A quick aside - October is now Macross Month

I've often spoken of my enjoyment of mecha anime, and possibly for Space Opera style shows too, the whole epic battles in space in realistically pointless but artistically impressive humanoid piloted battle robots and stuff really is for me what anime should be about.


So for the month of October, and possibly longer if it takes it, I will be reviewing the ENTIRE Macross story, in its own timeline's chronological order, which will be as follows.

MACROSS ZERO - (released 2002)
Super Dimensional Fortress MACROSS - (released 1982)
MACROSS PLUS - (released 1994)
MACROSS 7 - (released 1994)
MACROSS Frontier (TV Anime) - (released 2008)
MACROSS Frontier (Movies) - (with alternate storyline to TV anime, released in 2009 and 2011)


For the sake of those who've not heard/seen/know about macross, here's a brief explination of the core concepts, some of the legal issues and why this series is so respected worldwide.


The basic concepts behind the macross series are as follows, Millions of years ago, even before life began on Earth, a humanoid race ruled most of the galaxy, known as "The Protoculture" these beings were human sized, human shaped and human like, and are regarded as the first beings to achieve civilisation and culture in the galaxy.They developed advanced technology and faster than light travel and spread out across the milky way. Over time however, certain threats and dissent amongst themselves lead to more and more warfare, and no longer willing to sacrifice their own lives in battle, the protoculture created two warrior races, the all-male Zentradi and the all-female Meltrandi, who were all basically clones, forbidden "Culture" and only trained and raised to fight. Eventually, due to various "outside" circumstances, these warrior races began fighting amongst themselves and the Protoculture themselves, resulting in the creation of Giant-sized Zentradi and Meltrandi and eventually the seeming extinction of the Protoculture. As a last resort, the Protoculture had "seeded" several planets with DNA that would lead to a humanoid life form via evolution and for those humanoids to create "Culture" in the form of arts, music, performances etc that would lead to civilisation. Earth was one such planet, and in the Macross universe, our forms, civilisation and existance was all due to this event.


Skip forward to 1999, and a city sized alien space ship crash-lands on earth in the south pacific, unable to "cover up" such a large-scale event, the UN effectively takes control of the situation, recovering and begining to reverse engineer technology from the highly advanced alien ship, and as this carries on, they begin to rebuild the ship itself. A city springs up around the site, known as Macross City, but not every nation and organisation on the planet is happy with how the UN is handling the situation, nor the way the UN was forcing itself into a world-wide government. The fledgling armed forces created to protect humanity from potential alien attacks, called "The UN Spacey" (mixing the words "Space" and "Navy") are used in worldwide battles to surpress anti-UN forces, and for 10 years the "UN Wars" rage across the planet, barely coming to an end before the Arrival of a Zentradi Fleet, pursuing the trail of a ship that belonged to an enemy faction, the ship that crashed into Earth. Now mostly rebuilt and refurbished for humans, its during the ship's initial launch under its new name "Macross 1" that the Zentradi approach Earth, triggering previously unfound programming inside the ship which opens fire, trigging a war that will become know as Space-War 1 and is the setting of the Super Dimensional Fortress MACROSS series.



Almost all Macross series feature conflict between two sides, humans and an aggressor, who may or may not simply be attacking due to a misunderstanding. There is always music involved in some way, directly in the cases of SDF MACROSS and MACROSS 7, indirectly in the case of MACROSS PLUS and MACROSS Frontier and as a subplot in MACROSS ZERO and always ends with both sides coming to an understanding due to shared concepts, communication and other "warm fuzzies" (except PLUS but there's a reason for that). It uses the concept of music and culture as a bond that transcends race, language and time/space and that can bring together anyone and anything as long as the feelings are sincere. It also always features a love triangle of some kind, as the Japanese love that kind of interpersonal conflict and character development.


Standing proud at the head of the "Real Robot" genre alongside its more internationally famous stable-mate, the Gundam Franchise, the macross franchise has had its international reach severely stunted by a poor choice early on. Its production studio allowed an American company to re-edit and cut the SDF MACROSS series into two other un-related shows to create the ROBOTECH saga, with SDF MACROSS forming the first arc of the show. While not too heavily edited, making use of nearly-similar names and the like, the American company behind ROBOTECH launched various legal measures to prevent the release of MACROSS merchandise and the shows into their market. Due to this, to this day it is hard to find authentic, authorised american market copies of the show, with most subs and dubs in english being produced for australia. With most European anime coming in off the back of American shows, Macross has seen little interest from Europe. In Japan however, its one of the most celebrated and emulated shows around, with its space-opera storyline aped, parodied and copied in a huge amount of shows, most notably for us Brits would be the show "Martian Successor Nadesico", similar in both its "Accidental pilot", romance issues, jump to the far reaches of the solar system and return and piloted mecha aspects to SDF MACROSS.

Macross, as much as the original Gundam series, helped shape the Mecha animes of today, and each successive show has really built on that foundation, MACROSS PLUS was one of the first animes to make heavy use of both traditional animation and cell shaded CG animation, paving the way to its use in more and more mainstream animes now, ZERO was applauded as breath-taking in its combat sequences, even spawning its own meme regarding that, and Frontier in both its series and two feature films expanded on that and brought in two unique but equally powerful storylines that are some of the best writing around. Frontier is also helped by the massively impressive musical talents of Yoko Kanno, who's scores are probably the most epic i've ever heard outside of hollywood blockbusters and who also wrote all the "pop" songs performed by the singers in the show, an impressive feat considering the huge range of styles presented in the music of the series and the massive differences in style between the two singers in the movie.


If you like mecha anime, if you like space battles, if you like love-triangle relationship dramas or just animes with music as a central point, then you will LOVE the macross franchise, its only weak point in my eyes being the poorly produced MACROSS 7, suffering from the mid 90's trend of poor animes produced with what appears to be little to no budget, voice talent and too quickly for real quality to be put in. The contrast between 7 and PLUS, both produced in the same year really highlights the difference between an anime with a budget (PLUS) and one without (MACROSS 7).


Finally, the REVIEW  section for these will have a different layout, detailing the love-triangle aspect specifically for each anime, as this is one of the defining points of the whole franchise and important to take note of, as it often drives the plot.


So with that said, i'm off to begin a month of macross with MACROSS ZERO and its near-humanly-impossible high note in its theme...