Yuku free message boards

Imagine how rattled the REF would have been had they actually followed continuity and realized that Reinhardt had "Gone Ahab" on them, and launched the Neutron-S missiles at a time when the ground forces and shadow fighters effectively had the battle WON - then realized that the race that had provided them that tech was now attacking them....


(ooohhh,, look, an even deeper level of plot twist than Tommy was capable of conceiving....)

Don't let HG deny it. They have in the past - even the (now former) HG employees I have some respect for.

Simply put:

The original pitch for the Shadow series when originally announced was a dub of Macross 7, probably with heavy editing to reduce the role of Basara (mind you, reducing Basara's role even in the Mac 7 series would have been a good thing).

The evidence is there, if one chooses to look.

1. The description of the new enemy and its powers sounded suspiciously like the Varuata and Protodevlin. Comments also indicated it was not going on anywhere near co-existant with Episodes #84 & 85, but occuring after them, and not on/over Earth.

2. a major character is a pink haired daughter of Max and Miriya. I could buy the daughter part - but when they went so far as to even give her Mylene's hair color, alarms started going off.

3. The "concept" pics we saw very early on made the Alex character, announced as a major character in the beginning but ending up being a plot device, look ALMOST EXACTLY like Gamlin Kisaki. In the 6 years between the pic where where we see "Alex" and where he appears actually in the production, he gets totally redesigned, and made into a "red-shirt", as suddenly, the Marcus/Marlene/Ariel thread comes out of nowhere, having never been mentioned before.
This happens almost exactly at the point where HG's insistance that "We own rights to all Macross series" runs headlong into the Tatsunoko/Big West dispute. And, also, with the start of the major feet-dragging we got when the originally announced dates started approaching.

4. The beta version of robotech.com had a series of polls for new members at one point, as one logged in to or joined the site test. The series of questions pertained to importation of a Japanese series, airing it on televison, whether to bring music over, redoing the music in English, or just replacing it, and so on. The TV airing questions preclude this from being about the Animeigo Macross import, as it was a sub, and they (at this point in history) had already procured the original music for that project. It HAD to be relating to another project - and the only two projects out there to line up with each other were the announced new Robotech series and the 4-5 year old Macross 7.

5. Harmony Gold, in the same new series announcement period, also goes after Bandai and Toycom for announcing a game and a series of models for mecha that had only appeared in products by persons OTHER than HG (Macross Plus was Manga Entertainment, via rights from Big West, and the items in the game and toy line were all from non-video, Macross Plus or Macross 7 sources; even the VF-X2 VF-1 variant was an advanced model, and was going to be replaced by the VF-5000 to eliminate the potential rights conflict). This is while also, somehow, authorizing Tokyo Pop to import the Macross 7 Trash manga (which IIRC, that series actually never made it to a US release). By this time, HG had taken over the rights payments for Macross II from Palladium (possibly, without any authority to do so) after Nippan folded.

6. Somewhere between 1998 and 2000, HG went from telling its licensees that "we only own Macross TV, no other items in the franchise" to "we own US rights to all Macross, including stuff not made yet" - both supposedly based on the same contract. One does NOT make that kind of error in a contract - ESPECIALLY in Hollywood - and not notice it for nearly 15 years.
However, it is in line for a classic "rights erosion" attack, where you take limited, legal, rights on use of something for yourself, Then start expanding on them, pushing the envelope of what you really had. Eventually, if not called on it quick enough, the original holder is left with either acknowledging your rights, or taking you to court and risk having the whole thing tossed into the public domain from their not aggressively defending them enough.

Even before I saw the front end of the Haydonite ships I saw the resemblence. Both ships are heavily segmented, like scales or splint armor. The differences mostly are in lighting (especially that red light treatment going through the Haydonite craft).

One can easily see a kinship somewhere in their artistic ancestry.