Robotech Retrospective
Most of Robotech is near and dear to my heart. The series aired when I was young and impressionable, but old enough to appreciate it. It made a pretty big splash among my peers at the time. We didn't initially know its origins, but even when that knowledge came out (thanks to word-of-mouth and things like the Robotech Art books rather than the now-simple internet search) nothing really changed.
Someone had stitched together three unrelated anime series into a multi-generational science fiction story with some halfway-cohesive story and themes. Some people take offense at that. Me, I'm impressed by it. It wasn't perfect, but it was amazing for the time and offered up a surprisingly mature tale in animated form.
Romance in cartoons was all but unheard of, outside your picture-perfect Disney movies, at least so far as I remember. While a lot of it is owed to the Macross source material, Robotech had a lot to say about love. Interracial human love? There. Human-alien love across battle lines? There (in all three segments, even). Love that isn't perfect, requited, and neatly tied up? There. I really wonder if anyone realized what sort of impression that could make.
The series is probably what turned me on to giant robots/mecha in various forms. I went into Battletech going "Aw, cool, a Skull Leader Valkyrie" upon seeing my first Phoenix Hawk. And a number of our home-brewed roleplaying games back in the day were in some way Robotech-inspired. I also ate up what we had of the Sentinels. It was another Art book which told us the tale of what could have been - veterans of the first war going to find the Robotech Masters and getting drawn into an extended campaign to liberate alien worlds from the Invid (all while Earth suffered through the second and third Robotech Wars). The idea of the more psionic and "magic" aliens felt a little bit off, but it was all within the realm of "acceptable" and I was sorely disappointed to read the series never came to be because of changing financial situations.
When the Sentinels novels came out, I finally got the stories I longed for. They still weren't perfect, and I probably was a little more put-off by the cutesy "Children of Zor" and such than when I was first exposed to the story outline, but I still bought those books as they came out (and I think I still have them in a box). It wasn't quite the Robotech from before, but it was still worthwhile. I also naturally nabbed the Paladium RPG book when I came across it - oooo, stats for stuff!
Heck, I think I was early in my "furry" phase those days, and eventually ended up playing the (only two) garudans on a Sentinels MUSH. I found them pretty fascinating (even if you could describe them as drugged-up, hippy fox/cat humanoids). Heh. One of the things I most remember about that MUSH is offering to help with building and getting assigned to do a sky grid. That sounds simply until you really get into cross-linking all the rooms with exits and setting all the @descs and @succs and @drops and... yeah. It proved a whole bunch of work for something that wasn't used much, if at all.
While I can't remember all the specifics, I remember picking up End of the Circle because I wanted more Robotech, even if it was the finale of sorts. I all recall going through that book and thinking "Uhh... this is getting to be a bit 'out there,' even for a setting with bears, amazons, mecha-horses, magic of a sort, and a metaphysical/superscience 'protoculture.'" In retrospect, if felt much like what it was - an attempt to close out the story with less information than ever on what was originally planned, so it veered away from everything else more than previous installments. It was a bit disappointing, but ignorable.
Then there was a revival of sorts relatively recently, with Harmony Gold pushing toward making a new movie and/or series. They changed the canon, altering the Sentinels storyline to an extent I'm still not fully clear on. And the produced the Shadow Chronicles which, as I've just recently comment on, was not good. That really makes me reluctant to delve any further into the new material - I like my own head-canon better, thanks.
Someone had stitched together three unrelated anime series into a multi-generational science fiction story with some halfway-cohesive story and themes. Some people take offense at that. Me, I'm impressed by it. It wasn't perfect, but it was amazing for the time and offered up a surprisingly mature tale in animated form.
Romance in cartoons was all but unheard of, outside your picture-perfect Disney movies, at least so far as I remember. While a lot of it is owed to the Macross source material, Robotech had a lot to say about love. Interracial human love? There. Human-alien love across battle lines? There (in all three segments, even). Love that isn't perfect, requited, and neatly tied up? There. I really wonder if anyone realized what sort of impression that could make.
The series is probably what turned me on to giant robots/mecha in various forms. I went into Battletech going "Aw, cool, a Skull Leader Valkyrie" upon seeing my first Phoenix Hawk. And a number of our home-brewed roleplaying games back in the day were in some way Robotech-inspired. I also ate up what we had of the Sentinels. It was another Art book which told us the tale of what could have been - veterans of the first war going to find the Robotech Masters and getting drawn into an extended campaign to liberate alien worlds from the Invid (all while Earth suffered through the second and third Robotech Wars). The idea of the more psionic and "magic" aliens felt a little bit off, but it was all within the realm of "acceptable" and I was sorely disappointed to read the series never came to be because of changing financial situations.
When the Sentinels novels came out, I finally got the stories I longed for. They still weren't perfect, and I probably was a little more put-off by the cutesy "Children of Zor" and such than when I was first exposed to the story outline, but I still bought those books as they came out (and I think I still have them in a box). It wasn't quite the Robotech from before, but it was still worthwhile. I also naturally nabbed the Paladium RPG book when I came across it - oooo, stats for stuff!
Heck, I think I was early in my "furry" phase those days, and eventually ended up playing the (only two) garudans on a Sentinels MUSH. I found them pretty fascinating (even if you could describe them as drugged-up, hippy fox/cat humanoids). Heh. One of the things I most remember about that MUSH is offering to help with building and getting assigned to do a sky grid. That sounds simply until you really get into cross-linking all the rooms with exits and setting all the @descs and @succs and @drops and... yeah. It proved a whole bunch of work for something that wasn't used much, if at all.
While I can't remember all the specifics, I remember picking up End of the Circle because I wanted more Robotech, even if it was the finale of sorts. I all recall going through that book and thinking "Uhh... this is getting to be a bit 'out there,' even for a setting with bears, amazons, mecha-horses, magic of a sort, and a metaphysical/superscience 'protoculture.'" In retrospect, if felt much like what it was - an attempt to close out the story with less information than ever on what was originally planned, so it veered away from everything else more than previous installments. It was a bit disappointing, but ignorable.
Then there was a revival of sorts relatively recently, with Harmony Gold pushing toward making a new movie and/or series. They changed the canon, altering the Sentinels storyline to an extent I'm still not fully clear on. And the produced the Shadow Chronicles which, as I've just recently comment on, was not good. That really makes me reluctant to delve any further into the new material - I like my own head-canon better, thanks.
While nostalgia may be a hell of a drug, there are some things that just withstand time. Thank you for this little insight into your youth and influences. If it wasn't for Robotech, we might've never met.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I loved the Robotech series, except for End of the Circle. I borrowed the entire series from my local library when I lived in Calgary, and read them through over the course of a week. (That's right, I read the entire series in just under seven days). The Robotech RPG is up there for my favourite Palladium RPG, right beside TMNT. Yeah, I rag on Palladium (they deserve it), but Robotech and TMNT were fun.
ReplyDelete