Macross 7

MACROSS 7

The first "official" TV series sequel to the SDF MACROSS series, Released in 1994 Just after the PLUS OVA's.

OVERVIEW - After the series "Macross II" was made non-canon, an "Alternate universe" story, The next TV series officially confirmed as canon, and the continuation of the MACROSS saga was MACROSS 7. Set in 2045, 5 years after PLUSS and 35 after the end of Space War 1, The story is set aboard the 37th colony fleet, the 7th of the new "Macross-class" colony ships. It follows the fortunes of the 4 piece rock band, Fire Bomber, as the fleet comes under increasing attack from a strange new enemy.

REVIEW - I'll be frank from the start here. If not for the association with MACROSS and information regarding the overal meta-plot of the macross saga's universe, I would avoid this series at every single chance. The following review may be harsh and should be avoided by small children, pregnant women, people with heart conditions and any fans of the fictional band Fire Bomber. 

The "plot", if it can be called that, is fairly simple, the macross 7 fleet is under attack by villains from another dimension, likely the dimension of rejected-for-being-too-crap saturday morning joke cartoon villains.Only the "magical" singing of Fire Bomber can save the fleet, and they invent even more ridiculous "Weapons" to make use of "Sound Energy" to combat these space-elves.. 

no, i'm not shitting you. this is the actual plot.

Fire Bomber in the series is based around the arrogant, self-centered jerkass Basara, who doesnt give a crap about anything but singing his songs. Supported by Shifty-Ray, who seems to have fingers in every pie in existance, and the ever-silent Zentradi (Meltrandi) Drummer Veffidas (who has a total of 3 speaking parts in 49 episodes) and at the start of the series they are joined by the 14 yr old 7th daughter of original series insta-married couple Max and Milia, Mylene. Performing on massive stages to crowds of about 30 people to begin with, the band's fame eventually grows. 

Basara's other passion is flying his state-of-the-art VF19 into battles, however he doesnt fight, he sings. even his controls have been modified to being a guitar. Honestly, i couldnt make this shit up. He often gets mopey and irritated when the enemy, who are more interested in attacking, dont listen to his music. 

Meanwhile, Mylene's mother Milia, now estranged from Max, who is also mayer of the City part of the macross 7 ship, seems to spend all her time having her goons stalk and perv on her 14 yr old daughter, her intent is to stop her playing that "rock and roll music" like someone from the 50's would.. she then decides to give this up if Mylene agrees to meet someone Milia wants to set up an arranged marriage for Mylene with. Eventually agreeing, Mylene becomes aquainted with Gamlin, who's been getting his flight suit in a twist over Basara's music related stupidity in battle. Of course, Gamlin is instantly attracted to the seemingly pre-pubescent Mylene (she's 14 remember) and thus begins a cat-and-mouse game where Mylene lies about being in a band to Gamlin, yet still takes advantage of his generousity, accepting gifts and dates from him. 

The military cant stop the attacks, and rather than killing the pilots they seem "drained of the will to live", ending up in catatonic states. No-one can work out what is going on, except us veiwers of course, because we get cartoon level villainy exposition from the bad-guy side, rambling on about spiritia endlessly. Its worth mentioning now that the lead bad guy is in fact a man. Yes, the body he's possessing is a man, the being possessing it is a man. I know the long blond hair, pretty face, lipstick and woman's voice makes it look like a woman, but its a guy. This whole style was pretty popular in anime's in the 70's, quite why they revivied it for a mid-90's anime i dont know. Anyway. enemy soldiers with their apparently technological devices to draw "life energy" from people, have infiltrated the city and are attacking people. Seems no-one thinks anything of men wandering around in screen-glasses, massive mouth-guards and trenchcoats, but are blaming "vampires" for the attacks. 

this awful crap goes on for like 20 episodes, until Mylene's connections to both the military and the mayors office (her dad Max is captain of the fleet) lands the band with a TV role, recreating the "epic story of Lynn Minmay". This obviously proves she's been lying to Gamlin but he's fine with it. Around this time the bad guys revive one of their companions (because seeing the same guy repeat useless attacks over and over gets boring), who resembles an elf and is called sivil. Sivil speaks in short sentances, all involving the term "spiritia". This gets old about 20 seconds in. They attack the fleet, and Sivil apparently has an orgasm from hearing Basara. (that or the WORST case of constipation ever, its hard to tell with the terrible animation) she passes out and falls into the ship. Sorry, i forgot to mention that Sivil can fly in space, without a suit, and can talk without radios too, and move faster than the speed of light. Seems all that effort SDF MACROSS went to to establish the consistancy of physics between its universe and ours was for shit because MACROSS 7 pisses all over it. 

People start to notice that Basara's awful music makes the enemy flee, and likely out of pity, more people start to come to Fire Bomber's shows. In classic "cartoon villain timing" the enemy always seem to attack when Fire Bomber are playing a show, leaving Basara to run off to his valkyrie and sing to them, causing more orgasm/constipation in sivil to the point where she begins to stalk Basara by possesing people near him. Eventually just coming to see him, his music causes her to explode and blast off team rocket style, leaving her in a forest in a space-elf coma, IE naked in a glowing, floating bubble. Eventually found by Basara, he spends every moment singing to her, trying to wake her up. 

The military, revealed to be behind Basara's state of the art valkyrie via shady-Ray's dodgy dealin's, decide to give mechs to all the members of Fire Bomber, after finding out that Fire Bomber's music is the only thing that can revive the catatonic people if played to them endlessly (i'd raise from the fucking dead to escape it if someone played it nonstop at me), so now the whole band can fly into space and play music at aliens. yay. Named "Sound Force" because having a different name when playing in space to aliens is very important, they are backed up by a proper fucking nutjob "doctor" who also designed special backpacks that turn you into a super sayien when you sing "boost sound energy into warping light and time/space" and then "sound boosters" to go on the mechs to make use of this in space, because vibrational energy is very important in a vacum....

When the military find out about Basara singing to comatose space elfs in the forest, the do the logical thing, and kidnap the space elf, causing her alien friend to go on a rampage with Basara who, with help from aliend-friend and his magical technological spiritia beam and Basara's new song about power to rainbows or some shit, sends space-elf flying off into the distance, quickly followed by alien-friend. Basara gets even more mopy and buggers off trying to find her. Followed by Mylene and Gamlin, who have some very dodgy scenes (SHE'S 14 FOR FUCK SAKE), Basara eventually convinces them that he's out there looking for "his reason for singing" before vanishing off again. Eventually finding alien-friend and space-elf at a volcano, Basara saves the day when space-elf sinks into the volcano, which also collapses into the sea, by singing his "power" song again, which causes a perfectly preserved ruin, complete with green grass around it, to rise from the exact point where the volcano was. Thats right, Basara's songs have the power to ignore plate tectonics as well as logic and taste!

anyway... we finally get to an important part. 

The ruins are from the protoculture, and depict the story of the protoculture, long lost in the history of the Zentradi. They were the first beings to develop culture in the galaxy, and their race grew with two factions in it. Eventually stepping out into space they began warring with each other. Creating the warrior races of the Zentradi and Meltrandi as proxy's for the battles, they continued to develop more and more weapons, resulting in the creation of a race of beings called "The Evil" (pronounced "Ehvul" but i mean, seriously, a race called evil...) who were terrifying biological weapons. However the Evil were taken over by energy beings from another dimension, who came to seek Spiritia, life force, to feed on. these beings were called the protodevlin and they all but destroyed the protoculture, and most life in the galaxy until they were sealed by a power known as "anima spiritia". With the protodevlin on the move again, its obvious something disturbed their seals but before the "avatar of the protoculture" in the ruins can explain what anima spiritia is, the ruins are attacked and destroyed by a new combo of awakened protodevlin, a giant rampaging monster and a little butterfly/bird thing that endlessly spouts on about "beauty", seriously, every. fucking. sentance. the beauty of annoyance.

And so we return to the merry-go-round of endless battles, with the same old shit going on again, attack, retreat, attack, retreat from the protodevlin, scared off by Basara's songs. The bad guy's ultimate plan, long revealed by this point as being turning the humans, capable of regenerating their spiritia, into livestock for the protodevlin to feed from eternally, begins to take shape, and every attempt at fighting them off fully ends in failure. The series ends with an attempt at drama, with Basara near-death and the fleet under attack from the bad guy's final form, a "Spiritia black hole" that'll suck all life out of the universe, before Basara wakes up, sings a lot and in the last 10 minutes the Protodevlin also begin singing, realising that they can generate their own spiritia and leave the galaxy. 

*********

The biggest problem with MACROSS 7 is the production. The show was obviously produced on so little budget they likely dreamed of being upgraded to a "Shoestring budget". Even in the first episode we have jerky animation, repeated scenes, continuity errors, body shape distortions and colour glitches. It doesnt get better, in fact episode 39, not even a clip-show episode, has NO unique animation in it, made completely from recyled scenes. The voice acting is wooden in many places, even the score is recyled from PLUS and the non-canon Macross II. The band "rocking out" looks like they're having some kind of physical seizure, same with the audience "Dancing" and also sadly in the combat scenes. 

Fire Bomber's music is poorly produced too, with the sound mix being too heavily focused on keyboard parts and/or male vocals, even in the songs Mylene sings solo. The laughable point is when the songs always sound exactly the same, then the characters are complaining about others coming in early, or late. What I wonder about is how the members are shown practising or playing on their own but the whole band's sound can be heard, while on some occasions you see one of them press a switch to start playback on something, its never stopped in the same way, with the music "magically" stopping when they do. You have Basara or Mylene singing without backing, without amplification yet their voices are heavily produced, with backing and echo effects. 

My personal take on MACROSS 7 is that without the inclusion of the macross brand and characters, this series is not worth watching. Poor by mid-80's standards the fact that it came out a few months AFTER the amazing work of MACROSS PLUS is something the studio behind macross should be eternally ashamed of. Barely watchable and an insult to the well produced PLUS and Frontier shows, 7's only redeeming features are the introduction of more backstory for the Zentradi races and the Macross class ships, made up of the carrier at the front and the city ship at the back, capable of seperation into "Battle *fleetname*" and "City *fleetname*". One to avoid if you like you sanity.

MACROSS LOVE TRIANGLE

Virtually non-existant thanks to the plots focus on how "Awesome cool Basara is" and its terrible "saturday morning cartoon" feel, the only real triangle would be described as the feelings of Mylene for both Basara and Gamlin. Its possible it was downplayed due to Mylene's very young age, not that it stops the endless panty-shots of her, nor every pilot in the fleet hitting on her either. Mylene admits to feeling the same for Basara as she does for Gamlin in the final few episodes, while Gamlin proposed to Mylene on her 15th birthday. Basara is oblivious to everything but himself and glowing space-elves.

SUMMARY -

Story -   Laughable but not in the good way, each episode plays out like an episode of power rangers, with the bad guys acting like Pokémon's Team Rocket and "blasting off again" at the end of most episodes too. Pissing on the hard work of previous series efforts to establish themselves as realistic science-based fiction, MACROSS 7's plot, bad guys and heroes avail themselves of the realms of psuedo-science and plain mysticism. Characters are utterly devoid of charm, realism or redemption and grow about a much as a seed in an airtight container. I personally find it offensive that this pile of steaming crap is considered an actual part of the macross saga. 1/10

Production - Apparently animated by chimps working for a cup of tea, everything that could be wrong with an anime is present here in spades. Repeated scenes, poor animation, utter lack of care with timing, distorting figures and object so bad that at one point you can see Basara's glasses change shape and size IN A SINGLE SHOT. The only CG used is in the intro and is so obvious you'd need to be blind to miss it. Voice acting is awful, emotional responses are forced and fake sounding and it sounds like most of the cast rushed their work. Continuity is sorely missing at all points. Even the notably poorly produced and rushed work of SDF 12 years previous is better done than this. 1/10

Music -Recyling music from other series for the score, the original music is provided by the fictional band Fire Bomber. Serving as a stark reminder that the awful hair metal of the 80's never died in Japan, the overly pompus and overproduced sound of this band grates on the nerves. With TWO different singers for both Basara and Mylene there is little to no continuity between songs or spoken parts, not to mention the utter discontinuity between anything sung by Basara as default and the style of the songs sung by Mylene. Basara's songs tend to be about how awesome his music is and how everyone should be having a great time just because they're listening to it, though the songs "written" when he's singing to the space-elf are overly-forced "poetic" love songs in a "rock" theme, while all of Mylene's pieces are the same forced poetry love-song style, in soft ballad format. The opening piece is another awful Basara track, with Mylene songs closing out. Somehow over a dozen albums of Fire Bomber's music have been released in Japan and they continue to sell. makes no sense to me. 1/10

Accessability - The only macross series to involve Japanese culture heavily, with "Arranged marriages" and Kimono's given as gifts, a heavy, unnatural obsession with a 14 yr old girls groin and rear and many other points, about the only thing missing is a hot spring.. Still relatively watchable from a culture point of view, but much, much less so than other series. 5/10

Overall Impression -Terrible story, worse production and annoying music, the weakest link in the macross saga. its 49 episodes of hell for me and possibly even possible of making me physically unwell due to watching it. 1/10

Final Score - 09/50