Seto Kaiba

The sad part is, when you factor in the EotC stable time loop... this is actually possible.

Okay, so you're citing an exception that tests the rule... that's cool. Doesn't really change the fact that the vast majority of Robotech comics did indulge in blatant and occasionally nonsensical plagiarism... even engaging in some cross-genre theft of characters and stories, with appropriately bizarre results. Um... the "Tactical Battle Pod" DID make it into what little of the intended series was actually animated. It appears in the first five minutes of the "Sentinels movie", during the simulator scene. A bunch of 'em pop out of the undefined body of water that "Rick Hunter" crashes in, and waste rookie Jack Baker, ending the simulation at about four minutes in. Whether the "tactical battle pod" is legally actionable or not is kind of sketchy. It's clearly based on general design elements from the Regult and Glaug, yet it's so stylistically different that in my opinion it'd be next to impossible to build a successful case that it was copyright-infringing material. Just like the character designs, it's different enough from the originals while remaining at least vaguely recognizable that it would probably be in the clear. To date, I'm still not certain what "Robotech style" could possibly mean... aside from "turn your brain off and act like a complete twat".

The line between what was Macross and what was Robotech was drawn clearly enough that Palladium had to, and did, establish what could and could not be used for lineart in the original Robotech RPG. Well, Harmony Gold's resident spin doctor has gone on record to say that the reason the comics and novels were made non-canon was because they had been made during a period when Harmony Gold exercised little-to-no creative control over the products their licensees were creating, so that much at least can be taken as reasonably accurate. However, in light of the magnitude and frequency of the tracing, not merely from Macross but also from other shows which had nothing to do with Macross or Robotech such as the movie Independence Day, and the fact that at least some of their licensees WERE aware of the distinction and what they should not use, it seems fairly obvious that there was a LOT of blatant, senseless plagiarism on the part of the writers and artists doing the Robotech comics. If they had drawn it themselves, it would be one thing, but almost all of what they did was tracing from artbooks, from screen captures, and from box art. That's not interpretation at that point, that's plagiarism, pure and simple.

Yeah... let's have a look at these and see just how spurious they all are... Sorry, but nothing here is unique to Robotech or Southern Cross... this isn't a link at all. For one, Bowie isn't anything like a "guitar freak", the instrument he plays the most in the series is a piano, not a guitar. Not just a different instrument, but also a different genre. There was noting "vaguely mystical" about the Zor Lords either. Likewise, human soldiers being brainwashed and used by aliens is nothing new... Star Trek has done it at least a dozen times over the years. Bowie isn't a guitar freak, so there's no romancing of an alien girl by a guitar freak either, there's an alien musician sort of hooking up with a human musician, and I guarantee you Sivil was no harp virtuoso. Rejected, nice try though. Aside from the obvious fact that Alto's hair is not purple, and the circumstances of their dressing as women are totally and completely different... Alto Saotome being an oyama, a male actor who plays female roles in kabuki theater, and Yellow Belmont was a soldier who adopted the disguise of a female lounge singer to hide from the Inbit troops hunting survivors of the Mars Forces. Furthermore, the Inbit/Invid are not biomechanical, they are organic lifeforms operating mecha, and the Vajra are entirely organic lifeforms. Sorji/Sera is an Inbit/Invid in humanoid form, Ranka is a quarter-Zentradi girl who just happens to be infected with the virus that serves as the Vajra communications medium. Additionally, the Vajra are not a hive mind, per se... the description of how their communications work is more in line with a distributed intelligence. Additionally, while the 3rd Earth Recapture Force were hell-bent on wiping out the Inbit who had occupied their home planet, whereas the Frontier NUNS forces were mislead into a war with the Vajra for ulterior motives. Again, rejected because no actual link exists here, except in terms of generalities produced as a result of DRAMATIC oversimplification and omission of key detail. Eh, I could point to a half-dozen other mecha that do the same thing... not indicative of a link either. Nope, no link here either. The three muses of the Zor Lords were used to inspire the Zor people, and did so not by singing, but by playing ugly techno versions of stringed instruments. The muses in Robotech were used to keep cloned soldiers complacent and obedient. The Emulators of the Mardook in Macross II were used solely for the purpose of controlling the battlefield behavior and tactics of the brainwashed Zentradi troops by singing. The first two are similar, the third is not... and the third one is the one your argument depends on.

Jeez... you make it sound like FSS model kits are a controlled substance or something. It takes so long to do each kit that in terms of cost vs time it's probably a lot cheaper to do FSS kits than it is Macross ones. Aaah... I've got a few unstarted model kits, but unfortunately none of them are FSS.

It always was a cheap imitation of the DYRL flightsuit, which isn't surprising... since reportedly Tatsunoko's animators had difficulty understanding the distinctions between Macross and Robotech... or so Carl Macek claims. And that ain't the only place either... there were a couple years there where I think every single Robotech comic must've traced this image from DYRL artbooks at least once. I think the only companies to get the Robotech comic license who didn't indulge heavily in tracing from Macross artbooks and stealing characters and stories from other mecha shows were Comico and Wildstorm, though one could argue that Wildstorm's From the Stars miniseries was nothing but a Robotech version of events from the existing Macross timeline. Ooookay, now there's a dubious claim if ever I saw one. I challenge you to find me one good example of Macross ripping of Robotech. Macross is readily available (legitimately and otherwise) in the US and abroad, but Robotech is NOT available in Japan. I'd guess that any of this you perceive from the Macross end is either coincidence or something not unique to Robotech at all.

Actually, that there were no large-scale emigration fleets is another common misconception about the Macross II continuity. In fact, the official continuity provided in B-Club 79 makes mention of two specific colony missions, and the implication is that there were others as well. As can be expected, the Megaroad-01's departure is mentioned, though for reasons unexplained multiple publications put its actual departure in 2014. The other emigration ship mentioned is a ship called the Million Star, identified as a Macross-class colony ship, which was attacked by a large rogue Zentradi fleet only 1.8 light years from Earth in May of 2054, which is what kicked off the 2054 Zentradi invasion. The Million Star is also noteworthy for being the first instance of a mass-produced Macross-class ship in Macross, as the SDF-2 wasn't completed, and the main continuity didn't get 'em until Macross Frontier retconned them in.

Well, for starters those are two different mecha, one from Southern Cross and the other from Mospeada. The fighter in question is from Southern Cross (the Logan) and only has the two modes you see there, a transformation diagram is actually printed in This is Animation 10 (and is the ONLY mecha to get such a treatment in that book). The other is a nominally non-transformable mecha from Mospeada, whose name I have forgotten. Can't blame Robotech for that one either, actually... that too is from Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross. If memory serves, that's the searchlight thing used by the Zor when they first land on Glorie.

The god-awful Sentinels mecha designs were made for the aborted Robotech II: the Sentinels TV series and were created by Naito Anmo. Only a handful of the mechanical designs created for the series were used before work on the show was aborted. The only new designs to actually appear in the footage are the Zentradi battlepod (which appear just long enough to kill the protagonist in a simulation, about 4 minutes into the "movie"), the original "red turd" look of the SDF-3, and the redesigned "Robotech Factory Satellite" which looks nothing like the factor satellite in Macross. Also noteworthy are the imitation Macross character designs by Ippei Kuri, which look only vaguely like the original versions, and the pilot's flightsuit, which is a weak, ugly imitation of the flightsuits worn in DYRL. Nope, those are OFFICIAL designs created for Robotech II: the Sentinels, though I believe the specific art pieces are material drawn by Palladium's in-house artists and colored by the same hamhanded hack who did the rest of the art on the site those images are on.

No kidding, though the Waltrip bros. Sentinels comics ended up being a lot less weird, but no less campy, than the Sentinels novelizations written under the Jack McKinney pseudonym. It isn't just weird having both Lynn Minmei and Dana Sterling being Jonathan Wolfe's ex-lovers, Minmei slept around a fair bit, being bedded by Rick Hunter, Jonathan Wolfe, T.R. Edwards, and her own cousin Lynn Kyle, who IS a close blood relative in Robotech. Mercifully, the old comics never went the pseudo-mystical route the novels did, turning "protoculture" into not just a fuel, but a borderline magical substance that controlled the destiny of the entire universe... almost like putting The Force in your gas tank... (is anyone else remembering the "Liquid Schwartz" from Spaceballs now?) Not quite... if memory serves the Haydonite awareness merged with the protoculture matrix and did the black hole thing, and everything is revealed to have been a stable time loop and the very worst kind of predestination paradox, wherein Minmei is the mother of the original Zor and the SDF-3 is catapulted back in time, becoming the ultimate source of all of the universe's suffering, oppression, and genocidal wars by creating the Robotech Masters.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the Robotech fansites which dealt with the Robotech II: the Sentinels story were free Geocities websites which are now inaccessible since the hosting service has been discontinued. It's been a long time since I last read the old Sentinels comics, but in the current official continuity their role is minimal. Most of them were just stereotypical alien races who'd been oppressed by the Robotech Masters and later the Invid, had their occupied homeworlds liberated by the Robotech Expeditionary Forces, and later join the REF to form a goofy parallel to the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek, governed by the "Sentinels Council". The whole thing is really kind of unsettling, because as I've said before, the Sentinels Council aliens end up more as servants to the REF than equal partners in its operation or respected dignitaries. Apart from the Kabarrans lending their shipyards and manufacturing facilities to the REF, and the post-retcon Haydonites lending their advanced technology to the REF with ulterior motives, their involvement in the story was minimal at best.

I can... I downloaded the THORA blu-ray rips back when they first became available as a batch torrent. I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the encoding job, both in terms of the clarity of the picture and sound, and the size on disk of the files themselves. IMHO, it's probably the best fansubbed version of Frontier available. I didn't note any major spelling or grammatical errors when I watched it all the way through, though there are a couple terminology goofs that occur, generally centered around reaction weapons (which are often called "reactive" weapons in the subs) and fold travel, where the ships are referred to as traveling "in the fold" for some reason. Overall, they did a damn fine job. Yes, there are 25 episodes in the THORA release. Episode 1 is the "Yak Deculture" edition, which merges the "Deculture" edition pilot with the broadcast version of episode 1 to produce a somewhat longer-than-usual episode. In a word... "yes". The sound quality is excellent, and the picture quality is quite good too, though your mileage may vary depending on your monitor's contrast ratio, your video card, and the player you're playing it back on. I got great results using ZoomPlayer 6, a GeForce 7 series video card (in my laptop), and a nice high-contrast LCD. VLC Player produced excellent results as well, except that it may briefly stutter on the audio and have a bit of temporary blocky artifacting on the video if you skip forward too vigorously using the playback progress bar, though it clears itself up after a second or two. Can't help ya there.

Y'see... this is why I said you're wasting your time. No matter what you say, they're never going to realize that their arguments are complete and utter garbage, let alone acknowledge it. You're certainly welcome to ask them how they think the animation supports their ridiculous nonsense, but don't expect anything more than the same pants-on-head retarded arguments and the sort of twisted logic normally reserved for recent victims of Do-It-Yourself brain surgery. Really, no matter what you do they're going to try and spin it as a victory for them. It's the only kind of victory they'll ever have, since the odds of them outsmarting anyone capable of rational thought are virtually zero. Let's face it, you ARE arguing with people who are frequently outsmarted by the shift keys on their keyboards and/or are completely unable to figure out how to work a spellchecker. You are having a battle of wits with UNARMED men, Beltane. I suppose so... but only if you thought Beevis and Butthead was the very height of intellectual humor. I don't find them funny, but a lot of what they do is genuinely facepalm-worthy. Oh, no need to apologize. What little hate-mail I've gotten from Robotech fans that could be deciphered has always been hilarious reading. I've gotten a couple where the author was clearly so angry at me that his already lamentably bad writing skills deteriorated to the point where I spent twenty minutes asking if anyone recognized what language it'd they had been written in before someone pointed out it was just REALLY bad English. On the rare occasions I do receive hate mail for what I say about Robotech, I usually print it off and tack it up to the corkboard behind my desk as a trophy of sorts, right next to my collection of product documentation with atrocious "engrish".

Granted, you've got a point... My advice to you, Beltane... don't waste any more of your time on those idiots. None of them have the maturity or the knowledge to hold a rational debate, they just want to pretend they're experts by bullshitting and trying to shout down the people who actually know what they're talking about. If you're absolutely desperate to get your fix of mindless and nonsensical bullshit, just turn on C-SPAN. Otherwise, your time would be much better spent on communities populated with more reasonable, rational people... like MacrossWorld. Eh, most of Sentinels has already been ruled out. Just a few small elements were included to appease the fans who wanted to see a continuation of Sentinels. The way Prelude was put together essentially excludes a lot of the material in the comics and novels.

Handle that gag with care, it's an antique. Indeed... it's nice to see that amateur dramatics week is over and we can get back to business as usual. I expert you're right, that part of the reason some Robotech fans get butthurt over what we say here is because our observations don't just make Robotech look bad, their factual basis is such that they're almost impossible to refute. It's not just Robotech fans with personal agendas who take umbrage, it's also the fans who want to keep living under a rock and believing all the hype and bullshit Harmony Gold puts out about Robotech.

It's not like that's a new development, particularly where Robotech is concerned. Just before the release of the new edition of the Robotech RPG, the mooks running Robotech.com had a dice roll system added to certain parts of their forums so people could play the game online. Thus far, nobody has ever actually managed to get a game going there. The few people who tried to start games there gave up due to insufficient interest, and people coming in from Palladium's boards to recruit people never had any luck either. The few Robotech RPG games running online are mainly on RPOL, and they use the old 1st Edition books so their players can just download the books in PDF form instead of buying the new editions. The majority of Robotech fans who buy the books do so not with the intent of playing the game, but with the intent of using the book as an encyclopedia/tech manual of sorts, since apart from Robotech Art 1, Harmony Gold has never really bothered with such things. The "2nd Edition" of RPG is particular popular for this purpose, since the books are supposedly vetted by Tommy Yune before going to print. It's safe to say the biggest group playing the Palladium Robotech RPG are using it (or the Macross II equiv.) in order to play Macross-based games with revised rules and less ridiculous mecha stats. It certainly wouldn't be the first time Tony Stark got an add-on for his Iron Man armor that looked like a well-known mecha... I remember seeing pics circulate of an add-on he used against The Hulk that looked suspiciously like the RX-78GP03 Dendrobium Orchis, except scaled down to replace the GP03 Stamen unit with his Iron Man armor. While this will probably shock the hell out of Gubaba, both of the above statements are entirely correct (to the best of my knowledge). I remember this was actually the source of a fair bit of griping on Robotech.com after Prelude was released, which killed off most of the Macross characters left in the series and eliminated the possibility of Sentinels novel characters appearing, like Breetai's lover Kazianna Hesh and their child, Max and Miriya's second daughter Aurora, and Rick and Lisa's son Roy.

You're preaching to the choir dude... and you're entirely right that the Robotech fandom has a lot of fans who are pushing their own personal agendas. If it hadn't come from a trustworthy and reasonably well-connected guy who used to be a convention organizer, and been corroborated by a number of other fans who I trust, I would've immediately thrown it out as hearsay. I'll say this much, it's certainly plausible enough given Palladium's history of tracing art for their books and mixing stuff in that doesn't belong... the DYRL lineart in the first Robotech RPG book being just one example... and after a cursory examination of the artist's work on Palladium's games and Battletech, it beggars belief.

It's one thing to be laid off because the company you work for has fallen on hard times or is overstaffed, it's quite another to be fired for defying your employer and endangering his business. Unless it's a discrimination thing, nobody's gonna talk about the former, but the latter is almost guaranteed to cause a scandal. Considering what Kevin Long allegedly did, that the reasons for his dismissal were not made public is probably more than he deserved. What I've heard from the oldest of the old-time Robotech fans is that the reason for Kevin Long's dismissal from Palladium Books was that while working on one of their licensed properties, he was caught tracing copyrighted art from publications the management had told him were entirely off-limits and couldn't be used. I've also heard that he was later dismissed from another job (which I believe was doing art for a Battletech rulebook) because he had been caught tracing copyrighted art instead of drawing his own material.

Let's not split hairs here hulagu, for all practical purposes the "original" Robotech series is little more than a legitimized bootleg with a really bad Hong Kong translation, and every sequel attempt with the possible exception of the Robotech 3000 series has had all the artistic integrity of Space Gundam V, relying almost exclusively on stuff from shows they don't own (esp. Macross), altered JUST enough to avoid a copyright infringement lawsuit. Oddly, I had that exact same situation in reverse when a Japanese friend of mine in grad school saw someone with a bad Shadow Chronicles desktop background and thought it was Mospeada.

I know we've been over this in this thread a few times, but I guess once more wouldn't hurt... I've talked to Palladium and gotten a fairly reasonable explanation for exactly why there's so much completely ridiculous and wildly inaccurate stuff in the licensed Robotech and Macross II Palladium RPGs. It's not that they didn't TRY, it's mainly a lack of support from the owner of the licensed property in the case of RT, and a case of inadequate source availability in the case of the Macross II game. HG basically fobbed them off with a highly inadequate packet of information and left them to pay out-of-pocket to have official Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada artbooks translated, and go frame by frame through the footage looking for clues. In the case of Macross II, they had almost no artbooks to work from, so they had to go almost exclusively on the animation. I'd guess since there was no animation for the Sentinels series beyond the "movie" made from what little footage they had, it was likely entirely down to whatever they could scrounge from Harmony Gold's notes. More like rejected monster designs from A Pup Named Scooby-Doo. Let us not forget Dr. Lang's amazing Robot unicorn/pegasus.

Since the show's main theme is failure, does that mean 21's failure has come full circle and now he's a failure at being a failure? This is some seriously Zen poo now. I missed the episode when it went to air because the cable was out, but I caught it on adultswim.com when they posted it the following Monday, and I was pleasantly surprised. A lot of season 4 hasn't really thrilled me, but I liked "The Better Man" and this latest episode was IMHO the best of the season so far. Brock's back, that business from the first episode of the season is explained, and they've finally stopped fixating on jokes about Sergeant Hatred being a pedophile.

Well, the whole business with the more advanced VF-1 in DYRL being a block revision of the TV series VF-1 implementing controls developed for the VF-4 is a main continuity issue only... I've never been able to find anything to suggest it also holds true for the Macross II continuity. Rather, since the parallel world continuity treats DYRL as the only correct version of Space War 1, the TV series version of the VF-1 probably doesn't exist at all in that timeline, or if it does, likely only as an early-generation prototype or something. (The continuity makes note of small numbers of VF-1As being built specifically for evaluation prior to mass production) On mechanic sheet SDF:M UNS 01A, Macross Chronicle gives the TV series version of the Macross in storm attacker mode, which shows it as being pretty much exactly 1,200m tall to the top of the spikes on the main cannon, whereas the Battle-7 is given explicitly as 1,177m tall, which is so close as to make no odds. The back side of mechanic sheet MF Civ 01A gives the exact height of the Macross Quarter's storm attacker mode as 316m, which agrees nicely with the front side size comparison showing it as almost exactly the same height as the Eiffel Tower (324m).

In hindsight, it really is a shame that Robotech II: the Sentinels got canceled as early as it did. If the reception the various other incarnations of the series got and the fanbase's general antipathy for it are anything to go by, it probably would've been the final nail in Robotech's coffin... a series so piss-dribblingly awful that even the hardcore fans of Robotech often have nothing but scorn for it. One could argue that what's kept Robotech alive these last 20+ years has been that Harmony Gold's various failed sequels all crashed and burned either in development or the earliest stages of production, which allowed fans to look back on those projects and see an ideal of the show that might have been rather than the show that was actually made, and continue to hope that Harmony Gold would one day deliver a sequel that would meet their increasingly ridiculous expectations. Had one of their earlier attempts at a sequel survived production and made it to release before going down in flames, Robotech probably would've died with it. Kabarrians, actually...

If you consider the scope of the larger debate, it already has... several times, albeit not quite in the way you're expecting. For a while there, the belligerent and overly-defensive in the Robotech fandom were finding all sorts of colorful ways they could call people with dissenting opinions "Nazis". I remember back before I got banned from RT.com I was hounded across the boards by this one guy who apparently took umbrage when he posted his own take on what the Robotech continuity should look like in someone else's timeline question and I politely pointed out that there was already an official continuity and that the handful of unrelated "real robot" shows he'd worked into his take on the timeline had no business being there because they had nothing to do with Robotech, which was apparently news to him. So of course, he hounded me across the boards for like two weeks calling me a "posting Nazi" and all sorts of other amusing permutations on "<something> Nazi" until people started telling him to STFU. I've heard a fair few comparisons drawn between the administration stylings of Steve Yun, Tommy Yune, and Kevin McKeever and those of Joseph Stalin... particularly in terms of their philosophy that "man is the root of all problems, get rid of the man, get rid of the problem", but no Nazi parallels drawn yet.

IMHO, locking this thread won't really achieve anything that couldn't be achieved just as easily by enforcing a change of subject. Some people just don't want to let it go, so they quote the posts by the belligerent few and post big, long, wordy responses that provoke further belligerent behavior... lather, rinse, repeat. Best solution is to address the ones who'll at least try to debate in a civil and logical fashion, and ignore the rest outright instead of trying to make them see sense. A lock on this thread is no guarantee that the ones determined to start a fight won't just start a fight elsewhere on the site. After all, this thread exists to keep the Robotech-related malarkey confined to one part of the site. So long as we don't sink to their level, I'm happy. Let them come here if they want... we'll give them plenty of rope and if they choose to hang themselves with it rather than make something useful of it, that's their own business.