robotech

Here's what's really aggravating about the whole thing, Johnny.  They DON'T own all the rights to Macross.  They say they do, but they actually don't.  Let me explain.

Harmony Gold owns the footage of the original show, and they own the character names that they created, but the actual character and mech designs are out of their hands.  They can't make derivative work based on any of those old designs.  That's why Shadow Chronicles was almost all Mospeada crap.

And this is what makes their hoarding of the original show so aggravating.  They can't actually use that stuff in new media, but they hoard it so that their precious saga is complete.  And they won't let anyone else take a crack at it.

It was utterly amazing that they allowed ADV to produce an proper English dub of Macross, but it was short-lived, as ADV soon went out of business.  You can't buy it anymore, other than getting used copies on eBay.  And even when it was available, there was virtually no promotion of it.  I wouldn't say Harmony Gold buried it, but they certainly didn't lift any fingers to get the word out.  It truly was, in a literal sense, the very least that they could do.

That Kickstarter disgusts me.  I've heard many interviews with Carl Macek.  They make it sound like they're bringing his dream to life.  The truth is that it was just one thing that they did in the 80s, and he'd moved on and did much more important things later in his career, such as being the head of Streamline Pictures.  He wouldc consult on Robotech from time to time, but he was never involved creatively with the comics or the Jack McKinney novels.

The Robotech that Harmony Gold is making right now has almost certainly nothing to do with what Macek wanted to create back in 1986.  First of all, Sentinels was visioned as a syndicated 65-episode season with five-episode arcs that would play out each week.  It was built around the model of syndication television at that time.  There's no reason to make such a show now.  It's just not going to be the story that Macek envisioned, and if they try to do it that way, they're even dumber than I thought.

I think that Harmony Gold is and always was an IP troll.  They don't really exist for the purpose of making anything.  They hoard IP so that they can make residuals off of things that should have been out of their hands years ago.  The only difference is that everyone once in a while, someone at Harmony Gold gets the itch to do something creative, but it's always short-lived or rarely makes it past a pilot.  They get the dwindling fans excited, and then nothing else ever happens, because it's easier to do nothing and make residuals off of a show that's a quarter century old.

As a bonus, if you want to REALLY get mad at Harmony Gold, I suggest you head over to Talkshoe and find a podcast called Space Station Liberty.  The episode you need to listen to is the Kevin McKeever interview.  He's a little PR shit who came on to answer questions from the fans, except that he spent almost three hours (or so it seemed) talking about Harmony Gold's precious intellectual property and that they own everything.  (...except the stuff owned by Big West, but he didn't want to talk about!)

It was the most aggravating thing I've ever heard.