Gubaba

No, I didn't even get to see Renato's panel. I was manning the Satelight booth virtually the whole time.

Funnily enough, I ran into Tony Oliver on the exhibit floor while HG's panel was going on elsewhere.

Not meant for me but I'll take it anyway. Thomas Romain is a french animator/art designer who currently works for Satelight (that's Shoji Kawamori's studio). One of the few gaijin working in the anime industry as far as I know.

Exactly. In addition, he's the co-creator of Oban Sar Racers and Basquash, and he's done an amazing amount of really excellent design work for such shows as Aquarion EVOL, AKB0048, Symphogear, and Space Dandy.

I guess. I'm not sure myself, honestly. I just found it and after staring at it for nearly an hour, realized there was a person cleverly hidden in the pic.

I dunno... Looks pretty convincing to me...

There's a great bit in Part 2 (at 18:40) that @gwyncampbell tweeted about, where Tommy said that "research done by Lionsgate" indicated that nobody wanted the original Macross and that everyone just wanted Robotech, or, as Gwyn summarized it, "HG: No one wants Macross."

This caused Kevin McKeever to seriously lose it, and he posted seven tweets in quick succession, telling Gwyn to retract his statement because it wasn't true and didn't happen. Then Maverick LSC chimed in, saying that Gwyn's statement was "libelous ;-) "... No, I don't know what the wink is meant to mean either.

Anyway, it was a fun couple of hours.

Heh. Secret Agent Mylene will never stop being funny.

The disguise apparently works, though. In a Macross Facebook group I'm in, a screenshot from that scene led one guy to ask, "Who's that girl? Is this still Macross?"

So I spent the past four days working for the Satelight booth at Anime Expo. Everyone was very careful not to refer to the show as anything other than "the new Macross" or "the next Macross" (i.e. We still don't know what it's called, and maybe they don't, either), and the standard answer when anyone asked about the series was, "We're working on it now."

Thomas Romain confirmed that he's working on it, but I think we already knew that.

For all those unsure about the whole Macross in the west , Humungy Bauld issues read.http://kotaku.com/5990702/why-you-havent-seen-any-new-macross-in-the-west-for-nearly-15-years sums it up perfectly.

That article is actually pretty much entirely wrong.

I wasn't aware we were comparing MB to Shakespear....

???

Well, *I* sure wasn't...

I was just saying they exemplify your equation of poor story + striking visuals.

Poor story + striking visuals = Poor market performance at best or failure at worst.

Hasn't Hollywood proven that countless times already? I firmly believe it is a universal truth!

M0 was all about showcasing Satellite's CG animation abilities and less about a compelling narrative. If the story matched the visuals it would have appealed to the target audience as well as adults.

The target audience for Zero WAS adults. The OVAs are for the established fan base, the TV shows are there primarily to build a newer fan base. Just like Gundam.

And I don't know that your universal truth is that universal... Unless you think Michael Bay makes finely crafted stories.

Yeah... Remember the last Macross OVA series...? it didn't sell very well.

Also, not to get too in-depth, but I find the notion that adults can't relate to stories about adolescents baffling. I mean, I used to be an adolescent. I remember it relatively clearly, so I can relate to stories about others going through adolescence. It sure is a hell of lot closer to my actual life than living on a spaceship and being a robot pilot is.

Plus you can draw pictures in the sky too ...yahoo.. ...i miss that i dont give a toot attitude instead of growing up teen angst...

whoever is designing the characters for delta keep that in mind....regardless mecha design will still pull me in...

And yet... Plus is probably the most angst-y Macross to date...

Again, the new series is going to be on television. That means it's got a target audience of junior high and high school age kids,and the characters will reflect that.

That's pretty much entirely wrong, Skullmilitia... HG has the Macross name fair and square.

Regarding Yoshio's parents, at first assumed the guy standing next to Minmay in the grey sweater was Yoshio's dad. So are Roy, Minmay and Yoshio the only named characters introduced in this scene and everyone else are just unnamed extras?

Source: Super Dimension Fortress Macross Episode 1 Boobytrap 7 minute, 37 seconds, frame 22 out of 24.

That's not Yot-chan's dad. His parents appear in episode 2.

Well, you could always do what it seems like a lot of Robotech fans do: write "realistic" fanfic and pretend that it's the show...

Um... I still haven't finished it yet...

I realize studios will produce what the market wants and what is most profitable, I am not nearly as naive as some may want to believe.

"Sponsor Pressure" the only way I can justify the repeated use of 3 songs for nearly a third of M7. The alternative is too demoralizing to consider...

The actual reason is that they used all the funding they got and ended up with only five songs. It was a while before they got to make more. Is that demoralizing...?

It's from a doujin that Tochiro bought.

Well, it can't end worse than the LAST robot singer in Macross did.

You mean Elle? Nothing bad happened there...

Well... and then, as Renato pointed out elsewhere, the Ultra Fire liner notes state that Basara returned to Macross 7 a few months after the end of Dynamite 7. so who knows?

I was just hoping we get something in December...a preview episode or something to hype us up.

And, as I said before, we don't want a teaser episode, because that means the show will be delayed, mostly likely. Again, that's the only reason (as far as I know) that they showed a preview ep. of Frontier.

I think the show was initially meant to debut in Fall 2007, and they had to push it back to Spring 2008, so the Deculture Editon was put together as a teaser.

So yeah, if we get a preview episode this time around, it'll be because the show isn't ready yet, and is being delayed.

"Early next year" isn't Christmas, though...

The new Macross series is (probably) coming at the beginning of next year.

I think that's the biggest news from yesterday.