Overclocked On Caffeine v.1.1

Robotech: The Macross Saga

36 22-minute episodes



Mention the name Macross to any decent old school anime fan and they'll probably be able to regale you with tales of the Itano Circus, the affectionate name for the show's trademark missile barrages, contrails filling the screen like so much silly string of death, and of songs so powerful, they could change the course of war. Mention the same name to a child of the 1980s... and they'll probably give you a blank stare that'd do a cow proud. Ask them about Robotech, on the other hand, and they'll probably launch into the same speech as the anime fan with as much enthusiasm and the same dewy-eyed middle-distance gaze.

Somehow, despite being both a long-term anime fan and having the misfortune to be born in the 1980s, I completely managed to miss this. I had a few large figures based on the Zentradi mecha, and I know I saw a few Minmay dolls in the early 90s, but the show was never shown on any British non-satalite TV channel. So while the toys were admittedly very cool, I had absolutely no connection to them beyond 'I dig giant robots'. So, when I saw the box set for the first arc of the Robotech series for £10, I figured it was probably worth picking up, if only for the sake of getting it.

A little background for those still unaware of the show: back in the 1980s, three (mostly) unrelated mech shows were edited together to make a larger show suitable for syndication on US TV, the end result being unlike anything else shown on kids TV at the time. Two of those shows - Southern Cross and Genesis Climber Mospeada - have been all but forgotten, but the third, Super Dimension Fortress Macross, has had a lasting appeal like few others, both in Japan and in the West, with regular updates every few years. The most recent series, Macross Frontier, was released in time to celebrate the original show's 25th anniversary. In Western terms, it's comparable to Transformers, a classic well-loved show that's never really gone away, as so many others have.

Note: the following is a review of Robotech, the rewritten and redubbed version of Macross. I would've reviewed the original, but there was no option on the discs to switch to the original version. Hell, there wasn't even any subtitles for the hearing impaired! So if mentions of 'Rick Hunter' or 'Protoculture' make you physically ill, you may wish to stop reading right about...

...now.

The story starts in the far of year of 1999. An alien battleship crashlands on Earth, and the governments of the world put aside their fighting to try and find out what it is, where it came from and if there's any neat tech that can be ganked from it. Ten years later, the original owners of the craft come looking for it, and are less than happy to see it's been appropriated by a lesser race. So in a First Contact manoeuvre that would do Kirk proud, they open fire on the ship and the city that has since sprung up around it. So, the Captain of the battleship, since renamed the SDF-1, does the smart thing and gets the fuck out of Dodgem activating the ship's as-yet untested warp engines. This gets them away from the immediate assault, but leaves them with two more problems: the first, is that they've accidentally transported the surrounding city with them, a human population to the tune of around 70,000 people. The second, and slightly more pressing issue, is that they've now ended up somewhere in the orbit of Pluto, facing the crew with a journey that will take them at least two years to make, all while under constant attack.

Picking any holes in Robotech feels almost needlessly cruel: yes, the animation's ropey at times, the dialogue's outright dumb and much of the characterisation boils down to 'I did it just 'cus' but when you consider the show's coming up on 30 years old, none of it's very surprising. We've been spoiled in recent years by more sophisticated artwork and storytelling - even your average weekly shonen series can routinely impress in both these days - so in those respects, there's no way in hell the show could even hope to compare. And that's before you consider that the show's a bastardisation of the original. With all in mind, it's hard to know where to start. So we'll start with probably the single most important character in the show: Minmay.

I hate her. Well, that's not true. I just really can't stand her. Minmay first meets Rick Hunter, the dashing male lead, after he almost demolishes her house with a Veritech, the show's transforming mech/fighter jet in the second episode, and I spent much of the remaining series wishing he had. After Macross City is rebuilt aboard the battleship, they hold a beauty contest to raise morale, with Minmay being the winner. She's swiftly catapulted to stardom, becoming an idol singer, then a psychological weapon against the zentradi. In this role, she excels, not just against the invading aliens, but also against the viewer, singing the most insidious earworms you'll encounter outside of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn. Her songs are terrible, but catchier than anything I've encountered in some time. And she brings them out at every opportunity, no matter how inappropriate the situation, and there are some doozies. We're told repeatedly that she's lovely and wonderful and is capable of making even her enemies switch sides, blah blah, but if she's anything, she's the epitome of flightiness, stringing Rick along for the better part of four years, only really telling him she loves him when Lisa Hayes, the other main female lead, decides she likes him.

Then again, Rick and Lisa aren't that much better. He's a hot-headed pilot pining after two women, both of whom spend most of their time pining after another man (and when you consider that one of them's related to the guy in question, that gets a whole lot squickier). She's an officious wench who falls for Minmay's cousin because he reminds her of her last boyfriend who died on a mission. We're meant to believe all three of these people are wonderful and brave and blah blah blah, but from what we're shown, Minmay's an airheaded attention-whoring Pollyanna, Lisa's an arrogant stuck-up bitch hung up on someone or another the entire length of the show, and Rick's an idiot savant (with a heavy emphasis on the idiot part) who's good at flying but not much else. Really, for a show that lists the power of love as one of it's major themes, it frankly sucks at it. The worst offender is the romance between Max and Miria: he beats her at piloting, then at an arcade game, so the feisty warrior chick does the only reasonable thing and tries to knife him. Max, never accused of being the quickest plane in the hangar, then tells her she's pretty and asks her to marry him, at which point she loses her will to fight, her knife and her personality in swift order.

And then we have the music, because I don't feel I've gotten across precisely how bad it is. Don't get me wrong, the idea of music being so powerful it can swing te tide of a war? I get it. Hell, I believe it. Not to the extent that it's shown in the show (well...) but the idea that a piece of music can change things dramatically? The only people who couldn't believe that are the terminally cynical or the utterly soulless. And, contrary to what you may have heard, I'm not quite all the way there on either count. So yes, the concept, I'm utterly behind, 300%. Just... why in the name of Clapton's time-distorting appendages would you pick those songs?! They're terrible! Sure the actual song played during the key battle is probably the best of the bunch, but the rest makes me want to hunt down the reanimated corpse of Keith Richards and ask him if he'd mind using his powers as a level 25 lich to flay the writer and composer of the songs alive and force them to wear a suit made of lemons for the rest of their unnatural pain-filled lives.

Finally, there's the pacing. I can only look at the show from the perspective that it's the first third of an ongoing series. In that respect, the fact that the show just peters out after the end of the war between the Zentradi and Earth is understandable: it's not the end, since there's another 40 or so episodes still to go. By itself, however, it looks like they're just trying to drag it out another 10 episodes to fulfil some kind of contractual obligation. Nothing much of any consequence happens, beyond the last two major villains getting drunk, riding a mech into battle like a pony, then deciding to kamikaze the SDF-1. I hope the original series ended a little better than that, because it's sad watching any show flounder like that for so long.

So there you have it: a show that's a relic of it's time, incapable of standing proudly with its descendants, outclassed and outpaced by them at every turn.

And yet...

And yet, somehow, I couldn't stop myself from watching. Really. There have been a multitude of shows I've never been able to get past the first few episodes - sometimes barely even making it past the opening credits for some reason - that I have little doubt are probably better in every possible way. Why should it be that I get nowhere with them, yet I sit and finish all six discs of this over the course of a week? It's not because I actually paid for these discs, as anyone who knows my DVD buying habits can attest. And it's not because I was desperate to find something to do for this article: my original plan was to watch the first two seasons of Transformers Animated, something I'm about 6 episodes away from finishing. As ropey as the animation is, they took the smart decision to save the budget for the fight scenes, with the end result being stylish acrobatic dogfights, even if they do play fast and loose with the laws of physics all the freakin' time. The mech designs have never been bettered, as timeless and as classical as any Gundam, and the scope of the story, leaving aside the spotty execution, is still remarkable. Can you imagine watching this as a kid, getting to the episodes where the Zentradi directly attack the Earth, and seeing them wipe out 95% of the surface - and life! - on the planet in one go? With shots of people and cities being vaporised for good measure to boot! I think, when you get down to it, that's probably my main problem with the show - I came to it at the wrong time. As a kid, it would've fulfilled every craving I had for a cartoon - a series with continuity, where changes actually happen from one episode to another, where people actually die. Since the days of Babylon 5, these things aren't just common, they're virtually mandatory - networks won't even look at your show if you don't have some kind of year by year plan in mind. But back then, the only kind of shows that had any real continuity were soap operas, so seeing this in a cartoon? Mind blowing.

So there you really have it: A show that's probably better in its native language, but it doesn't matter because I'm just really bitter about being unable to watch it when I was a kid who would've enjoyed it infinitely more.

Hey, at least I'm honest about it.