Robotech wasn't the first anime show I had ever seen -- Battle of the Planets and Starblazers predate it by a good couple years -- but it was my first love. I liked Transformers, but I absolutely loved Robotech.

It was originally three unrelated series in Japan that were combined into one when it came over here because television stations required a certain amount of episodes in a series in order to syndicate it. Uncle Carl (Carl Macek) gets a lot of flak from certain quarters on the internet for this (and for his dubbing of Akira and on Robotech), but I think he did more to popularize anime in the 80’s and 90’s than absolutely anyone.

Each of the three series that make up the show has its own unique charm.

The Macross Saga

Roy Fokker and Claudia Grant were an interracial couple, but nobody ever commented on it. Roy was a fighter pilot and Claudia a member of the bridge crew. Roy comes to Claudia's quarters after a ferocious dogfight. They're on the couch, just talking, with Roy kind of strumming his guitar, and she says that sometimes it seems that what he does is just a game to him. "It's never been a game," he answers, and she goes off to the kitchen. When she comes back, she finds him slumped over. Cut to a doctor walking away from Roy's body on a gurney saying that he died of internal bleeding and Claudia covering her face and crying.

The main character in The Macross Saga was named Rick Hunter. (No relation to Fred Dryer. As the series went on, he gained command of two younger pilots, Max and Ben. Ben was just a lovable screwup, kind of there for comedy relief -- he wasn't a good pilot and he messed up just about everything. He gets killed in the episode after Roy dies, and the episode after that is Rick trying to write a letter to Ben's parents.

That's what I learned from Robotech. War is lousy and your friends die for no reason at all.

The Masters/Armies of the Southern Cross

I don't have a lot of commentary on Southern Cross. I think it's the strongest in the Robotech mythology, but I doubt that has much resonance for anyone who isn't me. It was neat, it was cool to have a military organization that acted like one (most of the time) and I liked what I saw, but I don't nearly as well as I know the other parts. Hovertanks are pretty cool though.

I started watching one summer near the end of the end of the Southern Cross. Kid's shows were almost entirely episodic at the time, and it blew my mind to have a complex ongoing story. As I joined the story, things were gearing up for a final battle. The heroes had to prevent the Flowers of Life from blossoming, otherwise the Invid (aliens so scary that they were what the current crop of alien invaders were fleeing) would invade Earth, destroy most of humanity and enslave the rest. And even as a kid, I was thinking, *yawn* "I think our heroes will pull it off."

Well, they didn't, and there was an overwhelming alien invasion that destroyed almost all life on the planet. I thought it was just about the coolest thing I'd ever seen.

The New Generation/Mospeada:

The story is a collection of clichés, but I still love it. The main character, Scott Bernard, is the sole survivor of the force that was supposed to retake the Earth, his fiancée proposes to him right before the big battle that's supposed to retake the Earth, but she gets killed and he assembles a ragtag group of freedom fighters to take the planet back. And it's full of melodrama (like the Invid clone a infiltrator that happens to look exactly like Scott's dead girlfriend, though the novel rationalizes this by saying that her genetic material happened to be the sample that's recovered and used as a template), but it works. Also, it didn't hurt that I hadn't quite turned eleven when the series premiered, so I hadn't been exposed to a lot of these clichés yet.

The thing I liked about Scott was how absolutely broken he was. He was raised in outer space, he was an officer and veteran soldier and stunningly naïve. He can't get over Marlene's death, and the other characters point out how creepy it is to name this amnesiac girl who looks like his dead girlfriend after his dead girlfriend. I also the climax to the series. The finale was called "Symphony of Light", and they convinced the leader of the alien race that Earth just isn't a good place for her people, so she leaves. It wasn't what I was expecting, but it was just awesome to get a resolution other than "Pound the other guy until he stops moving."

I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about the novelizations, which are really pretty good. Each chapter began with a Dune-like epigraph, and any book with a throwaway line about Vonnegut's concept of the duprass as a bonded pair is really a cut above the norm. Brian Daley and James Luceno, two long-time friends and Star Wars novelists, collaborated on them under the pen name of Jack McKinney. The world was different back then, and the novels were just about the only Robotech things out there and I'd go to my local Waldenbooks every week looking for the next.

The show may look dated by today's standards, but I think it paved the way for the mainstreaming of anime.

   -- Josh Wanisko