Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

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...”
( Although it hasn't been quite that long )

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 )

While I don’t know if “following some social media feeds without being signed up for their platform” is “avoiding some of the worst parts” or just “only encountering worst parts” (given that among other things I can’t make direct responses to anything), I have happened to see Bob Clark, whose weblog posts on Star Wars were how I first became aware of him, mention he was dipping into Macross for what he said was the first time with an aim towards watching its 1980s theatrical adaptation, “Do You Remember Love?” That Clark takes a measured interest in anime also gets my attention; that he’s somewhere in between “all or nothing” (and I’m kind of close to the high-end extreme myself) may add to the feeling of “a valuable perspective.”
( A thought on that perspective )

At some point, “all the anime I could watch” piled up to where I shrugged and kept going back to see whole series again every once in a while. As last year drew to a close, specific thoughts of what to watch once more were sprouting in me, turning to some of my most foundational series. A decade ago this year was the last time I’d watched all of Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada, 2009 being the year Macross’s space opera mecha action had been said to start. (While the series hadn’t been fully available in its original form over here in 1999, when its prologue had been set, my university’s anime club had shown its first two episodes subtitled, and I remember private satisfaction hearing cheers for the midair rescue scene.) Since then, though, I had happened to think I was coming up on three decades since I’d first seen some of their animation repurposed together as Robotech, but as that year itself had begun I’d decided to “mark an anniversary” by watching different series altogether, even if I’d managed to head back to a particular selection of Robotech episodes as a later indulgence. I suppose the thought did creep up on me that if I didn’t return to the series this year, that might somehow amount to “when again, if ever?”
( To 1999 and before )

Reactions unfolded one after the other for me off a bit of news that a Kickstarter-funded project to make miniature Robotech models for an RPG wargame had run out of all the money I remembered seeing it had raised and wouldn't ship everything promised. First of all, of course, it was unfortunate for the people who'd paid into it. In the context I'd seen the news in, though, the added piece of information the sublicense for the Robotech RPG had expired with the project seemed most of all to have a lot of people looking ahead and reminding each other of a revelation from just a little while ago. The license that had made "Robotech" in the first place wasn't "in perpetuity" the way it had seemed when it was being assigned all the blame for official Macross products not getting outside Japan with any ease, but had an expiry date some time in the next decade. Something about that gloating anticipation does seem unfortunate to me. I do have to admit that after so long and so little, the thought of "cutting a Gordian knot" can seem to have some appeal; at the same time, though, I have come to think "blowing everything up" might not work either. I know that once, years ago, an effort to import transformable Valkyrie toys was derailed because of Harmony Gold's Robotech contract; hard reports of further efforts to bring anything else Macross-related out of Japan being squashed the same "if we can't make money off it, nobody will" way have always seemed elusive, though, and there are murmurs too part of the problem seems to involve the original overseas rights being sold to a subcontractor in Japan back when the original anime was being made (which I understand is also tangled up with some of the more infamously off-model episodes).
( Thoughts beyond that )

Two years ago, I made a fair deal out of three decades having passed since I happened on Robotech. Sometimes, though, I do wonder if I've mythologized just what I made of that show back then as compared to any other science fiction-flavoured Saturday morning action cartoon I also watched visiting my grandparents, who had cable, or even to the episodes of Transformers and Thunder Sub my family had taped off our own TV and not recorded over soon after. I'm at least conscious of the suggestions of risk in letting personal identies get tangled up with inconsequential popular culture consumed, especially the stuff seen when young and impressionable. There is one bit of hard evidence left from back then, however, in a comic I drew to put together and in some small way preserve the serialized story I was taking in one disconnected bit at a time, even if I have to sum it up as the sort of thing a pre-teen could manage. It didn't wind up my only record, though, and the next part of a line that does trace between then and one of my leisure interests now picked up a bit over two years after my first viewing, which means it took place three decades ago right around now.
( In the leadup to Christmas... )

Not quite two years ago, I watched a "poetic reconstruction" of the scattered episodes of Robotech I'd managed to see "the first time around" three decades before to start me off down a path both long and perhaps a little strange. As I finished that project by at last getting through a parody-sequel video I'd long heard amusing rumours of and had available to watch for a while, though, I did wonder a bit if it might, to stretch the metaphor, either let or just make me step off a path now trailing off into lonely weeds.

After just a little while, though, it didn't seem to matter too much that the remnant of discussions "inside" seemed bitter in a "terrible food, and such small portions" way and the references from just "outside" go through a filter of fixed hostility, because there had been a time when my interest in Robotech had seemed to make me "a fandom of one." Some people can regale younger generations with tales of the days when "fandom" was carried out through the postal service, but even if I'd managed to hear about that before everything turned electronic I hadn't got to the point of trying it myself. After all those days with just one episode on tape, the novelizations, and the drawings in the first volume of the role-playing game, I did find myself still spending some idle moments contemplating the thoughts I'd had back then, and sometimes the reasons why I'd had them, back before everything had got a lot more complicated.
( Some things that have happened since then )

I've just about watched my way through the list of Robotech episodes I'm convinced I saw on TV in the mid-1980s. That they fit into the weekends of one-quarter of a year does point out how little of the series I was able to see on holiday visits to my grandparents back then, but also how even that got me hooked to the point of staying interested in its story until I got to university and joined the anime club there, and perhaps that also ties into my still watching considerable quantities of anime to this day (although I do have to admit that at a crucial point there might have been other factors holding me back from the more conventional forms of "the fantastic"...) I did skip a few episodes I think I saw but which just happened to be some of the more poorly animated instalments of Macross, infamous for wobbly animation quality, and I suppose my fragmentary impressions of what I saw are stronger in some cases than others. However, I do have hard proof of having seen one episode. Two years after the first Thanksgiving weekend I saw Robotech, we packed our VCR over to my grandmother's, and I spent that weekend taping shows. As luck would have it, the episode of Robotech I taped (by that point, the UHF channel was only airing the show on Saturday mornings) was one of the better-animated ones, and not that far removed in the course of the series from the very first one I saw. It made "something to remember the show by" even as I started collecting and reading the novelizations to know what the story was and picking up volumes of the RPG just to know what the machinery looked like.
( A few years later, and years after that )

The "official Robotech site" shut down a little while ago; I at least got an email from them saying this was a security measure in the face of hacking. (It might well have been a "nothing personal; we're out for money" exploit, but I suppose I did think, just a little, of the Macross fans whose constant condemnation of Harmony Gold can seem to overshadow their interest in the actual anime, and imagined, with a full awareness of the risk of making "dark hints," them reacting with some form of approval.) That this happened right when there seems to have been a tiny bit of movement towards the long-fabled "live-action movie" (and not that long after the rights-holders had seemed to decide they at last had to put a bit of effort into coming up with "new story product" themselves) did seem unfortunate. Eventually, links to Twitter and Facebook accounts did get posted; I wondered a bit about assumptions that there's no need to set up "independent platforms" these days, and anyway even "official" discussion forms just provide excuses for criticism. It did mean that when another bit of news about the movie was passed around to get me setting down thoughts about this whole matter, I was aware what discussion there might be of it was more likely to just be dismissive.

Even with all of that, though, I do appreciate that Jonathan L. Switzer, who I have sometimes thought of as the last "independent Robotech commentator" (although I shouldn't forget that artwork keeps being added to the "Robotech Visions" page on Facebook), has been posting sample pages from the numerous Robotech comics in "story order" on his Tumblr. It seemed for a while that he had ground to a halt with the penultimate issue of one series he had seemed positive towards, short of getting into the original adaptation of "The Macross Saga" with its early efforts to reproduce "anime style" and the stranger attempts in the three decades since to work in "additional stories," but then he picked up again. I suppose I was conscious of how I kept coming across sites he'd started to chronicle the Robotech comics but ground to a halt on; that there's relatively little commentary being added in the apparent style of Tumblr (although it is sort of interesting to notice posts with more "notes" and wonder just what lucky accident resulted in that) may help.

I just happened to see today that Robotech started airing in syndication exactly thirty years ago. Although that had been something I'd been more or less aware of, it didn't start airing in every market on the same date; I happened to see my first episodes of it on WUTV-29 from Buffalo on the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, and by going to the library and checking microfilmed newspaper TV guides I'm now more or less certain it didn't start airing the series until the fall season. (I haven't yet looked far enough into that microfilm to confirm reports that CHCH-11 from Hamilton also aired the show back then; I wasn't as inclined to tune to that channel when I was visiting my grandparents and didn't see the show on it then. Perhaps I don't want to acknowledge a missed chance, even if I keep telling myself I'm not wondering if I might have wound up more interested in "that anime stuff" if only I'd seen a few more episodes of Robotech years ago...) As I'm always wondering about topics to post about, though, a few thoughts did happen to fall together right now.
( The thoughts )