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Robotech is a science fiction franchise that was launched by an 85-episode adaptation of three different anime television series. Within the combined and edited story, Robotechnology refers to the scientific advances discovered in an alien starship that crashed on a South Pacific island. With this technology, Earth developed giant robotic machines or mecha (many of which were capable of transforming into vehicles) to fight three successive extraterrestrial invasions. The original television series (1985) Robotech was one of the first anime released in the United States that largely managed to preserve the complexity and drama of its original Japanese source material. Produced by Harmony Gold USA, Inc. in association with Tatsunoko Prod. Co., Ltd., Robotech is a story adapted with edited content and revised dialogue from the animation of three different mecha anime series: The Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada. Harmony Gold's cited reasoning for combining these unrelated series was its decision to market Macross for American weekday syndication television, which required a minimum of 65 episodes at the time (thirteen weeks at five episodes per week). Macross and the two other series each had fewer episodes than required since they originally aired in Japan as weekly series. This combination resulted in a storyline that spans three generations as mankind must fight three destructive Robotech Wars in succession over a powerful energy source called "Protoculture": Home video Following the original broadcast, the series enjoyed popularity on home video in VHS and DVD formats from the following distributors: For more information, see Robotech (TV series): Home Video Releases Sequels and spinoffs
Robotech: The Movie (1986)
Robotech II: The Sentinels (1986, cancelled) This aborted American-produced series would have followed the continuing adventures of Rick & Lisa Hunter and the Robotech Expedition during the events of The Robotech Masters and The New Generation. The feature-length pilot is comprised of the first three (and only) episodes that were produced. Being a sequel/spinoff to the combined series, The Sentinels featured characters from all three Robotech sagas and introduced the SDF-3 along with an overview of their new mission. According to director Carl Macek in Robotech Art 3: The Sentinels, the proposed 65-episode series was canceled after the crash of the Dollar/Yen exchange rate and lack of support by toy partner Matchbox. Efforts to petition the completion of this series have gone nowhere, but the pilot was released on VHS by Palladium Books and on DVD by ADV Films. Robotech III: The Odyssey (proposed) Producer Carl Macek revealed ideas for another proposed series, Robotech III: The Odyssey, which would have created a circular storyline that would end where the original Robotech began in a giant 260-episode cycle to fill up all the weekdays in a year. After the failure of Sentinels, Odyssey never went into development, though its ideas were worked into the Jack McKinney novel The End of the Circle. Robotech IV and V (planned)
Robotech 3000 (2000, cancelled)
Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles (2006) In 2002, Tommy Yune announced development of a new sequel which was not named until 2004 as Robotech: Shadow Force. The storyline is supposed to be a direct continuation of the unresolved ending of the original series. The title of the story arc was soon changed to Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles. The first trailers with finished animation were shown at Anime Expo and Comic-Con International in 2005. It was not until February 2006 when Kevin McKeever, operations coordinator at Harmony Gold, was able to confirm that the pilot movie had been completed. FUNimation Entertainment was announced as the home video, broadcast and theatrical distributor at the 2006 Comic-Con International in San Diego. Harmony Gold has planned several film festival showings, but delayed the DVD release until further notice. *. A thirty-second public service announcement for the United Nations, featuring Scott Bernard and Ariel, was animated during the production of The Shadow Chronicles. Although it did not use the original voice actors and the dialogue was somewhat out-of-character, it nonetheless marked the first fully-completed Robotech footage in twenty years. Robotech (Harmony Gold) chronology
The Robotech franchise
Robotech comics Robotech comics were first published in 1984 with DC Comics' short-lived Robotech Defenders and Comico's adaptation of the first episode of the Japanese version of Macross. However, the first adaptation of the Robotech television series did not arrive until 1985 with Comico's Robotech: The Macross Saga The various comic publishers include: Robotech collectible card game The first Robotech collectible card game was released in 2006 by Hero Factory, which had previously produced Robotech trading cards. Robotech music and soundtracks
Robotech novelizations Since 1987, Robotech was adapted into novel form by "Jack McKinney", a pseudonym for the team of James Luceno and the late Brian Daley, a pair of writers who had been working with Macek since they had collaborated on the animated series Galaxy Rangers. Using fictitious epigraphs in the style of Dune, McKinney's novels fleshed out the chronology (including adapting the incomplete Sentinels source material) in greater detail. Many Robotech fans consider the McKinney series to be an unofficial canon of its own, despite notable divergences in the writing from Harmony Gold's current official animation-based canon. Despite no longer being considered core continuity by Harmony Gold, the novels have been recently re-issued by Del Rey Books as Omnibus compilations. Robotech role-playing games
Robotech video games Robotech spawned four video game licenses, of which the most recent three were released: Impact While anime shows were brought to the US as early as the 1960s, such as Astro Boy, Speed Racer, and Kimba the White Lion, most were heavily bowdlerized for American audiences, with violence, deaths of major characters, sexual references, etc., completely edited out for what was assumed to be an audience of young children. Robotech along with the earlier Star Blazers (1974) broke with this tradition by leaving in some of those elements, and they are frequently credited as the series that helped spur American interest in Japanese animation, leading to the current anime industry in North America. Robotech was frequently among the top ten anime lists of American anime magazines such as Anime Insider, Animerica, Newtype USA, and others. Cascadia Con gave Harmony Gold an award for Robotech's contribution to the science fiction genre. Robotech had a similar impact in other places of the world, including Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and the Philippines. In China in the summer of 2004, it was awarded "Best Robot-theme Anime of all time" by the Cartoon Channel of China Education Television. It is highly likely that someone growing up in any of those countries during the 1980s, watched at least some of its episodes. (Robotech did not start its broadcast in China until 1991.) As in the US, it helped continue a slow but continuous rise in the consumption of anime. That said, Robotech is often an extremely polarizing issue among anime fans. Some critics consider the show to be an abomination that runs rough-shod over its original sources by westernizing character names, making some censor-appeasing edits, and changing the stories of three wholly unrelated series (some compare it to Woody Allen's camp Japanese movie re-dub What's Up, Tiger Lily?) to pass them off as a cohesive whole. Series writer/actor Greg Snegoff did say in an interview on the now-defunct Shadow Chronicles News fansite that, "afterwards, we received compliments from the Japanese who thought our dialogue and stories were better than the original," and Protoculture Addicts magazine reports in a Robotech fifth anniversary article that those compliments came from the production company Tatsunoko. However, Animag magazine (issue 11) and Animerica magazine (issue 9, volume 4) reports that the original Macross creators at Studio Nue and Artland such as story creator Shoji Kawamori and chief director Noboru Ishiguro expressed their disconcertion with the Robotech adaptation and surprise on its differences. In an effort to combine the storylines of three different Japanese series, certain characters underwent drastic role changes with little explicit character development or plot exposition. Notably Rick Hunter (one of the main characters of the Macross segment) was changed—by a line of dialogue—from an ordinary yet pivotal fighter unit commander into an unseen admiral who is said to have ordered the destruction of Earth under the controversial rationale of saving it from the enemy. The line by an unnamed commander on the SDF-4 in the episode "Dark Finale" was, "I've been ordered by Admiral Hunter himself to obliterate the planet completely." In addition, the 65-episode minimum guideline cited as the reason to combine the episodes applied specifically to weekday syndication. Contemporary series such as Star Blazers and Transformers series were initially syndicated weekly before reaching the 65 episode mark. The guideline also did not necessarily require a combined storyline; adaptations like Voltron coupled two unrelated Japanese series without directly combining the storylines. (A year later, 20 additional Voltron episodes and a crossover special were created for American audiences after the first daily run of 104 episodes.) Robotech has been the subject of two parodies by the fandub group Seishun Shitemasu: Robotech 3: Not Necessarily the Sentinels and Robotech 4: Khyron's Counterattack (using footage from, respectively, Gunbuster and ). See also ---- | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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