As a franchise Macross is this sort of amazing unique thing that continues to surprise me just in the fact that it even still exists after some 30 years. As a series its an often ugly tonal mess of a show with great highs and shockingly low lows. That said even acknowledging the turbulent production and range of quality that SDF Macross spans its easy to see why its still regarded as a classic even now. 1000http://i.ur.com/u6VR8FQ.jpg Super Dimension Fortress Macross was originally conceived in 1980 as a sort of Gundamstyle space opera by a group a Gundam nerds including creator and mechanical designer Shoji Kawamori Escaflowne AKB0048 and character designer Haruhiko Mikimoto Gundam 0080 That 2016 Zombies on a Train Show I Forget the Name of who previously worked together on a Gundam fan magazine in university. After a slew of production setbacks and alterations Macross released in 1982 kind of not resembling Gundam all that much which was probably for the best. In an alternatereality 2009 the United Nations attempt to repair a crashed alien dreadnought. During reactivation the ship the city it houses all of its inhabitants and a good chunk of the surrounding land are suddenly warped to the far side of Pluto. Macross covers their long journey back to Earth. Of course not all is hunkydory on their way back as they suffer various setbacks such as not knowing how to navigate an alien ship and a war with a race of spacefaring warmongering cultureless giants just to name a couple. Macross is after all a space opera at its core. Hanging off of that core however are a couple of bells and whistles that have come to set it apart from pretty much anything else. https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/9eabacc72960ce50895302b37d298993.mp4 Itano Circus good Bell Number One is its focal parity between the primary war story thread and the romantic subplot. Whilst fighting in the war main character rookie fighterpilot Hikaru Ichijou is unwittingly embroiled in a love triangle with commanding officer Misa Hayase and local idol Lynn Minmay. The show manages to tell these two seperate stories in such a way that they play off each other quite frequently while still having a pretty equal balance in screentime. Obviously any romances development will be informed by events outside of the romance itself but even then its rare for both sides to be equally interesting and immersive. The war story while considerably wackier than most is well done and treads an interesting arc that ranges from allout war to subterfuge to heel turns and unlikely alliances. The love story on the other hand had me invested pretty deeply to the point I was yelling at my boy Hikaru to stop being such an idiot and see that REDACTED is 100 not worth the heart ache. Shes a realistically complex and wellwritten character but you seriously dont want to go there my dude. As mentioned previously one point of the triangle is a local idol named Lynn Minmay also known as Whistle Number Two. In addition to being a scifi war anime and a romance anime Macross somehow also finds the time to be an idol anime. Not just any idol anime either a pioneer of idol anime launching Minmay and her VA Mari Ijima into national fame all the way back in 1982. While not boasting quite as large a collection as more recent entries every single one of Minmays songs is great with Silver Moon Red Moonhttps://www..com/watch?v=YpavXg01CAE being one of my personal favourites of the franchise. Mari Ijimas soft voice lends itself perfectly to the light melodies of early 80s JPop but also has the range to carry the heavier ballads. This aspect of the show chronicles Minmays rise to stardom as the voice and face of Macross City becoming integral to the other concurrent stories as it goes. Morale of troops and citizens during wartime is such an uncommon topic in anime and the way that SDF Macross leans so heavily into it was a huge surprise to me and what I thought was one of the best elements of the whole show. It all eventually culminates into an overarching theme of make love or music not war and the fairly widereaching umbrella term of culture they use I think is a notable high point for the franchise. While later series tend to bank on the music aspect likely because thats Macross cash cow SDF has a broader scope on what it deems more powerful than war making it feel that much more like a genuine message and less like a marketing strategy. At the end of the day its an interesting story about the biggest culture clash in history and the importance of art and entertainment to human civilization. It tends to be fairly exaggerated and somewhat cartoonish at times but its anime and it knows it. At one point the giants capture a group of humans and force them to demonstrate how humans procreate which leads to some funny hijinks. At another a pilot of one of the Variable Fighters Oh Macross is also a mecha anime dresses up their robot in a giants uniform and manages to slip past defenses despite being a fucking robot. Its some pretty fun dumb stuff which actually is a pretty decent segue into the next thing: the tonal shifts. 400http://i.ur.com/0brzVBf.jpg 400http://i.ur.com/bc8rMQp.jpg Left: How she should look Right: How she usually looks For a scifiwarromanceidol anime SDF gets pretty damn dark at times. Accidental operation of an energy shield incinerating an entire town here hull breaches sucking innocents into the cold depths of space there. Early on a couple of the main characters get trapped in an unknown sector of the ship and one suggests a double suicide which immediately sent up a million red flags regarding that character in my mind. Almost directly preceding that is a scene where Hikaru ties himself to the ship holds his breath and then dives off it to catch a giant tuna that happened to be floating through space. That scene by itself is fucking nonsense but when contrasted with the other its just surreal. This weird juggling of the tone continues throughout the whole show and while I actually found a lot of the dumb weird shit to be legitimately funny it can be pretty jarring at times bouncing back and forth. It definitely doesnt help when the animation quality tanks and makes what are supposed to be serious scenes just come off as goofy and ridiculous. Which brings me to my next point: Unfortunately SDF Macross never quite manages to escape its troubled production. Animation quality dipping is frequent. Frequent and severe. Haruhiko Mikimotos designs and overall style are among my favourites and to see them not given justice is a crying shame. This show is also the birthplace of the amazing Itano Circushttps://sakugabooru.com/post?tags=itanocircus and there are a lot of scenes that do actually look really good. Despite that most are average at best and some are downright awful. On top of offmodel faces cels not being aligned correctly to backgrounds and other such problems theres one scene in particular that lacks any inbetween frames at all and as such plays like a slideshow. It can get pretty egregious at times but thankfully I think the rest of the show carries enough weight to support this weak link. https://fat.gfycat.com/OblongImaginativeArcherfish. Knife Fight bad Another production quirk is the addition of 9 episodes on the end of the series. Originally planned for 27 episodes the positive response to Macross airing resulted in the shows sponsor stretching runtime to 36 in the middle of production. The show has a very clear ending point with a strong climax and definitive romantic conclusion so in order to make up those last 9 episodes they present a sort of epilogue that focuses on postwar rebuilding efforts. That in itself I thought was actually pretty neat as the aftermath isnt often seen in this sort of show but to extend the love triangle some characters have to go through some developmental regressions and it completely undercuts the impact of episode 27s resolution. I will say though that one character in particular gets a nice bit of development at the very end that helped redeem them in my eyes. 1000http://i.ur.com/ows15so.jpg Macross is weird. For every tragic loss theres a space tuna. For every minute Hikaru spends shooting down mooks he spends another angsting over his teenage love. I didnt even mention that the damn ship transforms into a giant robot. Or the Daedalus Attackhttps://www..com/watch?v=GT6Og9fOFCE. Man Macross is dumb as hell. Its great. P.S Maybe to make up for the series shortcomings a movie adaptation called Do You Remember Love?https://anilist.co/anime/1089 was made from the ground up and released in 1984. To this day its one of the prettiest anime movies Ive ever seen. Some designs and aspects of the story were altered so its not quite the same experience but regardless I cannot recommend it enough to anyone that likes anime.