Anime Thoughts: Super Dimension Fortress Macross

In a post reflecting on the anime I had watched in the first four months of this year, I mentioned how I'd made one more try at the experiment of rewatching one episode a day of Zeta Gundam, a "mecha" anime from the 1980s. I got through with no technical hitches this time, but my reactions to the series are still prickly and diffuse, and I wound up saying that the slight aggravation of days where I had to get that episode in to the exclusion of anything else left me uncertain about trying anything similar any time soon... and then, at the beginning of May, I started another experiment. Again, I was rewatching a mecha anime from the 1980s, one that accusations of "replaced music" and "imprecise translation" swirled around the form of it I first saw... and yet, one that's long been a personal favourite. Well before I had run into anything like stern declarations of it being a supreme achievement against which all subsequent works would be found wanting (which don't really show up for it anyway), I had managed to see it myself... more or less. The anime was Macross, in which a gigantic starship crashes to Earth in the distant and futuristic year of 1999 to be rebuilt just in time to face alien invaders also giant but ultimately human, which became the first part of Robotech. What was more, the experience was a little different this time around again. After seeing (all of it at last) "Robotech: The Macross Saga" in English and then watching Macross with its original Japanese music and dialogue subtitled (in a subtitle-only release), I was now experiencing a new English dub of Macross as Macross... in itself, something unusual for me.
( Lengthy contemplations on 'dubs' and 'subs'; Macross and Robotech... )