ROBOTECH

http://gundam.perso.cegetel.net/Images/Robotech%20-%20Lisa%20&%20Rick.jpg

KILLY AND ME

DDB

TOMBOT

What was the super ginormousest mech called? I can't remember.

TEHRESA

BASICALLY THE ARCHETYPE FOR BLUE VOLTRON AND BLUE RANGER AND EVERY NERD FRIEND IN GIANT FIGHTING ROBOT SERIES!

luckily for me I am equipped with the sort of intellect that makes exposition totally unnecessary in the circumstances of giant robot cartoon watching

does anyone have a better rez gif of this shot
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v200/chakisaki/vt.jpg

Been re-watching these again. Of course, they hold up.

I have the Perfect Collection cd soundtrack too. Really really wish I had some of this music on vinyl...

http://www.fanboy.com/2008/11/robotech-goes-to-hollywood-warner-brothers-film-in-the-works.html

maguire lololool

MINMEI, WHEN WILL YOU TAKE SHOWER???
― Alicia Fucking Silverstone (sexyDancer), Tuesday, July 11, 2006 2:43 PM

thinking about rewatching this

this is on netflix now and it's like I never watched any of the toonami broadcasts in the late 90s. just straight back to being 11 and lovvvvving everything about it except that certain things are way funnier, mainly the gloriously abrupt and stentorian narrator, the generally awkward and inconsistent translation, and all the jamming together of awesome space combat and like, beauty contests coming over the comm channel which is intentional comedy from the original macross. minmay annoys me exactly as much as she did then. lisa is a FOX. gloval is so great even though he barely does anything besides smoking his pipe and sounding seasoned and russian. god rick is such a bozo. roy, who I remember as a super cool badass, now just seems kinda wooden and blandly cool-ish. this show is the best because its lore makes absolutely no sense (even given its tortured origins - there is just no effort to keep things straight from scene to scene let alone across the whole series) but it all SOUNDS cool, esp. thru the zentraedi echoplex. "PROTOCULTURE!" oh man, I'm on board.

oh hrm this is a noiseboard thread huh

I appreciate that JW decided I was Gloval

no shit

used to watch this as a child so will see if it's as good as i remember it

lol @ Lin Kyle. 100% as much of a shithead as I remember. I did forget about the paranoid, cover-up-oriented Earth government, that's a nice touch.

love love love the "daedalus attack." I remember we found both the name and the maneuver as among the coolest things on the show. Also love how Macek forgets until the recap episode to explain that "daedalus" and "prometheus" are the two battleships that ended up in space with the sdf-1 and then got attached to it (never shown onscreen), so everyone's just using these two names all the time and you have to make up meanings for yourself.

My memory of this is heavily tainted by the novels. I remember reading those things with a cassingle of Enjoy The Silence blaring in my headphones late into the night. How much death was in this show? Like 50% of the characters all died at once when Gloval decided to kamikaze the SDF-1 into the Robotech Masters' fleet? Was that a thing in the show? What a trainwreck. Max whatsisface, he was my dude.

Also all the guys who had to pilot Destroids instead of Varitech fighters - what a shit assignment that would have been. "Says here you have orders to sit in this walking tank that basically melts as soon as anybody shoots at it. Plus side, most of the weight is gigantic guns and missile batteries! No, we don't have any good reason an actual gibbon couldn't do this job."

lol

can't remember how macross ends. just hit the first big death. blew my mind as a kid, I mean that is some heavy shit, and the episode just ends with another character getting the news.

hate how the versions on netflix have a different opening - different animation for each of the three sagas. otoh it's cool I In guess that they put the nudity back in (at least I don't THINK roy used to have a topless girlie calendar in his room)...

In a few years they should totally refashion this as a premium teevee series. Drones do most of the flying and shooting, but some kind of nifty rationale why people have to be out there with them in special transformer, uh, craft. Gloval is played by Idris Elba, obviously.

actually nevermind that dude has more than enough work lined up. Let's hold on Gloval. Michael K Williams as the Zentraedi commander, though.

Ah ! Loved this so much as a kid. The battles were epic and the sdf-1 and the varitechs were awesome (I had the latter as toys) !
I wish they could finally make a good movie "pacific rim" style... some good mechas-p0rn !
I might try to rewatch this but I'm afraid the actual quality might not live up to my good memories...
too bad they never made a good videogame out of this.

still haven't rewatched this but everyone dying was the craziest thing to let a child watch, but those were innocent times

i remember my pervy cousin got the show on vhs tape (rent or bought, i don't remember) and all the nudity was in there and he was so mesmerized

if i recall correctly, those ladies would undress when going inside the mechas, right? i always thought that was bizarre, even as a kid -- my introduction to weird/effed up japan

people undressing to get into the mechas in any of the robotech series would be a shock to me, though it's not totally unknown in the genre and i guess it's possible that with 'southern cross' i blocked it out along with almost everything else - very hazy, that show. whereas say, sailor moon has nude transformations in the original and the dub, and in practically every episode too. kinda nuts.

am up to the max/miriya story and am kinda disappointed by how quickly it all plays out. their confrontation in the park was appropriately over-the-top and emo-bonkers but everything after that, super abrupt. in my mind this took place over at least a few episodes.

another fun thing with this show is how its overarching rhythm/pace is totally bizarre. the combination of three unrelated shows is one thing, but then also you have macross which itself is really divided into three roughly 13-14 episode chunks (and was at one point going to end with the big big battle with the alien fleet in ep 27, til the show was a hit and they got the money to do the third arc).

but watching it as a kid it's just, you know, tuning in today, oh boy it's on in ten minutes, god knows what the fuck will happen. sometimes an episode is a space battle and advancing the soap opera and sometimes it's everything happening at once on every plotline, and sometimes it opens with TWO YEARS LATER... - great. Even just having an ongoing plot would have made it radically different from anything else I was watching, but it's sometimes so breathlessly dense with plot developments and only in a couple places do you have any sense of this beforehand, like there are certainly some "tension rising, the battle is impending" kind of episodes but mostly you're just flying blind.

I watched a couple of eps not long ago. I lost my mind at the Flying Circus flashback in episode 2 or 3, I guess? I'll have to try watching it again soon.

Idris Elba would be perfect for Gloval though.

ah yeah. and the the varitechs, sdf-1 and alien robots would be great with the same kind of CGI as in "pacific rim".
I could easily imagine a dark movie adaptation.
but I guess Robotech is not famous enough to justify a big budget movie.
also, as I said earlier, I wonder why no one bothered to make a good videogame out of this (I think there was a bad shoot'em up on PS2...).

I remember DLing a rom of a Famicom Macross game in the late 90s and being soooo disappointed. A near-totally-generic space shooter when they had a flagship property, should have been a big-budget, serious game. Sigh.

The bigger lapse for me was the basically total unavailability of the toys, which weren't all that consistent in quality to begin with. I think there were much better ones in Japan, maybe blocked by weird licensing issues (iirc the Transformers people had the rights to some of the designs). The one that I craved was the Invid Shock Trooper, my fave of all the mecha designs on the show and a marked contrast to the goofiness of the Invid themselves. The only thing I ever got my hands on, via garage-sale luck of the draw, was an individual Robotech Master:

https://bonanzleimages.s3.amazonaws.com/afu/images/1930/8598/45/__57.jpg

Sigh....

also agreed re: Elba - his Pacific Rim character has the right bearing, and in Prometheus he was the captain of a spaceship. It's basically all been screen-tested.

I still haven't seen Pacific Rim. Probably something I should correct.

ah, I remember I had these two big guys (although one was labelled Transformers, somehow) !

http://www.toyarchive.com/Macross/AlphaBlue8inch1c.jpg

http://www.geekmag.fr/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/transformersjetfire.jpg

I still haven't seen Pacific Rim. Probably something I should correct.

I could have sworn that I had some kind of toy of Focker's veritech, but maybe it was just the transformer?

I think the transformer was only that model/color.
iirc these two toys were quite big (well for a kid) : 20cm or something ?

ah, it was almost 25cm !
http://anymoon.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/Gakken-135-Legioss-10.jpg

Right, but I can't remember whether I had one or both? I had a friend back then whose family traveled to Asia a lot and it's possible that he had the Robotech toy.

hum. so no gonna happen ?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/olliebarder/2016/03/28/james-wan-talks-about-the-live-action-robotech-movie-cites-macross/#c886e126d3e9

Pacific Rim won't change your life or anything but if you have ever enjoyed Japanese giant robot shows you will probably have fun watching it, and there are a few REALLY good choices made. The arbitrary goofiness of needing two brains to sync up to control one robot is such a random anime premise, makes me smile just thinking about it. The biggest mistakes are making the monsters so samey and hard to see, and making the lead guy and his male lead rival so samey and hard to care about. Elba and Kikuchi killed it though.

also, it's too dark most of the times so you can't really see the robots.
which is a shame because they're really well done and DO seem huge and impressive !

my cousin had a lot of robotech figurines and they looked pretty good -- we never actually played with them, they just sat on his desk next to his computer. we'd play i want to say it was mechwarrior in the early 90s though

i had a bunch of transformers figurines instead

but gundam was way more popular in japan than robotech, and transformers didn't leave such an imprint on robot culture over there as it did in the us

but there were so many. among those not really into mecha anime, i want to say mazinger z (majingaa zetto) was more popular than robotech. it was for sure more popular than transformers

i've not seen pacific rim and had no idea it involved robots

I remember playing Robotech with my friends usually involved live-action role playing along with the TV, jumping off of couches and the like. I specifically remember running around as a veritech fighter in guardian mode, with my head down and my arms behind in a V-shape for the wings.

ya i played a few times and i know there were cards involved, but my memory fails me here, so i don't remember if that was robotech or another mecha game -- i want to say battletech but not sure

in the 90s we just stuck to computer games the most

My neighbors had the book for the Robotech role-playing game but it was pretty much over the heads of us younger kids, who were the most enthusiastic for the show. I don't recall getting very far into at it all, but we must have at least attempted to create characters because I remember us at least talking about a "bar-room brawl" scene flagrantly derived from the scene where outraged citizens on the SDF-1 ended up tussling with Lynn Kyle at the restaurant. We also tried the even more complicated RIFTS, from the same publisher, for exactly long enough for me to get kicked out for wanting to paint my postapocalyptic motorcycle pink. Still think we had a lot of fun rifling through the books and looking at the art though.

Oh man, I've reached the stretch of Macross where Macek is starting to try and weave in stuff to set up the next two sagas, and it is just gloriously incoherent. I seriously wonder if any other continuing-storyline type TV series has ever made as little sense as this. Really avant-garde. Setting aside Rick just suddenly spouting off confusing references to stuff he (and we) have never seen ("We may have destroyed the last source of Protoculture - which would mean that we, humans, would be responsible for the downfall of the Robotech Masters!") - - there's this continuing, right-there-on-the-surface confusion between two definitions of Protoculture, which is the central MacGuffin of the entire show. The version, which I'm given to understand is a basically correct translation of Macross, has it that the Protoculture are a super-ancient alien race that created the Zentraedi and humankind.

The other definition, which they invent in order to weave Southern Cross and Mospeada together, is that Protoculture is a power source revolving around the Flower of Life: the Invid in Mospeada crave the flower, and the Robotech Masters in Southern Cross want the lost Protoculture matrix which was supposedly aboard the SDF-1 when it crashed at the start of Macross. These two totally irreconcilable definitions will get used, casually, in the same episode and sometimes even in the same scene. Are the Zentraedi after Protoculture as a Robotech-powering source that they need to recharge their ships and robots, or do they seek the lost secrets of the Protoculture race, apparently including music and live birth?

To top it off there's an episode where Exedore shows up with charts and graphs specifically to retcon the previously very important plot point that the humans and Zentraedi are genetically identical (nevermind that we've already seen them have kids together). So now they're not both descendents of Protoculture (version 1), but the humans are, and the Zentraedi were created by the Robotech Masters. I guess in the version where Protoculture is a society/species, they could have subcontracted this out to the Robotech Masters, but why? Man this is fun stuff.

finale to macross saga: pretty awesome. three sad, damaged characters resolving their love triangle against a backdrop of massive explosions, alien kamikaze attacks, heroic sacrifice. of course you also have the incoherence brought by insisting that there was a second, never-seen battlefortress somewhere off-screen... but hey.

transition to southern cross is, ahem, awkward. the opening voice-over is a real hail-mary of retconning: "...of course, the feudal society that's emerged over the last fourteen years has taken many by suprrise..." yikes. so far i'm not feeling super inspired by either the mecha designs or the characters being set up. the colors and linework do seem a little more confident, bright, and consistent than in macross. it's punchier.

hum. I didn't know that part of the story. I don't think it was shown in France.
the mechas do look bad.

Finished slogging through Southern Cross, in an increasingly intermittent fashion during the middle stretch when absolutely nothing of any interest was happening. A serious step down from Macross with all its distinctive characters, great designs and action scenes, and memorable gimmicks/comedy. This feels like the original Japanese show was really just phoning it in, and maybe pitched at a slightly younger audience. You can't really tell whether the original scripts had more life to them, and maybe some of the characters that get a lot of screen time here without coming into focus do better with their original dialogue. But no matter what, you have an over-large ensemble cast where most of the characters never get scenes together, certainly not subplots of any kind. Macross had a couple of filler characters but if you bought into the love triangle at the center, there was a really strong through-line to keep you in there, and some big emotional payoffs along the way. Also, apparently Southern Cross was cancelled midway through, "forcing the scriptwriters to hastily conclude the series." It shows.

Then you have the issues from the translation, and oh mannnnnn, if the Macross chunk was sort of delightfully, refreshingly incoherent, here stuff just doesn't make sense in a way that makes all the character motivations deeply confusing, like you're watching something written by an eight year old but then run through a boring-ness filter. It's kind of inevitable: they're taking a self-contained show that's supposed to end with a big heroic sacrifice and turning it into the middle chapter that ends with a colossal blunder. Making matters worse, the original show isn't set on Earth - it's some planet that humans have only been colonizing for a little while, which is why there only seems to be one substantial city and a whole lot of wasteland. They almost get away with suggesting it's supposed to be the aftermath of the devastation visited in Macross, but you believe that the three mounds that the characters obsess over here are the ruins of the three spaceships (one never shown onscreen) from the end of the previous chapter, and that the surrounding city has in the meantime (just fourteen years!) up and left and also the ships became arranged in an equilateral triangle and turned into mesas for some reason. Then there's the very unconvincing "feudal society" (more of a military autocracy as far as I can tell) - everything just feels very unreal and ungrounded.

One particularly confusing stretch revolves around people debating whether the aliens they're capturing are humans or androids or clones, all of which are sometimes opposed (in ethical dilemmas) to them being alive, which is very confusing, and seems to stem from a major plot change where in the original the aliens are relying entirely on captured and brainwashed humans as soldiers. Why they got rid of that I'm not really sure, but it doesn't help matters at all.

The confusion culminates in Dana and Zor Prime, who I guess are the closest thing to the leads, but who never make any sense as characters. Zor, of course, wasn't originally a clone of the ancient alien who invented Protoculture, but another brainwash victim. He's pretty much a cipher right up until the last minute. Dana's backstory that links back to Macross is dropped like a hot potato and she just kind of lurches from scene to scene with no consistent personality besides a recurring tendency to go rogue and defy orders like every other episode. The other two female leads, despite a lot of screen time, are just automatons doing their military jobs.

Overall, definitely not recommended. I'm still going to stick it out for the Invid section, which is what hooked me in as a kid.

Well yeah, mospeada bikes are the best mecha ever, I think the Army or the USMC are still working on making that shit real

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqy55RqyTyo

original mospeada opening is some seriously generic anime theme song stuff but worth it for "DO YOU REMEMBER - THAT OLD LULLABY?!"

now watching macross on amazon prime, wonder how different it'll be from robotech

because robotech isn't on netflix anymore, is that correct? i couldn't find it which is why i ended up w og macross on amazon prime

Still on Netflix on my end! You may be better off though, idk!

I guess I never posted my thoughts on the Mospeada section. It was a lot more fun than Southern Cross and I totally got why it sucked me into the show in the first place. The "on the road, being hunted" premise gives it a lot of automatic dramatic interest, and reminds me a LOT of John Christopher's Tripod books, which I was also reading at the time. That's especially true early on before you ever hear the Invid talk - and apparently they talk a lot less in the original show - they're these very mysterious, giant overseers that everybody just has to toil under. Some of that gets dissipated since our heroes get their gear a little too fast, and indeed get assembled as a team a little too fast I think.

It also reminded me of The Mysterious Cities of Gold which I had adored at a younger age, and I probably hadn't seen anything in between that had that sense of an ongoing story, a journey that was actually going to reach its destination. MCOG pulls that off much more effectively, with several really distinct-feeling chapters and a real sense of changing environments as they move through South and Central America, not to mention certain structural choices, like a "collect the three sacred thingies" plotline, that create the clear sense of progress being made and certain episodes being 'special.' By comparison, Mospeada is a bit samey, repetitious and episodic, even if you do have fun watching them start to uncover the Invid's (sort of confusing) secrets. The cast is a ton of fun, also - the character relationships aren't as strong as Macross but after the faceless duds of Southern Cross it was great to have a basically likeable group of distinct people. Rook and Lunk go pretty underdeveloped, and Marlene never really makes sense (how amnesiac and confused about human society is she supposed to be?) but hey, it was still way more character than I was finding anywhere else in 1992, when this show was my absolute jam.