krpalmer | Entries tagged with robotech

Over the years, I've put some of my most notable links on a simple HTML page to serve as a "home base," but I don't visit every one of even those links every day. One day not that long ago, I selected one of the links I hadn't gone to in a while just on a whim, only to realise something I'd been sort of anticipating for possibly over fifteen years had happened at last.

One of the first things I'd searched for when I first went online (a few years before reputable search engines, although the first human-curated directories had started up) was information on Robotech, and my idle curiosity turned up several interesting sites. Somewhere off to the side of the arguments over whether the novelizations refined a ramshackle "canon" or let some dubious inventions and forces overshadow what had made the animation interesting to some people, there were some resources devoted to the role-playing game, even if it had come in for its own share of criticism from those who had the series on videotape. Beyond mere criticism, though, one person named Dave Deitrich had created an "RPG supplement" building from one final point of the RPG I had heard about and just sort of shrugged off before. Apparently unwilling to face the possibility campaigns might have to end, the RPG had had the enemies of the "Third Robotech War" turn around and head back to Earth, just perhaps jettisoning any possibility of "lessons learned" with a "take it from here, just the same as before" directive. "Third Invid War," however, invented some actual new equipment and set down a timeline that did eventually conclude, just perhaps managing to "create" without "complaining" in the process. As much as the timeline pointed to things not actually available (the way a great many other "Robotech fan projects" managed to), he'd also worked on a comparable online supplement presenting some of the Macross mecha.

One day in 1998, though, Dave Deitrich added a "sorry I haven't updated; I've been buying a house" note to his site, and that was that. He did keep his site up for long years afterwards, and along the way I found a "site downloader" tool that let me save the files for myself (although I suppose the "Wayback Machine" had more than enough time to archive the site itself), but now that the site's not loading any more I'm that much more conscious of Robotech "fading into the past" even in its anniversary year (as much as I know some other people would have different reactions to that...)

A while ago, I commemorated the tenth anniversary of a notable MSTing and then took the opportunity not that much later to mark the same anniversary for the first "solo MSTing" I'd written. I did write a few more MSTings after "Undocumented Features," but marking each of their tenth anniversaries did seem a bit grandiose. Now, though, it's been ten years since the last MSTing I completed going by the date stamp on my personal file of it, which does feel a bit more significant in its own if somewhat dowmbeat way. In accepting the opportunity, though, I did get to thinking I could say something brief about each of my solo MSTings preceding it anyway.

( 'When military schedules meet the MTV generation, something's got to give.' )

( 'The miracle acrylic bubble locks his hysterical sobs away.' )

( 'He's not even going to dignify that with a putdown, I see.' )

( 'Something of a war poodle cut, then.' )

( 'Abstract is this season's post-minimalist.' )

I noticed the announcement of a Kickstarter intent on raising almost six hundred thousand dollars to make a "pilot episode" for a science fiction anime series and wondered how close it would get to its goal, then perhaps didn't dwell too much on it until, in an aside to a related discussion, I noticed someone talking about how the rate of donations had picked up in the final days and the project was getting pretty close to being funded. All of a sudden, the thought of contributing and getting to see just how this latest experiment in "crowd-funding" would turn out got to me despite the reproachful awareness of "only pitching in now," and I went and added a pledge. Later that day, "Under the Dog" reached its funding goal with time to spare.

One just-earlier Kickstarter with a similar intention but different results was sticking in my mind, though; it might have played a small role in my wondering about just what would happen and holding back. Of the two large anime discussion communities I delve some depth into, I did notice some people on The Fandom Post's message board being quicker than anyone in the Anime News Network talkback thread to gloat about how the "Robotech Academy" Kickstarter had ground to a halt and was shut down well before its actual deadline. There were, however, also people on the official Robotech site forum dwelling on how Under the Dog showed more, and more interesting, preliminary work. I do just wonder a bit about whether for some people Under the Dog was more appealing because its creative team didn't bring as much of a "track record" to mind.

How the episode's worth of animation now crowd-funded will turn out is something I'll have to wait to see. How much further crowd-funding can be stretched is a question I continue to wonder about; at some point, the compromises of seeking funding from deeper pockets may have to be made. As much as promises of the show being "old-fashioned" in a good way appealed to people, I can think that if they want to see three anime movies that feel that way to me right now, they might try Mardock Scramble. Nevertheless, the accomplishment does seem something.

When trying to think of what to post about next in this journal, there are times I begin shaping ideas in my mind but think they need to wait for what they're built around to be finished first, such that they don't quite help the feeling I "ought" to post "every so often." In one recent case, though, the denouement came a few days sooner than I'd expected it to, and it only increased the sense of melancholia that had already pervaded what I'd been expecting.

( The kickless Kickstarter )

Before I had this journal, I had a home page, but even though the journal links to that page I haven't revamped it for quite a while. "Linkrot" is one thing; it's something else to look at things you said you were interested in and wonder if it's quite the same now. After a certain amount of unproductive thought about mere possibilities, I at last scraped together the motivation to start working on the text.

What I'd said about Mystery Science Theater 3000 could stay just about the same, even if it's been that much longer since the general MSTing community closed up. Aware I don't start my text adventure programs or Marathon all that much these days, I rolled them together and added an introductory section about "old computers" in general. I then turned my look at Robotech specifically into a "narrative" from Robotech to anime in general, although my daydream of going from a "Robotech eyecatch" to the "Super Dimension Fortress Macross eyecatch" to one from Macross Frontier with its illustration of the way things changed again seems on hold until the possibility of indeed getting those English-subtitled Blu-Rays of the Macross Frontier movies later this year and perhaps rewatching the TV series that preceded them. My section on Star Wars does stay at the bottom of the page where people might not be as likely to get to, but I did expand it; I also moved the link to my journal up to the top so that someone following a link might be a little more likely to see it.

To brush things up a little, I sorted out a few more basic tricks with CSS (although the style sheet section might be a little chaotic) and changed the look of some sections (although this might amount to the old-fashioned folly of "using every font in the menu just because you can"). I don't know how long it'll be before I work on my home page again, but maybe it might not be as long as the last time.

A little while ago, I bought an official collection of PDF-formatted issues of twenty-nine years of the "Skeptical Inquirer" magazine. (This inclination, perhaps towards "counter-counterarguments" in general, seems to come from when I was a kid and my grandmother kept getting me books about "the unexplained"; instead of being intrigued by intimations of "things I wasn't mean to know," though, I was just terrified by the pictures.) Working my way through them, I happened to notice an approving book review in an issue from 1989 of a book called "High Weirdness by Mail" by the Reverend Ivan Stang, cofounder of the Church of the SubGenius, which offered mailing addresses and capsule descriptions of "strange organizations." Among promises of "Weird Science," "UFO Contactees," "Jesus Contactees," and "New Age Saps," the review also mentioned the book covering "creativity outside the mainstream" and tossed "Japanese animation" right in the middle of that subsection. I admit that caught my attention. Wondering if used copies of the book could be bought online, I started looking into it, and noticed another brief review mention the book covered the perhaps unfortunately named author of a conspiracy I'd written a MSTing of. That added fillip was enough to make me place an order.

( Weirdness within )

At the start of the week, I made some joking comments about an "unofficial" sort of blurring between Star Wars and Star Trek. By the end of the week, that sort of thing had become official...

I suppose it's possible that J.J. Abrams has foolishly been given (or will appropriate for himself) too much creative control over the Star Wars movie to be made, and things will wind up playing to the tastemakers enough that the movie will get positive reviews that just happen to be another opportunity to gloatingly put down the work George Lucas did himself. It's also possible that with a story and script already provided, the questions won't be as extreme. (For that matter, a relentless minute-by-minute criticism of Abrams's Star Trek, a suggestion perhaps that enthusiasm can be brief and negativity can lurk instead of loom, became rather less appealing to me once the writer started throwing in random yet tediously predictable complaints about the new Star Wars movies...) My problem, though, may just be that in not having been that invested in the thought of "another Star Wars movie" yet, I'll be fine with the thought of not paying attention to it, just as I stopped paying attention to the novels telling their own "what happened next" story... It might even be possible that a few (more) people wind up wondering if "a tale has already been told to completion." (Of course, there were some people happy to think that three movies back.)

(As it turned out, this week also had some reports of a director being considered for the long-fabled live-action Robotech movie. I had almost stopped thinking about it, but it is at least a change from mere talk of scripts being written.)

Once again, I'm trying to craft a post around a video game I've started playing of late. As an unofficial open-source adaptation of a board game (or, at least, a game played with "map boards"), it's not a multimedia extravaganza, but it does give a chance to try out something I've been aware of for a long time. The game's called "MegaMek," and it's a computer version of "Battletech."

I started noticing Battletech game modules in hobby stores not that long after starting to watch Robotech, and as with other people the similarity in names and art left me wondering who was ripping off who. (Maybe it was more complicated than that, but of that a little more later...) With what little I could remember from the backs of those packages about the ravages of future war, I tried sketching out a timeline with the thought it might even turn into a story, one that only ran a few centuries into the future and had two sides facing off on a post-apocalyptic Earth. It was a bit later, the story unwritten, that I learned the game was set a full millennium in the future, and extended my timeline only for it to still end up with two sides facing off on a post-apocalyptic Earth. By then, though, there were Battletech novels on the science fiction shelves of bookstores, and I started learning what the real story was...

( tech versus tech )

I got up this morning contemplating posting a thought or two about finally getting to see the first episode of the new series of Doctor Who. (To abbreviate: there were changes in many ways as expected, but also continuity; I'm interested in what's to come but wondering if some of that comes from having followed the opinions of someone able to deal with the various controversies that seem to get whipped up over just how the stories for the various "companions" get wrapped up.) Then, though, I saw news that Carl Macek had died of a sudden heart attack, and that weighed more on me. Some of that unpleasant surprise might have come from his having done a podcast interview with the Anime News Network just a few months ago... but I balanced old thoughts that his different projects through the decades weren't always continued successes with the thought that he did keep working, and remembered that before I was able to "follow up" on Robotech by moving into the larger world of anime, I had been able to stay interested in its story for a decade, and I'm still able to mull over it now.

I was also reminded of when I heard years ago that Brian Daley, one half of the duo who had written the Robotech novels under a pen name, had died. It was on a Robotech mailing list whose members tended to have issues with the differences between the series and the novels, but an effort was made to hold down unpleasant comments. Imagining various people reacting in similar ways to then, I'm recalling again a thought I had that just because hypothetical cases can be stated of how anime fandom could have waxed in North America without Robotech, that can't be made to deny that Robotech did have an impact...

After an interview with someone from Geneon sounded interesting enough for me to try an Anime News Network podcast at last, I've listened to a few more of them. I've got to admit that the great majority of the time I skip over the hosts talking to each other and get straight to the latest interview to sound interesting, and so far as that goes an extended discussion with Carl Macek did indeed catch my attention. Having to head off to three twelve-hour night shifts in a row did delay my starting into it, but I was able to get through on my days off.

( Carl Macek's revenge, part one! )

( There may be problems with 'alternative histories' )

( Carl Macek's revenge, part two! )

( One unexpected moment )

Completing a nostalgic project I set myself to at the start of the year, I've rewatched the third anime series that got turned into a part of Robotech. "Robotech: The New Generation" does sometimes seem to me to be among fans, for lack of a better word, the "connoisseur's segment": it doesn't have anywhere near the baggage both before and after the fact that Macross provides, and its reputation is much better than that of "Robotech: Masters." Even so, it was possible that the odd interest I had in starting Southern Cross wasn't quite there when moving on to Genesis Climber Mospeada, whether through thoughts that this third series was more "episodic," whatever that meant, that it's a little less dubious to pretend that Southern Cross's character designs match up with Macross's than with Mospeada's, or just because Southern Cross's "declared flaws" somehow gave me something to react against in an interesting way the way general approval doesn't...

( Pretty much from the moment I started watching the first episode again, though... )

I resolved that in 2009, I would take the time I put towards rewatching anime series (always in part to reassure myself I'm not so completely mastered by the large quantity of DVDs I buy that I never get back to anything, thus defeating a purpose of buying rather than at least trying to rent them) and return to the series put together to make Robotech. After viewing Macross at the beginning of the year, deciding to rewatch the Megazone 23 OVAs (which have a more or less tangential connection to Robotech as most know it) seemed to open up a fair-sized pause in my project. Now, though, I've once again seen the anime series put in the middle of Robotech, but also the one most dismissed in a breath both inside and outside that composite series, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross... and yet, both even before starting into that specific anime again and in the process of watching it, I kept thinking that I'm at least interested in Southern Cross "more than I'm supposed to," and at times contrasting that to other mecha anime series from the early 1980s that receive wide praise but, when I have seen them, I've wound up thinking "I'm supposed to like them more..." Maybe it's just a case of "sympathy for a frequent target" carried to bizarre lengths, as opposed to heaps of praise making me elevate my standards in some subconscious way until nothing can meet them. In any case, I can identify "flaws" in Southern Cross, and yet in acknowledging them they don't seem to bother me as much any more; they're just something to be thought about.

( Some increasingly disconnected reflections ahead )

In my plan to use the time I devote to rewatching anime series this year to an odyssey of revisiting the different series that got put together and called Robotech, I've taken another sort of side trip. When I first got online with some curiosity remaining about one particular Saturday morning cartoon I had seen bits of a decade before and then followed up some of its spinoffs, I managed to turn up a "Robotech FAQ" which, among other things, mentioned there had once been a "Robotech movie" that had glimmered on the edge of release and then vanished. (I had actually seen a few brief, unrevealing references to it in some of the spinoffs before that, but that didn't have much of an effect on me.) It was explained that the "original" footage in the somewhat patchwork "Robotech: The Movie" had been taken from a fourth work of anime, the "Original Video Animation" Megazone 23, and when that OVA got re-released on DVD years later I took the chance to buy it... although aware that a "draw" now advanced at times to catch interest wasn't its brief, tangential connection to Robotech, but resemblances invoked between it and The Matrix. (Of course, those who invoke the resemblances do seem to have been interested in Megazone first...)

( Saying that may be more than enough to give the... )

As an interlude of sorts in between rewatching the anime series that happened to have been made parts of Robotech, I steeped myself that much more fully in the indulgent nostalgia this whole experiment might well boil down to and watched not an integral predecessor to one Saturday morning cartoon from the 1980s but a tragic, fragmentary follow-up to it. In contemplating this beforehand, I had wondered a little if "Robotech II: The Sentinels" helps prove the raw power of nostalgia and "first viewings." At the time they were attempting it, I didn't know that the people whose "post-production" work had formed a project they called Robotech were convinced they could finance new animation in Japan to elaborate on their story. (After all, the people who had made Voltron got some new episodes animated through their own efforts...) Instead, I first read an adaptation of a project brought without my knowing it to a crashing halt through a toy company pulling out and foreign exchange rates shifting. Perhaps, though, having next to no "visual reality" at the time to back up the new set of Robotech novels made it easier to fixate on a string of quibbling objections to certain things happening in them (including how a small point I found quite interesting in the original novelizations seemed to have been contradicted without a real explanation...) Then, the first group of other Robotech fans I came in contact with wound up pretty dismissive of "The Sentinels" as just one more example of the stuff that followed the original series but couldn't be interpreted through a "close to hard SF" viewpoint, for all that the video made from the three episodes' worth of animation actually finished reinforced the new chronology they had worked up but just happened to leave off at a point where they could finally envision events following it completely unlike what had been intended to follow it...

However, I suppose that in the end I'm no more intent on being offended by the concatenation of contingencies that shaped the half-life of "The Sentinels" than by the preceding and interlocking concatenation that shaped Robotech itself. As well, it was somehow refreshing to encounter an altogether new perspective from someone who had a chance to encounter Robotech quite recently, became quite intrigued by a small subset of its characters, and then decided that their development in "The Sentinels" was more satisfying than in the Macross franchise itself... It's easy enough to be aware that the video doesn't get its apparent main characters (most of who have new and somehow unflattering haircuts due to the need to redesign their appearances) anywhere other than to a wedding, and to contrast that to the action in the first three episodes of any one of Robotech's three component anime series, but somehow I find myself inclined right now to be kindly and remind myself that "The Sentinels" was meant to run five days a week in syndication where the anime series only showed one episode a week. Still, I'm not quite sure all of this genuinely affects my contemplations of a sort of "Platonic ideal" of Robotech, the intellectual game of reconciling things, or looking ahead to at least somewhat more substantial component anime series to follow.

Since starting to rewatch an anime series (at a somewhat higher tempo than I watch them the first time around) every few months, still worrying, perhaps, about how I buy the stuff much faster than I can watch it, but not letting that shape my viewing habits altogether, I don't seem to have lacked for ideas of series to view again. (That seems kind of encouraging in its own way.) It seems, though, that I managed to map out my return viewings for this whole year well in advance through a simple idea: since the calendar shows 2009, and that year was established once upon a time through a time-lapse sequence of iconic significance in my memory as the year the action really started in Robotech, I would rewatch the anime series (released a few years ago with their original Japanese language track subtitled and a strong component of nostalgia associated with them) that were combined to make it. After a little bit of toying with unorthodox ways to approach this, I decided at last to just start with Macross, the series first considered to be brought to North America and the series that started Robotech off. In contemplating how I might say something about that to help keep this journal going, though, I recalled how the last time I rewatched Macross, I was able to post about it here, for all that this time I was going to listen to the original Japanese language track...

( A difference between Macross and Robotech )
In any case, I was working my way through the show, handling well enough its wild swings in animation quality as different studios were brought in for different episodes, and secure in what's either a "middle of the road" or a just plain "wishy-washy" belief that, now that I have Macross, I'm more likely to watch it than Robotech but I see no particular reason to get upset over the mere existence of a show from the 1980s (although I suppose I do wonder at times if some seem to apply a "double standards" to "adapted anime" of that time other than Macross)... and then, on what might have been a whim, I started to revisit another part of the "Robotech experience" by starting into its novelizations.

( Meditations on novelizations )

I haven't heard a lot about the "live-action Robotech movie." However, today I did manage to run across a new tidbit, that the writers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar have become attached to the project... somehow, it's not quite the same as hearing Lawrence Kasdan was involved. I suppose, of course, that he just may not have worked out, and yet, I did notice the article mentioning how "Gough and Millar bring action and geek cred to the table," and asking myself how The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Spider-Man 2, and even producing seven seasons of "Smallville" is much more "credible" than The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Return of the Jedi... (Of course, as I've told myself before, those projects of Kasdan's were a quarter of a century in the past.)

Even I would have to admit that Robotech seems a pretty minor figure in the pantheon of 1980s pop culture. It seems, though, that the people working on a live-action Robotech movie have found a way to connect their project to some very major parts of that 1980s pantheon: Lawrence Kasdan has been hired to write a script...

When I first saw the news, my reaction was indeed pretty much "Wow!" (A bit later, I did also contemplate how the at-the-time past and future Star Wars novel writers Brian Daley and James Luceno collaborated under a pen name to write the Robotech novelizations in the 1980s, if to some ultimate fan controversy about whether the mechanisms they worked up to try and justify the story just wound up taking it over...) However, not that long after my first reaction, I thought that it's been more than twenty-five years since Kasdan wrote The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Return of the Jedi, and that he seemed to have set out on a different path than writing scripts for special-effects movies... and then I found myself wondering "What has he done lately?" Still, at least I didn't use the news as an excuse to beat up on George Lucas or, as one person seemed to be doing, to make dark allusions about Kasdan just for having been connected to Lucas...

Around the end of last year, I was interested in a "nostalgic" sort of way to hear that Robotech would be run on the science fiction channel in Canada, "Space"... but when the series got shifted from an afternoon to a morning time slot after just getting through its first segment, I had the uneasy feeling it wasn't doing that well. A few months later, it had vanished from the airwaves (although, to be fair, Space was obliging enough to show the recent follow-up Robotech feature before it was all over...)

Now, though, the series has reappeared on Space, in a Saturday morning block. Having first experienced Robotech as a "Saturday morning cartoon" all those years ago (although, of course, the series was extended from the anime Macross to make it long enough to sell in the weekly syndication market of the time), the news was interesting. "Saturday morning" is not what it used to be, I suppose, and I still don't know if it'll run long enough to finish the segment it's showing now and "wrap around" to its beginning, but I'll have to wait and see.

Not that long after I got just a little excited about Robotech returning to (cable) television on the "Space" channel, and four weeks after the series started showing there, I've discovered that it's been shifted in the schedule from 5 in the afternoon to 11 in the morning, when it would seem that just about anyone who would actually be watching the show would have to record it for later viewing. A gloomy part of me started wondering if the series will even run its full length, much less repeat... and then, I happened to remember that two decades ago, back around the time when Robotech was first on the air, one of my local television stations would show its cartoons at noon, and I would get my parents to set the VCR to tape them. Nostalgia, it seems, trumps depression.

Another thought that I had was that, showing two episodes a day five days a week, the channel had at least got through the "Macross Saga" part of Robotech. That, though, started me wondering about whether anyone would draw grander conclusions from that. Some Robotech fans seem to adhere to as fixed a party line of acceptance and rejection as some Star Wars fans seem to, and that line is to look with approving eyes at "The Macross Saga" but more or less look down on "Masters," the second segment of Robotech created by tricky dubbing of a second anime series. I suppose my mild and accepting mind just doesn't like to reject things, as I once became interested in the declarations of a few Robotech fans that, in fact, the real core of Robotech as a story is in "Masters," where the eponymous controllers of the Zentraedi and real drivers of the story meet their fate, setting up the more generally approved of (but not stand-alone, at least so far as those fans thought) third part of Robotech, "The New Generation." I suppose that to my mind, if you're going to see any merit to Robotech itself (what with a new, faithful dub of Macross itself), it should be viewed as an improvised unit and not just as one anime series stretched out to make it more saleable in syndication. Of course, those fans at times seemed at times to take a very dry approach to the whole series, and a lot of people who made a noisy point of disliking "Masters" also made a noisy point of disliking its characters...

As part of my usual daily round past various message boards, I headed to the "official Robotech site," and yet with my usual ambiguous feeling about whether I'm about to stop going there one of these days soon. This year, the unthinkable happened and there was actually some new Robotech animation released... and yet I find myself not really needing to read discussion related to it. Still, I get a "membership point" every day I log into the site, and I've got used to accumulating them... and then, today, I saw a news item proclaiming that the series will be reappearing on TV on a cable channel I can even watch on my side of the border, the "Space" channel.

( I admit I can wonder just why seeing this news interested me so much... )

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Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Entries tagged with robotech

The Unnoticed Passing of an Era

One Last MSTing Anniversary

Now Over the Dog

Robotech Academy Blues

A Long-Time-Coming Revamp

From the Bookshelf: High Weirdness by Mail

Obliquely Directorial Comments

The Next Best Thing to Mecha

Bad News To Wake Up To

A Macek Kind of Interview

Robotech Remembrances: Mospeada

Robotech Remembrances: Southern Cross

Robotech Remembrances: Megazone

Robotech Remembrances: Sentinels

Robotech Remembrances: Macross

Replacers of the Lost Screenwriter

Return of the Lost Screenwriter Strikes Back

Robotech Returns, Again

That happened kind of fast...

I don't need to be interested, but I am.