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Robotech was one of the first Anime released in the United States to preserve the complexity and drama of its original Japanese source material. Robotech, dubbed into English and released by the Harmony Gold corporation, fused the story lines of three different Japanese mecha anime series (with some modifications): Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Century Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada. The reasoning for combining these unrelated series was that the American TV stations had a minimum number of episodes for weekday syndication, and none of the three series met that requirement alone. Moreover, there was pressure from the American toy manufacturer who had licensed these three series to present them all as a single packaged product.
This combination resulted in a storyline that spanned three generations: The characters in the Macross saga, their children in the Southern Cross saga, and their descendants in the New Generation saga. The result is a surprisingly coherent story that resolves plot threads left unresolved in the earlier series. In particular, Southern Cross was originally intended to be a massive, be-all-end-all space opera, but ran out of money before it could be completed. Its inclusion in Robotech actually increased fan respect for Southern Cross.
There was also a novelization series, written by "Jack McKinney", a pseudonym for Brian Daley and James Luceno, which included extensive quotes from fictitious books and fleshed out the chronology in more detail.
Harmony Gold attempted to produce an original sequel series called Robotech II: The Sentinels, but only three episodes were made. The project fell through due to problems with the toy licensing and changes in the Japanese yen-US Dollar exchange rate, among other reasons.
Two different versions of the Sentinels saga were chronicled in the McKinney novels and a comic book series.
A theatrical film, Robotech the Movie was created between the premiere of the original series and the aborted production of "Sentinels". It used footage from the movie Mega Zone 23 and had only a tenuous link to the television series. It disappeared after a brief test run in several Texas theaters.
Despite the failure of Sentinels, producer Carl Macek later revealed ideas for a third series, Robotech III: The Odyssey, which would pad the number of episodes for all three series out to 240. The idea was that the last episode of Odyssey would lead into the first of the original Robotech, and since there are 240 weekdays in a year, a viewer who started watching the show would end up right back where they started, one year later. Odyssey never went into production, though some of its ideas were worked into the McKinney book The End of the Circle.
Releases
Robotech was originally released in 1985 in first-run syndication, meaning it was sold directly to local television stations without having been run on a network first. This was part of a trend in animation in the 1980s -- previously, local stations would run reruns of theatrical cartoons like Looney Tunes or shows that had previously been on network TV on Saturday mornings. This changed after a series called He-Man introduced a new economic model: shows sold directly for first-run to stations, driving and funded by sales of related toys. Cashing in on this fad may have been ill-advised for Robotech, as the show was written for teenagers, not the children targeted by the toy line. The failure of the toy line is a primary reason funding for Robotech II collapsed.
After its run in syndication, it appeared occasionally on cable television in the early 1990s, on both the Sci-Fi Network, and on Cartoon Network, which made the curious decision to run only episodes 1 through 60, bailing out five episodes before the end of the "Robotech Masters" story-line. KTEH, a public television station in San_Jose,_California also ran the series.
Spurred by fan interest, several abortive attempts to release the series on home video came and went in the 80's and 90's. FHE attempted to release one episode per VHS tape, but only got through a handful of early episodes before abandoning this approach. The company then edited the 36-episode "Macross Saga" portion into six movie-length tapes, cutting out episode introductions and slower scenes, and ignoring the "Masters" and "New Generation" segments entirely.
Palladium Books, which published a Robotech Role-playing game also released a set of VHS videos of the series via mail-order. It's not clear if they released the entire series.
Streamline Pictures, founded by Macek after the end of Robotech, released a series of "Perfect Collection" VHS videos, which included two episodes of Robotech along with their corresponding episodes of Macross, Southern Cross, or Mospaeda, completely uncut and subtitled, allowing viewers to see exactly what changes were made.
FHE released the entire series on VHS in the mid 1990s, with two episodes per tape.
In 2001, anime specialty company ADV Films began releasing the entire series on DVD, typically with six episodes per disc. Box sets of the series included extras like Macek's pre-Robotech dub of the first three "Macross" episodes, shown in Los Angeles in 1984.
In 2002, anime specialty company AnimEgo released the original "Macross" series on DVD, subtitled and unedited and completely washed of its relationship to Robotech. Several Macross sequels are also available on DVD from various manufacturers.
The footage cobbled together from the failed "Sentinels" project was released as Robotech II: The Sentinels on VHS in 1994 by Orion Home Video.
Robotech the Movie has never been released on any home video format.
Impact
While anime shows were brought to the US as early as the 1960s, most were heavily bowdlerized for American audiences, with violence, deaths of major characters, sexual references, etc., completely edited out for what was assumed to be an audience of young children. Robotech broke with this tradition by leaving in those elements, and is thought by some to be the show that kicked off American interest in Japanese animation, leading to a boom in North American consumption of anime that is still growing as of this writing.
That said, Robotech is also extremely polarizing. By westernizing character names, making some censor-appeasing edits and, most obviously, changing the stories of three wholly unrelated series to pass them off as a cohesive whole, some critics consider the show to be an abomination that runs rough-shod over its original sources. Defenders counter that such changes were necessary to get the show onto American television at all, given the cultural and economic rules of 1985.
Novels
Robotech was adapted into novel form by "Jack McKinney", a pseudonym for the team of James Luceno and the late Brian Daley, a pair of writers who had been working with Macek since they had collaborated on the animated series Galaxy Rangers. Using fictitious epigraphs in the style of Dune, McKinney's novels fleshed out the chronology (including adapting the incomplete Sentinels source material) in greater detail. Many Robotech fans consider the McKinney series to be an unofficial canon of its own, despite notable divergences in the writing from Harmony Gold's current official animation-based canon. Despite no longer being considered core continuity by Harmony Gold, the novels have been recently re-issued by Del Rey Books as Omnibus compilations.