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Robotech
1985 · TV series · 25 min episodes · 3 seasons
AnimationDramaScience FictionFantasy
Robotech is an 85-episode adaptation of three different anime television series made between 1982-1984 in Japan; the adaptation was aired in 1985. Within the combined and edited story, Robotechnology refers to the scientific advances discovered in an alien starship that crashed on a South Pacific island. With this technology, Earth developed giant robotic machines or mecha to fight three successive extraterrestrial invasions.
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They dubbed and spliced Macross with two other series to get enough episodes to syndicate as “Robotech,” which made it to a local TV station after school.
I always loved the F-14. Top Gun was of course a big reason (and I'm glad they brought it back for the newest film). But before Top Gun, there was Macross (or Robotech in the US). The variable state of the Tomcat influenced the variable state design of VF-1 Vaklyrie fighters in the anime. And I'm sure the AIM-54/AWG-9 Phoenix missle system (with the ability to fire on multiple targets almost at once) influenced the multiple missle launches seen throughout the TV series. Here's a clip I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZazVwBlz9fc
And for those who were wondering where the name comes from, it's based on an early 80s anime, that was show in edited form in the US as the first part of the Robotech tv series:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Dimension_Fortress_Macross
watching every single episode was a priority, because if you miss one, it could be years until you had another chance to see it.
Oh my god, yeah. The S1 and S2 finales of Star Blazers were huge annual events for me for a few years as a small kid.
Robotech was even tougher because there were so many episodes, since it was three totally different series stitched together hahaha. You miss one, you're waiting a looooong time.
In my location in the US in the 70's we had poor TV reception for the station that carried Star Blazers and Speed Racer. (Some combination of our antenna quality and our location.)
It wasn't until cable TV reached my area in the early 1980's that I finally got a taste of anime, in the form of Robotech. Catching every single episode was a priority, because if you miss one, it could be years until you had another chance to see it. (I wasn't rich enough to buy VHS tapes for the series, even if I could find them.)
Culture doesn't need any kind of "official" export. If it is good, it gets discovered, now more than ever in social media. I didn't grow up watching Atom Boy, Voltron, and Robotech because the Japanese government invested in exporting it. Those were pulled into the US by some distributor in the Midwest who discovered them by accident, and decided to have them translated and show on US television.
A lot of KPop and Anime was exported to the US by fans, who free of charge as a labor of love, did translation and distribution. In the 70s, 80s, even 90s, a lot of this happened by an underground distribution network, people would make copies and trade.
Indeed, I grew up in the 70s and 80s watching lots of Hong Kong Kung-fu films, eg Shaw Bros, Golden Harvest, etc. There didn't need to be a "strategic reason" for HK canto films to have atrociously bad translation and dubbing slapped on them and marked to Americans. It was done because someone noticed that Americans loved watching these things.
You're making excuses for the fact that domestic mainland Chinese art is suffering a crisis of creativity caused by the crushing censorship of the state. People only make "safe" art in China. If you make any art that criticizes the establishment, or tells history in a way other than they want it to be seen, you may find yourself punished.
Ask Ai Weiwei. This is not a conducive environment for artistic expression.
Enjoyment of it does rely a tiny bit on knowing the general tropes of "giant robot" anime as it does deconstruct a lot of those.
If you have seen even a few episodes of Robotech/Macross/Gundam that's plenty. Even a bit of Voltron or having seen the movie "Iron Giant" may do.
That being said, if you are familiar with the general idea of "Only this one average/milquetoast/nerdy teenager can save the world for contrived plot reasons" it should still be enjoyable as that's where it dials the deconstruction knob up to 11 the most.
A month or so ago I finally watched the Neon Genesis Evangelion series after hearing about it for more than 20 years. After slogging through a few episodes of predictable awkard-teenagers-pilot-giant-robots-to-save-the-world it finally reveals itself as a stunning exploration into the minds of troubled youth who are, effectively, subjected to a barrage of traumatic crises. It's a deep, rich world with complex characters, all with Herculean responsibilities and human weaknesses.
I'll have to watch Lain now, thanks to your comment.
I enjoy the usual suspects: Akira, Ghost in the Shell (including Standalone Complex), and Cowboy Bebop immensely. I like Robotech, though much of it is nostalgia. But I've found straying from the essentials to be challenging for my very Western tastes.
I tried to watch Stein's Gate and thought it was very clever, but the awkward romance and over-the-top characteristics of the main character were a bit too much. Knights of Sidonia and Attack on Titan got too weird, too quickly. I was too old for Dragonball. There's a lot of Western-focused, Japanese-animated options out there, but they almost universally lack the depth of their anime counterparts.
I'd love some recommendations if you have any, whether they be newer stuff or classics that I've overlooked.
TNG had the right number of multi-episode arcs and recurring characters (especially Q). Also every season finale was a cliffhanger two-parter with the first episode of the next season. Unlike TOS, it felt like things that happened in the episodic TNG episodes (heh) actually mattered in the larger world, even when it wasn't directly a part of a story arc.
DS9 is my favorite though, partially because of the story arc. It was also done quite brilliantly, with the story arc always being present, but not really solidifying into something substantial right away. This along with Babylon 5 were amazing. Prior to these shows, the only television sci-fi I had ever seen with a story arc was Robotech. Battlestar Galatica (original) had something of an arc, but was more like TNG.
TV was very mysterious back then. I would not see most of the episodes in a series as I had no way to record anything nor any idea when they were on besides having a TV Guide (which we never bought) or the local newspaper tv listings which got thrown out more often than not. TV was more of a random access experience back then. You got what you got. Saturday mornings were pretty awesome as far as cartoons went, but in some ways they weren't--it felt like not a lot of thought or effort was put into that programming and it was mostly about toy commercials. I watched a shitload of Saturday morning cartoons. I would usually get up at 6am and watch the national anthem which played both verses, and then some goofy local show involving a very fat lady and her dog would come on and she would talk about local scene stuff that I had no idea about. After that wa PBA bowling (TV Tournament Time). Cartoons came on around 7:30 or 8am, I think, and ran until about 11am. Maybe bowling was after, can't recall.
For most people, especially kids, shows had no continuity at all. I remember trying to watch Robotech (re-runs?) in the mid '80s and once in awhile I'd see two episodes in a row that were in the correct order. Doctor Who was the same way except that was on PBS and often times I could see a couple in a row. Things didn't change until my parents got cable sometime around 1985 or so.
One more anectdote I'll share: My kids both loved Scooby Doo so we bought all the old episodes on DVD. What strikes me most about the cheap animation is how few characters there were in Scooby Doo. If the gang was walking in a town or an amusement park, there were almost no local color--no people at all. That gives the show a creepy, xenophobic vibe. The gang is always all alone in an alien landscape, sort of like they were transported into an alternate reality.
It's interesting to hear Robotech mentioned on a site where intellectual property law is often discussed, without mention of the controversy surrounding its IP. When Harmony Gold USA created Robotech, it did so using exclusively licensed footage from a Japanese multimedia franchise called Macross. In the 30 years since, many new Macross works, including anime representing some of the most innovative uses of music-in-film-as-a-critical-plot-point (of great interest to a musical theater listener like myself!), have been produced in Japan to great critical acclaim, but their legal import and streaming into the US has been consistently suppressed by Harmony Gold, which maintains that it has the exclusive rights to the Macross trademark in the US [2]. From one perspective, Harmony Gold USA played a pivotal role in bringing anime to the US, and it's only rational that they be allowed to harvest from their Robotech brand without diluting it with Macross competitors. But it's a frustrating situation for Macross fans.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diegesis#Film_sound_and_music
[2] http://kotaku.com/5990702/why-you-havent-seen-any-new-macross-in-the-west-for-nearly-15-years
Japan has been captivating to Westerners since at least the days of Commodore Perry. But in this era, the "hook" was probably some form of anime, video game, or manga. In the 1980s, most television animation was utter crap, churned out by studios like Hanna-Barbera and intended to sell toys and keep the kiddos busy on weekday afternoons and Saturday mornings. Very little thought was given to story or characterization, and episodes were always self-vontained half hours (if that).
To a kid growing up in this time, Robotech (with its long-form structure, complex characters, and real death of major, beloved characters) was fucking Game of Thrones.
This same generation would grow up with Nintendo and Sega, and all the Japanese-originated games on those platforms. So it's not surprising that as young adults we would becone attached to the culture which produced all this stuff.
This kind of dubbing wasn't exclusive to anime in that era, publishers basically bought the rights to cheap visual content and produced their own stories and scripts on top of it for maximum impact in their respective local markets.
Germany: Die Zwei / The Pesuaders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Persuaders!#Redubbed_versions
Most famous and polarizing was probably the reworking of three different original programmes (Macross, Southern Cross and MOSPEADA) into Robotech
Earliest example might have been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_Up,_Tiger_Lily%3F
but the french perfected this sub-genre in the 70s:
http://physicalimpossibility.com/2011/05/22/movie-rip-offs-a-users-guide-detournement-and-dub-parodies/