Gubaba

I'm not sure what you mean about 0079 being only a movie...Gndam 0079 is simply another name for the originl Mobile Suit Gundam. (And you should watch the original Gundam movies before moving on to Zeta...there's a bit that they throw in at the very end that opens the door to Zeta in a way the TV show ending doesn't). Anyway, if you're just trying to get through the main storyline of Gundam, I'd do it like this: 1. Mobile Suit Gundam (TV) 2. Mobile Suit Gundam (Movies) 3. Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (TV) 4. Mobile Gundam Double Zeta (TV) 5. Char's Counterattack Not all of it is of excellent quality, and there's a lot of good (and not-so-good) stuff left out, but you'll be conversant with the primary story/characters/world of Gundam. Anyway, if you're not sick of it by then, you can either move backwards to the non-Tomino side stories (mostly set during the original series), forward to F91 and V Gundam, or far forward to Turn A. However, I do feel like I have to give you a last, very important bit of advice: friends don't let friends watch G-Saviour. And I think of you as a friend.

Has anyone said anything that would lead you to believe there will be a season 2...? I'm not trying to be an ass, it's just that we have enough unverified rumors out there already...we don't need to be adding more to the pile.

Hmmm...that might be the exception that proves the rule. If Lucas had listened to people who said "Everyone's acting like cardboard cutouts, and Jar Jar just sucks," maybe the prequels would've been better. (That said, I really liked the fight between the muppet and Count Chocula in Episode II.) For Macross, though, I think the main thing fans seem to be clamoring for is more Hikaru, Misa, and Minmay...which really isn't a story that needs to be told. Ditto any side stories set during Space War I. One thing I like about Macross is that each new series tells us a story we didn't know that we wanted to see. And then, by the end, we want more (or, at least, I did...your mileage may vary). The open-ended quality of the conclusions to pretty much every Macross story, for better or for worse, gives us lovely pictures to draw in our minds. And that's fine with me.

Hoo-boy...you're walking down the road that has no end. Gundam (the original, that is...I haven't seen any of the Alternate Universe ones like 00) does have a sense of idealism that comes into play late in the series, but even then...its a pretty slim hope. As for Zeon attacking earth...that never made much sense to me, either...apart from being able to have mobile suits strut their stuff in an environment where its easy to see just how massive they are. Tomino's novelization of the series (which, admittedly, is much more interesting in conception than execution) eliminates that completely and has the whole story set in space. It also fills in a lot of the backstory (a lot of which gets repeated or transformed in Yoshikazu Yasuhiko's excellent comic adaptation, "Gundam the Origin"). But still, Gundam is a cold series without a lot of real human feeling beyond the vacillation between determination and despair. But I kind of like that about it...of course, giant robots have always been and will always be an adolescent power fantasy...but that fantasy gets dashed early on in Gundam (who cares that you have all this power if you can't save your friends and neighbors with it?) and actively gets turned around as the series progresses (note especially the fear with which otherwise likable, earnest Zeon troops face the Gundam). It's escapism that isn't escapist. With all due repsect, I disagree completely. A lot of the TV series seems padded out, and some of it is just silly (The G-Fighter? Please. And the Guntank just looks stupid flying in space). But while I think the movies are great as a synopsis of the original series, I think they're terrible AS MOVIES. The episodic nature of the show is still apparent in movies, and so, the first couple of times I watched them, I kept expecting them to end several times before they actually did...and when the first two actually (finally!) DO end, it seems to be almost random. Just as DYRL works better if you've seen Macross, I think the Gundam movies are more interesting if you've already seen the TV series, and can appreciate the fix-ups in the animation and design. I do agree with you, though, that Zeta Gundam is a real gem of a series. It was the first one I watched, and it's still among my all-time favorites.

I agree completely. Most fans have no sense of how to tell a story successfully. Creators should listen to them at their peril.

Speed Racer, man. I don't actually remember watching it...I was far too young. But my sisters watched it and, according to them, so did I. Later, it was the one-two punch of Battle of the Planets and Star Blazers, and even as a five-year-old, I knew that Star Blazers was WAAAAY more sophisticated. And I think Megazone 23 was the first one I watched in Japanese with no subs.

True, but...um...while there IS such a thing as good enka, that wasn't it. Sheryl's version, on the other hand...

Rory Calhoun was in Macross...?

What about the Zentradi Enka singer? Doesn't he count?

Hmmm, Minmay's take on that song is...okay, I guess. But I think Exsedol really made the truly DEFINITIVE version.

Coincidentally, I just started MS Igloo 2 last night... There are no Gundams ("mass produced" or otherwise), there are no "cute" characters, there's no tidy little message about how, with effort and teamwork, ANYTHING is possible!, there are no enthusiastic young people talking about how beautiful the earth is or about the songs they wrote, and there's nothing that breaks established continuity into pieces, never to recover. In other words, it's nothing like the 08th MS Team.

Oh, just go to Danbooru. Everything ends up there, anyway.

Au contraire. I'd say the biggest folly of the series was, "Hey, let's say the blonde chick with the 'fro is Max and Miriya's green-haired daughter! And we can say that these aliens are the guys who created the Zentradi. And then later, we can say that the crab guys eat the flowers, and so Rick Hunter wants to blow up the earth. Oh, and that word for the common ancestors of human and Zentradi? That's now a fuel." Bad songwriting is about fourth or fifth of the list of bad things about Robotech. But since we're talking quotes, and since you mentioned music, here's a good one: "How many roads must a man walk down Before you call him a man? How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand? How many times must the cannonballs fly Before they are forever banned? The answer, my friends, in blowin' in the wind, The answer is blowin' in the wind." - Minmay and Hikaru

I don't really want to get into this again (I know, I know, I brought it up...). Still, to repeat: I understand your argument, I just don't subscribe to it. Unless you want to explain why, days after being told that she has a certainly-fatal disease that is transmitted through bodily fluids, Sheryl decides that sleeping with Alto would be a great idea.

I kind of agree...Alto seems so passive about the whole thing that if Sheryl had just stormed in and said, "Alto, you're my boyfriend now. Take me to bed or I'll kick you in the nuts," he probably would've done it. Sheryl wins by force of personality and will. But Alto, for whatever reason, does seem ambivalent, and I think she left the final choice up to him. Bad idea. Left to his own devices, I think he'll never choose. Yes. Yes, you did. As I said, only real Sheryl fans saw them. People like me who were on the fence didn't. Thanks for ruining my budding career coming up with endings for Kawamori.

The problem is that the "translation" isn't a translation, but rather a summary. There's a LOT left out, and I can't seem to locate that sentence in the book. I found the bit where it says that The girl named "Lynn Minmay sang," which should be beofre the "It took a year to land" sentence. I also found the "there were more than 79,000 Zentradi on earth" sentence, which should be after it, but I can't find that sentence itself. Now, I haven't gone through with a dictionary to look up unfamiliar kanji, but I know how to write "one month," "one year," and "heavy rain," so I've been looking for those, but I don't see them anywhere. Maybe this should be my next translation project...?

Have you ever written anything that just "wrote itself?" Have you ever started writing a story with no idea of what would happen, only to find that the characters themselves are bursting through your original conception of them and essentially telling you what to write? It happens, and stories CAN pretty much magically appear by themselves. I don't know if it happened that way with Alto, but it DOES happen. I think most people here (myself included) would agree that he SHOULD have picked Sheryl. What I disagreed with was people saying that he DID pick Sheryl (and you can tell because there are lots of little clues and hints that only a real Sheryl fan can see). Why stop at a quadrangle? Give Nanase, Kathy, Grace, and Bobby all crushes on Alto, too...then we'll have a REAL harem anime, and so a harem ending would no longer upset people. There. I solved the problem. Mr. Kawamori can thank me with cash.

Bah, it's the nature of message boards. Everyone has their pet issues, everyone says things that make others' blood boil, people miss the beginning of the thread and give information that has already been well-discussed. Generally, of course, judicious use of the search button would solve 99% of the repetition, but not always, and we've all trotted out some gem that we thought was entirely new, only to find that others had brought it up weeks before. As always, to err is human. Unless you're MisaForsaken. Then it's a way of life.

"BOMBAA!!"

Good grief...Macrossworld has turned into 4chan... I'm going to have to smoke an extra turd in hell for creating this thread, aren't I...? By the way, @Master Dex: I actually like Macross 7, Macross II, and Macross Zero much better than I let on in the original post. I was trying trying to rehash the arguments as succinctly as possible so that other people wouldn't feel the need to rehash them at length. I have, perhaps, failed in this endeavor.

I disagree. Often, characters can kind of take over, and dictate to the author what they want and need. Just look at Sheryl, who outgrew her original, rather minor role (or so I've heard) and managed to successfully, elegantly take over the entire show.

"'Prudent.' I hate that word." - Isamu, Macross Plus Episode 3 "That would be the most prudent course." - Jan Neumann to Isamu, Macross Plus Episode 4 "Mountain! Galaxy! LISTEN TO MY SONG!" - Basara (of course), Macross 7 Episode 49 "Luck is one of my many skills." - Isamu, Macross Plus Episode 4 "Does it make you feel good, to use all those big words to tell me I'm going to die?" - Sheryl I'll probably think of some more, but he's a couple of DYRL quotations (both from Hikaru) from the HALL OF INFAMOUS MISTRANSLATIONS!!! "My engine blocks are angry at me." "You change subjects just like an acrobat. Kyuuuuu-don!"

I don't know specifically about the black hole, but somewhere on the new Macross Compendium, someone asked about what happened to the Megaroad-01, and Egan replied that them going off and disappearing at the center of the galaxy was from promo material for a DYRL-based game from the late eighties or early nineties, presenting "Minmay's Last Message." So considering that A) it was a little giveaway promo item, B) it was for a game, and C) it was based on DYRL, it makes the whole story rather suspect. I can't verify this, but I get the feeling the "fell into a black hole" story came from the fanbase, probably first mentioned as a joke, but someone took it seriously and it spread. Lord knows I've had a couple of times where something I said in jest got wrenched out of context and misinterpreted (a while back in the news thread, when Sheryl's earrings had just been added to the MacZero Blu-Ray, I made a joke about other scenes that would be added to different chapters of the Macross story...and someone took me seriously).

It was mine, too. Britai, Hikaru, Kaifun, and now Bodolzaa...sad indeed. As for Mr. March's query about Zentradi skin color...I don't know about the in-universe explanation, if there is one (something tells me there's not), but I always thought it was very groovy and Space Battleship Yamato-esque And, if given a choice, I'd rather be purple with blue hair than green and bald.

Good ones! Although I haven't seen any naked people on youtube singing Macross songs...only schoolgirls, violinists, and guitarists who all wear masks. And if I'm making a jab at you, it's so subtle that even I don't know what it is... *GASP* A-are you saying I should *gulp* show some sense of...responsiblity...? When blaming others is not only more convenient, it's way more fun...?