originally written for and posted on Comicsnob.com [Dec ’06 – May ’08]
I was thinking of a different, more involved intro but honestly, what else do I need to say:
Robotech!
(no, no… imagine the voice-over guy saying it, with the Minucci/Ober score starting to swell in the background.)
Dateline 4 March 1985, on a TV station near you…
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the Ages of Fan IV — ’85: toys, shows, Robotech, cons, and the new fan culture
So we’ll begin this week with an extended aside: occasionally in reviews and in other off-hand commentary, I’ve referred to one anime or another as a “recycler”; this refers mostly to the re-use of animation sequences, but also to the re-use of plots. How many times can a giant monster attack Tokyo? (this is actually a zen koan.)
One of the earliest recyclers any of us in America will be familiar with is Voltron. Watch the lions assemble, here comes the force sword, and the monster of the week goes down in a blaze of vaguely non-violent carnage. Voltron has been a staple of the otaku and proto-otaku diet for decades now (before we even knew…) since the original U.S. airing in 1984. Voltron and other sentai (“task force”) shows — like say Power Rangers, not that I’m admitting that Power Rangers has anything to contribute to the current discussion past the obvious parallel I just cited — owe an obvious debt to Gatchaman (aka “Battle of the Planets”), right down to the fact that there are five members on the team. Gatchaman and Voltron may have become such a part of the fan landscape that you don’t realize—or didn’t even know—that kids TV series right up to today are still riffing on these old shows.
The two rivals, the princess, the big guy, the pee-wee/sidekick — these are anime archetypes now, but at one point it was all brand new… Voltron, even with it’s faults, is part of the anime canon; like Speed Racer or Astroboy before it. This was the first introduction to Japanese visual culture for many young American fans. If you aren’t six years old, though, Voltron (Hyakuju-ou GoLion, in the Japanese original) lacks a certain something. Voltron is certainly important, but we need to wait until the following year (1985) to find the next milestone for our otaku timeline.
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Maybe you’ve heard of Robotech, or it’s lesser-known-but-better alter-ego, Macross. I say “maybe” as in “maybe you’re an indigenous warm blooded sentient mammal or visiting alien species who has been on the planet for at least 10 years.”
The success of Robotech has nothing to do with the merits of the original series, Macross. It’s not like there’s some sort of freak-genius adaptation that made the American show an instant icon in sci-fi television either. In many ways, Macross/Robotech is just a rip-off of the earlier Gundam series, and the original English dub, while inspired in it’s own way, did nothing to alleviate the faults of the original — they were merely masked because no one watching it had ever seen Gundam, let alone would have known enough Japanese to begin nitpicking the adaptation. Heck, at the moment I can’t find the half-remembered sources, but I could swear that even the creators of Macross knew it was a Gundam rip-off, and occasionally played up points in the new series for comedic effect. I mean, the battleship transforms into a giant robot; is anyone taking this seriously?
Oh, we all took it all too seriously.
Robotech had a head start: the model kits were already available. In fact, before it was used as a show title “Robotech” was a blanket brandname used by Revell for a number of model kits derived from several unrelated Japanese properties, including Macross. This may be a contributing factor to the latter aggregation that now defines Robotech: Carl Macek and Harmony Gold had a show they knew would be a winner, but the trick was they only had 36 episodes. To make the property more palatable to U.S. syndication customers, who were looking for enough eps to do weekday daily broadcasts (a minimum of 65 eps; that’s one each daily weekdays, for 13 weeks) some drastic measure seemed to be called for. This is how two unrelated series (Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada) were tagged on to the end of Macross. It helped (and no doubt made the licensing a bit easier) that all three series were produced by the same anime studio, Tatsunoko Productions, so there were some vague compatibilities in both style and production values. Further continuity was manufactured by a over-arcing gloss provided via creative translation, some narrative voice-overs not present in the original, and a new music track to provide further continuity across the three story arcs. All this, to get us to the 85 episode epic known to American audiences as Robotech.
There was the TV show, and there were models and toys. There were trading cards and role playing games. Later, there were books and comics (not manga, but American style comics; reprints collected into trade paperback are still available from Wildstorm).
And the show itself must have run through all 85 episodes several times over, because a number of my younger friends (as in, up to 12 years younger) also have fond memories of this show.
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Robotech and Voltron inspired an explosion of anime fandom, briefly, in the mid 80s. Bolstered by the fans of previous generations (say, those raised on Astro Boy or Star Blazers) and enjoying a false sense of importance that ephemeral fans can bring to any property, the Robotech geeks went forth and staked ground they thought would be “Robotech” for decades to come.
It was of course premature. It is great to have demand for anime, but it would be another decade before the ability to supply shows to sate that demand would be in place. There was Robotech… and that was it.
But for a while things looked fantastic. All the different Robotech things had a multiplying effect, and while the timing was still just a bit early, some of the newly founded institutions had real sticking power; the long, slow decline of Robotech made it the vehicle for fandom through the long drought until the mid 90s.
And at least two Robotech institutions are still in operation today. In October of 1986, there was the first convention devoted just to Robotech, in Anaheim; it would run in one form or another for the next 20 years — and Harmony Gold still carries on in slightly modified (perhaps expanded would be the way to phrase it) form with The Robotech Convention Tour, which likely has a stop this year at some con near you. In early 1988 a fanzine named “Protoculture Addicts” published it’s first issue, and though repurposed as a general anime magazine, is still found on your local newsstand.
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Let’s say you were born in 1973. You would have been 7 when Star Blazers first aired, perhaps a little older if you caught the show in later syndication. As a 10 or 11 year old, you would have watched Voltron, and still been able to enjoy it — though Robotech, a slightly more challenging show, would have hit you a year or two later at exactly the same time that you first thought you were leaving childhood behind.
After the next long drought, in ’93 when you were at college, MTV started re-running Speed Racer (after midnight, but you’d stay up for every episode). Maybe you saw Sailor Moon, starting in ’95, or got hooked on Dragon Ball in ’96 (or depending on your preferences, maybe even both).
At this point, on the cusp of the new “kids” anime boom, when Pokemon started showing up on broadcast TV, you’d be around 25 years old and wondering if this kids stuff is all the anime that American TV had to offer, cable or otherwise. But if you look for it, at this point, in 1998, there would be all sorts of new series just now becoming available on the new DVD format. If you’d managed to cash in, even in small part, on the dot-com boom and now had both a little disposable income and fond memories for the cartoons of your youth — well then, this new market niche would have an immediate appeal. Some skill at internet searches would no doubt lead you to this whole new world of licensed anime, and eventually to manga too. From this point, compounded over the following eight years, it’s hard to say just where one might end up…
Hi, my name is Matt, and I’m an otaku.
I’m 33 years old, and I am Macross Otaku; there are many of us, and I’m not even the oldest member of this group. Someone out there was printing magazines, and organizing conventions. But as merely a fan I would like to think I’m indicative of the type: one of many teens who saw Robotech and became hooked.
From this point forward, being an otaku is no longer a odd hobby of just a few. We step into our own (though still small) spotlight to take our place as part of overall fandom. That is to say, it’s still a marginal hobby, but we’re now well known to fellow fans, and as the numbers continue to grow, the general public has also become aware.
In past posts I’ve referred to Robotech as my gateway drug; just good enough to get me hooked, but not quite enough to keep me satisfied. It engendered a lingering hunger.
further readings and references:
Fred Patton’s book Watching Anime, Reading Manga, an excellent resource on early fandom.
wiki: Anime in the United States
wiki: Robotech
- Super Dimension Fortress Macross
- Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross
- Genesis Climber Mospeada
wiki: Voltron
wiki: Mecha
