How would you have done the Shadow Chronicles

[Seto Kaiba]

Likely so that HG can introduc such "ideas" without stepping on BWs toes

Or it could be Tommy's Macross-inspired magic bullet to finally free Robotech's plot from that insipid macguffin it calls "protoculture" so they can move beyond the one story that Robotech has been rehashing for almost thirty years now and do something new.

[jaymz]

maybe

[mechachap]

I think the biggest disappointment with the Haydonites is that they don't seem to pose that big a threat. Plus they seem like a relic of the last decade, when Battlestar Galactica was popular. The Disciples of Zor, if well written enough, would've made a credible threat. The Masters made it sound like they were one.

[Tiree]

I would have made Shadow Chronicles similar to what HG did, but I would leave out the whole retelling of what happened at Reflex Point. I might start back to where Scott tells Ariel that he's going to find Hunter and the SDF-3 though.

I wouldn't have used the Haydonite's as a threat (at least not yet) and would have made it a pseudo breadcrumb treasure finding film.

Once that was over, I would create a new story arc, 30 years later or so about another alien race coming to earth. I'd probably have something about voyager to kick it off in the movie I just made, or when they find the SDF-3 it reawakens an alien race. Have a new crop of heroes, maybe a Hunter and a Bernard half Invid Kid as friends going through an academy when the Alien threat appears.

[Seto Kaiba]

I think the biggest disappointment with the Haydonites is that they don't seem to pose that big a threat. Plus they seem like a relic of the last decade, when Battlestar Galactica was popular.

That's the thing... the Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles "movie" is obviously trying very hard to be a middle ground between the Battlestar Galactica "new" series and the 1984 Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie and failing spectacularly.

If you exclude Palladium's usual copious and inexplicable exaggerations and downgrades, they actually did do quite a number on the UEEF in the movie... before they even fired a shot. By helping the UEEF against the Invid, they not only convinced the UEEF to commit virtually the entire fleet to a single action where they could be easily targeted and destroyed, they were able to plant sabotaged hardware that took every last UEEF ship and fighter out of the fight before it even began.

The practical end result of the Haydonite ploy was that the UEEF's main fleet of ~400 ships suffered significant losses, and the remaining ships and fighters are out of action. The only way the UEEF was able to fight back was to detonate the neutron-s warhead stockpiles on Space Station Liberty, costing them their principal shipyard, R&D facility, and their near-Sol staging ground, plus the many incomplete ships and mecha stored there, and the supplies a fleet needed to operate.

The Disciples of Zor, if well written enough, would've made a credible threat. The Masters made it sound like they were one.

But not a NEW threat... the Disciples were just another group of Masters.

If the goal is to bring in new fans, it would be better to simply make an "Ultimate Universe" version of Robotech, and hopefully fix some of the issues associated with the original version.

This is not possible due to the nature of Robotech itself... the intellectual property the series contains is the copyrighted property of other studios. Virtually nothing in the series is actually owned by Harmony Gold, so they would almost be starting from zero in terms of the designs AND story, since Harmony Gold has done everything possible to alienate the owners of the Macross and Southern Cross IP.

2. Get an animation studio that bloody knows how to do a good job. The CG used was outdated ten years before Shadow Chronicles was released, and watching the fights were BORING AS SIN. All of which I leave at the feet of HG.

When they're paid to do their job well, DR Movie is actually an exceptional studio which has many famous series in its catalog including Macross Plus, Sentou Yousei Yukikaze, both Ghost in the Shell movies, Bleach, and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.

The problem is that Harmony Gold's entire budget for the movie (less than $1 million USD) is roughly equivalent to the animation budget for a single 22 minute TV anime episode. RTSC's budget was at full stretch to get even the painfully poor, fourth-rate animation it got.

Good animation... good choreography... good direction... good art design... these things all cost money, money Harmony Gold's own staff admit their senior management doesn't think Robotech can justify, investment-wise.

4. Complete new mecha. While they may visually follow the overall aesthetic of the New Gen mecha, if that is what HG wished, but the new mecha used at the very end would NOT be "Super Shadow Fighters" but genuinely new mecha.

Harmony Gold actually tried to do this... but some designs were obviously canned due to the possibility of legal action from Macross's owners, and others (like the VF-13 Gamma) do not appear to have survived the approvals process. The whole goal of the movie was to try and Macross-ize MOSPEADA so it would have appeal on a going-forward basis, the New Generation being at best a distant second to the Macross Saga popularity-wise, so they went with a FAST-pack equipped Alpha as their next best bet.

[Seto Kaiba]

Which is why Robotech will die once its current fanbase dies (either literally, or because almost all of them decide to just move on). There is no getting new fans in as long as you remain reliant on the original series for anything.

Oh, I dunno about that... Macross is thriving and it's still relying on its original series as both the cornerstone of the timeline and a source of frequent plot references. The problems with Robotech's original series aren't that they're reliant upon it, it's that it's made from someone else's licensed IP and they have no control over, or ownership of, the contents, so there are very few ways they can legally build upon it for future works and everything which they want to do is mired in approvals.

The vast majority of Robotech fans are extremely attached to the original series, both stylistically and content-wise, and attempts to cut ties with it have historically been poorly received. Every attempt at a sequel has failed, and the result usually comes down to what the fans actually want... which is essentially the one thing Harmony Gold can't deliver, new shows that are Macross in all but name.

Even if you got past the problems with the law, Harmony Gold is singularly under-equipped, talent-wise, to develop new anime.

and there if you want to make money off it you either A.) Have to stop trying to bring new fans in and just cater to the old ones. [...]

's what they're doing now... they're pandering to the few fans they have left with the RTSC bait-and-switch "Where's Rick Hunter" routine.

[...] or B.) Do something drastic to bring new fans in. You cannot do B without some kind of reboot/reskinning/revamping of the old material.

That's what they hoped they would achieve with their botched modernization/Macross-ization of the New Generation in Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles... and doubtless the hope behind the live-action movie that Warner Bros is so diligently refusing to make. I don't think anyone sane is under any illusions that Love Live Alive was anything more than a smokescreen to disguise a lack of progress on the LAM.

You just can't there is too much continuity to learn and newer audiences (at least everyone I've ever talked to on the issue) just will not put up with the original series in its current state.

Considering Harmony Gold has summarily disowned pretty much everything outside the 85 episodes of the TV series, RTSC, and the few comics published in the early 2000s, there's rather less continuity to learn than there used to be. The trick, as demonstrated by titles like Macross Frontier, is to distill the past continuity into just the bare essentials needed to understand the story and to space them out on an as-needed basis instead of upending a proverbial dustbin full of expository dialogue at the viewer in the first five minutes the way Shadow Chronicles did.

I do agree that Robotech's original series hasn't really stood up to the changes in the industry very well... now that rewrites are considered something base and vile by most, it's not really attractive to your modern anime hobbyist. As long as Robotech endures, it will have to cope with the reality that it's a reminder of the bad old days when ADR directors had assumed that not rewriting everyone into an American would put the audience off the show.

[jaymz]

If they had the will to do so, they COULD do an all new anime starting from scratch with the same basic story premise. 3 generations. Alien Invasions. Super Alien Technology. Hell keep the basic storylines as well and everything else is aesthetics. Most of the elements are nowhere near all that original in any of the original source animes anyway.

However as has been pointed out they A ) will NOT spend the money to do so and B ) do not have the TALENT to do so.

[jaymz]

Which is why I also said:

However as has been pointed out they A ) will NOT spend the money to do so and B ) do not have the TALENT to do so.

[Seto Kaiba]

@Seto Kaiba

I think we are actually agreeing with each other in sentiment, just not using the exact same language.

Seems that way, yeah...

@jaymz

All things considered, maybe HG should just sell Robotech as an IP (or at least as much of it they are allowed to) to some other company that is historically successful on such things. It may or may not change things, but HG is unlikely to do that.

Some fans have theorized that Harmony Gold's behavior in recent years, particular the trend they've developed of quashing any fan films and suspending production of a continuation for Shadow Chronicles was motivated by a belief at Harmony Gold that if the proposed live action movie was a success, Warner Bros would want to either secure the rights indefinitely (thus freeing Harmony Gold from any creative obligations and letting them just sit back and collect royalties all day) or purchase the franchise from Harmony Gold at a king's ransom...

Harmony Gold's officially-stated reason for suspending production was because they wanted to cross-promote the LAM with RTSC II in the hopes of getting an actual budget this time, instead of trying to make a movie on some junior executive's lunch money.

The problem with selling the franchise is what many licensing contracts of that sort have a "buyback" or revocation clause that gives the licensing party the ability to either a veto on the sale of the rights to another party or reclaim the rights with (or without) a fee for the early termination of the contract (depending upon the circumstances).

[guardiandashi]

@Seto Kaiba

I think we are actually agreeing with each other in sentiment, just not using the exact same language.

Seems that way, yeah...

@jaymz

All things considered, maybe HG should just sell Robotech as an IP (or at least as much of it they are allowed to) to some other company that is historically successful on such things. It may or may not change things, but HG is unlikely to do that.

Some fans have theorized that Harmony Gold's behavior in recent years, particular the trend they've developed of quashing any fan films and suspending production of a continuation for Shadow Chronicles was motivated by a belief at Harmony Gold that if the proposed live action movie was a success, Warner Bros would want to either secure the rights indefinitely (thus freeing Harmony Gold from any creative obligations and letting them just sit back and collect royalties all day) or purchase the franchise from Harmony Gold at a king's ransom...

Harmony Gold's officially-stated reason for suspending production was because they wanted to cross-promote the LAM with RTSC II in the hopes of getting an actual budget this time, instead of trying to make a movie on some junior executive's lunch money.

The problem with selling the franchise is what many licensing contracts of that sort have a "buyback" or revocation clause that gives the licensing party the ability to either a veto on the sale of the rights to another party or reclaim the rights with (or without) a fee for the early termination of the contract (depending upon the circumstances).

the other issue that HG runs into is that in some ways their "rights" may be really shaky especially as some of the rulings in japan (the actual creators of the anime material in question) actually read as the company that licensed HG as the North American importer/distributor actually never had the ownership, or authority to issue them the rights they received.

at a fundamental level the "robotech saga" is really 3 unrelated short anime series, that were mashed together in order to get the total episode count up to something that would interest the broadcasters in North America

[Seto Kaiba]

the other issue that HG runs into is that in some ways their "rights" may be really shaky especially as some of the rulings in japan (the actual creators of the anime material in question) actually read as the company that licensed HG as the North American importer/distributor actually never had the ownership, or authority to issue them the rights they received.

This is actually a common misconception many Robotech fans have... in actual fact, the court rulings in Japan didn't affect the rights Harmony Gold obtained under license from Studio Nue and Big West's onetime partner Tatsunoko Productions. The license agreement between Tatsunoko and Harmony Gold never concerned any rights other than the distribution and the production of merchandise for the animation outside of Japan. The court rulings in Japan didn't change a single thing regarding who owned what... they just confirmed that Tatsunoko owned pretty much nothing because they didn't pay for its development. As Carl Macek himself told the fans at Robocon 10, Harmony Gold USA knew from the very start that it had no ownership of the contents of the original shows used to make Robotech.

[jaymz]

HG's trademarking of Macross is a bigger issue than anything else. While legal, it is my opinion that it was unethical to have done so as they have nothing to do with it's creation and/or popularity beyond it's use in Robotech.

[mechachap]

It really is a sad state of affairs. The final joke for long-time fans is that crossover comic...

[Seto Kaiba]

HG's trademarking of Macross is a bigger issue than anything else. While legal, it is my opinion that it was unethical to have done so as they have nothing to do with it's creation and/or popularity beyond it's use in Robotech.

Ultimately, it's the fallout from that decision and those Harmony Gold made based on it later that have had some of the most destructive consequences for Robotech. Burning the proverbial bridges with Big West has left Harmony Gold forever looking over its shoulder and fearing a franchise-ending lawsuit from the Japanese IP owners. That hasn't done anything good to their creative process... it's left them entirely afraid to do ANYTHING new.

It really is a sad state of affairs. The final joke for long-time fans is that crossover comic...

Nah, I think the FINAL joke is that, though both franchises in that crossover are in very dire straits due to their borrowed IP and neither has really had a spotlight on it in ages, that the Voltron franchise has had more success getting new material out there means that it's technically slumming by doing a cross-over with Robotech.

[Seto Kaiba]

Y'know what would've solved a lot of problems?

If they'd taken what they did in the Robotech: Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles comic miniseries just one step farther and used the Shadow Chronicles movie to completely get rid of the remaining problematic characters. They already killed Breetai, Exedore, and Dr. Lang, and put Minmei and Lisa "on a bus"... offing Rick would've bought them some elbow room in the story, since there would no longer be a need to keep up the pretense that Admiral Hunter can do no wrong.

[Tiree]

But Hunter is a fan favorite. That and you never want to kill off the 'hero' of the series. In this case Hunter, Dana, and Scott.

The fact they put Hunter kind of on the Bus, the prize at the end of the tunnel. He is pretty much out of the story. What might be good is to have Max mentor a new character (hero) and kill him off ala Fokker.

[Seto Kaiba]

But Hunter is a fan favorite. That and you never want to kill off the 'hero' of the series. In this case Hunter, Dana, and Scott.

Well, yes... that's why Tommy went to such great and tedious lengths to exonerate Rick from having ordered Earth's destruction. Just going from Harmony Gold's leaked plot outline for the remainder of the Shadow Chronicles, they don't seem to have any qualms about killing a main character or two as long as they're not Macross Saga characters. Both Ariel and Scott were tipped to "die" in the course of the Shadow Chronicles story arc.

The fact they put Hunter kind of on the Bus, the prize at the end of the tunnel. He is pretty much out of the story. What might be good is to have Max mentor a new character (hero) and kill him off ala Fokker.

Nah, that was bait and switch... Hunter had to show up just long enough for them to claim they'd honored their promise of explaining what happened to him, and then promptly let him vanish again so they wouldn't lose the one big draw the story actually had. The fans want the continuing adventures of the Macross cast, so Harmony Gold is dangling that just out of reach.

Max and/or Miriya is probably the worst possible option... they're the MOST contentious and problematic of the Macross characters, legally speaking, because Macross did use them in later titles for years and years. That's probably why Prelude wouldn't even let Max or Miriya APPEAR... they get mentioned once, in passing, and remain offscreen otherwise.

Kill off Rick and you can run with one of the other characters for who it isn't abject heresy to depict them as anything other than selflessly heroic and noble.

[Lt Gargoyle]

I would not have used the Haydonites, I think a civil war would be more fun to play out, the colony learning of Neutron S missiles attack become fearful of the UEEF High Command. Have the UEEF chain of command break down, sections of the fleet break ranks.
the role playing possibilities are endless. the players could become pirates, or perhaps they side with the UEEF or maybe they become Mercs and sell their services to those willing to pay for it.
The Haydonites suck story wise in my opinion.

[keir451]

I said "Screw all that BS !" and brought over a Coalition Firestorm Mobile fortress with a bunch of CS engineers and rebuilt the SDF-1 and now have teh UEEF/REF froces in a pinch as MY technology's power source won't run out in a year. Plus we found ANOTHER PC matrix (actually the original one from the SDF-1). They succesfully fought the Invid AND are restoring order to North America w/out screwing everything up. Eventually they will "deal" with the Haydonites the same way the CS deals with ALL it's enemies, by ruthlessly crushing them under their boot heel!