Seto Kaiba

Crap... makes me glad I got my 4th and 5th binders when I got issue 35... there're a couple up for sale on eBay from a well-regarded seller in case anyone's desperate.

The original Transformers movie, actually... It's generally held that Robotech: the Movie was killed by a number of extraordinarily bad decisions made by its editors (I refuse to call them "creators"), and circumstances in the industry. Namely, the choice to splice together the footage from Megazone 23 and Southern Cross, letting Canon Films meddle in the production process and demand changes to the plot, The Idol Co.'s new ending, the story's tenuous links to the TV series, the "mature content" found in Megazone 23 causing parents to take their kids out of the theater during the test run, a lack of decent advertising (reportedly the only timeslot they could get for the ads was at ~5am), and stiff competition from the Transformers movie. Isn't it amusing that a Transformers movie is probably going to be the death of another Robotech movie?

Hopefully the B sheet will also cover a bit about the auto-attack bits. Eh? You mean the VF-2JA Icarus, right? The "GERWALKroid" is probably going to fall under the header of "destroids".

So far, the only answer Harmony Gold has offered for why they never went back and finished Sentinels was because it'd already exhausted its product cycle in the comic and novel run. Use of the character designs was a non-issue, as they knew full well going into the thing that they couldn't use the Mikimoto designs for Hikaru, Misa, Max, and Minmay, so they created their own that had only a passing resemblance to the originals (Carl Macek said as much in a pre-Robocon 10 interview published in the August '95 comics issues).

Not here... you'd want to check the more reputable fansub torrent sites for something like that, though I doubt you'll have much luck finding the movie in AVI format. Nowadays, Matroska seems to be the container of choice among most fansub groups, since it supports multiple audio and subtitle tracks.

That's what fansubs are for, chief. It's certainly no secret that discovering what became of Rick Hunter and the SDF-3 was one of the major selling points for the Shadow Chronicles movie and figured prominently in the pre-release hype. Likewise the old, failed Robotech II: the Sentinels series was advertised as the "continuing adventures" of the Macross Saga cast. Even Carl Macek admits that a lack of tie-ins to the story of the "original series" was a major factor in the failures of Robotech: the Untold Story and Robotech 3000. So, yes... I think it's quite accurate to say that they're deathly afraid of parting ways with the last few Macross characters. Every time they've tried, the project has gone down in flames and joined the ranks of Robotech shows so bad even the Robotech fans hate them. I can definitely see there being a few Robotech fans who don't want to make the switch because Macross doesn't give every last detail of Hikaru Ichijyo's married life, but those are the sort of people who've been obsessively following Star Wars expanded universe to find out what flavor of toothpaste Luke Skywalker uses or whatever passes for plot there these days. I'd wager that most of them will just be happy to have a show that doesn't keep jerking them around as part of a neverending game of bait-and-switch.

I don't think anyone here would disagree with you when you say that Robotech will probably never actually finish a story. It's not just that they're too bloody inept to actually make new material on their own, but they're deathly afraid of having a situation where they can't sell the sequel on the basis of tie-ins to Macross, because they know that that's about all that's keeping what's left of their fanbase watching. Of late, it's become so obvious that Harmony Gold will likely never finish the Shadow Chronicles that even the rank and file Robotech fans have started to take notice and have begun to ask uncomfortable questions. If anything, the strangest part of this whole situation is what despite all of Kevin McKeever's protestations that it's a great time to be a Robotech fan, and that the franchise is "going gangbusters", other Harmony Gold representatives have made it no secret that they're short of money and having a great deal of trouble finding people willing to invest in a new animated Robotech feature. Tommy Yune himself has gone on the record at convention panels to say that Harmony Gold put the brakes on Shadow Rising in the hope that the live-action movie would raise Robotech's profile enough to net them some better sponsorship deals for Shadow Rising. It's not hard to see why they have to pin all their hopes for the future on the live-action movie... any potential investor who isn't a complete buffoon is going to take a good long look at the current state of affairs in the Robotech franchise and Harmony Gold's track record, and laugh themselves sick before politely declining and walking away.

Eh... I'm no expert on coloring books, but that seems like the sort of thing that would be probably be a fairly common gimmick in that particular medium. After all, there are only so many permutations of "color in this picture" when you're working to create a licensed product like that. It's probably indicative of nothing more than Robotech following a well-established industry trend in the production of their licensed merchandise, rather than malicious or lazy copying.

Just mulling that prospect over, my answer would be an emphatic "no". He was already a personality-less cybernetic stoic, but he seems to have watched The Matrix and come over a little bit Neo between episode 25 and the movie. Do we really want to watch him bullet-time around the place or scratch his ass while he's remote-controlling his VF-27?

Shhh... it has parkinson's... you'll embarrass it!

Honestly, between Bendo's borderline-Freudian obsession with bringing up his penis in conversation and the delusions fans of Robotech have about its popularity and influence in the industry, there's enough psychological issues in Robotech fanbase to keep the entire American Psychiatric Association on the gravy train for life. Since they're such a noisy lot, maybe MEMO's counting each one as several people because they're loud enough to be?

It worked in Zone of the Enders.

Is that a challenge? In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only a blue man with a green mullet and red underpants... Yeah... it doesn't scan very well, but hey, I'll fire up Photoshop and we'll see about selling that one.

But that raises the question... is more necessarily better? Macross allows the main characters of its original series to gracefully leave the stage... Misa, Hikaru, and Minmay sail off into the proverbial sunset aboard the Megaroad-01 to spread humanity's culture across the stars. It lets them leave the stage on a high note, and with their dignity intact... and while it was not intended at the time, it leaves the door open for future generations of characters. Robotech never gives its characters the luxury of a "happily ever after" or even the dignified rest of an old soldier whose duty is done. Instead, they kick artistic integrity to the curb and drag the most popular characters back time and time again, essentially making the entire Robotech universe revolve around them. Those characters end up forced into changes in characterization that don't line up with their original incarnations at all, and dragged into central roles in new stories in hopes that their presence will conceal or at the very least distract people from weak writing. We have to watch them grow old, decrepit, and eventually end up being marginalized by the gradual introduction of new characters or killed off in a pathetic attempt to provide some pathos for a boring story. Just look at what Robotech did with the Shadow Chronicles... they dragged back a bunch of characters from the Macross Saga as the core selling point of the series, but they're all old, washed-up, and changes in appearance and characterization left them feeling unfamiliar and unwelcome, like a stranger sneaking into your house thinly disguised as your best friend. Then they proceeded to reduce Rick Hunter to a witless stooge, turn Lisa into a sniveling whiner who gets incapacitated after three panels, turn Minmei into a brain-dead bimbo princess who needs the hero to rescue her (which he doesn't bother doing for like, a year... lol), leaving Exedore and Breetai as doddering old men (with male pattern baldness no less) who get killed for no reason other than to demonstrate the gravity (pun very much intended) of the Haydonite threat.

Just got my HMV order containing Macross Chronicle issues 30-35 this afternoon... kind of underwhelmed by a lot of the Macross 7 coverage, but then again I never really liked Macross 7's mechanical designs much. The DYRL and Macross Frontier stuff is damn nice, particularly the VB-6 Konig Monster sheet. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that what Sketchley told me was no exaggeration, Macross II is getting some decent coverage on the glossary sheets if nothing else. So far, my only complaint with that is that they keep getting the year the OVA is set in wrong. I guess they're either not referencing Kenichi Yatagai's interviews or Big West's pre-Macross II chronology, because they keep trying to say the Macross II OVA is set in 2090, when it's supposed to be set in 2092. The numbering isn't coincidental by any means... 10 years separate Macross II from the previous Zentradi attack for the 10th Anniversary OVA, and if you subtract 100 years from the dates of both, you get 1982 and 1992, the years Macross and Macross II came out in. There's really no room for debate on the matter, since the official chronology dates the previous Zentradi attack to 2082, and in-series dialogue dates Macross II to ten years after that. Where they're getting 2090 is beyond me, I guess they're just adding 80 to the end of Space War 1 in 2010, which is, I suppose better than US Renditions and Palladium measuring from the START of Space War 1 and coming up with 2089. Also, yeah... that pic of the Zentradi ship and the city built around it is DAMN cool... though what got me drooling was that absolutely gorgeous picture of the VF-4 in flight. I'm TOTALLY going to scan that and blow it up to wallpaper size for my big monitor.

Indeed... Robotech's "expanded universe" titles ended up doing a lot of those distasteful things anyway, turning Minmei into a complete and utter whore was just the tip of the iceberg. Yes, but Warner DOESN'T have any stake in Hulu, which was my whole bloody point... that MEMO is ascribing things to Warner's influence that couldn't possibly be the result of Warner's influence. Specifically, it was mentioned (repeatedly) that he had ordered the use of the neutron-s missiles against the Invid, which would devastate Earth's surface. The implication was that it would be essentially just as bad as the orbital bombardment conducted by the Zentradi, and would kill a substantial portion of Earth's population. After the fact, Tommy came along and retconned the whole affair to not only explain how the meaning of "Admiral Hunter" somehow changed from "Lisa Hunter (nee Hayes)" to "Rick Hunter", and to exonerate Rick from the guilt of having ordered Earth's destruction in the New Generation by turning him into the unwitting stooge of the Haydonites, who secretly supplied the technology and then misled the REF about its potential. Basically... Tommy Yune correctly realized that the vast majority of the fanbase doesn't give a toss about the Masters Saga and New Generation, and took great exception to Rick Hunter being made into a tough-as-nails commander who'd sacrifice Earth to defeat the enemy. So to pander to them and shift the blame elsewhere, he made the whole thing the secret work of the Haydonites.

You're a tough one to classify, since nominally your point of interest in Robotech is something directly from Macross. No kidding, I'd say MEMO had taken leave of his senses, but that would imply that he'd ever had sense to begin with, and all evidence points to that not being the case. Just like Maverick, MEMO is absolutely convinced that Warner is ultimately behind every move Harmony Gold has been making of late... he tried to convince everyone on RobotechX that Warner was behind Robotech being put up on Hulu, claiming that Warner owned part of the site and was leveraging that to get RT up where it could get better exposure.

No kidding... there's a lot more Mikimoto art of Ishtar than most people realize, on account of all the promo materials and the art that was made for the novels. DEFINITELY not one of the prouder moments in the history of dubbing... lulzy in the extreme, but god-awful in its own way. 'kay, I've fulfilled my duty as the leader of the Macross II nitpick patrol... now onto the content. I've always thought that the Valkyries from Macross II and its prequels were some of the best-looking mecha in Macross. I think the slightly more Gundam-like aesthetic really works well for post-DYRL Macross, and the clear design evolution linking all the fighters together, coupled with more logical transformations doesn't hurt my feelings any either. I'll never understand why people badmouth the Valkyrie II... especially since so many of them seem to do so based on the appearance of the 1/100 transforming toy (which didn't exactly follow the proportions of the line art) rather than the actual appearance of the fighter in the OVA itself. Not a huge fan of the 2nd Gen destroids, but the Defender-EX and Phalanx Kai were nice, and the Gerwalkroid was an interesting concept too.

Couldn't we have foregone the gross metaphor altogether so that those of us who are very visual thinkers didn't have to have that horrifying image scarred into our brains? After several years of trying to find a Robotech fan capable of forming a cogent argument for why anyone should watch Robtoech and meeting with a 100% failure rate, we've got more than enough information to conclude that this grand experiment is a fool's errand. It's not without reason that we've been unable to find a compelling reason to watch Robotech... we've been looking for something that doesn't exist. For something like two decades now, the only things keeping Robotech afloat as a franchise have been the nostalgia and gullibility of a few people who just don't want to let go of a few fond childhood memories. When you examine the answers we've received to our inquiries so far, it's all variations on the same couple of themes: nostalgia; ignorance; an irrational hatred of subtitles that more often than not seems to stem from borderline illiteracy; and a seething, unfocused hatred of Macross motivated by the fear that if they watch Macross and end up liking it that they'll somehow be tainting their rosy childhood memories of Robotech.

Just looking at that last scan I'm REALLY hoping Alto doesn't end up with Ranka... While it wouldn't hurt my feelings any to see them whack some of the worthless background characters who really went anywhere or had any significant development during the course of the TV series (like Nanase, Luca, and Ranka too if you stop to consider that she doesn't mature at all) in exchange for sparing Michel and allowing Klan to have something like a happy ending, I can't see it happening. It really is a shame, since Michel was at least likable and had a good, though a bit underused, dynamic going with Klan. Luca could just as easily be replaced with a generic background character or simply deleted without adversely affecting the story, and Nanase was redundant in both of her roles, as fetish fuel for Ranka x girl end shippers and fanservice for the guys who like ridiculously big tits, because both roles were filled by more likable characters (Sheryl and Klan respectively). About the best I think I can hope for is Alto to pick Sheryl and leave Ranka to wait tables or something. Maybe they'll take the EoE Shinji Ikari route with Luca and coma-Nanase this time... it'd be a damn sight better than having to watch him act like Mashymre Cello without the funny. Hell yes... all through the series I kept hoping she'd mature a little so I could stop hating her guts, but even by episode 25 I was still fervently hoping she'd get stepped on by a Valkyrie or something. Hopefully the movie'll improve her as a character or get her out of our hair forever... either is good. Hating Ranka isn't a some-of-the-time thing, it's an all-the-time thing!

Aha... thanks for the information.

Yeah, that's Tommy Yune all right... the Captain rank is reserved for Harmony Gold staffers who have admin privileges on the RT.com boards. If what he's saying is accurate, that means that the losses incurred when Robotech 3000 got the axe were somewhere around $500k. Not exactly a colossal loss, since inflation-adjusted that's only about $648k in today's money according to the inflation calculator at the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. Considering they weren't sure that the movie was going to sell in any significant volume, they made a sensible (if a bit overcautious) decision to keep its budget aggressively small so if it tanked as Robotech productions so often did, they'd minimize their losses. I have a query for anyone who used to do the convention thing back in '00 and '01... I was talking to a few people over on LU and a claim was raised that at either Sugoicon 2000 or 2001, there was a Macross panel with Dana Weaver and Neil Nadelman wherein one of the hosts claimed that the real reason the dialogue in Robotech's Macross Saga is such a f***ing mess is because Harmony Gold was forced to use an exceptionally poor translation of Macross supplied by Tatsunoko, and that Tatsunoko forbade them from making any changes to it other than those absolutely necessary to adapt it into Robotech. I know it sounds like an excuse tailor-made to exonerate Carl Macek and Harmony Gold of the crime of mutilating the original Macross series, since it concerns something allegedly said at a convention panel back before panels got anything like decent coverage, and it clashes with Carl Macek's claims of having made changes to Macross under his own authority to "improve" the series, but it comes from a fairly well-respected former convention organizer in the Robotech fandom, so I thought I'd stop and ask if anyone out there attended the Macross panel at either Sugoicon 2000 or 2001, when these statements were allegedly made, and could either confirm or deny that this was in fact said. I'd love to contact AnimEigo to check on this claim about their reasons for retranslating the show themselves, but their site appears to be down for the moment.

Just wanted to share something mean-spirited I wrote for the "dictionary" over on HP's site...

and as such... it's far and away the most active part of RobotechX. Can't be... if he was, we'd be able to understand what he writes and he wouldn't need the caps-lock!

Ah, I remember hearing about that, but I couldn't remember if anything actually came of it or not. Kind of reassuring, actually... since I didn't particularly care for Klan Klan and I didn't think Nanase really developed past being fanservice in the form of a pair of massive tits with a girl crush on Ranka.