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| Original animation commissioned for Robotech: The Movie. |
Robotech's 1985 run linked three distinct series into a single, multi-generational narrative. The episodes were sanitized for after-school viewers and for U. S. sensibilities and were Americanized in general. Still, it was the highest-profile early effort to present anime to Western audiences without directly dumbing down the themes.
As a young viewer at the time, I was spellbound. Most previous imported "Japanimation" titles were ones that had clearly been aimed at children in the first place, and they were further dumbed down for western audiences. Robotech strove to retain as much of that complexity as it could get away with. To young me, it felt as if I was watching an "adult" show that just happened to be in animated form.
I discovered the show when the second episode, Countdown aired. However, even the first episode was not Robotech's first broadcast...
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| Rick Hunter engages Zentraedi who are monitoring (but not understanding) a human beauty pageant. |
A BIZARRE PROLOGUE: CODENAME - ROBOTECH:
Execs had concerns about young American audiences being able to follow a complicated, ongoing narrative. Signs of this lack of confidence in their viewers permeate the series, from narration that occasionally feels all but omnipresent to such restating of plot points that I think Netflix used it as a template for its original films.
The single strangest attempt at handholding, however, is the "movie" that opened the series: Codename - Robotech.
A compilation film that covers roughly the first third of "The Macross Saga," Codename - Robotech was intended to make it easier for new viewers to follow the series. I'm honestly not sure how. The actual series opens with carefully paced introductions of both the characters and story elements. The movie clarifies that muddle of painstaking setup by instead offering... a context-free space battle in which characters we've never met rattle off Technobabble, with not a single explanation coming until a good ten minutes in.
The entire movie is a bit of an outlier. Unlike the other films, this was an introduction to the series rather than an attempt to continue it. Still, its very existence demonstrated Harmony Gold's lack of trust in its viewers to follow along; and its presentation, which prioritizes plot mechanics over characterization, foreshadowed Robotech's storytelling focus in contrast to the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, which did the exact opposite.
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| Robotech: The Movie - Mark Landry and his girlfriend, Becky, ride into an adventure that's been mostly forgotten. Thankfully. |
"THAT'S A CANNON MOVIE!" ROBOTECH - THE MOVIE:
The success of Robotech's 85-episode run was enough to justify making a movie to bridge the gap between seasons. Unfortunately, the distribution deal was with Cannon Films under its most infamous owners: Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who became notorious for slashing budgets and meddling in productions, invariably to the detriment of the films they released.
With no time to create an original animated movie before the new season, Carl Macek fell back on what had worked for the series: adapting an anime, in this case popular original video animation Megazone 23. Macek reportedly delivered a passably faithful version... only to be told that there were "too many girls and not enough robots and guns," and that this was "not a Cannon movie."
This led to Macek tossing in roughly half an hour of footage from Southern Cross, necessitating deep cuts to Megazone. The result is a mess. Though I could pick out one or two episodes that I think are even worse, I'd label Robotech: The Movie as the series' creative low point. It was barely distributed, and it's largely forgotten today.
There are two silver linings, however. If not for Robotech: The Movie, I'm not sure I'd have ever actually watched Megazone 23, a highly influential work that's well worth watching for any science fiction fan. Beyond which, at least it pleased Menahem Golan, who boasted of the result: "Now that's a Cannon movie!"
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| The wedding of Rick and Lisa in Robotech: The Sentinels. |
THE SEASON THAT WASN'T - THE SENTINELS:
After the first season's success, Carl Macek and Harmony Gold decided to pursue original animation for Season Two. Then the dollar/yen exchange rate shifted, making outsourced animation significantly more expensive. If this had happened a few months later, I suspect the season might have survived. With only three episodes complete, however, Harmony Gold decided that the expense was too much and canceled the project.
The Sentinels compiles the animation that was done into a movie. Fortunately, there is an arc: Rick Hunter balances his upcoming wedding to Lisa Hayes against preparations for the SDF-3's new mission, with the film ending after the wedding and just as the ship leaves Earth. This makes it feel less incomplete than it might have, even if it's evident that the most interesting part of the story is yet to be told.
I wouldn't label what exists as particularly good. Characters are bland, and the animators seem a lot more interested in the "B" plot, focused on the Invid invasion of the planet Rick's crew will soon visit, than in any of the scenes featuring the returning cast. Still, there are elements here that might have become interesting; and just having the casts of the three "generations" interacting with each other helps to unify the overall series.
Even so, based on what was produced, I'm not left with a sense that anything special was lost.
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| Young pilot Marcus Rush angrily confronts Scott Bernard in The Shadow Chronicles. |
AN ATTEMPTED CONTINUATION - THE SHADOW CHRONICLES:
Almost two decades after The Sentinels, and almost certainly in part because of Robotech's healthy home video sales, Harmony Gold produced a continuation: The Shadow Chronicles.
The Shadow Chronicles is almost the flip side of The Sentinels. The earlier film focused mainly on the characters from "The Macross Saga," with smaller roles for a few "Masters" characters and a couple of nods to "The New Generation." In contrast, this film gives leading roles to Scott and Ariel from "New Generation," solid supporting roles to Louis from "The Masters" and to some crew members introduced in The Sentinels; and represents "The Macross Saga" only through a brief appearance by Rick Hunter.
I liked it better than The Sentinels. Unfortunately, it repeats one of the earlier movie's problems, in that it ends just as the story seems to be taking off. A sequel, Shadow Rising, was intended. Despite posting decent sales figures, though, Harmony Gold never managed to move forward with it. They've also never officially canceled it, leaving it in what seems likely to be a permanent state of limbo.
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| Love Live Alive: Lancer reunites with his friends. |
A MINOR EPILOGUE - LOVE LIVE ALIVE:
To date, Robotech's final gasp is Love Live Alive.
I don't know whether or not this will be Robotech's final bow, as one more project keeps struggling out every decade or so. Still, there's an odd symmetry to it ending here. For most of the series' life, Robotech was made up of episodes of '80s anime series dubbed and edited to fit Carl Macek's multi-generational continuity. Love Live Alive carries on that tradition, adapting a music OVA that tied into Genesis Climber Mospeada; and as a compilation film, it provides a sort of mirror to the series' very first release, Codename - Robotech.
Genesis Climber Mospeada: Love Live Alive was a celebration of music. It had little dialogue, instead being almost all music, and it used its clips not to retell Mospeada's story but to punctuate emotions. Robotech reduces the concert to a single scene, with the rest being a bog-standard clip show. Judged on that basis, it isn't bad, and the frame scenes provide a bit of closure for the character of Lancer, but I wish Harmony Gold had retained the structure of the more memorable original version.
I didn't hate watching the Robotech re-edit. Unlike the Japanese original, however, Robotech: Love Live Alive did little to particular justify its own existence.
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| Lancer pauses in the ruins of a battlefield in Love Live Alive. |
OVERALL:
I don't find the Robotech movies to be objectionable. At a minimum, they all manage to be passably entertaining. Even the awful Robotech: The Movie is bad in ways that are sometimes funny... and it's the main reason that I ended up watching the excellent Megazone 23.
But a bit like the Robotech version of Love Live Alive, the movies don't really justify their own existence. They don't make the series larger; The Shadow Chronicles, in particular, muddies the continuity, which just about held together through the 85 televised episodes.
Other opinions are always available. For me, however, the movies add up to nothing more than a handful of curiosity pieces. A viewer who stops watching after the television finale, Symphony of Light, honestly won't miss much if they chose to skip these - though at least they're not a painful experience to watch.
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