Robotech

About sometime towards the end of Junior High, my family went on a trip to Door County, as had been the case of every time we went on a long trip, we often bought books for the ride, and on that occasion I had picked up for myself the first Omnibus trilogy of Robotech books.

Now this hadn't been my first exposure to Robotech, like many kids of the 80s I had seen it on TV, but I only seen bits of pieces of it, and outside of a single VHS that old movie store downtown, and a book from the middle part of the series that I had looked at on off, I wasn't well familiar with Robotech.

The books thus were my first real look at the world, and to this day remain some of my favorite. The Robotech novels took the story from the tv show and expanded on the universe in interesting ways (some of them are a bit odd like turning Protoculture from a power source to like the force but still it helped make some thematic sense and to serve as a reason for some of the deus ex machina moments) and were quite good.

When I got back, I became obssed about reading the rest of the series, and by that time next year or so, I had most of the the books, and later one I would read all of them, obtain two Robotech VHS, and later on a Robotech 2 Seintinels Comic Book. One of the first things I did on the internet was find some pictures of the SDF-3 at the local library. You could've called me a protoculture addict.

But I never watched the vast majority of the show. And in time, I saw Macross 2 (something I taped when it was played, which is still one of my favorite shows despite critics about it) and the Macross Do You Remember Love? movie, which was good, and then I saw the Shadow Chronicles when it came out and even had a argument with those who didn't like the retcon that brought about.

But I never watched the vast majority of the show, and so about after last Mother's Day, I bought the giant box set of Robotech, watched parts of episodes I already seen before to show my friend, the Robotech pilot episode for a sequel and then got busy watching other things. This spring however, I decided I was going to watch the show, and since I've been sick, that has been what I've been doing lately.

And so far, despite Macross saga's "quality" moments and English Minmei singing, I've enjoyed it. Its been utterly fascinating to me to watch how the directors and the American side staff turned three utterly different shows into a single coherent whole and they managed more or less to pull it off with some difficulty (the Robotech Masters sort of come out of nowhere, and script errors are very evident when they appear)

But so far, I've been enjoying myself, and that is good enough for me.