Deculture

Robotech was created by Carl Macek and his company Harmony Gold back in the stone age of modern anime, the 1980s!  *gasp*  Macek was looking in Japan for a series he could dub into English and show on American television sets.  Since he could not find one series of sufficient lenght to meet his needs, he took three series to make an entirely new animated universe called Robotech.

So America got treated to a kid named Rick Hunter, the cool leader type Roy Focker, the Japanese staple of an idol singer the teenage Lynn Minmay, officious office lady name Lisa Hayes, plus bridge bunnies, 50ft giants, alien love, transforming fighters, and something called Culture.  The TV landscape was never the same afterwards, afterall in this series we get to see a main character die on screen.  Shocker!

The series that got stitched together by Macek were Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, Calvary Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada.  Macek took the basis of the whole story arc from the Japanese Macross series and then created such things as the Robotech Masters and Zor to explain Southern Cross and finally the Invid search for the Flower of Life for the Mospeada footage.  Pretty impressive piece of creative writing there, but it offended the purists who existed even back then.  Success did not matter, Macek trifled with the anime universe most fouly!  So to this day to say Macek in the same breath as Macross will enrage some people.

But Robotech endures. Countless comic series were written about Robotech.  There are the novels that are based on the original series.  For the model collectors, Revell even produced for the US market some of the Macross models, so if you see something called a Tomahawk at a garage sale by Revell, that is Robotech.  Harmony Gold had even tried to create a new series called Robotech the Sentinels but it did not see distribution.  Recently they did manage to strike pay-dirt with Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles movie that sold very well.  Then things started to really pick up when Warner Brothers optioned to make a live action Robotech movie.  Now it seems the Robotech movie has picked up a screenwriter: Lawrence Kasdan while Shadow Chronicles has stalled at the behest of Warner Brothers.

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Posted Mon, Jun 23, 2008 5:33 pm Pacific Tag:

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