The Official Macross Delta Anime Thread Mk I

[SonicSP]

Maybe their relationship isn't good.

[Mafty]

That may well be the case ,and it unfortunately wouldn't be the first time for the Franchise that behind the scenes business issues affect things.

[pirx]

Well from technical standpoint Disney+ is more advanced, especially app while Chrunchyroll's app is ... well clumsy and has issue. Plus they seem to lack technical capacity to ensure stream is good quality worldwide.

[Mafty]

Crunchyroll is my favorite streaming site, but they do have technical issues from time to time, so that may well be a factor. Plus Disney has had issue with various shows and movies underperforming (particularly involving Marvel and Star Wars) so maybe they thought getting franchise like this would help boost viewership ( I'm not sure how popular Macross is as a whole worldwide compared to the other franchises, but It has been around for 42 years, and has a strong dedicated fanbase in numerous countries, so it definitely seems like good business)

Granted this is just a guess, without a Business Document we won't know.


on a similar note , who exactly has the merchandising rights? I mean like model kits and stuff? Will that go to Disney? or is it part of another company?

[Seto Kaiba]

Well from technical standpoint Disney+ is more advanced, especially app while Chrunchyroll's app is ... well clumsy and has issue. Plus they seem to lack technical capacity to ensure stream is good quality worldwide.

... I think you might have the names backwards there.

Disney+'s app is an embarrassingly bare-bones application from one of the biggest media giants in the world.

Crunchyroll was bought by Sony specifically for its app and streaming infrastructure, since what they had via their acquisition of Funimation was an embarrassing disaster with most of the same problems and technical limitations as Disney+.

on a similar note , who exactly has the merchandising rights? I mean like model kits and stuff? Will that go to Disney? or is it part of another company?

For now, it's unclear... the merchandise we're seeing seems to just be distributors importing existing products from Japan instead of developing any new products domestically. (Which is kind of what you'd expect, given that the bulk of Macross merchandising is character goods, music, and plamodels.)

[Mafty]

It's neat to hear more positivity regarding Crunchyroll, (they do at time have issues with stuff not always playing, but that's usually fixed fairly quickly). I 'm not a very technical person , so I'm unsure how exactly these services work on a technical level, I've just found Crunchyroll has a very good selection.

[Seto Kaiba]

It's neat to hear more positivity regarding Crunchyroll, (they do at time have issues with stuff not always playing, but that's usually fixed fairly quickly). I 'm not a very technical person , so I'm unsure how exactly these services work on a technical level, I've just found Crunchyroll has a very good selection.

Crunchyroll won the (legitimate) anime streaming war because it was the only show in town with an app that actually worked right. It was fairly basic for a long time, with dubs being treated as separate streams from subs, but it was extremely stable and efficient and it worked well on on almost any platform it was ported to. They did two massive overhauls of their service, one in the mid-2010s and one over the last two years, which added a lot of quality-of-life improvements and then merged the dub and sub options into a single stream while also merging Funimation's library into the system.

Their main competitors - Funimation Now and HIDIVE - were just tragic.

Funimation Now was such a train wreck that it couldn't maintain a consistent video quality level for more than about ten minutes even on the highest commercially available internet speeds. I had a multi-gigabit connection at the time I had a Funimation Now subscription and I was still stuck with a video quality that looked like a 240p bootleg half the time. Not to mention pausing an unpausing could desync the subtitles from the video and if you paused for more than a few minutes it would stop buffering the stream when you hit "Play" again. It was NO surprise when Sony threw Funimation's whole system in the trash after they decided to merge Funimation and Crunchyroll.

It's only been like two weeks since HIDIVE finally modernized their app to the level Crunchyroll was at in 2017. They had problems with streams not showing subs at all on a lot of devices, with app crashes, wild quality fluctuations, and freezes. It'd almost be worth the cost of a subscription now, if only they actually had anything worth watching in their catalog besides thirty year old robot shows and ecchi.

Disney+'s service is stable as a rock, but it's REALLY basic. You can watch things, but you can't see your viewing history, remove titles from your viewing history, and a host of other really basic functions most streaming services have had licked since like 2010. (I was amused and horrified to discover, after my parents put kids's shows on for their dog using my account, that the only way to clear your viewing history and reset your recommendations is DELETING YOUR ENTIRE ACCOUNT.)

[False Prophet]

Did Bandai get the rights for every Macross toys after Takatoku Toys went under, or did they only get the VF-1? And how the hell did that specific license end up in the hands of Hasbro for them to make Jetfire?

Reading the story of bankrupt Japanese toy manufacturers in the 80s and it gives me the vibe of a mini-economic bubble to the bigger economic bubble that was Japanese real estate at the time. Otaku nowadays like to lament about the death of the mecha genre (old meme, I know), but there is no way even the most dedicated global fanbase could sustain the pace and the investment of early 80s mecha anime releases. Especially when for every Macross you've got a dud like Sasuraiger.

That said, between the movie and Macross II, was there any new Macross toy being released? And it was crazy to remember that Macross II and Macross Plus were just two years apart from each other. Did it take a long time for them to create a script and do pre-production for Macross Plus, while preparing for Macross 7?

[Seto Kaiba]

Did Bandai get the rights for every Macross toys after Takatoku Toys went under, or did they only get the VF-1?

As far as we know, Bandai bought the Macross license and most if not all of Takatoku's Macross toy molds in the liquidation.

Because of the collapse of the Japanese toy industry into a virtual duopoly controlled by Bandai and Takara (later Takara-Tomy), the license has been with Bandai ever since though other licenses like model kits have occasionally landed in Takara-Tomy's lap (e.g. the TOMYTEC line of Macross Delta kits).

And how the hell did that specific license end up in the hands of Hasbro for them to make Jetfire?

Essentially the same way that the BattleTech/MechWarrior franchise ended up using Macross designs...

The "Generation 1" Transformers toy line was essentially a repackaging of a bunch of different pre-existing toys from other toy lines. Hasbro had partnered with Bandai's rival Takara and the foundation of the Transformers toy line was essentially repackaged toys from two different toy lines that Takara had developed: Diaclone and Microchange. But to pad out the catalog, Hasbro employees (most notably marketeer Bob Prupis) went to various toy expos looking for Japanese robot toys that could be incorporated into Hasbro's new series. If they saw some promising toys, they would reach out to the manufacturer (who at the time was only really selling those goods in Japan) and offer to buy the rights to sell those toys under their own product line outside Japan... with some of those agreements coming with prohibitions on selling those toys under Hasbro's new brand inside of Japan. In a few cases, Hasbro acquired molds for robot toys from companies that went out of business instead. The Macross VF-1 toy created by Takatoku was one of the designs that was scouted before the bankruptcy and would later be licensed from Bandai for limited use in the US.

(Where this differs from what FASA did is that FASA never actually bothered to do their due diligence, and just assumed the company that had been importing the Macross plamodels from Imai and Arii - a firm called Twentieth Century Imports - had the rights to the designs. Their assumption ended up getting them sued when they learned that TCI's business had been grey market and that the actual exclusive merchandising rights were in the hands of someone else who was very unhappy with what they did.)

Reading the story of bankrupt Japanese toy manufacturers in the 80s and it gives me the vibe of a mini-economic bubble to the bigger economic bubble that was Japanese real estate at the time. Otaku nowadays like to lament about the death of the mecha genre (old meme, I know), but there is no way even the most dedicated global fanbase could sustain the pace and the investment of early 80s mecha anime releases. Especially when for every Macross you've got a dud like Sasuraiger.

That's the thing... success spawns imitators. After Yamato convinced sponsors that serious drama could be a thing, Gundam became that sleeper hit that created the real robot arm of the mecha genre, and Macross became the first real instant hit in the genre, the sponsors of those shows and a host of their competitors all wanted to see if lightning could strike thrice and jumped on the bandwagon. So you had tons of studios in the anime industry developing their own original mecha titles because mecha was trendy and titles like Gundam and Macross were making bank on toy sales.

It's similar to what happened with the isekai genre after it made the jump from web novels to light novels and then to anime. You had a couple foundational titles that set the tone and made a lot of money (e.g. Overlord, KonoSuba, Yojo Senki, and Re:Zero) and then it was a mad rush as the studios scrambled to license similar stories for themselves in the hopes of being the next to strike it big and many authors turned their attention to the genre with increasingly unoriginal takes.

That said, between the movie and Macross II, was there any new Macross toy being released? And it was crazy to remember that Macross II and Macross Plus were just two years apart from each other. Did it take a long time for them to create a script and do pre-production for Macross Plus, while preparing for Macross 7?

After Macross: Do You Remember Love? there was a lull because there wasn't any new material coming out apart from Flash Back 2012.

Macross Plus spun out of a non-Macross project Kawamori was working on in 1985 called Advanced Valkyrie. The sponsor backing it ultimately pulled out, and the project would later go through several more iterations before splitting into several unrelated projects: Macross Plus, which took the basic story of Advanced Valkyrie, and Air Cavalry Chronicles, which continued developing the designs from the Advanced Valkyrie concept into the prototypes of some that would be further refined for use in Macross 7 while its own original story would undergo a genre change and become the fantasy series The Vision of Escaflowne.

[False Prophet]

After the Sharon Apple incident, did Myung suffer from any consequence? Didn't Isamu get kicked around in the military because of it?

[Seto Kaiba]

After the Sharon Apple incident, did Myung suffer from any consequence?

Myung's life after the events of Macross Plus has not been elaborated upon in any source I know of.

Macross Chronicle suggests it's possible she went back into the music industry, but leaves the question open-ended so it's not clear if she did or not.

She was almost certainly summoned to give evidence at the military inquest into the Sharon Apple Incident, given that she was a senior member of the Venus Sound Factory's Sharon Apple project team, the last member of the program's leadership left alive after Marj Gueldoa murdered Raymond Marley and committed suicide, and the model for Sharon's emotion program. It's unlikely she would've faced any real consequences though, as she wasn't aware of Marj's plans to use illegal bio-neural hardware in Sharon and was basically a bystander/victim in the incident. Even if she had done something illegal, the military coverup of the incident would probably have spared her any significant consequences the way it did for Isamu.

Didn't Isamu get kicked around in the military because of it?

Not as such.

Isamu had already spent several years being kicked around the New UN Forces prior to the events of Macross Plus because of his reckless and insubordinate behavior. The reassignment to the Test Flight Center at New Edwards in Macross Plus's first episode was basically the last time that we know of where Isamu received a disciplinary reassignment.

After the Sharon Apple incident, the New UN Government and New UN Forces took various actions to minimize or cover up their involvement in the Sharon-type AI's development and very public rampage. Isamu seems to have benefitted from the military's desire to avoid a public scandal over it, since admitting that a test pilot stole a next-gen Valkyrie from a top security facility and independently broke through Earth's orbital defenses would have been as damaging as admitting that the rogue AI that went rogue and mind controlled an entire city was a military prototype meant for use on emigrant fleets. They couldn't prosecute the hero of the day for what the crimes that'd put him in a position to save the day without exposing things they were actively trying to cover up and putting themselves in a politically difficult position. So they seem to have decided on a more subtle, ironic punishment for him. They promoted him and set him on a course for a desk job like Millard's, which ultimately drove him to retire and continue as a reservist while working for SMS, effectively making him Someone Else's Problem without having to dishonorably discharge him in ways that might draw scrutiny.

[Mafty]

Is there any information of Isamu and Myung's relationship following the series? Do they stay together?

[Seto Kaiba]

Is there any information of Isamu and Myung's relationship following the series? Do they stay together?

None.

There's no mention of Myung's post-OVA activities at all, and Isamu is only mentioned in three very specific contexts:

• As a Major in the New UN Spacy Reserve who was tapped by Shinsei Industry to serve as the YF-24 Evolution's test pilot to demonstrate the next-generation Valkyrie to the New UN Forces top brass c.2057. (Macross Chronicle.)
• As an unnamed reservist Major who takes the YF-24 Evolution prototype into combat with the Vajra when they attack Eden while under the control of Grace O'Connor in 2059. (Macross Frontier TV novelization.)
• As a SMS pilot attached to the Macross Quarter-class carrier Crazy Horse who piloted a custom VF-19 into combat with the Vajra and the forces of Macross Galaxy. (Macross Frontier: the Wings of Goodbye and its novelization.)

(The temporally-displaced version of 2040 Isamu that appeared on Uroboros in 2060 doesn't count for this purpose.)

We have no real idea of what he got up to between 2040 and 2057. Only that, by 2057 he was a reservist instead of active duty and that by 2059 he was working for SMS as a pilot and had cajoled Dr. Neumann into providing him a custom VF-19 to use while working for SMS.

[pirx]

Found this old article from 2022:
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2 ... me/.187292
Still waiting...

[Seto Kaiba]

Found this old article from 2022:
https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2 ... me/.187292
Still waiting...

Shouldn't be too much longer, I expect they'll want the home video releases to be available in-market not long after the streaming starts.

[pirx]

I still have first relase Macross TV DVDs from RightStuff although they are Crunchyroll Store now
I guess Crunchyroll acquired them recently.

The hoops i had to jump through before Right Stuff acknowledged my credit card for purchase... bank stament, card scan etc etc etc... those were times...

[False Prophet]

How good are the Arcadia models? The ones released by the new Arcadia, not the original company. I vaguely remember reading some positive reviews about them around a decade ago, but how are they compared to Bandai's offerings?

[Seto Kaiba]

How good are the Arcadia models? The ones released by the new Arcadia, not the original company. I vaguely remember reading some positive reviews about them around a decade ago, but how are they compared to Bandai's offerings?

I've never been much of a toy collector, but my understanding-by-proxy from friends in the fandom who do indulge more fully in that hobby is that the Arcadia Macross line and Bandai's DX Chogokin Macross line are basically the two best toy lines the franchise has.

I've heard it said that Arcadia tends to be more accurate to the animation while Bandai DX tends to be more... posable?

I've got a few from each, but I've never really compared them myself because I don't have any fodder for a like-to-like comparison. For a good while, Bandai's DX line was focusing on the new designs that were coming from Macross Frontier, Macross Delta, etc. while Arcadia was looking backwards to older designs like the VF-0, SV-51, VF-4, etc.

[Mafty]

So as of the 23rd Macross Delta will broadcast in South Korea, and Frontier is currently broadcasting.

Is there any word on when this year Disney+ will stream the series?

[Seto Kaiba]

I don't think there has been an announcement of a date yet.