I watched Robotech like alot of us here growing up, but I didn't become a Macross fan until I saw Clash of the Bionoids around '90 or '91. That led me to Books Nippon in NYC, and later ordering from them in California when the NYC store closed. I remember when Macross II came out. My friends and I at school were all over it, and I don't think any of us were really happy with it after watching. I first learned of Macross Plus at a comic con at the Jacob Javits Center in NYC in, well, I guess 1994. Manga was there promoting it, but it seemed like a year went by before it actually released. Sometime in 1996 I ran into a friend from highschool in a store, and we chatted briefly. He had actually seen a bootleg of a few episodes of Macross 7 on VHS, and he hated it. Man, was he right, LOL. It wasn't too long after that that I had my first exposure to Macross online, which was the old Macross Mecha Design website.
While I wasn't into Macross that much growing up, I was a big MOSPEADA fan. I lived in Pennsylvania for 5 years, and we had a store nearby us (part of a chain, I believe) called Children's Palace. I got ALOT of MOSPEADA toys there, along with a few Macross and Orguss goodies (I had NO idea what Orguss was at the time, but it transformed, so it was cool). I have no idea what an American toystore chain in the middle of Pennsylvania was doing with these toys, but they had them. And I'm not talking Robotech toys, I mean MOSPEADA, Macross, and Orguss.