Macross Plus Movie Edition - US THEATERS

[Seto Kaiba]

Just got back from the screening at the Rochester Hills, MI Emagine theater.

The turnout was about what the online booking showed... roughly a half-full house.  Everyone seemed to be pretty excited going into it, and the audience seemed to be having a good time throughout.  I know I enjoyed myself immensely.  The subtitle translation was a bit dodgy, but not enough so to be truly jarring.

[Kelsain]

Happy I didn’t bring anyone new to see this. Our theater didn’t start on time, took several of us to complain. Finally got started 1/2 hour late, then cut off automatically right after the Ghost dogfight. Theater staff had all gone home by then.

We’ll see what the refund policy is.

😠

[Slave IV]

T minus 10 mins for my showing. 

[charles88]

So what end credit message from movie about?

[Stampeed Valkyrie]

Pre-Show consisted of a brief overview of Macross past to present,  then a few minute message from Kawamori about Mac+ and what they did to during production.

Center Valley PA, 9 people including Mrs. and myself.    Totally empty theatre and some idiots who couldn't keep their mouths shut during the viewing.

[Metal_Massacre_79]

Just finished in Kenosha, WI. I think there were 11 tickets sold so it was pretty much me and a few old Macross nerds. Loved every second of it. I hadn't seen this version before, only the 4 part series.

[jvmacross]

Ended up watching the movie when I saw that NO ONE had bought any seats at my nearest theatre.....by the time the "pre-show" started....a grand total of three of us were there for the big WWM event.....ouch

Anyway...it's funny because I had actually decided to watch the "movie" edition for maybe the third time over the last weekend....and I actually found what turned out to be the "pre-show" as an extra on the Macross Plus BD that came out a few years ago....so if you have that BD you did not miss out much....the Kawamori intro was nice, but nothing interesting..or at least nothing I had not known about regarding the making of Macross Plus...would have been nice to have cracked open the vaults and showed off some never-before-seen lineart or maybe some original cels, gengas or dougas.....maybe next time or on some new "WWM" M+ boxset release

[NightmarePlus]

Was surprised to see that at least 20-25 people showed up to the viewing.

[snakerbot]

So first off, I really enjoyed seeing it in the theater. Site showed 8 seats sold, which seemed about right, although I didn't count. Started about 15 minutes late and someone did go out to ask about it.

Was the audio... different... for anyone else? Like, I guess some of it could maybe be attributed to mixing for the theater or whatever, but some of the songs were straight up different from any version I had heard before. Easiest to notice was during "Information High". In the "Sayonara to intrusive noise / No more childish play and no more toys" part, both "noise" and "toys" were echoed a couple times. On one hand it definitely felt intentional considering it was on beat and everything, but on the other it was kind of jarring and didn't really seem to fit.

[NightmarePlus]

10 minutes ago, snakerbot said:

So first off, I really enjoyed seeing it in the theater. Site showed 8 seats sold, which seemed about right, although I didn't count. Started about 15 minutes late and someone did go out to ask about it.

Was the audio... different... for anyone else? Like, I guess some of it could maybe be attributed to mixing for the theater or whatever, but some of the songs were straight up different from any version I had heard before. Easiest to notice was during "Information High". In the "Sayonara to intrusive noise / No more childish play and no more toys" part, both "noise" and "toys" were echoed a couple times. On one hand it definitely felt intentional considering it was on beat and everything, but on the other it was kind of jarring and didn't really seem to fit.

Yeah I had that happen too during the Information high part

[TehPW]

8 hours ago, no3Ljm said:

 

Thank you for this: My kid was a few minutes late so we didn't sit down until Isamu just launched into the air... I would say there was about 10 peps at the Southpark Mall Cinemarc in CLE... and i was the only one HOLDING a VF-11B (in fighter mode. man, that was bitch to transform from Battroid. and yes, my Wife made fun of me bringing to the theater, LOL).

thoughts:

Spoiler

One thing they fixed (a rather easy fix) was Isamu's injury at the end. In the original movie edition, because they added the scene with the HUD destruction and Isamu, bleeding from his forehead, the later scene shows no injury (because the HUD scene was movie, no OVA4). They fixed it for this sitting.

Spoiler

I think, not 100% on this, they changed/corrected something at the start of the ambush scene, the weapons fire looks new. I could be wrong,

Spoiler

 

, but the beams looked very, very thin and far more coverage as they crossed above the YF-19 as it was still rising

Spoiler

Lots of translation changes, many for the better... it would be very interesting to find out the discussion path in how or why they decided on the words they used. "Water under the Bridge" was certainly a unexpected phrasing...

Still, it was enjoyable to watch with my kid (we never see him unless he needs something washed)...

[jealous37]

Just got home from my showing.  I think there were about a dozen people in the theater.  Everything started on time.  I really enjoyed being able to see Macross on the big screen.  I hope they bring more movies stateside.

[treatment]

So the english-subs is from the International version (the wonky translationss from the blu-ray) or from the old MangaVideo US-version ?

Or is it a brand new translations altogether?

 

 

 

Edited December 15, 2021 by treatment

[Knight26]

Just got back, there were maybe 8 people at are showing, with boys and I being half of that.  Having never seen it on the big screen I thought it was awesome and it got my youngest interested in watching the whole of Macross, so win there.

[DYRL VF-1S]

46 minutes ago, snakerbot said:

So first off, I really enjoyed seeing it in the theater. Site showed 8 seats sold, which seemed about right, although I didn't count. Started about 15 minutes late and someone did go out to ask about it.

Was the audio... different... for anyone else? Like, I guess some of it could maybe be attributed to mixing for the theater or whatever, but some of the songs were straight up different from any version I had heard before. Easiest to notice was during "Information High". In the "Sayonara to intrusive noise / No more childish play and no more toys" part, both "noise" and "toys" were echoed a couple times. On one hand it definitely felt intentional considering it was on beat and everything, but on the other it was kind of jarring and didn't really seem to fit.

Were you at the Orchard AMC in CO? Cuz the same happened to me.

[HGSucks]

I just got back from watching it in one of the several OKC theaters that were showing it. There were about a dozen people showing up for this one comprised of a few couples some with Macross shirts. It seems as though they blocked out a couple of songs with sounds that were annoying. That's disconcerting that something that is a HUGE part of some of the series, including their meaning being part of the plot, were not subtitled. It's not a franchise like Fairy Tail that doesn't matter much if they are subtitled. It wouldn't be a big deal in a series like Zero but, in Frontier and in Delta (hell, that is the show but unlike some, I love it...7, not so much). I was surprised that in the history they included Macross II since, I thought that was considered non-canonical because didn't the rival studio Tatsunoko Productiond that was part of a 3 way lawsuit in Japan, do that without BigWest and Studio Nue (Tatsunoko Productions I believe was the studio that illegally sold the renewal rights to HG). So, it looks like there are still some possible song rights/royalty issues. I'm glad at least Voices was included. Anyway, despite my complaints, it still is a big accomplishment without HG being mentioned at all. I never thought I'd see something like it at all in the US so it is a big step. The names "Harmony Gold" and "BigWest" have huge ironies if you think about them and the effect they had on the franchise. The subtitles were uneven but, this is not too uncommon in anime since there is some debate within anime circles on how much liberty to take with strictly literal translations or more "artsy" and not so literal ones. This seemed to find an ok balance. English dubs have gotten better but subs of course tend to have better thanslations.

On a side note, I believe HG originally just wanted to do it as Macross only. However, do to the way syndication was done in the United States, they need many more episodes so were forced to by the other two series to satisfy the number of episodes they would need. Unfotunately, they decided that throw the series together as one big one. At first HG was cool and allowed an albeit bad like most anime English dubs at the time have a Macross Plus dubbed by ADV as well a Do You Remember Love. There was also a "Clash of the Bionoids" crappy version that I think HG might have been more behind. Anyway, I could be wrong on a lot of this so I'm saying all of this with the disclaimer that I'm taking this from memory and some of it may be speculative.  The so-called Macross saga was more faithful to the original although it still was basterdized by it's throwing around the word Robotech instead of protoculture some and making protoculture later having somethign to do with flowers. Anyway. I'm new and I apologize if this was a bad post. I'll try to post something with citations and be more concise. I'm just tired. It was exciting to see and better than I had remembered it. Anyway, I'm fininished bumbling this. I apologize to anybody I didn't give credit to as well.

[snakerbot]

16 minutes ago, DYRL VF-1S said:

Were you at the Orchard AMC in CO? Cuz the same happened to me.

AMC Willowbrook in Houston. I'm pretty sure it was an intentional thing, it was just weird. There were a bunch of other parts where I thought something sounded "off" but couldn't quite put my finger on it. Either the songs were mixed differently or the mixing between music and sound effects was different, that sort of stuff. Information High was just the part that stuck in my mind and was easiest to describe.

[Corrinald]

5 total people in my Ohio theater. Me and my two friends and a couple sitting behind us. 

I have never seen the movie version so it added to the experience for me. I didn't realize how much stuff they added, removed, and changed from the OVA. It was definitely great seeing it on the big screen and the Kawamori message before it was a nice touch.

I can't believe how many years ago it came out! My OVA version is a set of VHS tapes

[100mega]

I wanna give more detailed impressions later, but as a quick note the sound seemed totally screwed up. Like the center channel was cranked and the right and left channels where very low making all of the dialogue sound like directly from the mic and the music was totally ruined. One part during information high, when the glass is breaking into birds, the lyrics “NOISE” and “TOYS” where clearly heard all alone in the song through the center channel. It also made scenes feel weirdly awkward causing a lot of ambient sound to be non existent. I also had some idiot chucklehead humans laughing at the wrong stuff. Like seriously cracking up at explosions during action scenes. Going to see anime is always a nightmare and this didn't break the chain. 
 

edit: oh crap some of you noticed the same sound issue. I’ll have to compare with my bluray that has the new mix, but I’m certain it wasn’t intentional. Left and right channels were nearly dead. 

Edited December 15, 2021 by 100mega

[kajnrig]

Just got home. I was surprised at the turnout; last I had checked there were maybe a dozen seats sold, max, and it seemed to have doubled/tripled that over the last few days.

Movie is as good as it always has been. I don't know if the audio mixing is based on the Bluray mix or what. Regardless, it was different from the various stereo mixes I've heard in the past; some of the decisions were a bit odd. The subs were decent; at times they were much improved over the old Manga translation, at other times they were worse. Most fortunately, the video was completely free of the bugs seen on my, uh, rip of the film, as well as on clips/uploads on Youtube.

I was most interested in how young people who had never seen Macross reacted to it, and from the handful of teenage/20-something interviewees afterward, it was universal praise. Predictably, some were more attracted to the "Top Gun in space" aspect than the rest of it. My friend, who has seen the Frontier movies, was already somewhat primed for this, but even then the movie seemed to surpass his expectations. He mentioned twice how the movie didn't feel like two hours at all because of how engrossing it was.

So, good sign.

Edited December 15, 2021 by kajnrig

[Britai 7018]

Just got back from my showing and had such a great time. It wasn't a terrible excited crowd, but it was a pretty big turnout based on what everyone else had. I think we had 50+ people. Just the idea that we got to watch Macross in theaters is still amazing to me. I really liked the new subtitles. 

For the folks who had weird glitches I feel for you. The last Fathom event I went to (also my first) was the Transformers 1986 movie and they started 10 mins late. And when it started, it just picked up 10 mins into the movie, as if it had started on time. Oh and we had no audio for the next 30 mins. So we were fully 45 mins into the movie with no sound before they figured it out and rewinded back to the beginning (almost, they stopped at minute 2 or 3. but at this point we were just happy to get what we could get). 

 

[Boobytrap]

Just got back from the showing. It was a great time. There were probably over 40 people in the theater. I haven't seen + in years and certainly never on the big screen. This is an experience I would like to have again with other Macross titles. 

Hopefully someone like RightStuf or some other distributor gets to sell it in the States soon. I'd love to watch it on my home projector.

[UN Spacy]

Saw it with a fellow MW’er in attendance. 

T’was great and all but only 6 folks in a theater of 84 seats…a little underwhelming. If M+ can’t even pack a theater. 

[Keith]

26 minutes ago, UN Spacy said:

Saw it with a fellow MW’er in attendance. 

T’was great and all but only 6 folks in a theater of 84 seats…a little underwhelming. If M+ can’t even pack a theater. 

Well, not everyone is ready to start hitting theaters again, myself include. So I don't think it's a fair guage of turnout.

[treatment]

4 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Just got back from the screening at the Rochester Hills, MI Emagine theater.

The turnout was about what the online booking showed... roughly a half-full house.  Everyone seemed to be pretty excited going into it, and the audience seemed to be having a good time throughout.  I know I enjoyed myself immensely.  The subtitle translation was a bit dodgy, but not enough so to be truly jarring.

A post over at TFW-forum mentioned that Marj is spelled as Marge in this US film-release.

Here's a snap from the BD release's english-subs:

So it seems like they're using the wonky english-subs from the BD release on this US film release, huh?

That would be disappointing if true.

 

 

[M'Kyuun]

I also just got back from seeing it, and too, with fellow MWer @twich, who is now the only MWer I've ever met in person after nearly two decades of being a member.  That alone made the experience even better. 👍 Getting to 'talk shop' about Macross with someone who not only knows what I'm talking about, but can converse intelligently about it was in itself worth the price of admission. Glad we met. 

It was great to see M+ on the big screen, the only Macross film I've ever seen in that format. I hope more Macross movies come, and there are better turnouts. We had about 10-12 people show up in an auditorium that probably seats around 30-40.  Perhaps it's b/c I haven't watched my DVD copy in a few years, but it felt to me like there was additional footage that my DVD doesn't have. My memory is crap, though, so I may just be misremembering.  I enjoyed the subtitling, as there were numerous bits of dialog that were better than what I remember from my DVD, and from the OVA English dub.  There was way too much of "Bad Dog" in the soundtrack for my liking; out of all the gorgeous music that Kanno-san wrote for the film/OVA, that one grates and should have been relegated to the very short scene where they're calibrating Sharon.  Fortunately, we had no interruptions or sound issues, and got to enjoy Kawamori-san's intro in full, which I thought was pretty cool. 

Macross Plus was my introduction to Macross, and a major gateway for me into becoming an anime fan. It remains one of my all-time favorite animes, and probably still my favorite out of the Macross series, although I hold the original SDF:M and Frontier in pretty high regard as well. Seeing it again after a few years have passed, and in good company (everybody was quiet throughout, except for the occasional chuckle, usually involving Isamu in some shape or form 😄) gave me the warm fuzzies as you only experience with old friends. It's still a remarkable bit of cinema, and I'm glad I had the opportunity to see it on the big screen, which is something I never would have thought possible a year or so ago. 

[Bolt]

We had a great time ! The theater had about 25 others people in it. I thought it was a great turn out. Loved the Macross summary in the beginning. I had to yell Bomba ! When Macross 7 appeared. Anyway, it was totally cool having Kawamori  address the US audience. Definitely looking forward to ( and crossing my fingers for) more Deculture on the big screen.

[Gaijin]

Just got back from my local showing. There were about 7-8 people besides me which I was actually surprised to see since I live in a smaller city.

 

Was really nice to see it on a big screen. Video quality was good, translation a bit different and wonky but still great to watch. More please.

[kazuo]

1 hour ago, Keith said:

Well, not everyone is ready to start hitting theaters again, myself include. So I don't think it's a fair guage of turnout.

I think it's COVID+we're superfans living a bubble, thinking that Macross Plus is gonna sell out the house. It's not. Especially not with the minimal amount of advertising it got; I found out mostly by accident, and I follow the official Macross account and @giantrobo on Twitter, but that's beside the point. I think some of us are overestimating the reach of Plus, as good as it is.

Anyway, the script is a refined version of the BD English subtitles, and yes, it's "Marge" in the script they used. The script also needed better QC, because I picked up on at least two grammatical errors, maybe even some others I forgot about between all the teeth grinding I was going through during the screening. I wouldn't expect anyone to use the old Manga/Nadelman script anymore, likely due to licensing reasons - that ship has sailed. You can always download it from the 'net and roll your own custom BD IMG or MKV.

I also very immediately noticed all of the additional garbage "pew pew" laser effects and such, evoking very terrible memories of the old Rhino re-releases of Transformers where they had to add a shitty sound effect to every single thing. And the sound mix was terrible, absolute crap. The voice and BGM balance was way off, with the voice often completely overpowering the music; this was most apparent during Information High - you could barely hear the music! Awful. I also noticed the "noise" / "toys" echo thing during Information High, and I'm pretty sure it was an intentional change to the sound mix. Why would they do this?

I hate being so negative about this, but with the sound mix being so bad and the dodgy subtitles, I probably should've just stayed home and watched the BD. Would've saved ten bucks.

Edited December 15, 2021 by kazuo
still vomiting inside my mouth

[Rhubarbarian]

Can agree with everyone else that the sound mixing was awful - VOICES was often way too high, I also got the weird Information High glitch on the center channel, etc. I haven't seen the movie version for 20 years (my last copy was on VHS), so I don't remember if it was the movie release in general or unique to this release, but I noticed they layered the song Bad Dog over several other Sharon Apple songs and it was SUPER distracting. 

Our theater was pretty full but as I mentioned before, I'm in the LA area and we get a bigger crowd for these things.

[Keith]

Weird considering all of the OST's hit the U.S. digital stores without edits. I wonder if they tried to do a fancy theater mix & ran out of time/skilled sound engineers...

 

[100mega]

It has to be a mistake with converting the audio to whatever Fathom uses to show these films. I wonder if all showings were like this and most were just not as familiar with how it should sound to notice the problems? The whole movie sounded terrible throughout and I maintain that it sounded like the left and right channels were near missing. Center channel and real channels sounded normal. The lack of a full sound scape made everything from the center sound really strange. Like the example cited in Information High, I’m sure the audio track was probably panning from left to right for effect, but you only heard bits of the lyrics when it crossed the center channel. This would also explain why the laser noises where so exaggerated. They should have been buried in ambient noise and music. 

I’m happy people got to see it and enjoyed it either without the problems or didnt notice them, but this was a once in a lifetime chance to see something I dearly love ruined. I’m still highly irritated about the whole thing. No bumping Sharon Apple music is the worst way to experience Macross Plus. I want a second showing or a refund for the tickets I bought for my three friends and myself. It makes me sick to think it wasn’t half as cool as it could have been for them. 

[Focslain]

3 hours ago, 100mega said:

It has to be a mistake with converting the audio to whatever Fathom uses to show these films. I wonder if all showings were like this and most were just not as familiar with how it should sound to notice the problems? The whole movie sounded terrible throughout and I maintain that it sounded like the left and right channels were near missing. Center channel and real channels sounded normal. The lack of a full sound scape made everything from the center sound really strange. Like the example cited in Information High, I’m sure the audio track was probably panning from left to right for effect, but you only heard bits of the lyrics when it crossed the center channel. This would also explain why the laser noises where so exaggerated. They should have been buried in ambient noise and music. 

I’m happy people got to see it and enjoyed it either without the problems or didnt notice them, but this was a once in a lifetime chance to see something I dearly love ruined. I’m still highly irritated about the whole thing. No bumping Sharon Apple music is the worst way to experience Macross Plus. I want a second showing or a refund for the tickets I bought for my three friends and myself. It makes me sick to think it wasn’t half as cool as it could have been for them. 

Yeah the sound was off at our showing as well. It was still nice seeing it on the big screen regardless. 

As for attendance, I did a check of the 4 theaters in my area that was showing it (seems they added one). Of it the one I was at had 8 including myself and my friend. There was one that only had 2 seats bought (guess they had a private showing), one had a good 30 seats sold (also the largest of the theaters) and the newcomer had 0 sold as of 2 hours prior to showtime. 

Honestly for something like this I'm not surprised at the numbers, just glad it did something and hope they release more over here. 

[Seto Kaiba]

17 minutes ago, Focslain said:

Honestly for something like this I'm not surprised at the numbers, just glad it did something and hope they release more over here. 

Yeah, the turnout being low is kind of expected since they did pretty much bugger-all to actually advertise this one-day engagement outside of the die-hard Macross fandom, which has more or less been an underground phenomena for the last twenty-odd years.  It's still a promising sign of things to come, and I'm glad they did it.

[snakerbot]

9 hours ago, 100mega said:

edit: oh crap some of you noticed the same sound issue. I’ll have to compare with my bluray that has the new mix, but I’m certain it wasn’t intentional. Left and right channels were nearly dead. 

Either I didn't have this issue or I interpreted it differently than you. For me there were no pure side channels and no rear channels, but there was definitely front left and front right. It sounded like a stereo mix where everything got put into the front speakers, which I guess could be accidental, but wasn't clearly so to me. It could have just been a limitation of the source. I don't know about the mixing, whether that was intentional or not, but I think specifically the noise/toys echoes were intentional since I don't see how an accident could result in that.

12 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Just got back from the screening at the Rochester Hills, MI Emagine theater.

The turnout was about what the online booking showed... roughly a half-full house.  Everyone seemed to be pretty excited going into it, and the audience seemed to be having a good time throughout.  I know I enjoyed myself immensely.  The subtitle translation was a bit dodgy, but not enough so to be truly jarring.

On the topic of translation: this isn't specific to this theater showing and I've seen a few different translations for this part. What are Guld's words to Isamu and Myung in his final conversation when he mentions getting a drink with them? The theater showing and at least one other version I've seen translate them as "Let's get a drink after this" or "I'd like to get a drink after this" or something to that effect, specifically future tense. But one version I saw translated it as "I would have liked to get a drink after this", which I find more powerful since it's pretty obvious that Guld knows he's not coming back, where "Let's get a drink after this" suggests that he is or thinks he is.