Is There Really a Robotech, Virginia?

Every since I got ahold of (and watched obssessively) the original Japanese sources--Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada) Robotech has had a sort of strange, impressionistic existence for me.  Two sets of characters, two corresponding sets of events, but they are linked together in one and in separate continuity in the other.  Add that to the fact that even in the original production of Robotech there were things going on that they tried to shift in dialogue away from what was happening on screen--like the Macross-era episode where the narrator states Khyron is closing in on the battle fortress from behind, where they cannot be seen! and they're obviously flying in toward the bow--and Robotech just seems sort of . . . approximate.

I've never been interested in the inter-fandom wars and bickering: "Robocrap sux"  "Macross4evah" blah blah blah.  I'll watch either, depending on my mood.  I also never jumped on the anti-McKinney bandwagon.  For a long time, the McKinney novels were all the Robotech I had.  I couldn't afford the three-episodes-to-a-tape VHS releases--most of which chopping half the episodes down to 15 minutes each ANYway--and I never got into comics.  I've seen some issues of the comics, but the McKinney version of the Sentinals is the only version I've read in its entirety.

And there is a certain epic massiveness to Robotech that I like. In high school, when I finished the End of the Circle, I felt a strange urge to reread Dune, up to Dune Messiah.  I guess that was the only other series with which I was familiar that had the same sort of "galaxy-spanning" epicness (epictude?  epicosity?)  I mean, now Star Wars is the franchise with the greatest scope, with stories spanning thousands of years, but, at the time, I'm not even sure the Thrawn Trilogy was out.  If it was, I hadn't gotten around to reading it yet.

Transformers, too, has similarly expanded in scope.  That family of franchises has sort of a canonicity advantage in that they went with the "multiverse" explanation--there are many different parallel realities, so all of the different franchises and continuities (G1, Bayformers, Transformers Animated, Pokefomers--er, ARMADA, Shattered Glass) happe parallel to each other.  It makes it easy to give different authors creative licenses that way.  (Personally, though, I'm partial to the stuff Simon Furman was doing with IDW--I guess I'm more into comics as an adult than I was as a sprout). 

Of the three component series of Robotech, Macross is the one that's continued in the ensuing decades.  Not bad for something that was potentially a parody of Mobile Suit Gundam (which also has a whole crazy mass of meta-series and parallel continuities!).  Other than one quirk (the Macross-DYRL designs being canon), I guess it's one of the more consistent fictional continuities.  My favorite, personally, is Macross 0, with Frontier a pretty close second (Macross 7 and its spin-offs just don't appeal to me as much, even though it continues the story with my favorite character from the original, Max). 

Robotech did make a huge impression on me when I first saw it, though at the time I just liked the robots and the fact that ANY mecha could be carrying about a million missiles in hidden compartments on its limbs.  My girlfiend is just enough younger than me that she didn't see it in its first run; she first saw it in high school when it was being rerun on Cartoon Network.  She said she watched it off and on until "that big fleet of bad guys showed up and threatened to blow up the earth.  I thought, 'Whoa, how are the good guys gonna get out of this?  And then they don't, and everyone on earth dies.  And I thought, 'I love this show!'"

That's the main difference between anime and American animation in the 80s.  American cartoons had to reset everything at the end of the episode so they could continue selling the same collection of toys.  The Japanese apparently had no qualms about letting 'the bad guys' win.  A sense of real jeopardy does wonders for making a story more compelling, doesn't it?