Seto Kaiba

Was that a Captain Caveman reference? If so, bravo... Well, it's a safe bet that Harmony Gold's reluctance to add character and mecha data from Shadow Chronicles to the Robotech.com Infopedia is motivated by the belief that doing so will remove the primary motivation for fans to buy things like The Art of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles and the new Palladium RPG. Now, if you know anything about the old Palladium RPG, you'll know they have good grounds for thinking this. The majority of fans who're buying the Palladium RPG aren't buying it to play the game... they're buying it because it's the closest that any Robotech publication has come to being a tech manual. If they make the information in those books available for free, there's no reason for anyone to buy the books.

Really, it's the attitude that all of the material produced between '87 and '01 isn't really Robotech and isn't worth bothering with that motivated all of the witch hunting that's gone on ever since the fanbase went online. Initially, pretty much any mention of material from the comics or novels in a debate or discussion just got dismissed as irrelevant, but eventually it turned hostile. By the time I'd registered on Robotech.com, just mentioning something from the McKinney novels or the old comics was enough to make participants on both sides round on you and tell you to take your totally irrelevant crap elsewhere. It was only after they scourged the McKinneyists and Spanglerists from Robotech.com that they turned on the fans who also enjoyed the original Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada. They lumped the dissatisfied fans in there too under the assumption that they were secretly Macross fans working to undermine Robotech, and started trying to get the lot of them banned. Now that they've scourged the "Macross Purist Trolls" from their midst, they've once again rounded on each other and started fights among fans who prefer one saga to another, or who like one character and can't stand to see him or her criticized in any way. It's really hard to muster any enthusiasm for Robotech at all when the fanbase has spent at least 10 of the last 25 years tearing itself to pieces over matters of personal preference, and the franchise's creators haven't had an original idea in at least 24 years. Now, if Tommy had taken that approach with Robotech, the fanbase might not be the colossal mess of infighting it is today. Of course, the old comics are so badly written, so shot through with internal inconsistencies, and incompatible with each other in so many cases that the only way to divide them up into universes would be to make each and every title its own universe... and that kind of defeats the point of doing it in the first place. The inconsistent nature of the work done without oversight back when Harmony Gold was whoring the license out to whoever wanted it essentially doomed all of comics to being little more than a widely scorned collection of non-canon side stories that don't matter to the "one true timeline". Oh they knew... they just want to keep living the lie that Carl Macek, and later Tommy Yune, were selling... that the originals are inferior, unpopular shows that were vastly improved by their inclusion in Robotech. By the time the 90's rolled around, the only people left in the Robotech fanbase were the obsessive fans who were convinced for whatever reason that Robotech was the best show ever, and continued to buy the weak comics and novels which kept the franchise limping along. Those are the people who would've found the idea that Robotech wasn't just as good as, or better than, the Japanese originals profoundly offensive. All but the most obsessed among them gave up eventually after Macek and Harmony Gold's licensees produced a seemingly never-ending succession of failures. Some folks close to Harmony Gold have alluded to Warner having been motivated to pick up the Robotech license by a desire to get in on the frankly ridiculous amounts of money Paramount's live-action Transformers was making and do it cheaply rather than any actual belief that Robotech was popular. I think the general school of thought was that they'd take a title people vaguely remembered from the 80's, redo it, and roll it out for a revival in hopes of making scads of money with a mindless summer action flick that preys on nostalgia. More fool them, of course, since they picked a real dud full of material they can't legally use. You mean like a MMORPG, something like Habbo Hotel, or what? Either way, it costs money to develop crap like that, and Harmony Gold has likely been convinced that it's just not worth the trouble. After all, they went to the trouble of having a dice rolling system added to their forums so people could play the new Palladium RPG... and NOBODY's playing. The dice roll system just became the topic-bumping spam method of choice in the areas it was enabled in. Similarly, their attempt at online console gameplay, Robotech: Invasion, sold bugger-all and the game was so utterly lackluster that within weeks of it going on sale it was virtually impossible to find an online game to play in and Harmony Gold had the servers taken down because they weren't being used.

EDIT: Long post is looooooooooooooooooooooooong. Um... well, in all fairness you could probably make a pretty good case for calling me "that kind" of Robotech fan. I might not have much use for the franchise these days, and I never saw the point in collecting toys, but if you're looking for someone familiar with the intricacies of all the various Robotech adaptations, I'm probably about the best you'll do unless you go looking for some of the people who quit the fandom back around '04. Due in no small measure to my frankly ridiculous memory for details, I'm pretty confident I could provide an accurate, well-worded answer to most any question about Robotech... which is why even now, months after being banned from Robotech.com, people still try to track me down via e-mail to get their questions answered. Now, if you want to know why "that kind" of Robotech fan is so rare, I'll happily spell it out for you. You'll probably end up saying something like "well that's obvious", but it's the most honest and accurate answer I can give. If I had to name any one factor as the main reason "that kind" of fan is practically nonexistent among Robotech fans these days, I'd have to point to the way Harmony Gold handled the Robotech license in the late 80s and the 90s. Back when the fanbase first started to migrate online, the licensed comics and novels were the only thing moving the "Robotech story" forward. Even then, there was a lot of contention about their various departures from, and clashes with, each other and the "original 85", but fans still treasured them because that was the only thing new in the Robotech franchise at the time. Once Tommy Yune took over creative directorship of the franchise and rebooted Robotech's continuity, the old comics and novels were left out in the cold as no longer relevant to the story. The fans weren't entirely stupid, many of them found the novels and comics disappointing, with exciting-looking cover art sandwiching pages upon pages of awkward writing and bad art. Now that they had the new comics, which despite their fairly shoddy writing were a massive step up in quality, they didn't need to excuse the many failings of the old comics and novels anymore. By the time McKeever told everyone on SSL that the old comics and novels were the result of HG whoring the license out to whoever wanted it, the fans had already decided that nothing produced between the failure of Robotech II: the Sentinels (1987) and Tommy's continuity reboot (2001) was worth a damn, and that most of it was so different from the original series that it wasn't "real Robotech". If nothing else, it's the attitude the fans have that 99% of Robotech is cheap crap Harmony Gold's licensees turned out to make a quick buck, and that it's all of such low quality that it's not worth the time it takes to read it that prevents people from becoming "that kind" of fan. Honestly, as someone who actually read all the McKinney novels and almost all of the old comics, I have to say I agree with them in most cases. You don't get many expert fans who know every part of Robotech like the back of their hands because so much of Robotech is just piss-dribblingly awful. Even by 1980s standards most of what's in the comics and novels is every bit as stupid and campy as the worst material from the old Star Trek cartoon... and most of it is so far off from the TV series that in many cases it almost feels like an Elseworlds book. So, I guess if you wanted to sum it up nicely... you don't get die-hard experts in Robotech because most of it is so bad nobody wants to read it. He's a prat. He's an even bigger prat. He's an insincere prat. He claims to have been manipulated into acting like a prat. Are we seeing a pattern here yet? Your quest to find a rational Robotech fan who can explain what's so great about Robotech is a complete boondoggle because most almost all of the Robotech fans we get here are the disenchanted fans who are sick of broken promises, the angry fans who were banned for HERESY!, and the ones who're spoiling for a fight. We don't get the fanatics here because they spend all day telling each other we're all a bunch of baby-eating Sith Lords conspiring to destroy their fanbase from within, and we never see any rational, levelheaded fans who are enthusiastic about the franchise because there's no such animal. Anyone smart enough to read about the franchise's history instantly becomes disenchanted, and anyone dense enough to believe Harmony Gold's propaganda easily becomes a fanatic. Like I said... no such animal. Now if you'll excuse me, Sasquatch and I are off to go hunt grays and Chupacabras in Atlantis with Tesla's death ray. Not just Robotech.com... that's a fair description of pretty much EVERY Robotech fansite with a community section.

What I've heard on that note was that some, not all, of the charges were dropped due to the statute of limitations. Like nobody else here hasn't been banned from a few Robotech websites... Y'know... that may very well explain all the complaints I've read about how serious arm-twisting is needed to get them to fix anything on the properties they lease out.

Nah... some of the people who're speculating are also making ridiculous assertions about the movie and banning anyone who points out that they have no basis in fact. But does Hollywood love an idea with a history that can best be summed up as a sequence of embarrassing failures?

Thanks again for taking the time to summarize the last issue Sketchley. Unless Chronicle drops another Macross II article in #44, I'll go ahead and make my next order #40-43. Oh well... I didn't expect there to be one, but I did cherish a small ember of hope that they would add one with more hard data. Unsurprising... none of the previous publications bother, but the animation would seem to suggest that they number in the dozens, and that the ship is much more massive than Palladium would have us believe (244m... feh). Now THAT'S news I can use. Hmmm... it looks like they're referencing two distinct fleet formations there... the 12th Fleet is the Earth Defense Fleet which appears in the final two episodes of Macross II and is headed up by Capt. Balzae and the Gloria, and the 2nd Battle Group 17th and 18th Cruiser/Destroyer Squadron/Groups are the forces the U.N. Spacy scrambled to Mars to meet the initial Mardook offensive, headed up by the Heracles. It's VERY nice to hear that my suspicions regarding the beam cannon numbers were correct, and a pleasant surprise to hear about the missile launchers as well... which may indirectly confirm my theory about the similar looking ports amidships on the Gloria being similar in scale and armament to the big honking missile launchers on the TV-series ARMDs. I'll have to get the article myself to see if it confirms my other suspicions about the standard battleship... that the array of little ports that are similar to those on Mardook ships are fighter launch ports, and that the six large hatches behind the bridge tower are VLS hatches similar to those on the Oberth. I actually have lineart somewhere of the semi-confirmal gun thing... it's basically a halfway variant of the gun turrets on Zentradi battleships, where the "blister" splits along a seam to expose the gun turret itself... kind of like those gun blisters on the Thuverl Salan. Did they print the alternate/unused variant of the design that with the seventh, larger, forward-facing beam cannon on the dorsal gun mount?

Oh, they'd no doubt still send nasty letters and all, but I don't think they'd be able to do much apart from make a fuss. Context here... I wasn't talking about the cease and desist in what you quoted, I was talking about if it came down to actual litigation.

While I dread the inevitable answer, I gotta ask... did Macross Chronicle provide a size for the Gloria and standard battleship, or anything about their armaments? Yeah, the spoiler images on the blog show that #43's sheet is the long-awaited (by me at least) mechanic sheet for the VF-2SS with the Super Armed Packs.

Oh, you'll hear no disagreement from me on that note. Ultimately, the one overriding factor that has doomed pretty much every Robotech to eventual failure isn't that the franchise's owners (Harmony Gold) see the series as little more than a way to shake down gullible and nostalgic fans for a few quick bucks or the ineptitude of those currently running the franchise's "creative team"... it's the practices used to create the show in the first place. When you get right down to it, Carl Macek's tired old line about Robotech being an epic, generational sci-fi space opera and something he'd intended to do all along just doesn't hold water. If you examine the original accounts of the show's creation from the 80s, they're much more upfront about their real goal. To put it bluntly, Robotech was an attempt to ape the successful business model of Transformers Generation 1 with a bare minimum of actual work. Instead of starting from scratch and making their own TV series to push a preexisting toy line, Harmony Gold slapped together a show from whatever was handy, edited it minimally, and rewrote the existing stories a bit to make them a single continuity. Because the original show wasn't original in any way, the franchise is hamstrung by the legal constraints of their license agreements with the rights owners. As a result, they can't manipulate much of the material for future use, and the most popular installment is almost entirely off-limits. By sheer bad luck, the one installment of the series they're most limited in their ability to use is far and away the most popular, so any future sequel attempts are ultimately doomed to fail and disappoint the fans. Their only real options are to: (1) strike out on their own with a new series unrelated to any of the previous titles in the franchise and be crucified by the fans for making a show that's Robotech in name only, or (2) retcon like crazy and attempt to exploit weak dialogue in an effort to tack a continuation onto the increasingly convoluted story of a series from 20+ years ago.

Quoted For Truth. I think what me meant was that Harmony Gold is killing Robotech for its fans with a crippling lack of imagination and their cavalier attitude towards their fans.

Granted, it wouldn't reflect well on them in court that they spent six years ignoring the project only to deliver the coup de grace with a cease and desist notice a few weeks before the project would actually produce tangible results. All the same, there are far too many cases where the courts find that waiting on the cease and desist order and/or or not taking it up in court sooner isn't going to let the violator off the hook. In fact, FASA tried exactly that argument when they motioned for summary judgment right away after Harmony Gold took them to court over their use of Macross designs, and the courts said that failing to take action right away didn't constitute a waiver of rights. Now, Harmony Gold would have a much harder time establishing that UEG's project would damage their bottom line or reputation in some way, but corporate lawyers being the soulless sadists that they are, I'm sure they could concoct at least one way to tentatively prove it to the judge, or construct some other, far more actionable rationale to put a stop to the entire thing. No doubt you'll be even more shocked to learn that this isn't the first time this has happened either... this is just one of the more blatantly dickish moves on their part. For the longest time they were stringing Seifrietti Weisse along about a fan-art/fan-fic collection he wanted to publish, making him jump through hoops and even fire his cover artist because he'd landed on a list of "undesirables" in the eyes of Harmony Gold. 's probably a good thing, because I'm kind of enjoying my life of evil right now... just as soon as I persuade my girlfriend into a skintight leather bodysuit I'll have my evil overlord checklist all rounded out. Yes, many of them do.

Are we done yet? Yes and no... I'm neither the best nor the fastest translator in the world, but it looks like they're saying that we'll get yet another video game Extra Sheet covering the VF-9 from Macross M3... which, if that sheet also covers the VF-3000, and U.N. Spacy-variant variable glaug they'll have completely covered the playable mecha from that game. That second line's about the "VF-19 Kai (Custom) Basara Special"... though they've covered that one pretty thoroughly already... ?

Actually, they could make a pretty good case against Robotech Genesis on the grounds that it's derivative of those elements of the Robotech story owned entirely by Harmony Gold (aka all the poo they created to stitch the original shows together). While they can't make any kind of case about the use of Macross designs, they could likely make something of a fuss over the use of Southern Cross and Mospeada designs, since they seem to at least have licenses permitting them to use both. Yes, it's a scare tactic... but not one entirely without teeth. What makes you think they won't if he actually manages to get the project off the ground? The difference between what UEG did and what most fanfilms do is that they were actually on track to release something tangible. When you think about it like that... Harmony Gold probably felt they were being one-upped and resolved to stop it at any cost. This is Harmony Gold we're talking about... doing stupid, pointless crap that screws over the fans is practically their stock in trade.

Honestly, considering the number of complaints I'm still receiving on a weekly basis about the sorry state of affairs over there on Robotech.com, I don't think much was improved by Pizza's banning. True, he's not jumping on people at MEMO's behest anymore, but that hasn't stopped other people from stepping up to the challenge of making that place as hostile to intelligent discussion as humanly possible. For the time being, it just means MEMO has to get his own hands dirty for a change. Y'know, if this exact thing hadn't happened at least a dozen times since I first got involved in the online Robotech fandom back in '03, I might've been able to feel sorry for them. Instead, the only emotion this news of Harmony Gold's latest dick move brings is exasperation that UEG Productions has such poor pattern recognition skills that they honestly didn't see this coming. It might seem a little bit cruel, but it's nobody's fault but their own for pursuing a fan project that was practically guaranteed to end with a cease and desist notice. To the best of my knowledge, they never bothered to check with Harmony Gold to see if they had any objections, nor did they bother researching it to see if they could get away under fair use... so I really can't bring myself to feel bad on their behalf. Hell, I can't even muster an insincere platitude about what a loss their project's abrupt termination will be for the whole Robotech fandom. I've been aware of the project ever since it's inception, and during my tenure on RT.com I was repeatedly exposed to their concept art and trailers, all of which gave me the distinct impression that they didn't have a goddamn clue what they were doing. It takes a certain, special variety of suck to take some of the ugliest designs from Southern Cross and make them even uglier than they already were. What they did to my poor VF-1 Valkyrie was practically criminal. Apparently in their minds, smooth and rounded surfaces are the enemy, so every mecha is liberally covered in panel seams and sports more ridges and jagged edges than a bag of Ruffles potato chips. When you combine ugly designs, awkward animation, and stilted music, what you get is a losing proposition (or a direct-to-DVD movie called Shadow Chronicles). Either way, I can't really bring myself to see the project being shut down as a great loss. Cold? Maybe. Cruel? A bit. Honest? Totally.

Looks like they want to get back to producing toys that're guaranteed to sell now that they've successfully dragged their Masterpiece Collection line through the mud by having the reissued Maia MPC be just as bad as the recalled version.

Not really, no... but Harmony Gold has always had a problem with promising far more than they can deliver. It's not at all uncommon for them to hype up their latest project like it's going to lead the fans to the promised land. Just look at all the effort they put into trying to make it appear that Shadow Chronicles took the film festivals by storm when in truth it won a few minor awards at insignificant festivals, frequently by having little or no competition in its category. To say nothing of the fact that it appears they've botched the Maia MPC twice in a row now...

No problem, glad I could help. All this and they're still doing VF-1 sheets... that fighter's been covered to death and back again, isn't it about time they started using that space for something else? Like, say... my f***ing Metal Siren and Icarus? Seems that way, yes. That's what the compendium has down for his given name too.

Sure, we can have a stab at it... Mechanic SheetsVF-4 Lightning III (w00t)VF-1A ValkyrieSDR-04 Mk.XII PhalanxNupetiet Vergnitzs 5361VF-11B ThunderboltMacross 7 FleetVF-2SS Valkyrie II (B-sheet) Character Sheets Maximilian Jenius (DYRL)Gadget M. Chiba (M7) Timeline Sheet Ranka Attack History Sheet Minmay's Farewell Concert Tour (FB2012?) Worldguide Sheet Earth (Terrestrial) Unified GovernmentVajra Technology Sheet Spacesuit Glossary Sheet VF-1 Valkyrie thru Britai 7018 EDIT/Notice: I'm not 100% sure the phrasing on the History Sheet is correct, and I corrected a typo on the Glossary sheet which mistakenly says Britai 0718. EDIT #2: I took a look at the cover in patent-pending squint-o-vision... it's DYRL Max, not Macross 7 Max.

It's a safe bet that any Robotech fan who's posting here and isn't complaining bitterly that we shouldn't criticize the show itself or the fans who support it has long since given up on waiting for Harmony Gold to fulfill their empty promises of a future Robotech sequel that will go down in history as the mind-blowing, genre-redefining, epic masterpiece of science fiction that silenced all the doubters and nay-sayers forever and conferred upon Robotech the status of the most popular and successful mecha anime of all time. Honestly, the sad part is that I'm barely exaggerating the content of Harmony Gold's promises at all... and there are a fair few Robotech fans out there who honestly believe that one day soon the next Robotech sequel will shut Macross down forever and make Robotech equal to (if not superior to) the great American sci-fi franchises of Star Trek and Star Wars.

Which is, to anyone familiar with Harmony Gold's business practices, almost as good as admitting that they've been sitting on their hands and waiting for someone competent to save their asses for them. In all honesty, knowing Harmony Gold's "creative team" as well as we do, that seems like a winning proposition for them. All they have to do is rest on imaginary laurels for a while until Warner Bros either produces success, which they'll no doubt claim at least some credit for, or the live action movie goes under and Warner takes all the blame from the fans, leaving Tommy and company free and clear once they deny any involvement in it. I'd wager that their projections for the live action movie spin an optimistic tale of a glorious revival for Robotech that ultimately leads to a massive influx of new fans. If they're working under that assumption, they have no real reason to try and appease the handful of long-time fans and newbies who populate Robotech.com and attend their convention panels. If everything goes to plan, those people won't be necessary anymore, so they likely feel they don't need to put in the effort necessary to keep them interested anymore. Long story short... according to Tommy, the reason the live-action movie caused the animated Robotech continuity to grind to a halt again was that Harmony Gold saw the live action movie's potential success as a golden opportunity to obtain better sponsorship deals and thus a bigger budget for Robotech: Shadow Rising. Unfortunately, it seems this long-term approach was probably unwise, as it just means awkward stalling and backpedaling to explain why the movie that was "coming soon" is now "coming in the foreseeable future... maybe".

's Tommy's weak-ass attempt to underline the fact that the only two parts of Robotech that matter to the fans and to the ongoing story are Macross and Mospeada. When you look at it, it's just a trio of slightly modified U.N. Spacy logos from Macross with the white bits painted black so that it also forms the upside-down equilateral triangle that was Mars Colony's logo in Mospeada... just without the superimposed white M. Tommy probably thinks what he did is really clever, instead of just being really ugly. In the new comics, his design for Space Station Liberty is seems to have been shaped more by a desire to make it look like a massive version of that logo from a top-down perspective than any actual aesthetic considerations.

I'm contemplating setting up a mirror for it on one of my domains... I'll probably do that in the next day or so if all goes well, assuming I don't hear back from Mr March.

Okay, spelling issues aside... what I'm getting at here is that there's a distinction between (semi-)informed speculation and assertion. If you intend to talk about the accuracy and reliability of a publication, that distinction does matter. You won't see me verbally crucifying a magazine for posting informed speculation about a show, but when the writers start representing their guesswork as hard facts any pretense of accuracy goes out the window. Protoculture Addicts crossed that line far too often for it to be considered an accurate in any meaningful way. Publishing wild guesses and unfounded speculation as though they were hard fact is not accurate reportage by any rational definition, or even good journalistic ethics for that matter. Now, if the writers had at least bothered to qualify their statements to show what they were saying was speculation, I wouldn't have grounds for complaint... but they didn't. Instead of saying "this is what we think this is" they simply said "this is what it is". Perhaps I'm being unduly harsh because of my scholarly approach to this kind of thing, or because their gleeful idiocy and casual disregard for the truth created most of the misconceptions about Macross II I've spent the last couple of years fighting. All the same... if we're going to give a magazine a free pass to print unhinged, unfounded speculation as fact, does this mean we're also going to give MEMO and Maverick a free pass to come here and tell everyone that their crazy theories about the Macross rights situation are factual too? Bad example to pick, sketchley... the MAT book was written by Masahiro Chiba, someone who actually worked on the original Macross series and other parts of the franchise... and speaking as someone who has access to most of those early publications with regard to their wonderfully inaccurate Macross II article I feel fairly safe in saying those mooks didn't get their crackpot ideas from any reputable publication, or any of the less-than-reputable ones for that matter... most of it seems to have been pulled out of thin air.

Having never owned any of the old Matchbox Robotech toys from the 80s, I can't really say one way or the other about their quality... but I've heard a great deal of griping about their quality. It is noteworthy that at least in the 80s Harmony Gold's licensees weren't above trying to cover mecha from all three sagas in toy form (like the Hovertanks). Well... according to those in the industry the rights to DYRL have always been somewhat confused. Representatives of AnimEigo have said that nobody really knows who owns the distribution rights to the movie anymore, since it had been licensed for distribution abroad and released in a heavily edited form. What we can say for certain is that Tatsunoko retained the rest-of-world merchandising rights to DYRL, and later licensed those to rights to Harmony Gold after the whole legal brouhaha got started, as Tommy Yune has said at several convention panels. Despite some awkward verbiage, Harmony Gold has never claimed to have the distribution rights to DYRL... just the right to produce toys and other goods based on it for sale outside of Japan (probably a way for them to shut out any competing VF-1 toys). Presumably Tatsunoko was given the rest-of-world merchandising rights as part or all of their compensation for their role in the movie's production... rather like the arrangement that gave them the distribution and merchandising rights to the original Macross series outside of Japan. It doesn't look like they were given any rights other than merchandising though...

Um... fallacy control on the fallacy control: While Mecha Press was established to focus primarily on mecha shows and the like, Protoculture Addicts did still cover rather more mecha shows than anything else, particularly in their early years. I'll address the issue of their accuracy (or rather, lack thereof) below. Accurate from the start, eh? I've got a bunch of old issues of Protoculture Addicts and Mecha Press that point to rather a different answer. Rather more often than journalistic ethics would find reasonable, the authors tended to stoop to making it up as they went, often introducing things in articles that anyone familiar with the shows being covered could easily spot as untrue or unsubstantiated. Even without having my back issues in front of me I can pick out some pretty galling cases of bullshit... like their Macross II coverage saying that the green-haired hologram girl was Minmay, the Mardook are the Protoculture, and of course, completely getting the Meltrandi's role and backstory wrong, and to a lesser extent, farting up how the story relates to the original Macross and DYRL. So... accurate from the start? No. Not even close. A commendable effort, given the times and their situation, and rather more detailed than their contemporaries, but nothing like entirely accurate. (As a side note, Mecha Press's coverage was just as spotty, if not worse... their coverage of Five Star Stories had frequent cases of the writers making up specs and whole new technologies not present in the original story) (There's a whole host of lesser screwups I could pick on, but I'm not here to nitpick, just clarifying a point) What little Harmony Gold has been willing to say about the abrupt cancellation of Robotech II: the Sentinels hasn't exactly formed a consistent picture of what went wrong. Over the years, their story's changed a bit in the details, which tends to deflect the actual blame further and further in the direction of Matchbox. Fortunately for us, Harmony Gold's licensees tend to be a little less tight-lipped, offering us a bit more detail on what went wrong. As it stands, the prime factor that everyone points to when asked why Sentinels went tango uniform is the crash of the dollar/yen exchange rate which reportedly wiped out 25% of the show's budget almost overnight, forcing the powers that be to truncate it from 65 to about 36 episodes, and then cancel it altogether. Harmony Gold also lays some of the blame at Matchbox's door, though their reasons for doing so have changed between accounts from being described as a "lack of support" from their toy partner to Matchbox itself encountering financial trouble. I'm not sure about someone making a "wrong line of toys", but I've heard some 85ers attribute Matchbox's "lack of support" for the project to the lackluster sales of their mediocre Robotech toys. How much of their account is actually accurate... I can't say.