Fake! Copy! Stupid! (3)
When we got to Robotech, a few years later, we had given up on the whole TV cartoon thing. Of course, there were the cinematic cartoons, but they were different. Even if they were aimed at kids, they were of a much higher quality.
It was hopeless. There was nothing out there that was interesting anymore. Our world was limited. Part of it might have been that we were just growing up. But I will lay the blame on the material that was coming out of the “idiot box” itself. The producers of these shows simply didn’t care. We still went to the movies, but the whole fantasy and science fiction world was changing. Movies were now straight up action stories with no monsters or technological gadgetry. Even the field of comic books was producing fewer and fewer things that were grabbing me.
In came Robotech, in the wake of a long line of horrible American cartoons. Like some of the best cartoons from our childhood, Robotech was originally a Japanese cartoon. It was a direct descendent of Star Blazers, in some ways. It was a space saga that involved battles with enemy hordes. People actually died in this cartoon, including main characters. We were so impressed with how this cartoon not only chose to show a more realistic take on future warfare, but it carried a storyline that never went back to square one at the end of every episode. American cartoons were all about maintaining the status quo so that they could easily go into the next episode without any changes. Maybe they were concerned that the next writer wouldn’t get the memo about the changes from the last story. It was as if the team of writers were not expected to communicate with each other in order to be on the same page with changes in an advancing storyline. Robotech went forward, and there was no going back. Besides the killing, the fact the story evolved was the other feature that made the Japanese cartoons so much more sophisticated than anything that we were used to.
Robotech was the one breath of fresh air, the thing we could look forward to on a weekday morning. It was the summer before I started college, and my brother and I had time to kill. We’d talk about Robotech after every episode. He’d mention the things that he thought were fake. Almost nothing was perfect for him, but I could live with whatever he was mentioning because I was already in love with this show, and when you are in love, the flaws are no longer visible.
The show went through three different storylines. Each period was divided by about fifty years. The first was Macross, and it was the best one. It had to do with the defense of Earth by one ship against hordes of alien invaders. There was the love triangle, that would take over the storyline toward the end when the direction of the story changed dramatically after an all-out battle that destroyed just about everything, shifting the conflict into an unexpected area. After the desolation of Earth, the survivors that now held on in pocket communities around the world were trying to live with the repercussions of that old war. The military was a central element of the setting, policing these communities of humans and alien survivors instead of making war. Instead of large-scale battles, we now had small skirmishes between the defense force and alien bandits. One major bad guy had survived, and he was there to put together a sizable enough force to finally destroy the puny humans.
In the meantime, the main character was slowly falling for his commander, but he still had feelings for the girl that had been avoiding him due to her celebrity status as a singer.
Though I never admitted it to my brother, I was just as enthralled with the romantic dynamics of Robotech as I was with all that killing. And we were still too uninformed in those matters to know if the romance were fake or were some kind of a copy. And to me at least, it never felt stupid.
NEXT: Platoon