Seto Kaiba

Oh yeah, there are plenty of that sort in every franchise... though Robotech's seem to be the most vocal and obnoxious. I'm dealing with one right now, actually. A whiny little tosspot who used to go by Wraith_Knight, but apparently created a new account recently (Pizza the Hutt) to try and dodge the avid dislike many members seem to harbor towards him. He's currently throwing a hissy fit over on Robotech.com because I dared criticize Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles and insisted that the best thing for Robotech would be to get the hell away from the OSM and try something original. The most comical bit of all is that he's apparently been coming here under an alias to keep an eye on this site and this thread because he knows we're "saying bad things about Harmony Gold, Robotech, and Robotech fans", as though this thread and our criticisms of Harmony Gold and Robotech were some dark, sinister secret. It's guys like Pizza the Hutt, Doug Bendo, and Kevin McKeever who give Robotech fandom such a bad rap... and they don't even know they're doing it. It'd be hilarious if their stupidity weren't so damn depressing. I've got no idea why the majority of the fans put up with them.

That's why it's billed as a "reimagining", and not a straight-up adaptation of the Macross Saga. It'll bear as much resemblance to Macross/"The Macross Saga as Michael Bay's Transformers did to the G1 Transformers series. Not if they have a decent copyright lawyer they can't... Gubaba, I do consulting work in the auto industry... I've seen tiny research groups crush huge multinational corporations in court over patent infringement cases. I have no doubt that if Warner and/or Harmony Gold started abusing Big West's intellectual property, they'd take 'em to the cleaners and win.

Aside from the fact that one of the producers was reassigned to a different project by WB, the only tidbits that've come out are that Maguire Entertainment got the rights to the live-action movie, and that it was a "re-imagining". Yeah, that'd be in line with what little official information has been made available... Maguire Entertainment and Warner intend to make a "re-imagining" of the Robotech story, not a faithful adaptation. Well, if you talk to Kevin McKeever, about all you'll get is "yeah, they're working on the live-action movie" followed by "you can tell they're working hard because we don't have anything to show for it". In retrospect, it seems like Harmony Gold and 3DRealms must've been following the same marketing strategy... here's hoping they'll meet the same fate. McKeever's word isn't worth the kilobyte of so of database space it took to post it.

No offense to you, Freiflug, but it sounds like BS to me... similar rumors, all started by fans who "heard it from a friend", have been flying around ever since Harmony Gold announced that Maguire Entertainment got the rights to make a live-action Robotech movie. We have it, from no less a person than Tommy Yune himself, that Harmony Gold approached Big West not too long ago to talk about Macross rights and licensing, and that Big West told 'em to go pound sand. I very much doubt that they'd change their minds just because Harmony Gold is asking indirectly through Warner Bros. I can't imagine them having any possible incentive to want to see the movie succeed... especially when you consider their long-running squabble with Tatsunoko, and the fact that we've yet to see a live-action anime adaptation that could be called a success with a straight face.

Nope, not anymore. Right around the time Robotech: Battlecry first came out, the Infopedia listed it as the YF-1R, which is what the game calls it too. Right around the time the Jack Archer MPC was released, it was changed to "VF-1R" in the Infopedia.

's why I said "most", not "all". There are some fans out there who actually like the McKinney novels, and some who prefer them to the TV series itself. All the same, they're a fairly small minority, and one with a savage persecution complex, due in large measure to the fact that the majority of Robotech fans (and Robotech's "creative staff") hold the novels in such low regard. (Usually starting a sentence with "In the novels..." in a debate over there is enough to make sure most people don't even read the rest of your post) Yeah, I was too... it only appeared for a few seconds (one scene) in Ep32 "Broken Heart". The entirety of the footage showing it (a short .gif sequence) is in the Robotech.com Infopedia article on it. I find it particularly obnoxious, since the branch of Macross I'm researching (the alternate universe) already has a "VF-1R", and every time I talk about it I have to qualify it with "no, not the Robotech one". If only it were that simple... or that amusing. Lisa DID appear in Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles. The Haruhiko Mikimoto design (Misa Hayase) was replaced by a hopelessly generic-looking woman with her hair done up in a simple ponytail. I guess they decided that she wasn't worth the effort, so she gets seriously wounded early in the comic and spends most of the miniseries recovering, only to quit the military and become a member of the "Sentinels Council" instead, neatly getting her out of the way so they'd be able to minimize the number of VAs they'd have to call back.

Robotech's tech specs for the VF-1 Valkyrie are basically just the Macross specs with most of the details boiled out. The only real departures from the original Macross specs for the VF-1 Valkyrie are two animation goofs that were canonized, and the whole tossup over the fuel. That one animation error where the sensor blisters on the nosecone were animated as laser cannons was made official, which is flagged as a technology upgrade unique to units aboard the SDF-1. When the developers at Vicious Cycle were looking to pad out Robotech: Battlecry, they turned the VF-1A mistakenly animated with three head lasers from "Broken Heart" (Ep32) into another variant of the VF-1, the VF-1R. The whole fuel debate is still unsettled... initially Tommy Yune didn't specify what VF-1's ran on when he did the new comics with Wildstorm, but when the new RPG rolled out, he decided that the VF-1 runs on thermonuclear fusion (based on vague dialogue from the series). Fortunately, that's a McKinneyism, and even the fans gave up trying to shoehorn that crap into the continuity. Most of them treat the McKinney novels as borderline fan-fiction, due to their often nonsensical departures from the TV series. Initially, members of the Robotech "creative" team made some remarks that they were considering a looping story for future Robotech TV shows (Robotech III: the Odyssey, Robotech IV, etc.) and speculated at an ending in the future where a retired "Commodore Hunter" would start to tell a batch of cadets about how it all began, using that to loop the story around into a self-repeating narrative.

Really? I was assuming he's temporarily gone so hotblooded that the sudden change in temperature shattered the glass of his helmet. If you think that's bad... go read Macross 7 Trash, where they actually succeed in weaponizing spirita...

Contrary to my expectations, Chronicle's been paying a lot of attention to Macross II lately. Color me surprised. I figured that issue 21 was gonna be a one-shot, but they've had one or more Macross II pages in each issue since (except #22). Sylvie, the VF-2SS, the Mardook fleet, the U.N. Spacy officers, Hibiki, and now Ishtar...

Not at all... the time-consuming job is trying to keep an IT consulting business afloat while the local economy spirals toward oblivion. There's so little activity on Robotech.com these days that it rarely takes more than five or ten minutes effort to break up all but the worst of the fanwankery threads. Occasionally there's someone who asks an intelligent question, or someone who starts an intelligent debate, and on those rare days it doesn't feel much like a job at all.

Nah, far from it. All I've become is one of several volunteer zookeepers in the primate house.

Dimensions? I already got at least part of that. The only dimensions I've seen for them are their lengths, which are repeated over and over again in multiple publications. (There's something to be said for their consistency, I guess...) As far as weapons, we're gonna get "many x guided beam cannons", and for a few ships, converging beam cannons. I'd love to find out how many mecha those ships are carrying, but odds are we won't get that much. At least the Gigamesh article cleared up the vague statements about Feff's being one of a kind. My guess would be the sheet will cram all four main classes of Mardook ship onto a single sheet, though I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Feff's scoutship and Ingues's mobile fortress got mecha sheets of their own. Are you EVER going to get my name right? Seriously, just call me "Mike" if it'll help you remember.

Yeah, but that's really more like marching into the cage to stop the monkeys from trying breathe water... Treiz is one of those special children who believes that Robotech is a wildly successful and popular sci-fi franchise to rival Star Wars or Star Trek, and he usually tries to support his arguments with some pretty tortured logic that usually relies on throwing the "canon" sources aside and creatively reinterpreting a bunch of disjointed scenes out of context. No such luck, I'm afraid. Turns out even that "Art of the Shadow Chronicles" book reprints P. Thomassen et. al.'s OSM-derived mecha specs word for word... even the spelling and transposition errors. I don't think we'll have to worry about Chronicle translations being pilfered to bolster RT, they seem content with what they already have, and what they can steal from RobotechResearch and SteelFalcon where the VF-1 is concerned.

I know, I know... but hope springs eternal, even for this jaded Macross II fan. Since I'm really not too enthused about the current offerings in #22-24, I'm probably gonna wait 'till #25 before I order again.

Nah, most of the ones who enjoyed screwing with me seem to have all gotten the banhammer at one time or another and haven't been back to vex me since. The only one left is Treiz, who really isn't specifically targeting me, he's just using the message boards as an outlet for his stupidity. Oddly enough, there are quite a few members there who respect and value my opinion... made even stranger by the fact that many of them even LIKE me, despite my best efforts to offend them. I'd take umbridge at that remark about me being a know-it-all jackass who likes to toy with Robotech fans... I most certainly do not like toying with Robotech fans! I prefer to regard them from a distance... like watching monkeys fling poo from behind the plexiglass windows at the zoo.

I really find it hard to get worked up about this one... there's really not a lot worth saying about the ships, and what little worthwhile information there is, I already have. What's got my attention is the Hibiki Kanzaki character sheet... which will hopefully confirm some of the details about how he got hired into SNN (reportedly he covered a BIG scandal, but they don't say what) and maybe even mention the 2082 Zentradi invasion that inspired him to become a reporter.

Nah, these days they've gone back to the old standby of trying to divorce Robotech from its origins. Just look at that damn fool Treiz... trying to claim that even Harmony Gold's official line on the mecha of the series is wrong because it's based off of the Japanese specs. Wait, they were reliable once? Eh, it's pretty much common knowledge that Steve and Tommy select moderators based not on who was best suited to the job, but who kissed the most ass and toed the company line the closest. Really, between the asinine behavior of most of the moderators, the complete and utter lack of anything like new content, and the increasingly restrictive Terms of Use, it's no wonder the intelligent and knowledgeable people abandoned the site in droves starting in 2003. These days, if you take me out of the equation, you're left with a few occasional contributors who know what they're talking about, and a lot of frothy-mouthed baboons like Treiz, who couldn't spell his own name if you spotted him the T and the Z.

Eh, it's bound to start repeating itself a little bit eventually... usually they're not shamelessly ripping each other off, it's just repetition of common themes and plot devices, some of which have existed in stories since before we even had a written language.

Illogical it may be, but that didn't stop the U.N. Spacy from giving Misa Hayase command of a ship and its escort fleet at the rank of Major...

Oddly... no, my account is still fully active. Oh, the moderators there haven't kept it a secret that they want to get rid of me. Seifrietti Weisse told me flat out that he considers me the site's worst troublemaker, and that he thinks the site would be a lot better off without me. I'm fairly sure Maverick_LSC is in the same camp, which means the only moderator who's really not actively looking for an excuse to ban me is MEMO1DOMINION.

The article doesn't say anything about copyrights... all it says is that Harmony Gold wasn't affected by the outcome of the lawsuits over the intellectual property rights to Macross. Since they never had those rights to begin with, that's actually a true statement... the lawsuit did not affect the film distribution rights or the merchandising rights. So long as they have the film distribution rights, they can release it outside of Japan and edit it at their discretion. I'm sad... they locked my post after I got in my parting shot at Maverick_LSC.

As far as the VF-1 goes, the cockpit was significantly changed, the hexagonal three-panel main screen was replaced by a single-panel main screen, the controls were simplified (including eliminating the two extra joysticks for battroid mode, moving the transformation controls onto the throttle lever, etc), the HUD went from being a projection on transparent panels to being a holographic projection on the canopy, the hands were redesigned, etc. etc. etc.

Oh yes, I've no doubt that the more deluded fans will make a huge fuss that I've dared to inject common sense and fact into the proceedings, and Kevin McKeever will probably try to publicly chew me out for daring to question the legitimacy of his claim that Harmony Gold flat-out owns Macross.

Ladies and gentlemen... open your umbrellas, because the poo's about to hit the fan.

Eh, that's not really a discussion... the whole thing was started as a pineapple salad joke. Now it's just an excuse for two guys who hate each other to take potshots at each other. The few remaining mods there are too apathetic to do anything. You want full-on nonsense? There's a thread in their tech debates section where a bunch of frothy-mouthed nutjobs are trying to prove that the AFC-01 Legioss/VFA-6 Alpha is superior to the VF-1 in every way, mainly by making up "facts" as they go. I still maintain that the long wait between the "original" series and the Shadow Chronicles movie unhinged most of the Robotech fanbase.