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[Andres]

Can someone explain Yachiru to me?

[Reelya]

Counterpoint: our intro (with extracted footage from one of the pachinko machines I think) is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much better than the original intro.

IDK, I think the Robotech theme is like a cheesy Star Wars / 1979's Superman Movie ripoff, whereas the original is more poignant. The theme tunes play into the completely different way the adaptations were framed. Robotech is the airhead series about killing aliens, Macross is a poignant story exploring the tragedy of war. Take a look at the look in Hikaru's eyes as the opening bars of the Macross theme plays - it's tense: he's going up in a fighter plane to kill real people and possibly be killed himself. It's about fighter pilots not knowing whether this sortie will be your last. The Robotech theme doesn't capture any of that - it's basically jingoistic WWII victory music. This difference in framing carries through into the songs playing over the final battle. This change also shows up how the meaning of the term "protoculture" was changed in Robotech. In Macross, it's the ancestors of both the humans and the Zentraedi, highlighting out their commonality, whereas in Robotech, it's alien mutagenic super-robot fuel, which highlights the "alienesque" qualities of the invaders.

[Frumple]

... robotech actually has a fair amount of depth. It's just found more in the novels than the TV stuff, though the latter's not really lacking it, exactly, it's just more... disjointed, I suppose. Robotech's overall theme is pretty close to the one you ascribed to macross, too, tbh. Conflict ending up worse than cooperation is slathered all across the series.

[Reelya]

But I really think that those things were a result of the bits they didn't change. Anything they did change, watered down that theme.

Spoiler: Macross vs Robotech: differing fates for assimilated alien races (click to show/hide)

One thing people point out as a probably unintended consequence of shoe-horning the different series together, is that it's implied they basically genocided/assimilated the Zentraedi because they're never seen again as a distinct culture after the two sides end the war. The entire zentraedi culture was basically exterminated and forced to serve under humans. Humans who had, overall, much less advanced technology and knowledge of space warfare.

Whereas in Macross, the Zentraedi fleet commander Breetai Kridanik was made the combined UN High Commander after the war according to official continuity. Robotech fans on one forum were quite aghast on hearing this: "An alien leading human troops? Preposterous". But thinking logically, who else but Breetai would have been more qualified to lead an interstellar space navy? Certainly nobody on the human side. Robotech supplants that worldview with the "humans kick alien butt then force them to be like us" plot development.

[Neonivek]

But I really think that those things were a result of the bits they didn't change. Anything they did change, watered down that theme.

Yes but they did add something Macross didn't which is making the show sort of generational.

You do get the same sense of loss from Robotech if only because you can see how things change between.

Part of me wants the show to be remade for realsies... Just so the season changes are more legit (lets just say.... Protoculture)

[Reelya]

They should just reboot it as a live action series, and basically ignore the existing continuity.

There are too many things that don't make sense when you watch it again from start to finish. e.g the giants in season 1 are astounded that little people even exist (on Earth), don't know about kissing, and are amazed by the existence of music. They act astounded and shout "protoculture" (= "super robot fuel" according to Robotech) any time they see things like this. This even confused me as a 12-year old: why the aliens were so dumb as to think kissing meant you had stolen their robot fuel, when the owners of the robot fuel didn't even know about kissing.

Yet the adaptors tried to link that into season 2: Southern Cross, which was an unrelated series about human-sized aliens who know about kissing and use music as a weapon. And the giants from season 1 constantly refer to the human-sized and music-loving Robotech Masters from season 2 as being their masters: totally despite being incredulous about human-sized beings, and never having heard music before in season 1. It both infantilizes the Zentraedi while also causing virtually every sci-fi element of season 1 to no longer make any sense. It's a mess basically.

This is my main gripe with the series: adding the rest in the fashion that they did, completely wrecks the plot in Macross. Go watch Macross on it's own and Mospeada on it's own. Same material, less bullshit.

[Zangi]

Can someone explain Yachiru to me?

Bleach? 
Basically Kenpachi's Bankai sword person, but in material form. 

Why or how?  Errr...  *shrug*, monstrously strong neanderthal = materialization  (And probably some sort of emotional theme about loneliness, but its cool, Kenpachi has friends now.  So Yachiru is back to being a boring sword person thing.)

[Neonivek]

They should just reboot it as a live action series, and basically ignore the existing continuity.

And who is going to play the crossdresser?

[Reelya]

Justin Bieber.

Another reason to watch the original (three) series and not the bastardized Frankenstein version is that you'd miss out on the Mospeada opening:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqy55RqyTyo

[Neonivek]

Justin Bieber.

But he can't sing

[Reelya]

Neither could the voice actor in Robotech. BTW, in Mospeada they used a male VA for speaking and a female VA for singing.

Robotech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvXTC7LeIMI

Same character, Mospeada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w85WBFpmkpc

Basically the people in Robotech would have had to be deaf to not realize that was a dude (compared to Mospeada). Same thing as the people in Robotech would have had to be deaf from decompression in space to actually like Minmay's singing.

[Frumple]

But I really think that those things were a result of the bits they didn't change. Anything they did change, watered down that theme.

Spoiler: Macross vs Robotech: differing fates for assimilated alien races (click to show/hide)

One thing people point out as a probably unintended consequence of shoe-horning the different series together, is that it's implied they basically genocided/assimilated the Zentraedi because they're never seen again as a distinct culture after the two sides end the war. The entire zentraedi culture was basically exterminated and forced to serve under humans. Humans who had, overall, much less advanced technology and knowledge of space warfare.

Whereas in Macross, the Zentraedi fleet commander Breetai Kridanik was made the combined UN High Commander after the war according to official continuity. Robotech fans on one forum were quite aghast on hearing this: "An alien leading human troops? Preposterous". But thinking logically, who else but Breetai would have been more qualified to lead an interstellar space navy? Certainly nobody on the human side. Robotech supplants that worldview with the "humans kick alien butt then force them to be like us" plot development.

... yeah, this is where I'm finding it kinda' questionable you've actually done much robotech. Forget exactly when, but breetai ends up one of the major military commanders there, as well. Can't quite recall how major, though... it's definitely been a while since I last read through the books.

Though yeah, there's not much zentradi culture. That's because they basically didn't have one to begin with -- that's actually the entire bloody reason they didn't straight wipe the floor with humanity. Even the SDF's ultimate effectiveness hinged on that. And with wozzname's post war go, much of what was left of their hardliners got wiped (along with another chunk of the earth's already mostly gone population). Zentradi expertise and whatnot definitely gets tapped from one end of the post-initial war material to the other, though, and particularly once the hybrids and the relationships that formed them started showing up. The importance and crap of non-humans expands massively over the later material, too, especially in the novels with the later SDFs that start hopping around.

Robotech and macross are... very different, but robotech, particularly once it starts being able to work outside of kludging together macoss's material, does a legitimately pretty good job of coming into its own.

[Reelya]

Jack Kirby's books were retconned to not actually be very official I believe. He probably took a lot more from the wider Macross franchise than the TV guys ever did.

Well, sounds like they've retconned that the Zentraedi sort of faded away, but it really is just to justify how they magically vanish after episode 36. Even a warlike militaristic culture is plenty of "culture" even if they don't know about singing, swimsuit competitions and soda. So I find the idea that they just blended into nothingness because they "lacked culture" to be more of an apologist thing for the cracks in the series than anything else. After all, they did have huge fleets of very distinctive spacecraft, thousands of years worth of tradition and technology. Where did that all go? We're supposed to believe that tech that humans cobbled together in a decade from one single crashed alien ship out-competed every single alien-designed war machine from a 500,000 year old spacefaring race, basically overnight. After all, the series makes the point more than once that humans know literally jack shit about space warfare, yet our earth-based designs cobbled together overnight just happen to trump literally every device created by a race that had been fighting space wars for 500 millennia.

[Neonivek]

Neither could the voice actor in Robotech. BTW, in Mospeada they used a male VA for speaking and a female VA for singing.

No one does sing dubbing anymore... I have no idea why (there are certainly movies that desperately could have used it...)

[Reelya]

Neither could the voice actor in Robotech. BTW, in Mospeada they used a male VA for speaking and a female VA for singing.

No one does sing dubbing anymore... I have no idea why (there are certainly movies that desperately could have used it...)

It costs more to localize the music and how many people will shell out extra money coz you did that? Not enough to cover production costs on a song. Also the music is normally licensed separately to the anime. The anime producers have broadcast rights to the audio track, which they can confer to a licensee, but that doesn't give the right to adapt or change the music or publish the lyrics, which is the reason so many official subs lack song lyrics. That's the reason so many animes have a splash screen with King Records or similar at the start. Those are the rights-holders of the music, and if you wanted to adapt it, you'd basically have to talk to King Records, to get the master tapes of the music so that you could dub your own version.

Notably, Russia commonly adapts the songs. But they seem to literally use that. one. singer. in every single series. I'm guessing it's all localized by this one company which that girl works for, and they get a cheap deal on the backing tapes, because a Russian version isn't a big threat to the original version in terms of sales, compared to English.