Macross 25th aaniversary brainfart...

[polidread]

Macross Frontier gives homage to everything Macross gave out the past 25 years !

id love to speculate and over analyze to death everything found in the first episode but im not so good with it...

but ... the continuing forum conversations lead me to speculate anyway - Studio Nue really really wants to give the franchise a super shot in the arm and rejuvenate interest in it - for both the old and new fans.

but Shoji Kawamori seems to be frustrated with the limitations of his first series - in animation, finances, corporate mandated editing, even the Court case involving Harmony Gold versus Big West in ownership of the Macross series rights - the court case definitely hinders Macross' merchandise from entering the US popularity

he attempted to rectify this with the release of the Macross movie "Do You Remember Love" abandoning the TV series story and practically rewriting everything about Macross.

Years later, he reneged by saying this was a movie created WITHIN the Macross universe, with the characters appearing in the movies as "actors portraying the roles of Hikaru & company", much like Hollywood making the Pearl Harbor movie to romantize the human story of the Pacific War

but every Macross animation and videogame which came out after "Do You Remember Love" picks up their visual and narrative cues from DYRL and not the Macross TV series

as examples: the Super Dimensional Fortress Macross which was hacked by super computer Sharon Apple in Macross Plus appears like what it did in the DYRL movie; the Zentraedi Archivist Exedol appears in Macross 7 like what he did in the DYRL movie

it's like Shoji Kawamori and Studio Nue have been, for years, trying to avoid dwelling in the original Macross TV Series while the court case involving it's broadcast and design rights was being disputed.

Kawamori has even been blunt in answering questions as to what happened to Hikaru, Misa, Minmay and their long distance emigration starship Megaroad as they travelled towards the center of the Milky Way Galaxy: "God Knows" it's as if he's subtly asking the fans to move on and not dwell with what happened to the first Macross story...

Studio Nue created Macross Plus, Macross Seven, and Macross Zero making each series Very different, strongly diverse from the previous one but each one expanding on the singular Macross universe.

and now they've come back to directly tackle the original series with Macross Frontier - an almost verbatim telling of the first Macross TV series BUT without the visual cues of the first series

glaring examples: the famous red and white Macross Kite logo, the Skull Squadron logo, the UN Government - some of the particular visual and narrative cues from the first Macross story whose ownership is being disputed by Harmony Gold and Big West

......

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whoa! there's a pungent example of geek brain diarrhea for you.....

[RDClip]

I thought DYRL came out the same year or earlier than robocrap?

[Radd]

I suspect you're over thinking the origins of the movie. SDF:M turned out to be a popular tv series, and so a movie was made to capitalize on that. Tatsunoko was involved in the production of the movie, and unless I'm mistaken there was no legal headbutting back in those halcyon days of yore.

I suspect the fact that all subsequent Macross endeavours have taken their visual cues from the movie, rather than the tv series, has more to do with Kawamori and company seeing those designs as more visually appealing. I mean, if you made a popular movie, comic, or tv series, and later released a redux (either sequel, remake, whatever) and later continued within that same universe, you'd probably want to use the designs you think are better when showing the past, or bringing back old characters/mecha/what-have-you.

As for Kawamori's "bluntness" on the fate of the original cast, the generally accepted idea, that he was simply done with their story, and rather tired of being pressed for more information and requests for sequels featuring those characters, and so made an offhand remark about them disappearing simply to shut people up, seems to make enough sense. More than the idea of avoiding the issue for legal reasons, especially seeing as how these legal issues, again, did not even exist at the time. If that were really an issue we would not have seen Hikaru, Misa, et all in the Frontier recap of SW1, or had Max and Millia playing such big roles in Macross 7.

I would agree that the lack of the UNS kite logo is likely due to a desire to increase their chances of marketing the show internationally (as I recall, HG trademarked that logo in the U.S.).

[Elektrix]

How can you tell that Macross Frontier as a whole will be a verbatim retelling of the original Macross series?

Just because the first episode plays out with many similarities (or at least to DYRL), I don't think we can tell much about what the overall series will be like/about.

[azrael]

Paying homages to a franchise is different that retelling a story verbatim.