Seto Kaiba

Absolutely, but there's nothing wrong with introducing Robotech fans to Macross and then setting those newly minted Macross fans loose here. I wouldn't go that far... for many, Robotech is an introduction to anime that leads them to pursue more sophisticated titles later on. Sure, Robotech's creators are in denial about the fact that they don't actually own Macross, and are even more deeply in denial about the fact that their magnum opus has largely been forgotten, but that's just an unfortunate fact of life. The Battle of the Planets franchise seems to have up and died... the upcoming CGI movie is based directly upon the Japanese version (Science Ninja Team Gatchaman) and is being done by Imagi Animation Studios and Warner Brothers. It looks like the rights to the show were obtained directly from the Japanese creators. I suppose it would be akin to Harmony Gold losing the rights to Macross, effectively killing the franchise once and for all. I can see Harmony Gold potentially losing the western rights to Macross, but they'll never give up their pet project Robotech. Even if they lose the rights to Macross, they'll just keep doing what they've been doing, basing their future works on Southern Cross and Mospeada.

While it is tempting to let the moderators ride roughshod over the Robotech fanbase, it just doesn't sit right with me to do nothing while good people are abused by idiots in authority they don't deserve. I know I'm not going to be able to change anything over there, I just pipe up every now and then to point out the lies, half-truths, and exaggerations when the bullshit starts getting too thick for me to stand. Believe it or not, I don't actually hate Robotech. I acknowledge that it was instrumental in igniting western interest in anime. I also acknowledge that it's a crudely executed amalgam of three shows that were never intended to be together, and that time has been distinctly unkind to it, rendering it an all-but-forgotten piece of 80's pop culture that failed to thrive and grow beyond its origins. I would be interested to see an all-new, all-original Robotech with no ties to Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada... and I know full well it will never happen. I go to Robotech.com for one reason, to answer the questions that the fans are asking about the show's origins, its universe, and its future prospects. Better they get an honest answer from me than fallacy-ridden crap from people like Treiz and Jeebers... and when they do eventually say "Enough of this poo! I want something better!" I'll be there with a friendly smile and some information about Macross. I've personally introduced something like seventy Robotech fans to Macross over the last five years... and almost all have come back to learn more after their first taste.

It's not an orchestrated attempt to cause trouble over there, not by any means. Just the few of us who still have accounts over there complaining about the unfair treatment we're receiving at the hands of the moderators for making what are by all evidence completely accurate statements about the current position of the franchise, and its future prospects. We're just appalled by the fact that Robotech.com's moderators are so dedicated to quashing any criticism of Robotech that they delete posts, lock threads, and ban people for giving opinions that don't even violate the site's terms of use. It's like a god damn police state over there...

Now that doesn't surprise me. Most of Robotech.com's moderators are quick to lock threads that are critical of Robotech, but look the other way when Robotech fans bash Macross. Right now, there's only one moderator who's a regular on there who I can actually say I can respect... MEMO1DOMINION. The only other two regular moderators, Seifrietti Weisse and Maverick_LSC, have this unpleasant tendency of stepping up to defend people flamebaiting Macross fans, and stopping people from posting legitimate criticism of Robotech.

Robotech fans have issues with the truth... they're as deep in denial as it's possible to be. Are you sure we're talking about the same Robotech.com? If I could pick words to describe the site, "overcrowded" and "thronging" would not be among them... quiet as a grave over there most of the time.

I too am interested to hear this... what did you post that so offended them?

For as long as I've been on Robotech.com, people there have been suggesting that Tommy was the one who got Steve the webmaster job (despite his only experience being a BA in creative writing) because they're brothers. I've only attempted to watch it three times. Usually I stop about halfway through out of sheer boredom. Yeah, they've been doing that ever since the movie came out. It's usually the die-hard, fanatical Robotech fans who spend their free time complaining about Macross shows they've never seen, who pop up to insist that the fact that Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles feels like an overlong game intro cutscene is actually appropriate because it's the first installment in an ongoing story. Fortunately, there are very few people who do that... Jeebers is one of them. Treiz is another.

Where're you coming up with 90,000 people? The military crew of the Macross was 20,000 people, most of whom are presumably living in navy-style bunkrooms in the midsection of the ship. The civilian population living in the ship's improvised city section numbered only 58,000 people at the start of the war. The crews of ARMD-01 and ARMD-02, as well as the pilots stationed aboard them, are likely living aboard their ships most of the time. The way it stacks up, the total population that HAS to be living aboard the Macross (the crew and civilians) is at most 78,000 people, only three quarters of which are actually permanent residents of the city. Yes, the population density in the city section is a bit extreme, but the city has an extremely unconventional layout (being built in tiers, and occupying something like half the ship, where gravity is not a huge issue). The city does seem a bit larger than it ought to be, but that's just dramatic license.

Your rant would've been a LOT easier on the eyes if it wasn't one stupendously huge paragraph. Break it up a bit next time, it'll be easier for everyone else to read. Occasionally, I have cause to wonder why Harmony Gold was willing to settle for Tommy Yune. When he joined the Robotech franchise, his entire portfolio consisted of a couple adventure games (The Journeyman Chronicles series), a brief stint working on Superman Y2K, the comic adaptations of Speed Racer, and a Danger Girl miniseries. All in all, not the most impressive resume for a creative director. I'm guessing he was merely the best of a small group of applicants. It's not like Robotech creative director was/is a hugely prestigious position. He was probably the best they could find who was willing to do the job. EDIT: If anything, Danger Girl: Kamakaze ought to have been an indicator of how bad Yune's attempts to "improve" Robotech would be... the plot revolves around a Japanese fascist group left over from World War 2 (though one with paradoxically Communist insignia) who stole a germanium-based antimatter bomb made during the final months before the Japanese surrender (you may now "WTF").

Actually, it's a huge stretch to try and fit the production model VF-4 into Robotech, because the official line on the VF-4 in Robotech is that it was NEVER mass-produced, and in fact only one or two prototypes were ever built. You, sir, frighten me.

Yeah, they blamed the project's failure on Netter Digital having gone bankrupt earlier that same year. EDIT: Actually, now that I think about it, there's an alarming trend of companies going bankrupt and/or out of business shortly after acquiring a license to produce Robotech products. A tidy little microcosm of the entire franchise, more like.

Robotech 3000 is pretty much ironclad proof that Harmony Gold's creative staff was terminally incompetent even before the changing of the guard that brought us Tommy Yune. For the last time, that model is a VF-X-4 prototype, not a production model VF-4. The production model VF-4 does NOT appear in Robotech, and it is the production model VF-4 that the URRG attempts to add to the Robotech universe.

Nope, it never does. Yes, Robotech 3000 was set in the year 3000.

An odd choice... considering Robotech's timeline has never really gone past 2044. No, it's not. The production model VF-4 first appeared in Macross: Flashback 2012. It's the VF-X-4 prototype that briefly appears in Super Dimension Fortress Macross as a scale model. I'm reasonably certain it does not appear in DYRL. In any event, the URRG's VF-4 entry does not use the VF-X-4, it uses the completed VF-4 design with the Kawamori-designed battroid mode from VF-X, and cites This is Animation Special: Macross Plus and Macross Digital Mission VF-X as its sources. EDIT: The article's remarks section even explicitly mentions that the completed VF-4 design "never appeared in Robotech".

Why go that far? Just file a copyright infringement claim against the site with Yahoo! Geocities. It's really an odd dichotomy. Robotech fans so often profess to hate Macross and regard many Macross fans as elitist, but so many of them spend their free time trying to expand the Robotech universe by grafting mechanical designs, characters, and stories from unrelated universes onto Robotech's original series. As I've illustrated in the past, there is that small segment of Robotech fans who are convinced that Macross is a ripoff of Robotech. I also know a few groups of Robotech fans who are convinced that the best way for Robotech to move forward is to rewrite more of Macross. It's these two groups that indulge in the blatant and often senseless practice of trying to rewrite and incorporate the rest of Macross into Robotech's universe, and occasionally other shows as well. Possibly the least offensive of the Unofficial Robotech Reference Guide, which openly admits that it isn't intended to be a reference for the "official" Robotech universe, but rather is an overly detailed supplement to their series of fan fiction. What makes them stand out is that they pursued it from a scholarly angle, and that there are very few mecha included that do not belong to the animation used in Robotech's original series (the VF-4 Siren/Lightning III being the only one that leaps to mind). All the same, many Robotech fans don't seem to realize that it its articles aren't intended to apply to Robotech itself, and keep trying to cite it as some grand official source to rival the Macross Compendium.

Actually, as far as I'm aware the "thinking cap" is something McKinney came up with. Carl Macek gabbled on a bit about protoculture causing an "empathetic" link between man and machine, but it was the McKinney novels that made it a piece of technology integral to the control of a battroid. Of course, even Robotech fans are quick to shoot that one down, citing the fact that neither the dialogue nor the animation supports the existence of such a technology in the series. There was actually a big, overly verbose thread about it not too long ago. If you think Robotech fans have a persecution complex when confronted with Macross... it's NOTHING compared to the persecution complex the McKinneyist Robotech fans have developed because of the fanbase's general antipathy towards anything associated with McKinney. I guess you could argue that Robotech fans are only emulating the show's creators when they're stealing everything that isn't nailed down and/or on fire and trying to graft it onto Robotech. These days, it's virtually impossible to find a Robotech fansite that hasn't stolen something from one of the later Macross shows, or any of a host of other mecha shows. Even the much-lauded (among RT fans) Unofficial Robotech Reference Guide includes a bunch of mecha that aren't even in Robotech. The sad part is it's one of the more conservative ones... I've seen Robotech fans trying to incorporate mecha, characters, and stories from as far afield as Neon Genesis Evangelion and Godannar.

You did a good job of not flaming... but Maverick_LSC apparently didn't like what I had to say, so he locked the thread. Someone might wanna remind that poor chap that Sentinels was canceled and never finished, and Untold Story never got released like it was supposed to (because it bombed its test screening), so there really has only been one Robotech continuation. Kind of hilarious that the only joke name for RTSC that offended him was Tommy Yune's Day Off. Not even the baldfaced implication that Tommy Yune was a bad a writer as Ed Wood... just a simple reference to Ferris Bueler's Day Off.

That's pretty much the status quo of Robotech fandom. I'm going to keep sparring with McKeever on this one... just for yuks. Hehehe... game on Kevin... game on...

I would actually be inclined to avoid that sort of thing, except where tradition dictates such titles... like having the captain of a ship being called "Captain" regardless of his/her actual rank, and extending that to "Admiral" being the title for a fleet commander, regardless of rank.

Actually, it should properly by Army/Air Force. In most countries with active space programs, military operations in space fall under the jurisdiction of the Air Force. "Spacy" is a contraction of "Space Agency".

You chaps'll enjoy this... http://www.robotech.com/community/forum/re...genumber=1#post

Glad to help. Not sure who said that one... I recall saying that Macross was far and away the most popular segment of Robotech. So much so that every major attempt to continue the story (Robotech II: the Sentinels, Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles) has been centered around the remaining Macross characters. Heck, the two most important parts of the marketing blurb were "Mark Hamill's in it", and "find out what happened to Rick Hunter". The latter of the two is the most frequently professed reason for buying the movie. As far as popularity goes, the New Generation (Mospeada) is a distant second. I don't think Tommy and Steve are quite that clever... as marketing coordinator, Kevin McKeever was already the public relations fall guy in the event something went wrong with either project. Actually, as far as Harmony Gold apologists go, rhade is by far one of the least offensive of the lot. I and more than a few others have reason to cause to suspect that he probably doesn't actually believe his own defenses of Harmony Gold, and that he's just sucking up to Kevin McKeever in hopes of being made a moderator. Admittedly, rhade has told some pretty outrageous lies in the past... last month he posted a very dramatic virus warning on Robotech.com. It was all very theatrical, warning everybody about the dangers of a new virus called "Virut". When I pointed out that the Virut family of viruses was better than six years old, and that the last new variant of it had been detected over a month previously, he flat-out told me that I didn't know what I was talking about (I own an IT consulting firm, he manages a hotel). I asked him what variant it was, and who detected it... he wouldn't answer. I asked him where he got his information from, and he tried to convince me that he was a "freelance programmer" for Microsoft, Symantec, and McAfee, and that all three companies were sending him viral code so he could work on defenses for his own systems. Of course, that's about as obvious a lie as it's possible to tell, and just for kicks I confirmed that it was bullshit via some friends of mine who work for Microsoft and Symantec. When confronted with his lie, he tried to claim he'd gotten that secret information through MSDN (which is also an obvious lie), and then ran to the moderators for protection. Still, there are worse apologists out there... Treiz being one of the very worst. He loves making apples and oranges comparisons to try and justify his view that Robotech is one of the best-selling, most-popular sci-fi franchises of all time.

Hey... they're not the sharpest knives in the drawer, so it probably takes them a while to think up plausible lies to appease the fans.

I am nothing less than astounded that you were able to say that with a straight face. There has never been anything original about Robotech, and I very much doubt there ever will be. Yeah, the guy who played Mannequin Skywalker certainly is aloof and unlikeable enough to fit the bill... you might be on to something there.

Yes, two... 1.) Give up on Robotech. It's dead, and has been for something like twenty years now. Harmony Gold's beating a pile of rotting giblets that used to be a dead horse, in hopes that the twitching simulates life. 2.) Macross: Do You Remember Love?.