Seto Kaiba

While I don't want to (grievously) offend the more levelheaded Robotech fans out there, I really have to say that I honestly think that one of the prerequisites for being a long-time Robotech fan is having faulty pattern recognition skills. Let's face it, a complete and total inability to spot a negative trend as it emerges is the only thing that could keep someone hoping earnestly that Harmony Gold would one day roll out a decent sequel and revive Robotech after 25 years of failure and broken promises. Granted, past performance is no guarantee of future results, but you should still examine the track record and adjust your expectations accordingly. I'd bet real money that they honestly believe the stupid claims they make on a daily basis are accurate, well-reasoned, informed arguments and that we're just making fun of them out of spite. They don't stop to take stock of what they say because that would mean admitting the things they said were wrong, and they'd much rather believe the delusion that Robotech is a highly successful, wildly popular, genre-defining franchise than accept the grim reality that the majority of few the people who know about it regard it with barely-disguised contempt. They won't ever stop saying the stupid poo that they consistently get ridiculed for because that would entail admitting they've been betting on the wrong horse for over twenty years. Faulty pattern recognition skills and a frantic desire to validate two decades or more of their lives wasted waiting for a revival that will never come.

Smart money says he'd deny it flat-out, and attempt to rebut it with the sort of argument only someone who spent the entire day pounding nails into their skull with a tea tray would find even remotely convincing. Then he would no doubt launch into another comical tirade about how fear of Robotech motivated the producers of Star Trek's and Avatar to rush their movies to release, or that Macross's creators were in awe of Shadow Chronicles and decided to copy as much as they could from it to help them compete against Harmony Gold's next sure-fire blockbuster... Shadow Rising... a movie Maverick's been waiting for for over four years! EDIT: Oh, I forgot... and then he'd accuse you of taking pleasure in the suffering of others and revoke your posting privileges, assuming you were somewhere he could do the latter and get away with it.

Somehow, it doesn't surprise me at all that Maverick_LSC is trying desperately to come up with some way to convince himself that Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles, and Robotech itself, was something other than a lame direct-to-DVD movie many Robotech didn't think was all that good, and was ignored by the anime industry at large. He wants a way to validate twenty-plus years of waiting for Harmony Gold to get their act together and produce a sequel. Basically, Maverick's trying to legitimize Robotech and his belief in its superiority by trying to present the illusion that even Macross's creators think Robotech is the better story and are trying to imitate it. It's errant nonsense, of course... Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles has nothing that even remotely resembles an Itano circus. All they have are a few cases where large numbers of missiles are launched and the mini-missiles swarm together briefly, just once, shortly after launch, and then speed off in straight lines.

Y'know, despite Carl Macek spending a fair bit of time rhapsodizing about what he perceives as flaws in the story of the original Macross TV series and how he "fixed" them and "improved" the series as a whole, I don't think he's ever attempted to say Robotech is perfect (an indefensible statement if ever there was one), he just goes on with the standard "because I say so" assertions that Robotech is the superior story. It's certainly not what taksraven was saying in any case. Exactly what Carl Macek thinks of having Tommy Yune reboot the continuity in order to kick virtually everything he ever did, including most of his post-facto explanations and rationaliations, to the curb remains something of a mystery, as he never seems to actually comment on it when given the opportunity to do so.

No, I don't think we've bothered to cover that one, but we can be fairly certain that the VF-25 does in fact have some kind of secondary engine system providing the thrust for forward motion in fighter mode. Exactly what kind of engine it is, your guess is as good as mine, but its glowing pinkish-purple exhaust is visible in Macross Frontier episode 2 at about five minute in, when Alto and Ranka are cruising in GERWALK over the city in Gilliam's VF-25F right after Michel shoots the last Vajra down. It appears to be mounted more or less where we'd expect it to be. Just looking at the CG model, the engine's built into (or are on the underside of) the plate that protrudes backwards between the vertical stabilizers in GERWALK mode (the one with the Skull logo painted on it on Ozma's VF-25S, which is color-coded bright green in this chart).

While I could yammer on about how each culture has certain tropes endemic to its traditional storytelling, and the various regional perceptions of what constitutes "foreign" styles of storytelling, it's really neither here nor there. Your point is valid in that there is no one set of rules or characteristics that divides schools of storytelling into "Western" and "Eastern", or by any other vague geographical definition you could think of. It would be remiss of me not to qualify it by saying that while there's no objective definition of such, most every culture makes subjective classifications along those lines when the writer's background influences their style in a fashion that doesn't appear often among native writers, or draw upon some element of their native culture the readers won't be familiar with. While it IS a seriously flawed premise, people are going to make distinctions like that based on their own experiences anyway. That Maverick is using it as an attempt to draw a distinction between Macross and Robotech is pretty bloody ridiculous... he's falling back on the obviously flawed facade that he's a film industry expert and relying on the old axiom "If you can't dazzle them with your knowledge, baffle them with your bullshit." EDIT: Good grief that first paragraph sounds pretentious, but I really can't think of any way to word it better right now.

Too technical? My bad. I just cited a few examples of just how prevalent ending the story with some form of cliffhanger is these days in "Western" storytelling. It's bad practice, but it gets done a LOT in narrative-driven merchandise... not so much in cinema, but it crops up every now and again there too.

Yeah, I found that amusing too... he's definitely trying to cast Macross as an inferior product that's being "exploited" for a quick buck rather than a franchise that succeeded entirely on merit, seemingly oblivious to the irony in what he was saying... the creator of the cheap knockoff accusing the original creators of making a cheap knockoff. Actually, he says that he picked titles that were already in Harmony Gold's catalog of licensed works... he didn't decide to acquire anything, he just used what was already available. Clearly you don't play many video games... easily 3/4ths of all narrative-driven games these days end in some kind of cliffhanger or at the very least have "to be continued..." stapled onto the back end, regardless of whether or not they actually intend to make a second game, just to leave the option open if the first game sells well enough. It's the same with a lot of popular (and not-so-popular) novel series these days, where each and every installation ends in a cliffhanger or with some new villain presenting itself, to force the story to go on FOREVER... the Star Wars and Star Trek novels did it all the time, as do a LOT of fantasy series. On VERY rare occasions, if skillfully hidden under a larger, overarching plot, it CAN work... but examples of that are few and far between. The only one I can think of offhand is Dan Abnett's "Gaunt's Ghosts" series of Warhammer 40,000 novels... though after fifteen novels or so the many variations on "they recruit the disenfranchised soldiers of another destroyed unit/settlement and slog off to the next warzone" have long since started to pall.

Ask and ye shall receive... from part 1 of Robotech.com's Carl Macek fan interview, published 10 May 2001: and from part 2 of same, published 21 May 2001: Nah, I'm a computer scientist with a software engineering bias... give me the answer to the nearest tenth of a second or express it in quartz clock cycles.

Remember, one of the areas where Carl Macek insists he improved on the original Macross series with his Robotech adaptation was eliminating music as an important plot device and making Minmay into an obnoxious twit with "marginal talent" with the stated intention of showing that even a misguided person can make a difference. Just like virtually every claim of intent the man makes with regard to the production of the Robotech "original 85", this is almost certainly something he came up with after the fact to perpetuate the illusion he created Robotech according to some grand preconceived vision rather than slapping it together in an amusingly haphazard manner like he alludes to during his earliest interviews. As if he was completely and totally determined to set off every bullshit detector in the house, he then went on to claims Macross's sequels were moving away from giving music a central role in the story and that it was likely the result of Robotech's influence. Now, just to put this bullshit in context, this "interview" of his was posted on 21 May 2001... at which point the state of the Macross franchise renders the remarks he made so obviously wrong they verge on comical. Remember, a major part of Harmony Gold's efforts to keep the Robotech franchise limping along is giving the fans an exaggerated impression of the franchise's popularity and influence, along with a rather heavily rose-tinted and extensively censored account of its history. All too often, they mistake fantasy for fact and assert that Robotech is great classic of both anime and science fiction that rivals much more successful titles like Star Trek, Star Wars, Macross, and Gundam in popularity and influence. Some of them you can blame for it, namely the ones who bought into the lies of Tommy, Kevin, and their lackeys because they didn't know any better. Others, like those lackeys themselves, just have a tenuous grip on reality and don't want to accept that it really is just an obscure show with VERY limited niche appeal. Unless the live-action movie actually makes it to release and resuscitates the slowly cooling corpse that is Robotech, it'll never make it to 50 years. It'll be a bad footnote in Macross history LONG before then.

For pretty much any rational Robotech fan (yes, they DO exist) the prospect of any RT project actually being seen through to the end is almost unthinkable. In Robotech's long, sordid history, Robotech projects that didn't meet their end in failure and cancellation are astonishingly rare commodities. Given the mixed reception Shadow Chronicles got, I'd be surprised if more than a few of the rational fans were expecting a continuation of any kind. The general sentiments I saw from their corner were that Shadow Chronicles was going to be another Sentinels... a weak pilot for a series that never got off the ground. Considering all the delaying and double-talk surrounding Shadow Rising, they may yet be vindicated in that belief too... Yeah... but that still doesn't make the 4+ years statement work out... it comes up about eight months short of the 4 year mark at the absolute earliest.

Considering his almost Bendo-esque penis fixation where you're concerned, one might wonder if it isn't all projection caused by some deep-seated inner turmoil over his own sexual orientation... who knows, the "LSC" in Maverick_LSC might very well stand for Likes Sucking... well... you can fill the rest in for yourself, it shouldn't be too difficult. Not surprising, he seems to find something terribly fascinating about my profile, considering he seems to be checking it roughly every 24 hours or so. I didn't think my "About Me" section was THAT captivating... While I'm not sure about #3 there, it's no secret Maverick_LSC and MEMO1DOMINION both make a hobby of spying on "dissenters" who visit message boards like this one and periodically report any criticism directed towards Harmony Gold and/or Robotech so their RT.com profiles can be earmarked for a speedy ban on entirely trumped-up charges. No doubt he not only expects Robotech and Macross fans to be in awe of him because he claims to have insider knowledge of the goings-on at Harmony Gold (something he's never been able to prove) and because of his moderator status on Robotech.com. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he expects anyone here with an active RT.com account to be afraid that he'll shut it down for speaking heresy. ;-) For some reason, as I was writing this I was struck by just how very much Maverick_LSC's acting like an Imperial Commissar from Warhammer 40,000... the only significant difference being that instead of screaming "HERESY!" and shooting the offender, he screams "HERESY!" and reaches for the ban button wherever he has the power to do so... Some call Maverick_LSC's methods "unconventional", "questionable", or "ethnically unsound", but Maverick_LSC knows what notions like that are: HERESY. Fortunately for us, he wants to clear up a few things. Now you might be wondering, just what is "heresy"? Is criticizing Tommy Yune's work as Robotech's creative director heresy? Maverick_LSC: IT'S HERESY! How about criticizing Carl Macek's work on the original Robotech series? Maverick_LSC: IT'S HERESY! Liking Macross more than Robotech? Maverick_LSC: THAT'S EXTRA HERETICAL! Protecting the minds of Robotech fans from heresy is hard work, but it's certain to pay off eventually, right?

Yes, the Shadow Chronicles movie will have been out for 4 years this August, but only actually available to the fans for three (as it went on sale in January 07)... the pertinent point is that the existence of a sequel was not even announced until February '07 and wasn't named until July '07. So for Maverick_LSC or anyone else to have been waiting for a sequel to the movie for 4+ years, they would've had to know about it back in or before January 2006, well before even Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles came out, and if memory serves, before the name "Shadow Chronicles" had even come to light. At or around that point it was still known tentatively as Robotech: Shadow Force, an interim name it held between being Robotech 2004 and its final title.

Yes... yes it is... though in rather a different way then you meant, perhaps. For Maverick_LSC to say he's been waiting 4+ years for Robotech's revival is a masterpiece of understatement. It'd probably be more accurate to say he's been waiting 20+ years for that, but then again that just makes him sound like a desperate loser with lousy pattern recognition skills who can't accept that his favorite childhood TV show bombed back in 1986. More importantly, if he's been waiting 4+ years for Shadow Rising... the boy must be clairvoyant. How else could he be waiting 4+ years for the Shadow Chronicles sequel that was announced less than three years ago? Well, Robotech's standards for quality music are abnormally low... their great cosmic idol is a singer who makes the worst one-hit wonders look like timeless classics, voiced by a woman who had to get shitfaced drunk before she had the courage to warble those horrible songs. I remember what BlackRose said when she first saw that scene... "Now this is a brave new world... one where masochism isn't just socially acceptable, it's a favorite group recreational activity! Let's all go to the mess hall and suffer horribly for a half-hour!". Pretty much nobody, except the few n00bs too green to know better. Bear ye in mind that the reason Maverick_LSC thinks he's a film industry expert and Hollywood insider is because he does his own (awful) amateur films, some of which he posted here in a pathetic attempt to troll me, and claims to be occasionally talking to Kevin McKeever. The guy's a massive blowhard who goes to extreme lengths to make himself look like a bigshot because he has a unglamorous day job in aircraft maintenance and a wife who treats his anime hobby like something sick or criminal that needs to be hidden from their friends and neighbors at all costs. His buddy and backup is a rent-a-cop who emptied his family's bank accounts for Robotech and thinks he's a film industry legal expert and Robotech guru because he claims to have talked over the legal situation with a film industry lawyer he can't name, and has had Carl Macek at his fansite convention booth.

No, your memory's sound... having Chase Masterson's character (Janice Em2) sing that horrible old Minmei song "We will win" in a voice almost as ear-bleedingly bad as Rebecca Forstadt's original performance didn't really serve any purpose in the film, except giving them some theoretically plaintive-yet-hopeful background music while they panned backwards out the Ark Angel's window. Chase Masterson's other music number about midway through the film, equally awful, had little purpose other than allowing them to show off Janice's massive rack in a low-cut slurmty dress (rather, a holographic projection of such, since Janice is a robot) and provide fodder for a halfhearted attempt to inject some romantic tension Marcus and Maia's relationship.

Oh, there's precious little in the way of actual harm they could do... but that doesn't make it any less obnoxious, nor any less creepy. I must confess it is somewhat amusing to me that even after being banned from Robotech.com and MEMO's RobotechX for what I can only call my "heretical views", they still consider me enough of a threat to their narrow-minded, dogmatic little fantasy world to want to keep a close eye on me to make sure I'm not spreading my dangerous, seditious knowledge among the fans. I doubt they're watching me because I'm saying something they can't counter, because in all the time I was verbally sparring with them they never once came up with a counterargument for something I'd said which didn't immediately set off the bullshit detectors of every sane reader.

Glad we're on the same page as far as the context of my analogy goes... the rest is generally irrelevant. Nice to see some more IT blokes around here, I do IT work in the auto industry m'self, but that's neither here nor there. Well, I do... the idea that I'm being actively cyber-stalked by two married men with no lives because they're afraid that I might say something bad about a failed animated sci-fi franchise from the mid-80s is somewhere between hilarious and downright creepy. That the people in charge of the Robotech franchise are SO thin-skinned and SO incapable of handling criticism that they actually want to silence me is nothing short of comical. If I had a Facebook account or anything like that, I don't doubt that one or both of 'em would be spying on me there too... and that's just freaking ridiculous.

Granted... but it's dollars to donuts he's been accessing my profile here to keep an eye on what I say about Robotech and Harmony Gold. Just like MEMO, Mav's borderline-obsessed with silencing criticism of Robotech and its creators by any means available, and thanks to the incredibly childish antics of Doug Bendo my reputation among Robotech fans seems to be an eclectic mix of "top Robotech expert" and "ringleader of the Robotech haters". For all practical purposes, they seem to perceive me as Schrodinger's Fan... I'm both an expert fan and detestable hater until they read a post of mine and the waveform collapses temporarily, leaving me as one or the other. I do seem to attract the crazies, don't I?

So... never? It's not like they have the know-how to produce anything that'll make the industry take them seriously again. Any future the franchise has is going to be in the hands of someone other than its owners. Nah, I think it's called cyber-stalking... poor bastard must think I'm behind PTH's latest bout of unfocused rage.

It's nothing to do with my antipathy towards Apple, well-justified though it is. Take my remarks in context and you'll see I was drawing a parallel between the business plans of Apple and Harmony Gold. Specifically, how the core demographic of both companies is a "captive consumer base" which will buy just about anything with the brand name on it, with little or no regard for quality. In some ways, Harmony Gold's current situation reminds me a lot of where Apple was in the mid-90s, with a small but fanatically local consumer base keeping the brand moving forward despite some astonishingly stupid calls by the management and public opinion of the brand ranging from polite indifference to undisguised scorn. Now, whether or not Harmony Gold will find that one magic product (like Apple's iPod) that'll become wildly popular and make them mainstream... your guess is as good as mine. EDIT: I wonder why Maverick_LSC keeps checking my MacrossWorld profile... 's that boy back to spying on me to see what I'm saying about Robotech again? Dude needs to get a life... or maybe his wife just needs to take away his internet privileges .

Definitely... at this rate it looks like it's only a matter of time until Pizza's pointed criticisms of Harmony Gold's handling of Robotech and the 25th anniversary get MEMO so thoroughly hacked off that he'll re-ban him from RobotechX, leaving him nowhere to go except back to RobotechFactor or over to HappyPenguins's site, assuming he doesn't just re-register there under a new name like he did last time. I doubt it... they couldn't even scrounge up enough material to make a single reasonably compelling 90 minute movie. At least the first 30 minutes were recycled story from Symphony of Light, and the remainder could only be called flat, dull, and uninteresting. Yes, other people have essentially handed them everything they need in the setting, the characters, the mecha, and the overall plot outline, but even then they couldn't come up with a compelling story to save their souls.

So far, I haven't been able to find the exact post where it all went down, but given what he's said about it he was banned for antagonizing other members on the Series & Stories section of the Robotech.com boards. He was baiting the "Disciples of Leonard" in a thread about what would've happened if the Robotech Masters had made peace and warned humanity about the Invid, and he seems to have interpreted his ban as having been motivated by MEMO's friendship with some members of the DOL. Once again, he seems to have concluded he was banned not because of his actions, but rather because someone was conspiring against him. Based on this, I'd say his attacks on MEMO and Harmony Gold are probably motivated more by anger over his ban than having come to his senses and realized what a crapshoot Harmony Gold is.

Not entirely... if such a thing could even be said to have existed in the first place given the general shortage of Shadow Chronicles merchandise. Apart from the DVD, the only merchandise the movie had was the artbook, the soundtrack, the recalled Shadow Fighter MPC, and some miscellaneous odds and ends. In the last year or so, the only "new" RTSC merch is the reissue of the recalled Maia Sterling MPC. Being an IT guy by trade, I have no respect for any division of Apple except their marketing team, who have gone above and beyond the call of duty by using fraud and deception to sell low-grade consumer trash to the general public and got them to like it. Harmony Gold doesn't have the talent to do more than flail around and look foolish whenever someone asks a question for which they don't have an answer that makes them look good.

With the housing market in the shitter, whether Harmony Gold is still actually turning enough of a profit on their real estate interests to make any potential loss on Robotech insignificant is somewhat dubious... but yes, they have their captive audience, populated primarily with 30yo+ guys who are so starved for new material that they'll snap up anything provided Tommy Yune slaps the name "Robotech" on it first. It's like Apple's core demographic, the militant macfags who don't care WHAT the new Apple product is or how much it costs, so long as they can get their hands on it as soon as possible. In this case, the difference is that Harmony Gold keeps its fans waiting indefinitely and has never produced anything trendy or popular. There is a small and growing trend of fans starting to finally realize they're being strung along though... (Still no way to tell if PTH is genuine in his sentiments to that effect or not, since the factor that got him railing against HG and MEMO seems to have been MEMO banning him from Robotech.com (again)) Closure nothin... it's ridiculous in the extreme considering the franchise has been staying afloat by milking those Mikimoto character designs and Kawamori/Miyatake mechanical designs for ~20 years.

Of course. Even a halfway-competent creative director would have known that establishing your new villain's motivation in some limited edition comic book most of the audience will never lay eyes on, let alone read, rather than in the movie itself where the general audience will be seeing the villain for the first time is a phenomenally stupid idea. It's the sort of pants-on-head retarded plan we'd expect from a rank amateur or someone suffering from drill-induced brain trauma, and only the most inept creative staff could take even remotely seriously.