by JexKerome on Mon Aug 02, 2004 6:24 pm
Surprised you don't know what's up with Robotech. Or maybe it's just that I'm a geek.
Robotech is an american creation. A guy named Carl Macek attempted to bring anime to the States big time, but the biggest hurdle he found was that most anime were too short to be syndicated, and all the potential sponsors balked at that. So he took three different anime from Tatsunoko: SuperDimensional Fortress Macross, SuperDimensional Army Southern Cross and Genesis Survivor Mospeada and welded them together, through heavy editing, to make Robotech.
History was made then. Comics, novels, toys, and of course, bringing Anime to the masses, in a history where characters doubted, loved and died, and the futility and horrors of war were clearly shown. Robotech was a runaway hit.
Carl Macek had it made, and in the 80's, with his company Harmony Gold, set out to make a sequel to Robotech, animated by japanese but the story being a shared effort. The sequel was called 'Robotech II: The Sentinels". A few episodes were made and then disaster struck: the company lost all funding, the yen gained on the dollar, and the project was cancelled. To recover some of the cost, Harmony Gold stitched the few R2 episodes into a movie, and that was all.
Then, in 2000 Harmony Gold launched Robotech.com. The site's purpose is twofold: first, to sell oodles of stuff to Robotech fans, and second, to create a community for Robotech fans to gather, and run by them the idea of ANOTHER Robotech series.
Of course the fans where foaming at the bit for such an event. Harmony Gold first proposed an All-CG series, dubbed Robotech 3000, firmly based in events that would have appeared in Sentinels. Fan respone and financial setbacks killed the project before it really started. Harmony Gold then felt silent until a year ago, when it began to hint at yet another Robotech series. The fans were wary at first, but the thing seems to be for real, and now it has a name: Robotech Shadow Force.
It's also a direct continuation of Robotech, starting where it left off, and so the fans are more eager to see it. As for how good it can really be, it's everyone's guess: Harmony Gold's very tight lipped about it, and not even character/mecha sketches have been released, though according to the story, the mecha would be Shadow Alphas and Betas for the human side.
Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse- reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor. Thus, the men who commited the atrocities of September 11 were neither cowards nor lunatics of any sort, but Men of Faith- perfect faith- and this, it must finally be acknowleged, is a terrible thing to be.