This post is about Macross Frontier (or F). But it’s about more than that, in a way. It’s about my glorious childhood.
That might have been horrifying, and I apologize. But Macross does hold a place, deep inside me, that causes those Sunday afternoon nostalgia vibes. You see, when I was young I watched a lot of cartoons, and some I watched and re-watched. Of those, there are only a few that I can remember. One, Ox Tails, drove my father mad. At some point I stopped renting it (from the local, not a Blockbuster, video store, remember those?) because I liked it, and started renting it because the weasel-laugh made my father’s eyes bug out. Any time I ask him, “Hey, guess what I bought?” about a DVD, he assumes the worst: that I’ve found Ox Tails. It makes it easier to tell him that I’ve, for example, bought the whole of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, though.
Ox Tails I rented a lot. Also, the few He-Man videos the store had, as well as Thundercats. Of course, my audience here will be more interested in titles like Transformers, Speed Racer, Voltron, and Robotech (yes, I’m excited about the live-action Speed Racer. I’m trying not to irritate my girlfriend about it; she’s two years younger than me, she has no idea what I’m talking about when I mention these things).
Robotech is, obviously, the one I’m driving at here. And before I get started in earnest I should say that yes, I know all about Harmony Gold, about the three series mashed into one. Hush. Robotech means Rick Hunter, and Valkyries, and heart-stopping drama. I was seven, and a show I watched dared to kill characters. Even then I was just cogent enough to know that was outside the norm. I used to rent the video where the ship captain sacrifices himself to get the bridge crew off, and I would watch it, bloodless, every time. I get a wave screaming down my body, from my shoulders down my arms and stomach, when something really touches me, and I would feel that every time that ship blew up.
So you may have to work your imaginations a little, if you didn’t have Robotech as part of your childhood, to sympathize with the joy — the nearly pure, child-like joy — I feel at seeing a Valkyrie sweep into shot on its wheeled/hovering feet, half plane, half mecha, firing the gun slung low under its cockpit face. I grin, and smile, and laugh out loud in a way that my favorite comedians can’t make me do. I remember Rick, though I forget the names of most of the other characters. I can’t tell any longer if the singer was Minmay then, or if I just know her name as that from reading about Macross later in life. But I remember the sprawling, frightening fights, the armadas, and the clouds of missiles that a friend of mine likes to make fun of — not maliciously, just because he thinks they’re a bit silly and he knows I like them. I make fun of him for being color-blind, it’s all good.
It feels almost impossible, at first blush, to talk about Macross Frontier. I get my feet caught in the trailing ends of my childhood. Some parts stun me, because they’re so similar to what I know, but so different in the details. The traditional Macross pop idol is sweet and earnest, but Sheryl isn’t, really at all. She’s sexy, and indeed, dressed almost as Chocolate Misu. Chocolate from the manga, even! She is very interesting, though, and perhaps more to the tastes of the audience (myself included). Ranka more than fulfills the sweet, slightly dojikko quotient.
It is clear that I’ve missed a lot of ground. I watched Macross Plus back in the days of Saturday Anime on Scifi, but I missed most of the stuff in between. Ranka is, if I caught that correctly, a quarter Zentradi, and Alto doesn’t really care when he hears that. Excellent.
It’s far too late to be writing this, I suppose. I’ll write more when I get a chance to watch more of the series — I’m finished with everything save grading in my semester, so time has unlocked for me, like a sweet bonus stage revealed after hours of toil. I’ve watched two episodes so far. Good night, folks.
The most I think you missed was Macross 7. I don’t know if Plus covered the expansion of humanity via the City Ships, much Macross 7 certainly explains this. No one in Macross 7 really cares that Mylene is half-Zentradi (her parents being, of course, Maximilian and Milia Jenius) and she’s even some kind of strange sex icon (in the episode where they have lowanglers selling photos of her rearside).