anime

The worst part of Robotech is that the songs are absolute booty compared to the originals in Macross.

Slowly working my way through this video since it seems like it has some of the recent updates with all of the licensing mess.

OH BOY MY SPECIAL INTEREST TIME TO BUCKLE UP KIDDOS!

The video is a pretty exhaustive overview of Robotech as a franchise, but we're just scratching the surface of how capitalism ruined your childhood. (And it did, if you were a fan of either Macross, Robotech or Mechwarrior.) (Also I'm going to be abbreviating a lot of this so I might get things wrong, I'll try to source where I can but I'm only human and make mistakes, and most of my sources are, like, fandom wikis and forum posts and not academic papers. I could link the lawsuits but I don't speak legalese and I doubt y'all do either, so you can go find those yourselves)

I. IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS SUPER DIMENSIONAL FORTRESS MACROSS

The year's 1981, and some nerd named Shoji Kawamori at a small place called Studio Nue saw Mobile Suit Gundam and decided he wanted to make a show as cool as that. Problem is, anime is really expensive and really hard to make (both then and now), and he needed money. This is where all the trouble begins.

After many trials and tribulations, the show is completed, but a bunch of the animation work had to be outsourced to another company called Tatsunoko Productions and, when time came to pay the piper, they came up short. So Tatsunoko renegotiated the contract with Big West (the company bankrolling Studio Nue) and shrewdly secured the lucrative rights to international distribution and merchandising, because apparently this is a thing you can do.

Super Dimensional Fortress Macross goes on to become a pretty big hit in Japan.

II. WHAT IF WE TAKE THREE DIFFERENT SHOWS AND STAPLE THEM TOGETHER

It's 1985, and this American dude named Carl Macek had just watched some anime and was so blown away he figured he could make lots of money selling a dubbed version to white people. He was right.

The production company he worked for, Harmony Gold, got the rights to that show from the company which held those rights: Tatsunoko Productions. Problem is, American tv stations had a minimum required episode count for a broadcast run, which SDF Macross by itself did not meet. So Macek's big idea was to grab two other unrelated Mech shows (Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber Mospeada) and edit them together into one continuous long show.

As you can imagine, the best part of Robotech is the start, which is pretty much just a dubbed SDF Macross, but to be fair to Macek his rewrites to make all the other shows fit together mostly work, even if for some reason there's now an inexplicable space flower that powers robots? or something?!? that wasn't in the original shows. Macek would later leave Harmony Gold to found his own studio, which imported and made dubs for lots of Japanese anime, like Studio Ghibli movies and Akira. He's sometimes attributed as the man who launched the Western Anime boom.

III. THE ARTIST FORMERLY KNOWN AS BATTLEDROIDS

It's also 1985, and Jordan Weisman is a man cursed to watch his life's work be crushed to dust repeatedly in front of him, by forces of capital and finance far too powerful for him to confront. He doesn't know that yet. All he knows is that he's at some random trade show, that he's holding some really cool model kits in his hands, and he's got an idea for a rad boardgame.

Weisman's company, FASA, secures the rights (or so they think) for the images of these cool mechs (from the Japanese anime Fang of the Sun Dougram, Crusher Joe and, you guessed it, SDF Macross) from a company called Twentieth Century Imports, which imported them from Japan from a model kit manufacturer called Nitto, which got the rights to make the model kits for the Japanese market from various anime studios, among them Studio Nue and Big West. Supposedly TCI could do this, but I won't bury the lede- it's the 1980's and no one can fucking keep track of international distribution rights, so actually they can't, but FASA won't find out about this for a few years.

Anyway Weisman publishes the boardgame, and names it BATTLEDROIDS. He gets sued by George Lucas, and is forced to change the name to BATTLETECH.

IV. CARTOON WARS

It's 1995 and everything's hunky dory.

Macross had a mega-smash hit movie (Do You Remember Love, it's a classic, I highly recommend) and a sequel OVA series called Macross Plus. It's really well received, and the crew that made Macross Plus will go on to make a little show called Cowboy Bebop.

Robotech's... doing ok, I guess? They tried to continue the show with a direct sequel season but it got canceled after three episodes, and they did some deals to get some toys made.

Battletech is doing gangbusters, because they've got a Saturday morning cartoon show (YOU DARE TO REFUSE MY BATCHALL!?!) and one of those newfangled electronic videogames called MECHWARRIOR 2.

But Battletech isn't the only Mech Saturday Morning Cartoon show in town, and the West ain't big enough for the both of them. (The other show is ExoSquad. I'm not going talk about this bit player cos this post is long enough already.)

To cut a long story short, Playmates tries to James Somerton a Mech for ExoSquad, so FASA rightfully sues (the Mad Cat really was one of their best original designs), but because Playmates was making the Robotech toys for Harmony Gold, HG gets wind of Battletech's use of it's IP and takes legal action. FASA settles the lawsuit out of court cause, um, well, yeah. It's 1995 and no one can fucking keep track of international distribution rights.

The immediate result is that FASA removes the Macross designs (and to be safe they remove ALL non-original ip designs) from their published work- these mechs gain the moniker "The Unseen". Ultimately the legal fees incurred from all these lawsuits would prove too much for the small boardgame publisher (even with their saturday morning cartoon and videogames), and sadly FASA goes under in 2001. The rights to MECHWARRIOR get sold to Microsoft.

V. ITALIAN PRIME MINISTER SILVIO BERLUSCONI

Ok, so for this part of the story to make sense, you need to know two things.

1. Harmony Gold is actually a real estate/ip holding company, not a film/tv production company

2. It was founded by Frank Agrama to help his buddy Silvio Berlusconi commit tax fraud

So it's 1998, and Harmony Gold is threatening to sue anyone who even so much as thinks to import anything Macross related from Japan. To quote from a cease-and-desist letter:

"Harmony Gold's exclusive rights extend, without limitation, to the distribution of the Macross television series and the right to create and authorize the sale of merchandise based on such series."

See, by this time Macross has basically become a franchise. Kawamori's made an entire sequel show, Macross 7, about Space John Lennon battling space vampires with the power of pacifism and rock and roll, in his sick guitar controlled transforming red jet fighter robot, but no one in the West is going to be able to see it till 2021 at the earliest, and the reason is Harmony Gold.

(The other reason is that it released 3 months before Evangelion and um, yeah got kinda overshadowed.)

Harmony Gold is interpreting it's contract with Tatsunoko to claim that it has the sole rights to produce sequels to SDF Macross, and not, like, the guy who created it, cos he sold the rights or something in the 80's and who the fuck can keep track of international distribution rights. For it's part, Tatsunoko is happy to play along, in order to dispute the rights to Macross and try wrest control away from Big West.

Big West and Tatsunoko go to court in 2000.

Tatsunoko v Big West gets resolved in 2003, with the rights outlined as, well, how I described them earlier. Studio Nue (and thus Big West) owns all the original designs for the characters, mecha, and resulting story; while Tatsunoko has international distribution rights for the original show (SDF-Macross) and merchandise.

But nothing Macross makes it West for the next 20 years, because Harmony Gold basically plugs it's ears and pretends nothing happened, and that Japanese Court rulings don't apply to international distribution issues. Kawamori doesn't want to risk legal action in the event that an American Court rules unfavorably.

So instead of getting the excellent Macross Frontier, Western fans get the hot steaming pile of doodoo that's The Shadow Chronicles (Harmony Gold attempt at a sequel).