ROBOTECH

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.