mech798 wrote:Star Trek has a metric ton of "alternate settings" with the IP holders being fine with that, simply stating that canon is what you see in the movies.
Yes and no? Ever since Gene Roddenberry's falling out with
Star Trek Star Fleet Technical Manual author Franz Joseph in the mid-70's,
Star Trek has had a canon policy that only what is in the
Star Trek TV shows and movies is canon.
Licensed novels, comics, games, etc. have been non-canon since that point with no real effort to codify them beyond "non-canon". With no real coordination between authors prior to the 2000s, most authors simply abandoned any attempt at inter-story continuity and made their stories as stand-alone episodic as most of
Star Trek was at the time. Some novels, comics, or games do describe their own alternate settings but because of the heavily episodic nature of the beast they're never really referred to in those terms because they're stand-alone non-canon stories. It wasn't really until after 2000 that there was anything like a recognized alternate setting existing on an informal basis. Even then, there were only the two: the Pocket Books
Star Trek Relaunch novelverse and the setting of
Star Trek Online. The only reason that distinction was drawn is because both were ongoing storylines that were heavily serialized instead of episodic and so different from each other in almost every respect, so keeping them separate from each other and other material was a critical anti-frustration measure if you intended to discuss non-canon
Star Trek material coming out.
mech798 wrote:Disney, while devcanonizing a lot of the EU star wars material, continues to publish it, and has no issue with that separate setting "existing" and of course for the longest time, the star wars IP holders weren't really concerned with the validity of canon, beyond the actual movies.
The whole brouhaha over the old
Star Wars EU was because it was
decanonized, not because of its canon status prior to that.
Disney continues to publish that material because they know even the fans that hate the new trilogy and the franchise's current direction will still buy reprints of that old material... in no small part due to many of them refusing to even acknowledge the validity of the new canon. It's monetizing denialism, it's not really lending any validity to the now non-canon material.
mech798 wrote:For robotech, As bad as some of the products in the 1990s were, at least they were out there. As much as the EBSIS might not work with canon, at least it was out there as part of a growing and popular product line.
That's... kind of at odds with objective reality, to be honest.
Robotech never had a large following. It was a bandwagon-jumper trying to get a piece of Hasbro's
Transformers action, and it entered into a market already glutted by similar merchandise-driven cartoons. Its broadcast ratings were never better than middling and its merchandise lines sold poorly. Its expectations were built around a completely different demographic to the one that was actually watching it, and that hurt it in the near term and the long run. Efforts to get a movie and sequel series out met with failure due to mismanagement with a side of poor timing. Its merchandise efforts past that point can best be summed with two words: "Diminishing Returns".
The product lines weren't growing, they were shrinking. Worse, the low quality and inconsistency of what WAS coming out was making those products so contentious that by the time the fanbase went online in the late 90's they were basically little more than fodder for flame wars. The toxicity of the fanbase, combined with the poor quality of the licensed goods that were all that the franchise had to show for itself, ended up being a prime driver of the steady decline of the already-small fanbase. Palladium's original inclusions like EBSIS were small potatoes compared to some of the nonsense that came from the writers at Eternity/Malibu, Academy, and Antarctic, but it was still in poor taste and enough to drag it into the flame wars alongside the comics and novels.
The comics are probably the most visible indicator of how poorly
Robotech's product line was performing. The sales volumes of
Robotech comics were always low, in indie comic territory, but sales were always on the decline. Of the three
Robotech comics publishers in the 1990's, only one - Malibu Comics - did not see its license revoked because of poor quality and poor sales. That's misleading too, though, because the reason it avoided that fate was it was bought out by Marvel Comics and Marvel decided to drop the
Robotech license for the same reasons. The tenure of each successive licensee got shorter too, before Harmony Gold lost patience with the poor sales performance. Malibu had the license six years, Academy for three years, and Antarctic for two. The reason it looks like the second DC license lasted longer is because the lack of any titles in continuous serialization... it was all short-run limited edition comics.
mech798 wrote:Since HG has started enforcing canon--what have we seen?
Well, the most pertinent answer might be: what haven't we seen? We had one egregiously bad comic that I'm not certain if it was supposed to be canon, not canon, or the result so a bad acid trip given that the time travel and such was closer to a weird Dr. Who episode than rogbotech. We've had a few game books, which died because in canon, there's really not much to do. We had a trickle of HG stuff that eventually died, but even before that ran into the issue of the demands to stick with a canon that was just unfriendly to any kind of campaign.
Now granted ,some of this was due to HG's desperation to avoid touching te most popular era--MAcross, which is probably wh7y the EBSIS was popular since it was the time period where you could play around with veritechs and Rick Hunter as active parts of the game.
That's got more to do with Harmony Gold's own rather unrealistic estimation of
Robotech's prospects than anything.
Harmony Gold rebooted and relaunched the
Robotech franchise in the early 2000s with a specific goal of reinventing
Robotech as a credible sci-fi/mecha anime property. They made a lot of their decisions by copying the best practices of the leaders in their chosen industry. Having an official canon was considered one of them. The problem they ran into is that that ship had already sailed quite a long time ago.
Robotech was too old, too obviously dated, and too saddled with its (and Harmony Gold's) bad reputation to ever be taken seriously. Tommy Yune got his paltry budget for the first episode of the Shadow Saga OVA by selling his bosses on the dream that it would make
Robotech mainstream and popular and that the rest of the project would be funded by investors it attracted from outside. It was a doomed undertaking from the start because he didn't the talent pool to do a proper job of it in-house and he didn't have the money to bring in outside talent to do the job properly for him. The first episode was written in-house, the animation farmed out to a cheap second-string team at a studio that mainly does tweening work for Japanese and American studios, and the voice actor costs were quite high because the returning cast are SAG members.
What we've seen since is the fallout of
Robotech's third and apparently final failure to launch.
Robotech's plans for the future were all predicated on Tommy Yune's promises that the Shadow Saga would be a hit and would transform
Robotech into a mainstream mecha anime title.
When it failed, all those plans went to pieces. They were left with no source of funding for the remaining episodes of the Shadow Saga and it was quietly cancelled in 2007. Plans for future comics and games and so on went unfulfilled because the franchise never raised its profile to attract new licensees. Palladium's 2nd Edition Macross Saga, Masters Saga, and New Generation games were meant to be a holding pattern while they waited for the second Shadow Saga episode that never materialized so they ran out of material. That those settings, when making an effort to actually resemble what's in the series proper, are somewhat barren for RPG purposes wouldn't have mattered quite so much because you were supposed to be getting a big, bold new setting full of space adventure as a result of the Shadow Saga's future developments so it wouldn't have mattered so much. Instead, we ended up revisiting where the franchise was in the 90's when the anything-goes licensing meant a trickle of increasingly poor quality merchandise that only the most dedicated fans were interested in buying. Problem is, there's not nearly as many of those fans as in the 90's, so the returns continue to diminish making the franchise less appealing to licensees as time goes on.
Now that point has become largely academic, since Harmony Gold has bent the knee and Big West is coming to release all of
Macross and complete
Robotech's long slide into irrelevance.
The reason EBSIS was better-received than some of the other material of the 90's had little to do with its actual merits. Like all of
Robotech's least unsuccessful ventures, the book it was in met with relatively high enthusiasm because it was what we'll call
Macross-adjacent. Most of the
Robotech fandom was only really ever invested in the Macross Saga, which is why it dominates
Robotech's merchandising so utterly. Harmony Gold and its licensees knew this, of course, which is why the vast majority of sequel efforts and licensing are either set during the Macross Saga's events, or prominently feature Macross Saga characters and/or mecha.
Only three of the eight main books in the "1st Edition"
Robotech RPG (#4
Southern Cross, #5
Invid Invasion, and #6
Return of the Masters) and one of the four adventure books (#3
Lancer's Rockers) aren't set during or immediately after the Macross Saga. The
Sentinels books also technically count, since the entire
Sentinels arc is screwing around in close proximity to the continuing adventures of the holdover characters from the Macross Saga.
mech798 wrote:Put simply--canon is highly overrated and often, from a marketing point of view, a terrible idea.
For successful franchises, canon is often an invaluable marketing tool and something nearly essential for retaining a devoted fanbase who want to see continuity between stories and understand how the fictional universe fits together. Canon can sometimes be a powerful selling point in and of itself that can draw attention to new works that wouldn't otherwise be strong enough to stand on their own, or that are disliked by fans but tolerated precisely because of how they fit into canon. To give an example or two,
Gundam ZZ is largely disliked by western audiences but is tolerated precisely due to its place in canon: connecting the beloved
Zeta Gundam up to the nearly-as-beloved
Char's Counterattack.
Gundam Narrative also coasted on canon because of its direct connection to the much better-received
Gundam Unicorn. Canon ultimately saved
Star Trek from a major blow too. The J.J. Abrams movies were originally set to be a reboot, replacing the existing
Star Trek material, but fan backlash saw them retooled into an alternate universe story... which was fortunate, because the new movies turned out to be commercially unsuccessful to the point that their investors pulled out after the third one leaving that branch of the property in limbo.
For unsuccessful franchises and failing media formats, canon can be an albatross around their neck as their existing fans can end up refusing to accept or acknowledge a reboot or retooling of the series aimed at making it appeal to a broader audience.
Robotech falls into this category, where the small but fanatical fanbase refused to accept the reboot and ultimately the attempts to retool it into a property with broader appeal without sacrificing its existing audience failed.
