bullshit is MEMO1DOMINION, a man notorious for using people like the idiot in question as stooges to harass the people he doesn't like into saying something he can ban them for. So no, he's not the leader or spokesman of the Robotech fanbase... he's just some idiot with delusions of grandeur trying desperately to make someone care about what he has to say.

Eh... the only time Tommy ever takes notice of what Robotech fans are doing is when he's either plotting to make them surrender their work to him so he can take credit for it, or plotting to kill the fan project for stepping on his toes. The idiot in question does nothing Tommy would want to take credit for or call attention to, and he's not doing anything of any real value that might make Tommy look bad by comparison, so Tommy doesn't care. Yep, it was only ever performing well against the Fz-109s when it was fighting inside the dome, where the VF-14-based Fz-109 is at a distinct disadvantage. Once the battle was in space, it was spanked so quickly it wasn't funny... and with a UN ace at the controls too.

Well, the stated purpose is to discuss and inform people about the Macross licensing thing and why Harmony Gold are a bunch of tossers... but if we're going to discuss stupidity in the Robotech fanbase, let's at least focus on the people who actually matter, and not just some internet gutter snipe who calls people names on some free podcast because he's desperately trying to compensate for the fact that his life is going nowhere. If you're looking for stupidity from people who matter, you still don't have to look very hard where Robotech is concerned... Tommy Yune is a veritable treasure trove of moon logic and idiocy... so was Carl Macek. Hell, you can even have a go at the abundant stupidity from Luceno and Daley, or Spangler, or any of the other idiots who've contributed their dubious talents to Robotech over the years. Considering the semi-recent developments explaining that all gunpods from the GU-11 on were using rounds designed for penetrating energy converting armor, one would assume that to be a major area of advancement over the years, considering energy converting armor visibly improved.

Do we ever even see either of those in battroid mode in the animation? I don't recall seeing it, but it's been a while since I last watched DYRL. If we don't, then that's probably why only the fighter and GERWALK modes are colored.

Okay, I prepared for comedy gold... so where is it? There's certainly none to be had in that pathetic Doug Bendo video, unless you find the fact that the functionally illiterate mental midget can't even spell simple words like "reborn" correctly the very height of comedy. Why waste time and posts bringing examples of his stupidity to our attention? Seeing him acting like a goddamn idiot and dribbling bullshit out of both sides of his mouth is nothing new... it's been a 24/7/365 thing for him since at least 2003. Lemme spell it out in plain English: Doug Bendo is not worth a minute of anybody's time. He's never contributed anything of value to the Robotech fan community, and nobody of consequence cares what he has to say. He's just an idiot with a degrading dead-end job and an internet connection who desperately wants someone to take him seriously. He's a joke, and not even a funny one.

Wait... what? Wasn't "laser machine pistol" also what they identified the TV version's gun as? I guess the short-range electron beam gun is something of a myth then...

There's a word for that... and that word is "fan-fiction". (Of course, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to label all of Robotech as somebody's hackneyed attempt to commercialize a badly written Macross-Mospeada crossover fan-fic)

Somehow, I doubt Macek would've been able to avoid much of the spite and bile directed at him even if he'd never deluded himself into believing he was the anime industry's answer to Gene Roddenberry and started pretending the Robotech TV series was the result of his grand creative vision. Now, I won't deny that Macek's history of telling ridiculous lies to exaggerate his own input and take credit for the work of the show's original creators will probably be a major part of how he's remembered, but that's far from the only reason anime fans considered him a blight on the industry. After all, there's also his profoundly offensive attempts to claim that he'd made the shows he worked on better by deleting the original cultural context and setting and "Americanizing" them, or trying to convince everyone that anime had no value on its own and his rewrites were profound improvements over the originals. Eh? Let's be honest here... Robotech II: the Sentinels was Macek's attempt to rip off Star Trek in hopes of giving his lurching, nightmarish atrocity broader appeal. Calling it original is a bad idea... the only thing that changed was who they were stealing ideas and set pieces from.

True, it might not be all that surprising, but it's still disappointing in light of the fact that those non-anime portions of the Macross II timeline are far more important to the continuity than those in Macross's main continuity. Welcome to my world. Did they, as I expected, identify its pistol like they did for its opposite number in the TV series? Just from the snippets I've read, it seems like the Mardook worldguide sheet doesn't have anything that couldn't be deduced from the animation or taken from the existing artbooks. Not surprising or disappointing, I'm just too thrilled to have that beautiful painting of the Mardook fleet. (Gonna blow that sucker up and make it my display background) Excellent. Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice...

Indeed... were Tommy to man up and stop throwing a fuss-fit every time someone criticizes him would be a huge leap forward in his growth as a "professional" artist. Tommy's current achievements do lose a certain something when you notice that Shadow Chronicles is basically Tommy's personal masturbation material.

We needn't wonder why some Robotech fans are keen on integrating large portions of Macross into the Robotech universe when they would object to using most any other series... it's actually quite obvious. In any rational assessment, the only part of Robotech that at least 85% of Robotech fans actually give a tinker's damn about is Macross. Those fans just want to see more of the Macross Saga characters, and see more cool transforming fighters like the VF-1 instead of the lackluster offerings from Southern Cross and Mospeada. They keep hoping that Macross will be made into Robotech because it's the only way they'll ever get a Robotech continuation that isn't pathetic. Admittedly, while I would like to see Robotech stand on its own and stop mooching off Macross, the very idea that it could is preposterous. In the end, Robotech is a whole considerably less than the sum of its parts. Even the Masters Saga and New Generation are essentially incapable of standing on their own merits, as everything in Robotech ultimately hinges on the Macross story and characters. Were someone to start developing a Robotech series capable of standing on its own, why bother calling it Robotech, since it'd be a whole new universe bereft of everything made previously. They could get away from the name's legacy of failure and call it something more appropriate like The Adventures of Captain Scowlyface and the Stripperific Android. Without Rick Hunter and, more importantly, Macross, the idiots at Harmony Gold might as well give up and stop wasting everybody's time with their ineptly-assembled garbage. Also, don't go giving Tommy any credit for the mechanical design of the "Gamma Fighter", because it's not even close to being original. It's a transforming version of Mospeada's AF-03C Combat... one with a battroid mode that ends up looking suspiciously like a blockier VF-9 Cutlass. Nobody of consequence, that's who. About the best you can expect is that Tommy'll get ahold of that episode, notice they're taking a dig at his baby, and cry himself to sleep every night for the next month before siccing MEMO on them... just like he did when I got to saying that Shadow Chronicles was a massive steaming turd in a novelty box shaped like a larger steaming turd.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. So they're giving Macross II a timeline sheet after all? If they get the year right, then I'll consider it a rousing success, even though they seem to have completely forgotten a colossal portion (about 80 years worth) of the timeline including at least three plot-critical wars with the Zentradi. Huh... wicked cool.

Eh... can we really hold that against them when so many Robotech are clueless about real anime? On the rare occasions when some Robotech does suggest that a particular anime title be rewritten into a Robotech saga, the vast majority of Robotech fans come out against it because they want Robotech to stand on its own... which I'm sure you'll agree is hilariously ironic, considering that there's no such thing as original material in Robotech... not even in the Shadow Chronicles movie. The only real cases where fans did attempt to integrate mecha and story elements from other shows into Robotech were where fans just wanted to add some variety and interest into their Robotech RPGs, rather than continue to slog through the same tired material over and over again for the better part of 20 years. Yes, the inclusions were in bad taste and reflect the Robotech fanboy mentality that everything original is inferior to Macek's rewrites, but they were at least done for reasons we can understand. (Even Sketchley's done this to some small degree with his Macross RPG stats page... though the few items he's included are ships from Macross's nearest neighbor, Gundam, to flesh out the civilian ships for the game)

Probably, of course by then she would have had control of an entire Vajra hive and the combined New U.N. Spacy fleets, which would be a pretty formidable force once she managed to track down the Zentradi and/or Supervision Army. But in realistic terms, we'll never know because she never got that far. She might've just continued the same policy the NUNS used, and just confront them as they show up rather than seeking them out and destroying them. Okay... the spellchecker in your browser is your friend. Please use it. Also, the Protodeviln and the Varauta Army have been a non-issue since 2046, so they aren't a factor anymore. The Supervision Army is supposedly still out there, though all we've seen of it to date is a pair of gun destroyers... one that crashed on Earth, and one that the factory satellite capture mission stumbled across.

Super 8 was also the common name for Kodak's Super 8mm motion picture film cartridges... maybe it's a film reference?

Your guess is as good as mine. You're right in that the original Macross series makes the female troops out to be a fairly small percentage of the Zentradi 118th Main Fleet. Presumably a lack of Zentradi women would only drive the rate of inter-species breeding up when the bulk of the female breeding population is human. Macross II's parallal world continuity makes things a bit less messy by adding defectors from two cultured Meltrandi fleets into the mix along with the cloning program and the various Zentradi fleets that defected. Not that I've seen, but presumably they got the cloning technology from somewhere. C'mon, with a handle like "Lott Sheen"*, what were you expecting? His attitude towards Kawamori reminds me a lot of the way some of the older Star Trek fans and writers regard Gene Roddenberry... a good idea man, but not someone who should be allowed to have full creative control of the projects he works on. (The example Star Trek fans usually give is the first season or so of TNG, where the human cast were faultless paragons of virtue who spent a lot of time preaching at and/or outsmarting morally, ethically, and intellectually inferior aliens) I can kind of see where Lott's coming from, since I prefer the Macross shows made before Kawamori returned to the franchise with Macross Plus, since the later stuff's changes in theme and tone made them feel almost like a different series at times, though I'm not quite so extreme as to say Kawamori ruined Macross, since I rather enjoyed Macross Plus and Macross Frontier. * In case you don't know who Lott Sheen is, he's Komilia's wingman and love interest from the PC Engine games which were made as prequels to the Macross II OVA. Specifically, Macross 2036.

Oh, no doubt of that... especially given that they STILL refer to the fact that Robotech is made from three unrelated anime titles as the show's "dirty little secret". If Robotech II: the Sentinels proved anything about Robotech as a whole, it was that the franchise's "creative team" had absolutely zero creative talent. The only way they could produce a marketable product was to take someone else's work, slap a hastily rewritten story onto it, and play it off as something they came up with on their own. Eh... it's possible that some people are taking that particular attitude. However, I expect it's more to do with the fact that actually sitting down and watching the unedited Southern Cross series practically guarantees pain and suffering for the viewer. The show is just a clusterfart of bad decisions. The story stank, and was made even worse by trying to wrap it up abruptly, the mechanical designs were just idiotic, and the cast was completely unlikeable. Even the music was bad by the standards of the day. As I've said in the past, Southern Cross is probably the one original show that actually benefited, story-wise, from inclusion in Robotech, if only because it was tied into characters and stories that didn't completely suck. It should say something that the only die-hard Southern Cross fan of my personal acquaintance primarily likes the show because he has a massive axe to grind against the entire officer class and pilots in particular, and the Southern Cross series focuses mainly on ground troops led by officers who are generally either either maliciously incompetent (Claude Leon) or just pants-on-head retarded (Jeanne). If you know anything about Southern Cross it should come as no surprise that his favorite character was Andrzej Sławski (Angelo Dante in the RT dub), the only one who seems to realize that Jeanne falls into the same intelligence demographic as the office furniture. No, you're not in any way atypical for that... in fact most Robotech fans don't have a bloody clue what anime is, and don't care. They just want more Macekres. It's only after they seek out other stuff for whatever reason that their eyes are opened.

Plausible, but there's always parenting classes. I can't imagine the U.N. wouldn't sanction that sort of thing in the event Zentradi started having families. Insofar as Zentradi ship crew sizes, the mean is easily enough established as 1,507 by the simple expedient of taking the ship count in the 118th Main Fleet and dividing it by the rough estimate of the fleet's total population. So we can assume the average battleship's got around 1,500 people on it total.

Eh... I didn't get much of a "vilification" vibe from that Animerica piece. To me, it felt more like a casual dismissal of the whole Robotech franchise as no longer relevant or interesting now that the originals were available, rather than a declaration that Robotech was a horrible crime perpetrated against Macross. Granted, the whole Robotech franchise seems geared to deny the very existence of the genre it's supposed to belong to. Harmony Gold's stance that Robotech is superior by far to the "flawed" originals seems like a calculated attempt to put the fans in a mindset where they're predisposed to be dismissive of unedited, uncensored anime. I suppose that's why so many Robotech fans seem to be completely clueless about anime, and why several still insist that Robotech is something completely different from anime.

Couldn't tell ya... that was a bit before my time... Since at that point my first experience with anime was still a little while in the future, I didn't get a chance to observe how anime enthusiasts reacted to Robotech in the 90s. Of all the anime magazines I've collected as part of my research into Macross II: Lovers Again, only one of them actually mentions Robotech when discussing the history of the Macross franchise... Animerica Vol.1 #0. In that issue, Robotech is only mentioned briefly, and only then when it's relevant to Macross. The two brief mentions it gets are: #1. A brief blurb about Streamline's plans to release subtitled versions of Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada as part of the Robotech Perfect Collection. Interestingly, the Robotech episdoes which are intended to be the main purpose of that release are mentioned only in passing, and more as extra baggage than as something worth watching. #2. An even briefer mention of Robotech as an ungainly mishmash of Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada that enjoyed a brief moment of success in the US before bombing spectacularly, done as an aside in the featured interview with Haruhiko Mikimoto.

Okay, poor choice of words on my part... but no poorer than calling it "free TV". I'm talking about regular broadcast television which is supported by commercial endorsements. It's not "free" by any means, it's all supported by advertising revenue. But that's exactly the point... that the shows failed to gather any kind of significant following during their limited runs on broadcast television, and that it was the cable channels decision to run anime that really took anime from an obscure niche market to something that most people are at least passingly familiar with. Realistically, none of the shows you listed did much of anything as far as giving anime mainstream appeal in America. Those are relics from days gone by when most people didn't even know what anime was, and the industry was almost an underground outfit. Those shows didn't have much of any influence on the industry because nobody gave a toss about them back in the day. They came before the anime craze the cable providers started in the late 90s. Just look at Robotech... even during its initial broadcast run it was a poor performer and was all but eclipsed by the Generation 1 Transformers series. Carl Macek himself even attributed the failure of Robotech: the Untold Story to, among other things, being completely overshadowed the the release of Transformers: the Movie. Saying that old shows like Robotech were what got the ball rolling and helped give anime its current level of recognition is nothing short of absurd. They weren't what made the public sit up and take notice, and most of them aren't remembered fondly, if at all. It's the stuff from the late 90s that deserves credit for making the anime industry more accessible.

Part of that is, no doubt, the result of a good deal of energetic fornication on the part of the Space War 1 survivors and a good twenty years of mass cloningat the behest of the U.N. government. While we see a handful of Human-Zentradi hybrids take center stage in Macross, it seems a bit odd to assume they ended up on the rare side when 87% or more of Earth's population was Zentradi immediately after Space War 1's conclusion. It may simply be that there is a significant percentage who are hybrids and the show simply doesn't call attention to them. By 2045, nobody seems to think it remarkable that a neighbor or a classmate is part-alien. Eh... if we take the contents of the Macross Frontier Pash! Animation File at face value then the 5th Generation colony ship Macross Frontier is operating at only a fraction of its maximum capacity. Taking that into account, even if the Zentradi population's resource demands are five times that of the micloned population, they still wouldn't be anywhere close to pushing the limits of the bioplant ship's resources. In war, however, the drain on resources and damage to the ship did eventually force them to miclone their Zentradi residents.

While I'm reluctant to bring any RT community shenanigans here for the obvious reasons, I just have to speak up briefly to voice my incredulous disgust. On a related side note, I took a look at the boards over on Robotech.com and RobotechX.com for the first time in about five months, and I'm having second thoughts about the idea of a Robotech Wiki. I know there are other, much less idiotic Robotech fans out there... but if these are the sort of people who'd be populating the project's community section, it's probably not worth the effort. Sure, the material is still worth documenting... but the PEOPLE. My god, the PEOPLE in that fanbase SUCK. Not to toot my own horn, but it looks like the illiteracy brigade's concerted effort to remove anyone with a functioning brain and a legitimate opinion from the fandom has, if anything, succeeded in driving the quality of discussion on the forums down to a level where describing it as "abysmal" seems overly generous. It's like everything went to hell in a handbasket as soon as the handful of knowledgeable fans stopped holding their hands and beating their skulls in with the facts. Hell, I thought Robotech.com was a crapsack even before I left, and now... the community has deteriorated to the point where I'm almost unwilling to believe it's the same site. I'm not sure what was more galling... the thread where they're making what they fondly imagine are profound arguments in favor of adopting Astro Plan as the next Robotech Saga, another "what became of the SDF-2" thread, the thread about how protoculture is like the force, or the threads hating on "Macross Purists" for not being shattered by Carl Macek's death and saying mean things like that he liked to take credit for the work of others and that he wasn't the anime messiah Robotech fans want to think he is. Seriously... if this is the standard by which the Robotech fandom is to be judged, I'm going to have to seriously rethink the idea of a Robotech section for my site. I didn't think it'd gotten THIS bad...