Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 1994
Feb. 1st, 2023 07:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWith a new month came another year’s worth of anime to select an episode from, just as with each day of the month past. By now, though, I’m getting to the point of anime that had been relatively fresh when I joined the club at university (in that still-antique time when a title could be a year or two old and still be percolating through the (North) American fandom...) Having skipped the opening episodes of the original Macross itself this time around, I was still ready and willing to acknowledge that “Macross matters to me in particular” with one choice among sixty by watching the first episode of Macross Plus.
Obviously I can’t prove with whatever number of personal counterfactuals whether I’d have joined the anime club without having noticed Macross Plus promoted on the posters for their first show of the term. Having managed to become aware of the title’s existence beforehand, though, just as seeing the name “Macross II” had really started making me aware there was more animation in Japan than just Akira, could certainly be called “one more useful push.” I can’t say my interest in Robotech had been entirely in “The Macross Saga” for all that I wound up with more visual source material for it than for the later parts of that story, but that interest having eked along for as long as it did in a way at least detached from “character designs” has let me look back and identify a thread of continuity.
I did happen to notice the first episode of this OVA is longer than the TV episodes I’ve been watching, or indeed than the two OVAs I’ve watched in the last few days. After that, I pondered to what extent having known about the backstory helped me and what someone might have made of it with just Top Gun and The Right Stuff to work with before I managed to shrug that thought off. I’ve admitted after watching the OVA just a few years ago (as part of a different “anniversary”) that its main characters being a little older than “average anime characters” but still “immature” might be more of a sticking point now than it once was. This time around, though, I might have been better able to to just acknowledge “setting up problems to be explored and perhaps resolved” and take in the audiovisual experience.
Obviously I can’t prove with whatever number of personal counterfactuals whether I’d have joined the anime club without having noticed Macross Plus promoted on the posters for their first show of the term. Having managed to become aware of the title’s existence beforehand, though, just as seeing the name “Macross II” had really started making me aware there was more animation in Japan than just Akira, could certainly be called “one more useful push.” I can’t say my interest in Robotech had been entirely in “The Macross Saga” for all that I wound up with more visual source material for it than for the later parts of that story, but that interest having eked along for as long as it did in a way at least detached from “character designs” has let me look back and identify a thread of continuity.
I did happen to notice the first episode of this OVA is longer than the TV episodes I’ve been watching, or indeed than the two OVAs I’ve watched in the last few days. After that, I pondered to what extent having known about the backstory helped me and what someone might have made of it with just Top Gun and The Right Stuff to work with before I managed to shrug that thought off. I’ve admitted after watching the OVA just a few years ago (as part of a different “anniversary”) that its main characters being a little older than “average anime characters” but still “immature” might be more of a sticking point now than it once was. This time around, though, I might have been better able to to just acknowledge “setting up problems to be explored and perhaps resolved” and take in the audiovisual experience.