"Robotech is back now"

For the true anime enthusiast, I wrote the following essay in one sitting as an example for an assignment prompt in English 102. If I had to score it, I'd give it a solid B:

Robotech: Timeless American Sci-Fi

February 27 2008 will mark the re-release of the Robotech tabletop role-playing game by Palladium books. The original game was my first foray into role-playing at the age of twelve. A friend had pointed out an ad for the game in the first issue of Marvel Comics’ Visionaries featuring penciled images of the animated series from Japan’s quintessential image: giant gun-toting robots that diehard fan boys like myself knew signified a sci-fi epic matched perhaps only by those two franchises beginning with “Star” [“anime” would not enter American pop-culture vocabulary for another five years]. Over the past twenty-one years, I’ve delved into both hardier and sleeker game systems: three and a half versions of D&D, FUDGE, Runequest, etc, but, for all of the admittedly clunky mechanics of Palladium’s house system under the hood of the Robotech game then and now, the prospect of encountering it again amounts to intellectual comfort food—the bubbly, crusty pan of mac ’n cheese fresh from the oven that any of us over thirty know we’d be feeling in the morning. But the memories of friendships forged in countless hours of narrative creativity are worth the retread.

Now, most would hesitate to call role-playing games “intellectual,” but these books were the collective catalyst for transforming a twelve year-old, who wasn’t a recreational reader, into an English instructor—they facilitated the discovery of the juxtaposition of imagination and language. This all started with the Robotech franchise: the result of producer Carl Macek’s efforts to produce a plot line that would weave three distinct Japanese animated series licensed to Harmony Gold USA into a cohesive eighty-five, twenty-two minute, episode run for an audience of Ragan-era adolescents that has sense spawned three DVD collector’s editions, more than twenty novels, plus a plethora of other media and merchandise over twenty-two years, including an upcoming feature film with Toby Maguire attached to produce.

Prior to Macek’s handy work similarities between the series were accidental: all depict giant, transformable robots, or mecha, piloted by humans fending off an alien threat. Macek’s revision coalesced with the term “Robotech” to signify the oft unexplainable alien-derived technology seen on screen. Each series became a “generation,” or act, of the unfolding plot. Earth’s clash with an armada of fifty-foot giants leads to a near-totalitarian Earth government’s post-apocalyptic confrontation with the remnant of the erudite civilization responsible for those giants twelve years later. Decades afterwards, Earth is enslaved by the entirely alien enemy of both previous invaders. These aliens acquiesce not from force, but prompted by love to self-discovery. Hopefully the uninitiated reader has gleaned a skeleton of the plot’s intricacy from that brief synopsis. Mecek notably conceives this generational approach two years before Gene Rodenberry’s re-launch of Star Trek under the TNG mantle. Robotech’s enduring success is remarkable if only because the whole thing was designed as a means to turn a quick buck, an American purgative.

By personal taste alone, I would rank Robotech among the top five timeless American produced sci-fi franchises, but the question remains if its place may be objectively assessed as such. If I’m going to say “Robotech” in the same breath as Star Wars, I may as well invoke the criteria Roger Ebert establishes to assert that films place in cinematic history: those of “technical watershed” and “deceptively simple storytelling”(Ebert). I would add that Robotech fans also approach it with equal ferocity as Star Wars and Star Trek fans relish those franchises.

By today’s CGI standards, even the “Remastered” versions of the draftsperson’s precision hand drawn cells appear grainy and primitive, but few had seen their like in 1985. The famed original Transformers series had aired the year before, but its detailed depictions of now classic giant robots paled in comparison to those in Robotech. Battle scenes sported multiple mechs form different vantage points. Of course, this meticulous work is the product of an ideology informing the animation, the point of contact for the Americanized plot: animation audiences can be sophisticated enough to appreciate artistry. This transplanted innovation would not be seen in entirely homespun animation arguably until Warner Bros. Batman: The Animated Series in the early 90s.

Robotech differs from previous Japanese animated properties re-packaged for the US market because, while plot elements were changed, with the exception of a few now laughable stock shower scenes in the second “generation,” the footage of the original Japanese parent series, though sometimes spiced with stock footage for the sake of continuity, remained intact when aired. That meant relatively graphic violence, unapologetic deaths of principal characters in war, psychological instability and drug addiction, long term effects of grief, the now-stale anime trope—the naïve alien in drag, etc. Robotech was pulled from some affiliates in the South because of the series’ inclusion of an inter-racial romantic relationship and a transsexual heroic character.

Despite such ill-founded controversy, Robotech’s plot, like Star Wars’, is “deceptively simple.” In episode one, nineteen year-old Rick Hunter, flying circus ace, finds himself amid an interstellar conflict neither side understands. The bulk of the first thirty-six episodes, with or without the giant mechs in the scene, catalog Rick’s maturation over a decade. Episode thirty-seven introduces the half-alien Dana Sterling, who must confront her feelings of disenfranchisement as the only one of her kind. Similar themes are addressed with multiple characters throughout the series. There is no force here, or Vulcan mind-meld, but the theme that humanity as a quality, not a species, will prevail runs throughout Robotech. And perhaps because it is animated, Robotech depicts the human cost of war more responsibly than others in the sci-fi genre. Characters not only wounded, but bleed and react to injury realistically—no stun setting or instant cauterization.

Robotech’s sophistication does not exempt it from some of the prevalent shortcomings of sci-fi. It has the same dialog issues as Star Wars; just listen to the song lyrics—bad by anyone’s standard, even for the 80s. It doesn’t have guys in red shirts dropping dead every episode, but the overuse of spliced footage might infuriate even the most dedicated fan. Some of Mecek’s continuity elements are down-right silly. The prime example is “protoculture.” In the original 1982 Japanese plot of Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, the term signified culture predicated on procreation through natural means; in Robotech it refers to a distilled substance used to facilitate the link between pilot and machine. Fans debate that one heatedly on the internet.

The combination of the plot and painstaking animation attracted a broad fan-base, which is,though smaller than that of other enduring franchises, intensely loyal. Blogger Peter Rojas has this to say: “You seriously don't want to know how much of my spare time I devoted to tracking down even the most mundane details about[Robotech]”(Rojas). The Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles DVD (2006), a new animated feature, has brought the project full circle after a twenty year hiatus: original animation is now being produced to fit the Robotech storyline. Such a feat would not have been possible without fan demand. If for no other reason, Robotech will be remembered as the gateway to Dragon Ball, Cowboy BeBop, Death Note, etc. for American audiences.