Robotech Heading to Big Screen, Starring Toby Maguire 236
dominique_cimafranca writes "Classic anime cult favorite "Robotech" may be next for the big screen live action treatment, if recent news from SciFi.com's SCI FI Wire is to be believed. Tobey Maguire will produce and may star in the film. The article says 'Warner Brothers Pictures picked up the rights to Robotech, which features giant robots known as mechas. Maguire is producing through his Maguire Entertainment banner and is eyeing the lead role in what the studio plans as an SF franchise a la Paramount's hit Transformers.'" I wonder if they'll go back to the Macross source material when plotting the movie... there's a lot more good substance there then in our version.
GoBots coming to live action... (Score:2, Funny)
As long as he doesn't f-it up along the lines of Spiderman III. Of course, Transformers mostly sucked too. Maybe the higher-level storyline in Robotech will allow for a better movie? Go go Hollywood crap pump!
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NO ONE went to the movie for the storyline. They went to see giant robots fighting. So, with that being the case -- why make a crap story?
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NO ONE went to the movie for the storyline. They went to see giant robots fighting. So, with that being the case -- why make a crap story?
I went to see Megan Fox. don't tell my GF.
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[...]then have blurry, confusing fight scenes which make it really hard to figure out who's fighting who and what the hell's happening?
Transformers is hardly the only culprit here. The "handycam perspective" has been destroying films for years now.
I used to think it was done just so the director could cheap out on the choreography (after all, it doesn't have to be good when the audience can barely see what's happening), but they're so prevalent now, even in big-budget films, that I can only conclude tha
Overfiend coming to live action... (Score:5, Funny)
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(Which er, sucked.)
I don't think it'll be the original version. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't think it'll be the original version. (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't matter.. (Score:2)
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Battletech, was actually the second version of the game. The orignal (which I still have a copy of) was called Battledroids. Both came after Robotech (well, actually after the japanese version - Macross), which itself was likely influenced by such shows as Battle of the planets, Star Blazers, and Voltron. (all of which are the American names for Japanese series, often totally unrelated to the storylines of the american versions)
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat [wikipedia.org]
Yeah, honestly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever.
Posing the question is tantamount to trolling on the front page.
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How is that any different than the vast majority of any Hollywood produced films based upon any previously written storyline? They always change the ending and fuck up a good bit of the story along the way and it's part of why wa
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Not always, though. The movie "Fight Club" was better than the book. "Master and Commander" took a lot of liberties but was an admirable representation of the source material. The "Godfather" movies were WAY b
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The last major American toy company to be involved with the production of a Robotech series, Matchbox, had to pull out of the Sentinels production due to the rising yen and as a result the show's production failed. Si
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Actually (AFAIK), the last major toy company involved in producing Robotech toys was Playmates Toys, who ran a fairly complete series of Robotech figures at reasonable prices under the Exosquad label in the 1990s. So says the VF-1S Veritech and Male Zentraedi Power Armor standing on my desk.
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Thank you for mentioning Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and I'll raise you Jaws.
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I really don't have any hopes, but it should be possible if they tried or cared. That's the problem, they really can't care.
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Presumably in Japan, they get the same things, except the villain gets the love circle, where upon he (or it, as the case may be) engages in non consensual tentacle sex with many underage girls each with strangely large innocent eyes. Lollipops and cute pink dresses are optional. The villain entity, being unsure which human orifice
More info leaked (Score:2, Funny)
As big an RT fan as I am... (Score:4, Insightful)
OOOH! AHHG! YES!
But another part of me is wondering how well this is going to translate into live action. And whether or not it's going to wind up stepping all over the beloved (though flawed) series that introduced so many people to anime.
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Minmay's music is more like trying bile flavored rat-poison for the first time!
Talk about a way to ruin a perfectly good action-adventure cartoon.
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kyuun kyuun kyuun kyuun
watashi no kare ha pairotto
kirari tette kyuu kouka
goo to fukashi te kyuujoushou
nagaku o o hiku hikoukigumo de
ookina haato ga kasane te futatsu
aoi oozora rabu sain
I love you
You love me ?
dakedo kare ttara watashi yori
jibun no hikouki ni o netsu na no
kyuun kyuun kyuun kyuun
watashi no kare ha pairotto
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Stage lights.. flashing! The feeling smashing! This is my time to be a star!!!!
Re:As big an RT fan as I am... (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing that they absolutely need: an orchestra.
One thing they can do without in a movie, but which was crucial to the series: a narrator.
I almost want to say the first arc could be made into a trilogy by itself. The discovery, development, training, the first fold, being lost, death, first contact(s), spies, micronization, destruction, reconstruction, more destruction, etc are going to be hard to squeeze into a single movie, even if it turns into "Dances with Bretai" and is 3 hours long. The main problem I had with The Sentinels was that we were introduced to a whole new alien race, find out they are bad, and see them defeated in the span of 90 minutes. While I'm sure part of it is latent Comic Book Guy "It was better when I was 8 years old" feelings, I'm pretty sure they would have taken 5 episodes of introduction and explanation for me to care that anything happened to them.
For some reason, when thinking about the Mospedia chapter, I keep thinking of the danger room from X-Men III. Mostly, the scrapyards.
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Still, different good or different bad?
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With the timeline of the series, it would be very difficult to handle the necessary exposition otherwise.
Even the lamest narrator is preferable to the Asimovian-style dialogues that plague SF movies otherwise.
Even so, I cannot help but be skeptical about this effort, even if they restricted themselves to the Macross 'age'.
Cramming the sto
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Oh, you said 3 movies for each chapter... nevermind.
flaws are good (Score:2)
Take Red Dwarf. The first three series were filmed on cheap sets, with minimal budgets, and, well, the props were mostly crap. And yet the result was pure gold. Never before had I encountered something so funny that I almost pissed myself laughing.
The problem arise when people with big budgets try to recapture that, it never seems to work. In the case of Red Dwarf the final three series were well funded, had lots of resources, and the result was at be
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Part of me is going:
OOOH! AHHG! YES!
But another part of me is wondering how well this is going to translate into live action. And whether or not it's going to wind up stepping all over the beloved (though flawed) series that introduced so many people to anime.
I'm going to spoil it for you: this movie's gonna go down like slugs on toast. There's no way it's going to be good from an objective point of view. There's also no way it will be subjectively as good, either. I was a kid when I first encountered Robotech. I encountered it when I was like nine or ten. It appealed to me at first because it was animated and had transforming robots. But once I got into the story, holy shit. Love, loss, death, consequences, this was not just some Transformers knock-off. Why di
This is heresy! (Score:5, Funny)
Videogame Attract Mode (Score:2, Offtopic)
What I want is PS3 videogames that have a long, detailed "attract mode" [wikipedia.org]: a script that runs the game through its paces. Once someone has "solved" these games, there isn't any reason that a script showing how it's played through shouldn't be available. I'd love to leave my big screen TV set play
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Bert
Who has someone in India to run his lava lamp.
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MAME? (Score:2)
Angband borg screensaver (Score:2)
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What I want is PS3 videogames that have a long, detailed "attract mode": a script that runs the game through its paces. Once someone has "solved" these games, there isn't any reason that a script showing how it's played through shouldn't be available.
Sure there is -- those are games meant to be played, not movies meant to be watched.
If you consider them a work of art at all, then you should respect the artist's intention. Metroid Prime:3, for example, has a first encounter with metroids that got me on the edge of my seat--but that would be completely missing in a scripted play. Heck, it'd be completely missing if I just recorded the signal of me playing and sent that to you. the game was meant to be played.
OTOH, you mentioned a PS3. Which is probab
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I don't know what it is that makes you think a PS3 isn't for playing games, unless you've got some kind of Xbox prejudice. But then, I did buy it to experiment with Linux on Cell. So the "art" I want to use it for is just a bonus.
Oh, and the thing cost me $550. And it's a damn good DVD player.
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plural (Score:4, Informative)
Besides that, a Robotech live-action with today's 3D animation will absolutely rock! It'd be hard to pack into 2 hours, but I'd like to see some of the 2nd and 3rd Robotech series (and/or Macross Plus) mecha involved, since they look so cool.
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A moose bit my sister once (Score:2)
"Mecha" not "mechas". The same way that "deers" or "mooses" are incorrect. One mecha or many mecha, there is no S at the end.
Except that "deers" and "mooses", you know, actually exist.
Welcome to the 21st century!
You have your actual, crummy mecha, land walker [youtube.com].
A hint of what all-terrain robot legs can do with a robot donkey [youtube.com].
And mechanical monsters are a cultural inevitability, ask robosaurus [youtube.com].
The Source Material (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, with Warner Bros. in the fray now, they might actually work out the IP rights, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
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As I understand it, Harmony Gold is free to do things like continue selling the original Robotech show, toys base
Macross source (Score:4, Interesting)
A number of "Robotech" movies were planned, all canceled. This is one of those cases where I feel the fans suffered by a company holding onto to their intellectual property far too long without actually using it.
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Robotech, meanwhile, had a sequel in The Sentinels, but it died. Nothing
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There have actually been a number of follow-ups to Macross (though it's no MS Gundam). There was Macross: Do You Remember Love (basically the movie version of the show), Macross II (which no one liked, and isn't considered in-canon, IIRC), Macross Plus, Macross 7, and the prequel, Macross Zero. And some little things like Flashback 2012. Personally, I'd suggest watching Macross Plus and Macross Zero. The others aren't really that good.
Yes, there were follow-ups to Macross, but not really for Robotech with apparently "The Sentinels" which was canned as a series and reworked into film length. But again that was 20 years ago. There were some ideas slated for Robotech not nothing ever completed.
To me more clear, Macross is a different animal to Robotech. Macross centered around the idea that culture is the most powerful force. This is even apparent in Macross 7. Macross Plus while released in English isn't really apart of Robotech.
Most
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Again, check out Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles, which came out earlier this year. The DVD is like $20 on Amazon.
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How much did Transformers make this summer? (Score:2)
Such a big difference in story lines would make it difficult to integrate
The Transformers movie is about an incoherent macguffin, and apparently all those scientific progress the germans and russians were doing in the 20th century were actually reversed engineered by a secret US government agency by studying a frozen alien robot kept in california and never thawed nor disassembled.
It's Hollywood kid: fuck the story line, it's gonna have cars, babes and lots of explosions, and the protoculture will be a macguffin of all-spark proportions.
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Macross was, is and will ALWAYS be better.
How will this film be marketed in Japan where they only know of Macross?
The best thing about Robotech for me, as it is part of my childhood, the voices, themesong and the names... other than that.. i prefer Macross, but Robotech the tv series will always have a place in my heart.
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Interviewing Harmony Gold rep tonight (Score:4, Informative)
But a movie is only a couple of hours (Score:2)
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I think it'll be the beginning of the story, when the SDF1 crashed the Earth, and the first Zentraedi attacks. My prediction is that it'll end up in a strategic victory (i.e. Earth isn't destroyed... for now) in the middle of the storyline, of course, AFTER the SDF1 is teleported to Pluto.
Since when ... (Score:2)
It's clearly a clone of Transformers, which was about as shit as you get. So what? Someone decides to copy it because they can't think of anything better?
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It's clearly a clone of Transformers, which was about as shit as you get. So what? Someone decides to copy it because they can't think of anything better?
You are aware the original Macross predates Transformers as well the whole giant robot things is a massive genre of Japanese shows. It's like saying Wedding crashers is just a clone of Rush hour, and blade runner is just a clone of the maltese falcon.
Even if it's a clone, it's still nice to have more geek fare like thi
Is it just me (Score:2)
But god damn it his voice is pissing me off. I'll be ok if he stars in this movie as long as he doesn't speak.
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Not just you. (Score:2)
keep it real (Score:3, Insightful)
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besides there probably rewrite that part so poor innocent American audiences aren't shocked by it. A hero dies...Never!! I also doubt there will be a war going on in America when the Super Fortress crash lands either. Or accidentally wiping out most of Toronto. The heros will be more two dimensional then when drawn and the Zentradi will be faceless evil aliens.
Sleds (Score:2)
Just to spin this waay off track, I remembered one of the funniest Wayne & Shuster comedy bits I'd ever seen. --They re-did Citizen Kane as a half hour comedy sketch, and in the second scene they had the reporter agonizing over the question, "What was Rosebud? What did he mean?" The fellow he was talking to shrugged and said, "Maybe it was the name of his sled."
It totally cracked me up. Twice, in fact. --The first time because I'd never even heard of Cit
RoboTech ... will be right back! (Score:2)
So, which is the movie going to be based on? I suspect the 1st war.
I've been meaning to buy/rent/borrow/catch on tv all the episodes some time to re-acquaint myself with the old series...
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I was introduced to (good) Anime via Robotech, which was on for half an hour every day after school. I was quite young, and did not start to pay attention to it until much later in the series. That being said, I liked the 1st War, never really understood the 2nd war, and fell in love with the Invid invasion of the 3rd war.
I do see the film as being a good means of separating the Macross and Robotech franchises.
I didn't really have the benefit of seeing The Masters(2nd war) and The New Generation(3rd war) until an adult, and to be honest I found The Masters UNWATCHABLE. For my nieces and nephews I went out of my way to buy the ADV Films [advfilms.com] version of Macross.
Truthfully, the three wars _could_ be done in 3 movies. Think "Lord of the Rings," as it was difficult but translated to the silver screen successfully. But it would take somebody who truly loves the series to do it right.
Well, Macross - Do you remember love? (movie one) was pretty much the 36 episode Macross saga shoved into 2 hours. It worked OK, though it was a bit of a stretch as it w
No singing please (Score:2)
Franchise? (Score:2)
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I'm doubtful this will end up going anywhere. It's only in development, they don't have a script, it's Tobey's first real movie as a producer, and the guy they've brought on to do the writing is an unknown. Tobey just wants a sweet development paycheck-- after five years alternating between Brett Ratner and the Walchowski brothers to direct, and half-a-dozen "it" girls "attached" for Lynn Minmei, the project will die quietly, with Tobey $5 million richer.
On the other hand, he might get really attached to
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You're making me, Ang Lee. They won't like me when I'm Ang Lee.
Oh yeah (Score:2)
Bring it on! (Score:3, Insightful)
Tread carefully... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Of course they'll change the valkyre! It's an F-14 for crying out loud! It looks dated. If they base the new valkyri
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Pffft. You must not have been following the debate in the Transformers community before that movie was released this summer.
Unlike, say, G.I. Joe, Transformers has been in more-or-less continuous toy production since Beast Wars. Several of the recent comics are considered near-canon, and several collectible toys have been made just based on "The War Within" comics. Deba
Good! I am now waiting for Star Blazers! (Score:2)
Hm. (Score:2)
The concept is just so. . . weird, it could only fit in an animation from Japan.
Think: Alien vessel crashes to Earth. What is the government's logical response?
1. Hush it up and give it to the tech boys in Area 51.
2. Put it into active service as the Earth's flag ship despite the fact that half the vessel hasn't even been properly explored.
Part of the mystique of Anime for Westerners stems, I thin
Amazing coicidence (Score:2)
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They were knights (the game was loosely medieval-themed) and yeah you're right [gamerflicks.com] there is supposed to be a movie. Weird. Paramount is looking at it, the article says.
Still, once Paramount passes on the idea and they can't find another major production house to pick it up, it'll probably go direct-to-DVD. Maybe kill off an evening with it that way.
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Hence, "joust". Some people need the obvious thrown in their face to get it across.
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At the top of my head:
Macross Saga
Zhang Ziyi as Lynn Minmei
Jennifer Aniston as Lisa Hayes
Yup. I agree. Owen Wilson as Roy Fokker
Topher Grace as Max Sterling
Claudia Grant? Halle Berry!
And if ever...
Robotech Masters
Claire Danes as Dana Sterling
Wilmer Valderrama as Bowie
Keanu Reeves as Zor
Robotech Invid
Matt Damon as Scott Bernard
Orlando Bloom as Lancer (aka Yellow dancer)
Reese Witherspoon as Rook Bartley
That's all I can think of now...
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Zhang Ziyi as Lynn Minmei
God you're high. Unless Minmei gets to kick some ass... nahhh. Of course, I'm in favor of Zhang Ziyi (sp?) in anything, but this doesn't look like a movie for her... wait, Miriya. Yeah, cast ZZ as Miriya. That would add the distinctive flavor of awesome to the film. And, if memory serves, we'd get to see ZZ painted green.
Yup. I agree. Owen Wilson as Roy Fokker
Ok. He's got enough experience now that he can probably carry a leadership/mentor role. In the movie
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Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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