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krpalmerWhile I don’t know if “following some social media feeds without being signed up for their platform” is “avoiding some of the worst parts” or just “only encountering worst parts” (given that among other things I can’t make direct responses to anything), I have happened to see Bob Clark, whose weblog posts on Star Wars were how I first became aware of him, mention he was dipping into Macross for what he said was the first time with an aim towards watching its 1980s theatrical adaptation, “Do You Remember Love?” That Clark takes a measured interest in anime also gets my attention; that he’s somewhere in between “all or nothing” (and I’m kind of close to the high-end extreme myself) may add to the feeling of “a valuable perspective.”
I suppose it would be nice to see Clark’s comments on Macross developed at further length in a less ephemeral way, but one early declaration stood out for me all the same. When it came to the famous love triangle of the original series, he did seem to have rooted for its original “Hikaru and Minmay” configuration to the point of disdaining its final “Hikaru and Misa” resolution. While I usually seem able to accept those things as they turn out (perhaps just as peculiar as my flip side of not demanding all fictional characters wind up in a stable partnership), I did realise almost at once that having first encountered Macross as “Robotech: The Macross Saga” meant I’d seen the possibility of “Rick and Lisa” spelled out (in some significant part through narration, whether voiceover or in the Robotech novels) much earlier, or at least much more pointedly, than in Macross. “The wedding of Rick and Lisa” wound up leading off the leisurely opening of the international coproduction that would further develop Robotech’s story; after shifting exchange rates made “The Sentinels” collapse just as footage started getting in the cans, that might have wound up seeming even more significant. There’s certainly a question as to whether something about Minmay was “Japanese” enough (despite her being of Chinese ancestry) to never quite have worked with American producers and those fans not quite able to transition to Macross (even as other fans found ample fault with that unfortunate reinterpretation); I’ve wondered in the past if Kimagure Orange Road, an anime series from the second half of the 1980s, might have been viewed in somewhat the same way by English-speaking fans I was aware of only through long-echoing comments. In any case, the new perspective even after so long was interesting to run into; I’ve admitted to being not as enthralled with Do You Remember Love as many others make a big point of, seemingly because of its extensive visual redesigns, but simple positivity towards it was nice to see.
I suppose it would be nice to see Clark’s comments on Macross developed at further length in a less ephemeral way, but one early declaration stood out for me all the same. When it came to the famous love triangle of the original series, he did seem to have rooted for its original “Hikaru and Minmay” configuration to the point of disdaining its final “Hikaru and Misa” resolution. While I usually seem able to accept those things as they turn out (perhaps just as peculiar as my flip side of not demanding all fictional characters wind up in a stable partnership), I did realise almost at once that having first encountered Macross as “Robotech: The Macross Saga” meant I’d seen the possibility of “Rick and Lisa” spelled out (in some significant part through narration, whether voiceover or in the Robotech novels) much earlier, or at least much more pointedly, than in Macross. “The wedding of Rick and Lisa” wound up leading off the leisurely opening of the international coproduction that would further develop Robotech’s story; after shifting exchange rates made “The Sentinels” collapse just as footage started getting in the cans, that might have wound up seeming even more significant. There’s certainly a question as to whether something about Minmay was “Japanese” enough (despite her being of Chinese ancestry) to never quite have worked with American producers and those fans not quite able to transition to Macross (even as other fans found ample fault with that unfortunate reinterpretation); I’ve wondered in the past if Kimagure Orange Road, an anime series from the second half of the 1980s, might have been viewed in somewhat the same way by English-speaking fans I was aware of only through long-echoing comments. In any case, the new perspective even after so long was interesting to run into; I’ve admitted to being not as enthralled with Do You Remember Love as many others make a big point of, seemingly because of its extensive visual redesigns, but simple positivity towards it was nice to see.