A First Kick at a Franchise
Dec. 17th, 2023 08:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerTime has passed since the announcement certain anime-releasing companies would bring Blu-Rays of considerable parts of the Macross franchise over here. This isn’t quite the same sort of wait as for other anime releases, and other fans have slid back to complaining. Sony having bought Right Stuf, whose production arm Nozomi had been connected to the longest and latest series, has had a lot of dark aspersions cast on it. It might have been a matter of seeking distractions from that to pick up on the tidbits that AnimEigo was preparing to launch a crowdfunding Kickstarter to release Macross II. With that, I just might have found a certain peculiar amusement in this matter of priority involving a company that’s survived despite (or because of) not having ranked among major players since the twentieth century and a title that’s been pretty far down on the collective list of franchise favourites for even longer.
Before I knew about that, though, seeing a notice about a “Macross II role-playing game” and then buying the game book (despite not having enough friends to ever think of trying to play it) had been significant moments in my slow and sometimes imperceptible progress towards figuring out Robotech hadn’t been just “a single envelope-pushing cartoon from that nebulous place all cartoons came from,” nor just “a relic of a vanished era of large-scale science fiction action cartoons,” or even just “one bit of animation from Japan that had come close enough to view.” As soon as I was able to see more anime, though, I started running into dismissals of Macross II. It was more than a decade after that that I got around to seeing that title at last, and I could see several points that could have gone into those old dismissals.
At the moment, though, I suppose the temptation to start putting money where my mouth was was enough to make me pay into the Kickstarter too, and this after it had reached its initial goal. It could still take a while to go from crowdfunding to this release. One thing that I’m wondering about in the meantime is a more recent dismissal that Macross II can be seen to draw on the old movie Roman Holiday; as that sort of thing isn’t quite as reprehensible to me as it might be to some, there is the thought of trying to see the movie myself.
Before I knew about that, though, seeing a notice about a “Macross II role-playing game” and then buying the game book (despite not having enough friends to ever think of trying to play it) had been significant moments in my slow and sometimes imperceptible progress towards figuring out Robotech hadn’t been just “a single envelope-pushing cartoon from that nebulous place all cartoons came from,” nor just “a relic of a vanished era of large-scale science fiction action cartoons,” or even just “one bit of animation from Japan that had come close enough to view.” As soon as I was able to see more anime, though, I started running into dismissals of Macross II. It was more than a decade after that that I got around to seeing that title at last, and I could see several points that could have gone into those old dismissals.
At the moment, though, I suppose the temptation to start putting money where my mouth was was enough to make me pay into the Kickstarter too, and this after it had reached its initial goal. It could still take a while to go from crowdfunding to this release. One thing that I’m wondering about in the meantime is a more recent dismissal that Macross II can be seen to draw on the old movie Roman Holiday; as that sort of thing isn’t quite as reprehensible to me as it might be to some, there is the thought of trying to see the movie myself.