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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...”
It’s still just possible to say “well, I didn’t know about it on the day.” At the risk of making a big deal of merely peculiar personal circumstances, I can also consider how I hadn’t penetrated the “one more Saturday morning cartoon” surface of Robotech, or even “Robotech: The Macross Saga,” anywhere near as fast as older viewers, or even people with more pocket money, different priorities spending it, or just more comfort hanging out in comic book shops. I can’t quite identify or recall a singular moment where “everything I’d known crumbled.” Late in the 1980s I did manage to buy the first volume of the Robotech RPG, far more to “help remember what the machinery looked like” than with any thoughts or hopes of “playing the game with friends,” and it had a few pages of “Japanimation Notes” near the back; as with the rest of the volume, though, they might have been written with a casual assumption of “knowledge already picked up elsewhere.” Perhaps it’s significant that the notes didn’t make it clear “Macross was the name of the ship, nor just the island it crashed on or the city that wound up inside it,” or “the transforming fighters were called Valkyries.” (That name did wind up in Robotech’s dialogue once; the novels both acknowledged that and brushed it aside.)
In any case I can now say it’s been longer since I’ve had access to Macross itself (via the “AnimEigo DVDs”) than I passed without it, even if the years I spent “trying to remember Robotech with just one episode on tape and not much else in the way of visual records” had a certain impact on me. It’s one thing to face all the assorted criticisms of Robotech without having developed the same initial disdain, even as I consider how cerebral my enduring contemplations are of what it might have offered me against what skewed from Macross. On a lighter note, not realizing for years how different Southern Cross’s mecha designs or Mospeada’s character designs were might have played a role in winding up continuing to take interest in both those series too. So far as also managing to look ahead goes, though, the recent interest in and concern about “computer-generated art” has me wondering if at some point (and perhaps even in the next ten years), somebody with more time than sense will be able to give instructions to a program and have every frame of “the off-model episodes” of Macross redrawn “the way the good ones look...”
It’s still just possible to say “well, I didn’t know about it on the day.” At the risk of making a big deal of merely peculiar personal circumstances, I can also consider how I hadn’t penetrated the “one more Saturday morning cartoon” surface of Robotech, or even “Robotech: The Macross Saga,” anywhere near as fast as older viewers, or even people with more pocket money, different priorities spending it, or just more comfort hanging out in comic book shops. I can’t quite identify or recall a singular moment where “everything I’d known crumbled.” Late in the 1980s I did manage to buy the first volume of the Robotech RPG, far more to “help remember what the machinery looked like” than with any thoughts or hopes of “playing the game with friends,” and it had a few pages of “Japanimation Notes” near the back; as with the rest of the volume, though, they might have been written with a casual assumption of “knowledge already picked up elsewhere.” Perhaps it’s significant that the notes didn’t make it clear “Macross was the name of the ship, nor just the island it crashed on or the city that wound up inside it,” or “the transforming fighters were called Valkyries.” (That name did wind up in Robotech’s dialogue once; the novels both acknowledged that and brushed it aside.)
In any case I can now say it’s been longer since I’ve had access to Macross itself (via the “AnimEigo DVDs”) than I passed without it, even if the years I spent “trying to remember Robotech with just one episode on tape and not much else in the way of visual records” had a certain impact on me. It’s one thing to face all the assorted criticisms of Robotech without having developed the same initial disdain, even as I consider how cerebral my enduring contemplations are of what it might have offered me against what skewed from Macross. On a lighter note, not realizing for years how different Southern Cross’s mecha designs or Mospeada’s character designs were might have played a role in winding up continuing to take interest in both those series too. So far as also managing to look ahead goes, though, the recent interest in and concern about “computer-generated art” has me wondering if at some point (and perhaps even in the next ten years), somebody with more time than sense will be able to give instructions to a program and have every frame of “the off-model episodes” of Macross redrawn “the way the good ones look...”