Seto Kaiba

Robotech Defenders what?

From Harmony Gold? Nah. They just keep repeating their same old line about how the litigation over Macross in Japan didn't affect them. MEMO was parroting it over there too.

Oh there's no doubt that he is... he's over there on his site preaching about how Harmony Gold OWNS Macross. That Roven's an idiot? Isn't the Voltron live-action movie project still tied up in the courts because the US distributor doesn't have the IP rights to GoLion?

I just got back from seeing it with some friends not too long ago... it did not wow me. If I had to pick one word to describe it, it would be "Schizophrenic". It can't seem to decide if it wants to be a mediocre fantasy/action film or a depressingly bad teenage romance comedy. The end result of trying to mash those two conflicting storylines together in cliffnotes form left me feeling like Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince had originally been two movies, filmed separately and spliced together. I'd really say this movie was a failure of editing, because so many scenes from the novel that should've been included because of their importance to the plot were left out, and so many scenes that did bugger all for the actual story were included. The "new" scenes, like the destruction of the Burrow, kind of leave you wondering if they were added just to get rid of surplus pyrotechnical supplies leftover from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

According to Tommy Yune, Harmony Gold wants to work with Big West to release the rest of Macross in the US, but Big West doesn't want to work with them (specifically, doesn't want them getting a cut of the profits just because they trademarked the name "Macross" in the US and abroad). I'm sure Kevin McKeever has his own spin on things, where Big West are big, evil tossers who want the still-beating heart of Carl Macek on a silver platter before they'll consider working together. I'd go so far as to say it's the LEAST vital topic here... Robotech is a shambling corpse of a franchise that has yet to produce anything new or interesting to realize the promise that its creators editors continue to claim it shows. If I had to ascribe one particular function to this thread, it would be trying to form a decent theory about why Tatsunoko is content to prolong the current state of affairs, rather than trying to mend fences, brooming the tired anachronism that is Robotech, and releasing Macross on a worldwide scale.

The only time I've ever been banned from an internet forum was back in 2004 or so, for posting several choice remarks about Doug Bendo, who at the time was doing his damnedest to draw me into a flame war. I got a temporary ban that was lifted after only a couple of hours, and Doug Bendo got a permanent ban. (I still say that's possibly my greatest service to the Robotech fanbase)

Recently, I had quite an interesting discussion with some fairly influential members of the Robotech fanbase about just this sort of thing. It seems that quite a few of the more vocal and fervent defenders of Robotech and Harmony Gold... particularly those who are very active in the fanbase... are motivated by the mistaken impression their hard work will land them a paid staff position working on Robotech for Harmony Gold. On an unrelated, but still interesting note... during that discussion an interesting theory was proposed about the whole Harmony Gold/Warner Bros partnership. With the huge emphasis on the live-action movie as thought it were a make-or-break situation for Robotech, some of them have started to think that Harmony Gold may be shopping around for someone with more experience to take over creative control of Robotech, leaving them free to just sit back and collect royalty checks. The theory is that the live-action movie project is to get Robotech back into the spotlight long enough to make it a marketable property for them to sell. Give it time... they're screwing over Brian McAfee pretty badly right now... I'm sure they'll get around to screwing MEMO over once they're finished.

On another note... I've heard from a few fairly reliable fans who still attend Harmony Gold's increasingly feeble convention panels that the forthcoming Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles game that they were hyping not too long ago will be, as we predicted, a cell phone game.

From what I've heard so far, the "celebrations" for Robotech's 25th anniversary aren't going to be anything worth writing home about... most of what I've heard about is fan-organized get-togethers. They'll probably trot out some sort of "25 years of Robotech" video at a special panel discussion each time (brace yourself for many dramatic accounts of how they spent 1987-1999 giving Carl Macek piggyback rides). Eh, I can maybe see them announcing a few more MPCs (probably Marcus with a "Super Shadow Fighter" and the Shadow Beta) and maybe the renewal of the super-poseable line, but another DVD re-release? Not bloody likely, they're still trying to convince people that Robotech Remastered and the Protoculture Collection are worth buying. Yeah. That's how the wisecracking cardboard cutout "best buddy" character died.

Doesn't he also shout "BOMBAAA!" in one of the episode previews?

Yeah, they've hinted that a few times in the past, but nothing has ever materialized. The closest they've done were those limited-edition bookends that had a Regult on one end. While Harmony Gold's marketing department may not have a solid grip on reality, their minds aren't completely out to lunch... they know full well that Masterpiece ANYTHING from the Masters Saga/Southern Cross won't sell. They did a poll a while back on their official site, asking what saga was the fanbase's favorite, and the results were pretty predictable... the vast majority voted Macross, a small but significant number voted New Generation, and almost nobody voted Masters. Fan interest in Masters Saga toys has ALWAYS been low... most fans detest the entire saga on principle. There have been a few petitions for Masters Saga merchandise beyond the Southern Cross Army mug and sweatshirt, but they usually peter out after the same five or six signatures. I think it's pretty safe to say that Southern Cross is the redheaded stepsaga of Robotech.

I think you may have been right on the money, actually. I popped into the RT.com chatroom briefly tonight, and was told that apparently Steve and Maverick_LSC were talking about me, and other members who "need to tone down their behavior". I was apparently close to the top of the list, because of my "negativity" about the franchise, which amuses me to no end. Not really, no. RobotechX is pretty much a separate entity from Seifrietti's Robotech Anthology project. More like they're TAUNTING Harmony Gold, secure in the knowledge that they can't do a damn thing. Remember, Big West owns the IP rights, not Harmony Gold. Ah, the public relations nightmare continues... I see McKeever's working hard to make the Hulu molehill into a mountain.

Far too much going on these days... of course, you can just turn on the news to hear all about why I'm so bloody busy. All the same, I prefer to keep a finger on the weak, thready pulse of Robotech fandom, simply for the sake of staying in the loop on HG's weakening stranglehold on Macross. If that means I have to put up with a couple idiots, so be it. Personally, I think the subject of how the powers that be at Harmony Gold are mistreating the Robotech fanbase is an excellent barometer for the health of the franchise. You have to remember, the Robotech franchise is essentially coasting on merchandise sales and the future potential of the live-action movie and Shadow Rising. The only thing that really changed between the last Robotech release drought and the current one is the type of merchandise that's keeping the franchise alive. In late 80's and 90's, what kept the franchise afloat was the inexpensive comic books. These days, it's $200 toys. Back then it wasn't a big deal to lose a few fans, because they were still pretty numerous, and the expected profit loss was minimal. Now, they're depending on a much smaller fanbase to buy outrageously-priced toys, and every die-hard who says "FGSFDS! I QUIT!" means less people spreading the word, and hundreds or thousands of dollars in lost revenue, and potential undercutting as fans who are sick of their poo broom their collections on eBay. If they continue alienating their increasingly skeptical and rapidly shrinking customer base, how much longer will they be able to keep convincing the higher-ups that renewing their Macross trademarks is worth the money? For that matter, how much longer will the higher-ups at Harmony Gold be willing to keep backing Robotech when the disgruntled fans stop buying the overpriced toys and re-released DVDs? If the live-action movie and/or Shadow Rising falls through, will there be enough fans left to keep the franchise alive until they can muster themselves for their next attempt?

Oh this is bad comedy... I get threatened with a ban for essentially doing nothing at all, and after three pages of personal attacks, flame-bait, and trolling, sanman gets this: I haven't heard back from Steve on my e-mailed complaint about Maverick yet, or on Maverick's assertion that e-mailing him to dispute his obviously BS judgment call constitutes harassment. EDIT: Oh this is REALLY amusing... it looks like he's trying to imply that at least a few of the people supporting me are using clone accounts to appear more numerous than they are. Suddenly, I fully appreciate why so many of the good contributors who used to go to Robotech.com have given up on the site and the fandom and gone to greener pastures.

Yeah, that was pretty much my assessment of the situation. I'd guess that Tommy knows full well that the chances of Seifrietti's Robotech Anthology being a success are pretty slim. He probably doesn't want to waste company resources on a book that most likely won't sell, and he doesn't want to say "no" and risk offending Seifrietti, who is one of the few remaining Robotech.com moderators, so he's giving him the runaround so he doesn't HAVE to say "no". I wonder if Seifrietti has realized it yet. And I am not one of them, hence my reluctance to get involved.

Eh, I really can't imagine there being any benefits to contributing to such a small site on that scale... unless you count sitting at the RobotechX booth at conventions... which I don't (Sorry MEMO). I can't say I have any real interest in contributing to the Robotech Codex either, since I've already got one time-consuming fan project on my plate... building my Macross II reference guide. Honestly, I'm not sure if I should show MEMO and Seifrietti a bit more respect because they're trying so hard to do something good for the fanbase with their respective fan magazines, or feel pity because they're working with the certain knowledge that they'll get screwed over by Harmony Gold just short of the finish line. I couldn't work under conditions like that. Sorry, brain's running on autopilot... I meant RDF HQ, which is, like RobotechX, a ghost town. In fact, the only real activity there in the past few days has been this post made by manofsan (aka sanman) about how to deal with "Macross purist trolls" (or rather, anyone who doesn't agree with his belief that RT is flawless). This guy's a hoot... it's like one of those murder mysteries where the murderer gets amnesia and starts investigating the crime himself, except with trolling. EDIT: Hmmm... it looks like Maverick_LSC's been here to see what I've been saying... I wonder if I'll be receiving a snide e-mail from him soon.

I'd bank on it being a bad year for Harmony Gold and Robotech just based on their pitiful offerings at the panel discussions they've done. With the live-action movie still a distant POSSIBILITY on the horizon and Shadow Rising going nowhere fast and gathering essentially no fan interest at all (seriously, NOBODY, even on Robotech.com, seems to care about it), they're back to where they were in '01, coasting solely on toy sales and the pitiful re-releases of their DVDs. Well, that presents its own particular set of problems... In its current state, Robotech's continuity is a horrible, fractal cluster-fart of contradictory stories. If you thought the confusion about whether DYRL or the TV series was the right version of Space War 1 is bad, Robotech is a billion times worse. Because Harmony Gold got into the habit of giving licenses to anyone who could spell their own name in three tries or less, half of the stuff they produced back then reads like it was written by someone whose total knowledge of Robotech is a single, vague recollection of the back of a VHS box from some five years previous. Despite Harmony Gold's declaration that all that garbage was non-canon, the fandom has taken it upon itself to mirror the fractured, confused, often nonsensical state of the continuity. You have the purists, who hold the TV series above all else, the McKinneyists, who think the novels are the be-all end-all of Robotech, the fans of the comics, who really don't have a fancy name and think the now non-canon comics are the bee's knees, and the Universalists, who want to smash all the contradictory stories of the TV series, novels, comics, non-canon side-stories, etc. into one big messy whole and call it official. Because the fandom is so heavily divided, it's almost impossible to get them to give a poo about any one thing or any one fan site. This, of course, makes it impossible for them to congregate at any one fan-site. The two big fansites are RobotechX and RDF Underground, but both of those are essentially ghost towns, where most of the members seem to have given up and moved on, leaving only a few devoted contributors keeping the place moving. I avoid going to RDF Underground, because I see the population of that site as a bunch of Bizarro-world beings with completely alien concepts of fun and entertainment, but I do visit RobotechX from time to time. RobotechX is the only site with any real concessions to a fan-made Robotech encyclopedia, but it seems to be done from a Universalist approach, and with the active population of the site numbering some six people, those of us who actually know the source materials and the few authoritative Robotech books well simply cannot be arsed to do anything with it. We have better, less tedious things to do, like counting the number of atoms in our monitors, calculating the growth rate of our front lawns, or reciting the complete text of War and Peace backwards in Hindi.

You're half-right. FASA sold the rights to the Mechwarrior line ages ago... Wizkids had it for a while, and I think the current owner is Catalyst Game Labs, who made an announcement June 24th of this year that they had acquired the rights to the "unseen" (aka Lost Mechs) artwork from the early Battletech/MechWarrior games. The announcement can be found here: http://catalystgamelabs.com/2009/06/24/cat...gs-back-unseen/

No source that I'm aware of specifically defines it as any one of the three. Given its size (never more than 3) and its equipment (VF-17 Nightmares) I would say that it's probably just a special forces team.

Wow... just wow... anything I say will just detract from the fact that this just goes to show how right I was. Robotech will always be remembered as a penny-ante crapfest because it never produced anything worth watching after the first series... it'll never escape association with Macross (specifically, as something riding Macross's coattails) either at this rate. Nah, the current Robotech fandom in general is going to hell. There are very few decent people left among the fans... because the few decent people (like you, me, Wanzerfan, Jasonc, etc.) get hounded off the site for our lack of blind faith in the franchise. They've been whittling the fanbase down so that only the blindly faithful remain, the idiots who will buy the same Beta fighter four times just because it's painted a different color... the idiots who bought the original series on DVD every time a new version came out... the idiots who still hope that Harmony Gold will revisit and finish Robotech II: the Sentinels and Robotech 3000... there are, sadly, enough to them (for now) to keep the feeble mess that is Robotech chugging well into the foreseeable future. Whether McKeever will ever get his comeuppance? Well, it won't happen on RT.com... not so long as he has admin privileges there. Maybe he'll get too big for his britches and get axed like Tom Bateman did, or he'll become head of RT and run it into the ground for us. It might take a while, but I'm a patient man. I can wait. I do... every time he posts. Frankly, it's a mystery to me why Harmony Gold even hired him. After seeing how he handles panel discussions at conventions, how he behaves on message boards, and reading his blog, I wouldn't give him the time of day even if his resume was printed on solid gold ingots. He's an ideal example of the very worst aspects of Robotech fandom... a frothy-mouthed fanatic who does his damnedest to discredit or drive off anyone who doesn't think Robotech is a flawless masterpiece beyond the critique of mortal men. I'm not privy to internal Harmony Gold affairs at all, but just based on what I've seen I don't think much of his abilities as a marketing director either. As any cynical businessman will tell you, marketing is the use of fraud and deception to sell trash to idiots. A key part of being a good marketer is knowing just enough to come up with a believable lie. Not only is McKeever's hype virtually transparent, but he actually seems to believe his own absurd claims that Robotech is successful, popular, and a big seller. He actually thinks that getting it into a nosebleed timeslot (7am saturday) on a Canada-only Sci-Fi network ripoff and getting the movie onto Hulu are huge achievements. It's never a good sign when a marketing department starts to buy into its own hype... that's what got GM where it is now. In the interest of not ruining my expensive new monitor and keyboard with projectile vomit, I think I'll pass on re-reading that thread. It gets better... that group's stated intent is to "correct" people who think that Leonard (orig. name Claude Leon on SDC: SC) is a big, evil tosser or a bad commander. They pop up in droves when someone badmouths him. They'd probably poo out their kidneys if they saw that the Wildstorm comics depict both Leonard and RTSC villain Edwards as Anti-UN agents working to bring the United Earth Gov't down from within.

It gets better... just like the last time he sent me a bullshit threat, I sent a scathing e-mail to Maverick_LSC, illustrating exactly why his accusations that I was baiting, trolling, etc. were completely and utterly unjustified, and then told him flat-out that the only rational explanation I can see for his behavior is that he's abusing his mod position to pursue a personal beef against me, and that I would be appealing to Steve for a review of the situation and the revocation of his moderator status. I sent a carbon copy of the message to Steve, and told him as much in the e-mail. What I got back from Maverick_LSC was: He forwarded them the letter they already got when I sent them a carbon copy, and is filing a harassment complaint against me because I called him out on his obvious bullshit threat. I actually busted out laughing when I read that... it's just SOOOOOO illustrative of why the whole Robotech franchise is going to hell. Yeah, it's complete and utter bull... at some point or another ALL of the site's authorities on the various sagas and their Japanese origins have offered to update the Infopedia for free... myself included... but they always ignored the offers. Now we're getting some snide line about how they'd pay more attention to the site if only we paid them to do so. McKeever's their marketing director... and the worst thing to happen to the Robotech franchise since its creation (its creation probably being the worst thing). SAVED FOR GREAT JUSTICE. Sir, I wish I could shake your hand... that was epic. (Show it to McKeever, it proves you're a better writer than any of the asshats who wrote Shadow Chronicles) Isn't it? I've gotten all kinds of e-mails of support and agreement about that thread, though many of the people are afraid to publically post their support for me and my position because they don't want to be banned out of spite by Kevin McKeever or Maverick_LSC. This is truly a franchise that abuses its fans to no end. They're like an abused spouse that's too afraid to leave. Why has Robotech survived this long if they're dead-set on treating their fans so poorly? Those days are gone, I'm afraid... never to return. With McKeever at the helm, there is no such thing as freedom of speech on those boards. Discourse on politics, religion, or anything that isn't PG-13 safe is banned. Criticism of Robotech for any reason, even constructive criticism, is apparently also banned. I look at McKeever and Maverick_LSC's behavior over there, and they consistently remind me of two people... Stalin, and Senator McCarthy respectively. We've got one joker who makes people who disagree with him disappear, and another who's content to invent enemies where none can be found... triumphantly marching off to battle against the fans, and returning with the scalp of a "Macross purist", a fan who dared to criticize the Shadow Chronicles.

Nah, they'll leave it intentionally vague, just like they did last time... I'm looking forward to the first (probably of two) Flashback 2012 character sheets... and hopefully soon we'll get a VF-4 Lightning III sheet.

"Brera's wardrobe provided by The Village People."

Total non sequitur here for a moment... I got drawn into a discussion about the current state of the Robotech franchise and how it's remembered on Robotech.com. The OP quickly turned out to be one of those dyed-in-the-wool fanatics who thinks that Robotech is a flawless classic beyond the criticism of mortal men that must be regarded as a megahit. He took it very poorly when I explained to him that 9/10ths of the world doesn't know what the hell Robotech is, and that the remaining tenth is split into fans, people who hate the show, and people straddling the fence between the other two groups and started attacking me for it. The dolt was basically labeling anyone who disagreed with his deluded belief that Robotech is a pillar of the American sci-fi genre as a troll and trying to hound them off the site. When a bunch of people reported him... it was ME who got threatened with a ban by the moderators (specifically, Maverick_LSC, a particularly loathsome little toady who interprets any criticism of Robotech, no matter how well-intentioned, as flame-bait). Then, of course, McKeever comes along, while professing to actually listen to fan opinions, quotes my criticism, and says "this is why I don't listen to Robotech critics". And these people wonder why the Robotech franchise is circling the drain? It's run by people who only listen to positive feedback, and do their best to quash criticism of any kind. I wrote to Steve Yun about Maverick_LSC's behavior... I expect a VERY interesting and informative response... if he does what I think he'll do, I'll be posting a copy of his e-mail telling me that fans aren't allowed to criticize Robotech under any circumstances...

Hey, if you take the tribute shows and convention tour away from him, he won't have anything to do at all. Since Harmony Gold isn't calling the shots on the live-action movie, he doesn't have anything to do on that front, and it's highly doubtful that they're actually doing anything about Shadow Rising. Maybe he's cooking up another plot-critical limited-edition comic book to tie Shadow Chronicles and Shadow Rising together, so they can keep the same level of storytelling quality... y'know, overlong intro cutscenes that explain nothing and go nowhere. No doubt the fans will try to make something major of it.