On June 28, 1985 the 85th and final episode of Robotech premiered. The long story of Earth’s three Robotech Wars was over. Robotech was not the first anime to get translated into English and air in the United States but it was, in my opinion, the series that really pushed anime, or Japanimation as it was called at the time, and manga into prominence among science fiction and comic book fans. Voltron had come out the year before, you may counter, or you may champion the Transformers, who had appeared as toys in the US in 1984 and as an after-school cartoon in 1985. You might even advocate the cause of Speed Racer, who had been a regular feature in before and after-school cartoon line ups since the late 1960s.
All true, I admit. But it was Robotech that truly opened up a generation to anime… and I will tell you why.
The Japanimation Pioneers
Robotech was far from the first animated or even live action program from Japan to get widespread attention in the United States. Japanese media broke out of the art house circuit in the 1950s with Godzilla, the translated and Raymond Burr enhanced American edit of Gojira. More kaiju (giant monster) and tokusatsu (special effects) films followed, including a host of Godzilla sequels and imitators. This showed US distribution companies there was money to be made licensing and translating Japanese productions. A full two decades before Robotech premiered Japanese animation started to air in the United States when NBC licensed Astro Boy and began showing it nationally in 1963. Tobor the Eighth Man, about a cyborg police detective who recharged by smoking cigarettes (I swear it is true; check it out here) followed in 1965, Gigantor (probably the first mecha to hit US airwaves) came in 1966 and soon after came Speed Racer, arguably the the most successful animated Japanese import for at least the next twenty years or so. It is worth noting some of the same people who translated Speed Racer also translated and distributed Ultraman to American viewers (as well as a less successful series called Space Giants). The 1970s saw repeats of all of these shows continuing to run on American television stations and brought a few new entries, including Battle of the Planets (a translation of Gatchaman) and StarBlazers (Space Battleship Yamato).
Most of these shows were heavily edited in addition to being translated. Battle of the Planets, for example, apparently lost enough content in most episodes that a new segment, featuring a robot who communicated missions to the team, had to be created. Up to this point, all of the shows brought to the US were also aimed at children. This continued into the 1980s with 1984’s Voltron, a translation of Beast King Go-Lion (and later Armored Fleet Dairugger XV) and the American produced cartoon versions of the Transformers and Go-Bots toy lines. The truth was in the 1980s, even though you could still find Speed Racer, Tom and Jerry, Popeye and Bugs Bunny, the before and after school cartoon blocks featured on many independent (ie not network affiliated) television stations were dominated by cartoons tied to toy lines such as Rainbow Brite, He-Man, Jem and the Holograms and, of course, GI Joe.
The Birth of Robotech
Robotech, although it did have an associated toy line, was a little different. Carl Macek discovered anime in, of all places, Japan. He became convinced the more serious storylines of the 1970s mecha (robot) dominated anime, such as Macross and Gundam, could be successful in the United States. After all, the 1970s had brought US audiences an animated version of Star Trek, the experimental French/Czech Fantastic Planet and Ralph Bakshi had produced both Lord of the Rings and Wizards. The trend seemed to be continuing into the 1980s with the science fiction/fantasy anthology film Heavy Metal, Rock & Rule (1983) and Bakshi’s fantasy film Fire and Ice (1983). Convinced American audiences were ready for serious Japanese animated science fiction, Macek secured the rights to Superdimensional Fortress Macross.
Although US audiences may have been ready for Japanese animation, US television was not quite convinced. Besides, TV buyers insisted that daily syndicated programs have a certain number of episodes… and Macross came up short. Instead of giving up, though, Macek famously secured the rights to an additional pair of programs (Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA) which featured similar mecha designs. The three series were, however, completely unrelated. Macek kept the three series’ basic stories intact but added elements to the translated scripts to form a single overall story depicting three successive wars fought by generations of Earth humans against aliens seeking the secrets of a powerful (mystical?) energy known as protoculture.
By combining the three distinct series into a single narrative, Robotech was ready for US daily syndication. Although not actually generated to sell toys, like GI Joe and Transformers, there were toys in Japan related to the original series. Revell had secured rights to model sets for a series they were calling Robotech Defenders, which was also tied to a (very) short lived DC comic book. They also acquired the rights to some robot and vehicle combining toy sets which they marketed as Robotech Changers. Some of these designs were included in the new pastiche show Macek was creating but instead of fighting with Revell he joined forces with them and adopted “Robotech” as the title of his project.
Robotech Hits The Air
I was in junior high when Robotech premiered. In St. Louis, where I lived, it was carried on KPLR TV 11 which was the flagship television station for the group which also owned World Events Productions… the company who had created Voltron: Defender of the Universe. There were instantly, though, vast differences apparent between Robotech and Voltron. It is in these differences where I see Robotech as the vehicle to usher in an age of manga and animation.
Voltron seemed familiar in many ways. There were a force of five, including a big guy and a girl, much like Battle of the Planets. And also like the members of G-Force the Voltron Force were pretty much the only defense against the evil aliens. Most of the the dangerous alien plots in Voltron were hinged on giant monsters, kind of like Ultraman. There was a certain familiarity with Robotech, too. Aliens were invading and a stand had to be made, much like the members of GI Joe had to fight against Cobra or how Battle of the Planets’ G Force had to confront the plots of invaders from Spectra or how SHADO had to protect the Earth in the live action series UFO. There was a huge difference between Voltron and Robotech, though. Voltron tended to face monsters sent by an evil space witch! Cool as the robot was, it still seemed like a kids show. But on Robotech people died.
From the very beginning, it was obvious Robotech was not the average after-school cartoon. Aliens invaded, people died, a single ship found itself at the far end of the Solar System cut off from Earth. The main characters had problems, like surviving and adapting to being essentially drafted. Rick Hunter, a young fighter pilot at the center of the show, struggles with his on again off again girlfriend becoming a wartime celebrity and, later, a love triangle. He also has serious doubts about becoming a soldier. His adopted big brother Roy Fokker, an experienced pilot and war hero, has a very serious girlfriend in bridge officer Claudia Grant. They are an inter-racial couple, by the way, in an 1980s after-school cartoon. And, although this is a major spoiler for the first story arc in Robotech it is necessary to reveal because it is the best illustration of how serious the show was at times, Roy Fokker dies rather slowly, poignantly and on camera (here is a censored version of his death). Roy was not the only major character killed in the first of the Robotech wars and, remember, all of this is simply in the first third of the series. You have to keep watching through to the Third Robotech War before you get to the freedom fighting drag queen…
Japanimation!
Robotech undeniably hit at the right time. It was part of a wave of Japanese comics and cartoons, not always translated, flooding comic, video and book stores. At the time it was common for both anime and manga to be referred to as Japanimation. Although Robotech was arguably not a technically Japanese product its in release form, it very much became a symbol of this new collective genre in science fiction and fantasy. I remember at the time it was popular for shops to have signs with some type of logo or symbol for various sections. The local video store had SPORTS with a black football outline in one section, ROMANCE with a heart and WAR with a star in circle. And over in SCIENCE FICTION (with a black outline of a flying saucer) was JAPANIMATION with the black silhouette of a robot from Robotech (okay, technically it was a Valkyrie fighter from Macross but in America it was a Veritech fighter). A book store I frequented had a very similar sign with a Veritech in outline on one side. On the other side, by the way, was Lum, the tiger striped bikini wearing alien from Urusei Yatsura (the first hit show based on the work of Rumiko Takahashi who went on to create Ranma 1/2 and Inuyasha)… she was also a pretty common symbol of the Japanimation comedy back in the day. Conventions marked the rooms showing 24 hour non-stop Japanimation with the logo of the Robotech Defense Force or, perhaps, one of those ubiquitous silhouettes of a Veritech/Valkyrie mecha. (Remember, there was no streaming back then and 24 hour viewing rooms of genre programming were huge at the old cons!)
Because Robotech had not shied away from some of the more grown up content in the three storylines it presented a whole generation was introduced to the idea an animated series could be serious. From there many of us went on to Mobile Suit Gundam or Captain Harlock and Galaxy Express and saw things that would still have been extremely difficult to credibility present in live action productions. Although Robotech disappeared from television after its original run in many markets (rumors in St. Louis comic shops were that the television stations aligned with World Events had all dropped it before completing its run… and there were evidently issues created in some areas when Roy Fokker died and in others when Roy kissed Claudia), it found new life with many fans in a few ways.
First, videos of the original source series started to appear in the US, particularly of Macross related series and shows while Comico continued to put out a comic book based on Robotech. Second, in late 1986 Robotech appeared as a role-playing game from Palladium Books (the folks who made the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and Other Strangeness role playing game). In 1987 Del Rey began publishing novelizations of the series written by Jack McKinney (a pseudonym used by James Luceno and Brian Daley, who wrote the Star Wars radio dramas). Video games started appearing in the 1990s and are still coming out (at least if you have a Nintendo Switch and live in Australia). Although there were attempts to create a sequel series, now have ever come to fruition, nor has the long rumored live action version. However, there have been a few straight to video movies over the years including Robotech II: The Sentinels, Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles and Robotech: Long Live Alive.
The Godfather of Anime in America
Something that falls somewhere between breaking my heart and pissing me off is when I hear modern anime fans badmouth Robotech. They often complain that it mangled the original shows. There are proclamations it ignorantly mixed up separate series. But let me tell you something:
You weren’t there.
I vividly remember Robotech during its original run. It would be another couple of years before Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered. V: The Series was probably the most serious science fiction on mainstream television. Cable was not yet widespread in American homes. Satellite dishes were still the size of backyard trampolines. Robotech was a pretty major science fiction television event and it was the first Japanese anime presented widely in the US which was not squarely aimed at children (even if it was pretty much featured as an after school series in most markets). I remember KPLR running Robotech late at night on Saturdays (technically early Sunday morning) and then trying some other experimental series: Captain Harlock, an early translation of Dragonball and maybe one or two other projects from Harmony Gold (the producers of Robotech) as well as the first couple episodes featuring the second incarnation of Voltron.
Times were very different; options were limited. Most of your freedom to search out content came in the form of the video rental store and those could be a real adventure. Depending on where you were the closest video rental store might be a chain like Movies To Go, a couple shelves of random tapes at the local gas station, a weird indie with a curtained off closet full of porn like RST Video in Clerks or if you were really lucky maybe there was a Chinese or Indian grocery store who rented movies you could never have gotten access to a year or two earlier!
Carl Macek and Harmony Gold got Robotech on to syndicated television across the country and not just in a couple of cities with large Asian-American populations with stations running foreign language imports (such as Sonny Chiba’s live action Shadow Warriors). Depending on how you interpret the times, Robotech either fanned the embers of existing demand or simply straight out built a fan base for Japanimation. Dirty Pair, Macross, Urusei Yatsura, Fist of the North Star, Mobile Suit Gundam, AT Votoms, Project AKO, Fight Iczer One, Galaxy Express… Soon, all of that great anime was dripping into the US through interested video stores and comic shops (I remember when we got the first copy of an unedited version of Gatchaman in the comic shop where I worked circa 1989… we were floored!) but it was Robotech that first made it on to television across the country. It was Robotech that showed animation could be more than GI Joe, Transformers, Speed Racer and Voltron. Robotech is why people today, even non-fans, know what anime means.