Macross turned 44 this month: Valkyries, Minmay, and the Itano Circus

I remember it first as Robotech. It was on weekdays at 5pm and I had never watched anything like it as an 14 year old.

@RudeDogXtreme Respect. You were watching Robotech back when being an anime fan meant taping episodes off TV and guarding that VHS with your life. You knew what a Valkyrie was before the internet could explain it. Roy Fokker would salute you. Which episode hooked you first?

Robotech kid reporting in. I knew Roy Fokker before I knew what a transformation sequence was, and I've been chasing that feeling ever since.

@Kaze funny story about the reality of the VHS taped anime and how valuable they were. My wife once told me a story how she once recorded over one of her brother’s Robotech VHS. She took it, figuring it’s just her unwanted cartoons he had taped 4-5 years prior. She just used it in her friend’s VHS camcorder when they were screwing around in high school. He wanted to kill her.

Total newcomer here, so I'll ask the beginner question for everyone: do I start with the TV series or the movie, Do You Remember Love?

@Mochi Start with the TV series. It's the full story: Hikaru, Minmay, Misa, Roy, the SDF-1, and the slow realization that the Zentradi have never experienced music, romance or culture.

Then watch Macross: Do You Remember Love? (July 1984), directed by Noboru Ishiguro and Shoji Kawamori. It retells the story in about two hours with some of the most lavish hand-drawn animation of the decade. Mari Iijima, Minmay's voice actress, sings the title song, and the way that song is used in the finale is why people still talk about this film.

For the Robotech folks: it isn't just a dub. In 1985 Harmony Gold and Carl Macek stitched Macross together with two unrelated shows, Southern Cross and Mospeada, and rewrote them into one generational saga.

That deal tangled the rights for decades, which is why Macross itself was so hard to get legally in the US. In 2021 Big West and Harmony Gold finally reached an agreement that opened the door to worldwide releases.

Three shows wearing one trench coat. And it worked. Respect to Robotech.

It absolutely worked. A lot of us became anime fans because of it, me included.

Craft corner, because this show is a textbook.

Ichirō Itano animated the missile swarms: dozens of missiles corkscrewing through the frame while the camera chases them. Fans named it the Itano Circus, and animators are still imitating it forty years later. Then there's Haruhiko Mikimoto's character designs, those soft faces and big glossy eyes that defined what an early-'80s heroine looked like.

If you draw, pause any dogfight and study how the smoke trails lead your eye.

The Itano Circus is the original hype moment. Change my mind.