Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

Advance reports the latest release over in Japan of “the Macross movie” Do You Remember Love? would have English subtitles got my attention. That particular piece of the Macross franchise hadn’t been included in the recent rollout to streaming services outside Japan I don’t have a subscription to. While I am quite aware a good number of other fans assign all the blame for that continued absence to Harmony Gold, I have to admit to being willing to wonder if there might be something to the occasional counterarguments the number of entities involved in the production of the movie four decades ago could have something to do with particular problems with its overseas rights. (I also understand that when the English dub of uncertain provenance was released on videotape years and years ago, Harmony Gold didn’t appear to have been involved...) In any case, I did start contemplating taking a rare step indeed for me.
( Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence )

Posting twice about Transformers this year, even if it’s an anniversary year for them, was already unusual for me. I have to admit that even the casual awareness I maintain of them can sharpen uneasy thoughts about “light entertainment” now amounting to selling “established properties” to people hooked on them quite early in their lives. If there’s a risk to stretching them too far one way or another, there could be even more of a risk of just getting caught up with “bad faith actors.” Even so, one recent bit of news about Transformers reached not me not through the usual conduits I keep ready to hand but as a piece of “anime news,” and that had me thinking of a bit more than the very familiar characters that help sell the toys and other products.
( A song once listened to )

Time 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... )

With 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.
( “Dedicated to all pioneers” )

A sudden flurry of “Macross Blu-Rays over here before long!” announcements from the big Anime Expo convention grabbed my attention on the weekend. Special theatrical screenings of some of the “movie versions” had been something in the months since the staggering announcement the rights to the franchise had been sliced up at last, but I had kept thinking “discs would be something more tangible, more lasting.” I guess I still don’t know know much these discs will actually cost, but with several established companies said to be releasing different titles I can at least hope things won’t be that different from their established patterns. The big winner out of them does seem to be Right Stuf’s production arm Nozomi, and with just about all of Gundam now released through them it does seem like a good time for them to be starting on something new. Regardless of the differing judgments of conventional wisdom on the different titles in the franchise, there is the nudge of “obligation” in having seen most of them through underhanded means in past years. (The problem there might be how I never quite got around to the latest series, Macross Delta, until the conventional wisdom had turned negative on it.) For all that Macross 7 wasn’t announced at the same time as all the other titles only to surprise people a day later, though, the announcement that would seem to “get everything else started off right” didn’t happen. Harmony Gold only provided platitudes rather than the very original series, and that of course let fans respond with contempt and conspiracy theories. Some things haven’t changed even now.

The evening was wearing on yesterday when I clicked a link kept ready at hand to take one more look at the Anime News Network web site. It might even have been a little unusual for me to head to that site then; I can’t recall any particular motivation for it beyond, perhaps, wondering if anything else had been added to the start-of-the-season previews (although it’ll be another three months before I get around to any of those new shows myself).

For the very first item in sight, it took an instant or two to make sense of all the names in the headline together. That’s not to say I couldn’t see what connected them, but “Big West” and “Harmony Gold” hadn’t been associated with “agree” before. Pushing into the article, though, I read the explanation “the distribution of Macross and Robotech” had been worked out, read it again, and reminded myself we’re more than a week past April Fool’s Day. It took some time to gather my own thoughts.
( Years in the making )

By just about any measure I’ve been watching anime for a long time. Weighing explanations for this (that don’t cast me in too bad a light, anyway), I’ve pondered whether I avoided “aging out of a teenaged diversion on realising I’d grown older than the typical ‘anime character’” through not having seen any of it in high school (save for a few videotaped relics of the mid-1980s “giant robot boom” I was then only just sorting out had come from Japan and been followed there by much more animation). On arriving at university, though, I noticed posters for an anime club, and all of a sudden one long showing a month was available for the reasonable price of a membership. It was significant enough I’ve been making an indulgent deal of “five-year marks” since (save for that first “five years later,” when I was getting some working experience too far from university to drop back in on friends on the weekends of showings but supposing my salary too low to start building a personal collection) and working out various “personal showings.” Now, after returning to memorable titles from the club years and after, sorting through my growing collection by years of production and picking “one sample episode a year” (my collection has stretched on either side since then), and settling on “one long series per decade,” I contemplated a preserved poster from the club’s old web site for the first show I attended and realised I could return to what had been shown then. It would be just a bit more than “seeing what I’d seen then,” too.
( Cyber City Oedo 808 and Phantom Quest Corp )
( Macross Plus )
( 3x3 Eyes and El Hazard )
( Bonus addition: Castle of Cagliostro )

Midway through this year, my grand-to-grandiose project of returning to the original Macross and then taking in a string of other series had got through everything connected by time slot and official localization; I still had a number of shows left linked up by whims sparked by once-noticed comments and standard brand names, though. I also had no intention of this getting in the way of another careful selection of up-to-the-minute or nearly so anime, but as these three months wore on I did find my thoughts turning still further back. It did add up to another busy viewing schedule, and during it I managed to see at least a bit of anime from each of six successive decades.
( Continuing to start with: Zillion and Gall Force )
( Streaming part 1: To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts and Astra Lost in Space )
( Streaming part 2: Granbelm and Symphogear XV )
( Streaming continued: Fruits Basket and Mix )
( Two differing steps back: Mach Go Go Go and Zombie Land Saga )
( Manga preparation, perhaps: Urusei Yatsura and Gunnm )
( Moving along: Gunbuster, Orguss 02, and Gunbuster 2 )
( Moving back: Flying Phantom Ship and Attack No. 1 )
( Wrapping up: Carole & Tuesday and the Macross Frontier movies )

An Apple news site linked to a old photo of Susan Kare, the bitmap artist most associated with shaping the on-screen look of the original Macintosh (although she was also later hired to design icons for Microsoft Windows 3). The link was promoted with the comment the picture was at a high enough resolution you could get a good look at details in the background of Kare's office, so I followed the link to the photo. Taking in the clutter behind Kare (who, sprawled back in her desk chair, did fill most of the frame), I first noted the artwork and design books, then looked at the upper left of the picture. All of a sudden, a different bit of 1980s trivia kicked in. A red toy robot on the shelf looked familiar; I could put a name to it at once as Inferno, the Autobot fire truck from the Transformers.
( A feedback loop of history )

While it may have snowed here last night, making the ground much whiter than I can remember it being for a lot of the winter, one however-skewed sign of "spring" is a new season of anime series starting up. I'm still in that evanescent early stage where I can at least consider watching the series as they stream, hoping they won't be dismissed by everyone else. For one series in particular, I was contemplating going a bit further to take it in; I hadn't quite expected the invitation to go that much further.

Seeing news the Japanese discs for the new Macross Delta series had been listed with English subtitles did remind me how the Macross Frontier movies had been released with them, and how I had gone to the point of ordering the box set from Japan as "I value it that much higher than these other titles" converged with "I'm not just spending money on an object I'd put on a shelf and never actually watch," although I tried not to make a big deal of that afterwards the way a certain number of importing English-language anime fans sometimes seem to do. It is, of course, the "end-run" way around the perpetual licensing enigma some people are very intent on assigning exclusive blame for; it's also going to get very expensive to buy all the discs the series is going to be split up among. I remembered all the times having got my hands on "fansubs" of an anime series would make me buy the licensed release before getting around to seeing the series, just because that was the right thing to do (even if I could suppose some insisting it was that much more righteous to import the Japanese releases). The simple, cheap, and unexciting solution is not to watch the Macross Delta fansubs. That, though, does happen to be a lot like what happens quite often with me.