The Long Voyage of the Macross

By happenstance, I came upon a capsule acknowledgement of the original Macross having premiered on Japanese TV in October of 1982. I’d been just too late for the actual “it was on this day...” date, but in a way that gave me more time to mull over my thoughts, and perhaps grapple with them too. That the futuristic year the anime’s story is said to begin in is well in the past didn’t register on me at all to begin with; I suppose “where’s my flying car?” complaints say as much about “stories and what we make of them” as much as “actual technological developments.” The occasional uncertainty as to whether mentioning “watching older anime” is a “foolish boast” even if I don’t add “and I can watch new anime, too” didn’t come to mind early on, either. The question “did the mere fact Macross showed up just prove long-maintained franchises weren’t such a weight on pop culture back then?” might have been a momentary distraction from the really heavy issue. Pondering that forty years back from 1982 itself was in the thick of the Second World War, regardless of how that conflict still weighed on (North) America’s merely cultural engagement with Japan around that year, could have just been an additional distraction from “it’s one thing to take interest in ‘something older’ (even if it’s serialized science fiction animation on TV from another country); it’s another to have been interested since a tender age...”
( Although it hasn't been quite that long )