Redwolf's Journal (continued)

I've mentioned before the legal suits between Harmony Gold and the companies behind Battletech . It's based on a mess of international licensing rights that others have researched and explained better than I every will.  I don't have all the details of the settlement, but the end result seemed to be that certain mecha designs which originated in Macross could/would not be used in Battletech . And so those models, even though they were iconic, became the "Unseen." There have been attempts to redesign them over the years, but mostly they're just sort of avoided. Well, it looks like this has come up again. I wouldn't have noticed or cared, except Harmony Gold is including in its current case the Hairbrained Schemes Battletech game in development. They've also targetting Piranha Games' Mechwarrior Online . This annoys me largely because it may delay (probably not prevent) release of the former, which I've backed and look forward to. If you look...

I've had three-day weekends be too short or too long, this one worked out just right. Admittedly, I pretty much blew Friday being lazy, but I actually got some cleaning done after that. Yay. I find the timing spooky, but just after I get to watching Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles , there's information released about the potential Robotech Academy . A week ago, I would have been excited. Now, I seriously doubt Harmony Gold's ability to produce anything worthwhile. The pitch alone is wedging events into a continuity in a place that seems questionable. There's a time lapse between the first and second wars, sure, but most of the children of the Macross-era heroes are accounted for. Nevermind that they're running a Kickstarter for half a million dollars to produce a pilot episode. That doesn't really guarantee a series. Plus it seems like a lot of money. Data might be a few years old, but references I can find seem to indicate a half-hour anime episode runs less...

Most of Robotech is near and dear to my heart. The series aired when I was young and impressionable, but old enough to appreciate it. It made a pretty big splash among my peers at the time. We didn't initially know its origins, but even when that knowledge came out (thanks to word-of-mouth and things like the Robotech Art books rather than the now-simple internet search) nothing really changed. Someone had stitched together three unrelated anime series into a multi-generational science fiction story with some halfway-cohesive story and themes. Some people take offense at that. Me, I'm impressed by it. It wasn't perfect, but it was amazing for the time and offered up a surprisingly mature tale in animated form. Romance in cartoons was all but unheard of, outside your picture-perfect Disney movies, at least so far as I remember. While a lot of it is owed to the Macross source material, Robotech had a lot to say about love. Interracial human love? There. Human-alien love ...

Finally cracked open the Robotech boxed set upon getting home today and put in The Shadow Chronicles . I'd read up on this new canon (as it contradicts much that was in the novels way back), so I knew the general gist of things. I just didn't expect it to be quite so... cringe-inducing. The CG-based animation isn't terrible, but it's pretty lifeless. The dialogue feels somewhat stilted. I can only imagine that without having seen the series and knowing the story prior, the plot would be utterly incomprehensible considering even with that knowledge, it felt messily rushed. I find myself wishing I could say it overused exposition to explain things because the actual result is a lot of lacking explanation of what's going on. And this on top of how I personally feel a number of things should have simply been done differently. Just... wow. I wanted that to be good, but that's one of the worst things I've seen in a while.