Robotech: Love Live Alive

The international cover, because I like it better.

Spoiler Level: Atomic  NEUTRON-S!


Okay, time for me to dust off the old blog. I finally found something that made me want to spout off an opinion. And that thing is-- what else? -- ROBOTECH! Specifically, the new release Robotech: Love Live Alive.


The Good:

* First off, let's give kudos to Harmony Gold for successfully completing and releasing a new Robotech project. And no, I don't mean that in a snarky, ironic way; I am genuinely grateful when new Robotech material is completed and released, and the canonical Robotech universe is made a little bit bigger.

* The new animation. The majority of it is absolutely beautiful. We get to see so many of those classic still frames from the beginning of "The Invid Invasion" brought to life! We get to see the Invid destroying the three mountains that contained the remains of the SDF-1!!! Talk about beautifully tying Southern Cross and Mospeada together... wow, just wow. And we get to see Dana, watching the Invid invasion happen, and climbing aboard a ship and leaving Earth. (That few seconds of animation is very crucial, my fellow Robotech fans... it establishes officially that Dana did not leave Earth before the Invid arrived as was commonly cited in other media, but that she was there for it. And the implication is that she may have been part off the Southern Cross that "weary from the constant battles with the Robotech Masters, was no match for the battle hungry Invid." The implication we're left with is that Dana was in fact killed in those opening still frames from "The Invid Invasion," and we just never knew it. Of course, we're still not shown that, so the possibility that she survived the battle and headed for Tirol is still there. But I digress.) And we get to see Lancer, now officially identifying himself as Lt. Lance Belmont of Yellow Squadron, trying to join up with Jonathan Wolff and Point K in an earlier attempt at reclaiming Earth and meeting with the same fate as Scott Bernard. Great stuff.

The new animation of Sera and Lancer at the end is, admittedly, pretty weak. I honestly do appreciate the effort to mimic the original 80's style so it would look consistent when intercut with the original Japanese Mospeada: Love Love Alive animation, but the result is more reminiscent of the times when Sandy Frank Productions tried to have Mark and Princess interact with 7-Zark-7 on Battle of the Planets. But you know what? I DON'T CARE!! Because it gives Lancer and Sera the absolutely best post-finale ending they've gotten in any media since 1985. It's wonderful, it made me smile, and it made me forgive that the animation didn't really work.

* The return of the classic voice actors! And everyone is there, even the classic announcer! The homages in the dialogue to "Booby Trap" also seriously warmed my heart. Oh sure, everyone sounds older, but that's okay.

* The new musical score.  Now I mean absolutely no disrespect to Scott Glasgow when I say this, but this was more like it. The score he wrote for The Shadow Chronicles is very beautiful music, but the themes he created reminded me more of Stargate than Robotech. This time he stuck to the original Robotech compositions, but rearranged and reorchestrated them into an absolutely beautiful opening medley of the Robotech theme and the Flower of Life theme. It evoked the classic Robotech feelings while exciting me for something new. I hope it gets released on a soundtrack someday.

* The "next episode" promos for both Robotech: Love, Live Alive and Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles using the original announcer. Priceless.

Dana watches the Invid destroy the SDF-1 burial mounds.

The Bad:

* It's a 90-minute clip show.  Okay, I was always a staunch defender that Robotech is something new and not beholden to its original Japanese source materials. But good gods, what a horribly wasted opportunity. Mospeada: Love Live Alive was a farewell love letter for the Mospeada fans, a Yellow Belmont concert featuring new songs, classic songs, and new renditions of classic songs, all done up as music videos using footage from the original Mospeada TV series, with about 6 minutes of new animation used as a framework.

Now of course you can't just drop the Robotech Yellow Dancer songs on top of the Mospeada Yellow Belmont music videos, but this would have been a great opportunity to create new music videos to the Robotech songs that tied all three generations together.

But no, instead Robotech: Love Live Alive is a freakin' meatloaf episode.

And it's not even that they wrote dialogue to go with the original Mospeada clips used in the music videos; no, those original clips are completely excised in favor of simply showing us truncated versions of the episodes "Lonely Soldier Boy," "Eulogy," "Enter Marlene," "Ghost Town," "Frost Bite," "Reflex Point," "Dark Finale," and "Symphony of Light," with a few origin sequences from "The Secret Route" and "Metamorphosis" thrown in.  And there isn't even any connecting dialogue for most of it, it just fades out from one episode clip and into another episode clip.

Robotech: Love Live Alive restructures Mospeada: Love Live Alive so that the opening Yellow Belmont concert is now instead a climactic Yellow Dancer concert at the end of the show. The interview sequence in the middle of M:LLA now forms the frame work for R:LLA, with Lancer telling his life story (and thus explaining the clips) to the interviewer. And that's fine; in fact, in many ways I feel they were very creative with the way they mixed everything around and integrated some new animation for the interviewer.

But the end result is we get a wonderful new 9-minute opening sequence and an enjoyable new 8-minute closing sequence sandwiching 70 minutes of boredom. And that's a lot of time to be bored. Oh, sure, I suppose if you haven't watched Robotech since 1985 it's a nice nostalgia trip, but for those of us who have... a lot... it's dull. ("Definitely cute, but dull.")

* No new Michael Bradley music. Again, such a wasted opportunity. Michael Bradley's already recorded new versions of his Yellow Dancer songs on his wonderful albums Lonely Soldier Boy and Lonely Soldier Boy II (available at www.michaelbradleymusic.com), and using some of those instead of the standard Harmony Gold Music versions would have mirrored the Mospeada version nicely. But they didn't do that.

I have no idea why, I haven't heard anyone comment on it one way or another. I assume because if they wanted to use Michael Bradley's new versions, they would have had to pay him, while they can use the versions already owned for free. I doubt there's anything malicious about it; it's just less expensive to do it that way.

But it's also a lost opportunity that creates more lost opportunities. Remember how I mentioned the new renditions Scott Glasgow did of the background music? Well, that's less than 9 minutes worth of new music, but if you had some new Yellow Dancer songs too... well, they could have put out a whole Robotech: Love Live Alive soundtrack album.

(And I have to mention this-- Michael Bradley is also lead singer for a Police/Sting cover band called Ghost in the Machine, and they've done a version of "Synchronicity II." Now, as any self-respecting Southern Cross fan knows, there was a piece of frequently used background music in the original Japanese Southern Cross that was a direct rip-off of "Synchronicity II." So they had a chance to do a Robotech Masters music video to Synchronicity II as sung by Yellow Dancer! Yeah, yeah, it now means paying Michael Bradley AND Sting instead of using all your own music for free, but... man, that would have been cool.)

* No Macross clips. Part of what makes projects like this special is the opportunity to tie all three generations of Robotech together. But just like how the new version of The Sentinels removed every frame of Macross, there's not a frame of it here either. Granted, they wouldn't fit in as smoothly as the Southern Cross clips due to the time frame, but an image of Admiral Hunter from either Sentinels or Shadow Chronicles during one of the times Lancer referred to him in the interview would have been nice, and would have represented the Macross Saga generation without getting into any sticky legal issues of likeness rights.

In the interest of full disclosure, for the last two complaints I'm being the kind of fanboy I find annoying. Because around 1997 when the first full length Robotech soundtrack came out, I started making my own version of Love Live Alive. (But I think I called it Robotech: We Will Win 2045, or something like that.) And with the release of Michael Bradley's new albums, my vision for it only got more grand. (The only thing that I felt I still needed was Michael Bradley making a cover of "Land of Confusion" by Genesis!) So I am totally suffering from a case of "That's not how I would have done it!"

But that still doesn't forgive 70 minutes of clip show.


The Ugly:

* The 2-Movie Collection. I wanted to have Robotech: Love Live Alive on my DVD shelf. Instead to even get a copy of Love Live Alive, I had to rebuy The Shadow Chronicles. Again. Which means I don't even get the nice Lancer cover art that was made for it. Or have a Love Live Alive logo all nice and prominent on my Robotech shelf. I was willing to let it slide that I had to rebuy something I already owned just to get something new because the price point was the same as I would have willingly paid for Love Live Alive by itself, but I wasn't pleased about it. Especially since...

* The Love Live Alive disc is a bare-bones DVD. It has a small art gallery (which granted, is nice because the M:LLA art book is impossible to find) and the previously mentioned "next-episode" promo, but that's it. Which could also be forgivable if it wasn't for the fact that...

* Mospeada: Love Live Alive subtitled and all the bonus features for Robotech: Love Live Alive will only be available in the new Robotech: The Complete Set DVD Box set. For $89.98. So, instead of giving me a full DVD with both the Robotech version and the subtitled Mospeada version-- something I've been wanting since the 80's-- they make me rebuy The Shadow Chronicles and then tell me I'll have to rebuy everything, again, if I want the stuff that should have been on this release in the first place.

Um.... no.

You know, I'm not a Harmony Gold hater. But you know what? I don't like being treated this way either. Harmony Gold-- fuck you. I'm breaking up with you.


The Final Verdict:

While containing some wonderful moments, it runs too long, rehashes too much, and is the victim of some horrendous business practices. It's worth getting if you can get it cheap, but only if you're a big fan who will get the same big thrill out of those first 9 minutes that I did.

Maybe I'll go back to making my own adaptation again.

Robotech Ratios [UPDATED]

The new Robotech Complete Series box set is out, and I have three questions before I commit to buying all of Robotech again. I'm posting this because my friend and fellow Robotech fanatic Lisa has offered to help answer them for me!

For those who don't know, Robotech was remastered several years ago. On the plus side, this remastering corrected a problem the video releases has always had: the image ratio was finally fixed. More on this later. On the negative side, they changed all the sound effects, and changed the opening titles. Instead of having one title sequence for all 85 episodes mixing all the generations together, they gave them three separate title sequences focusing only on one generation. I didn't like that; I like the way that showing all three generations made it feel like one big story. I liked the change in sound effects even less. This version was then collected in one giant box set called the Protoculture Edition, which has become a kind of shorthand for referring to this version.

Now the impression I was getting from the convention appearances of the Robotech staff this year is that with this new edition, they were able to recover the original, separated audio tracks, and so were able to restore it the sound to the original versions yet still keep enhance it for 5.1. However the sticker on the box in this picture posted by Harmony Gold from NYCC says it's the Remastered Extended Edition. So do they mean it's been remastered for this edition (as they made it sound at the cons), or is it the same as the previously released Protoculture Edition?

So, here's my questions (and anyone can feel free to chime in and answer):
UPDATED: Lisa's gotten back to me with the answers, so I'm sharing them here in case anyone else cares.



(1) Does it have the original, multi-generational opening and closing title sequences?


Original titles


Remastered Titles
VERDICT: No. This edition has the Remastered, single-generation openings and closings.


(2) Does it have the original sound effects?
Here's a brief comparison from Episode 2, "Countdown"

VERDICT: No. This edition has the Remastered sound effects.

(3) Is the image in the correct ratio?
This is a tough one to explain. Some time after 1985 but before the Remastered Extended Edition, the show was tweaked. Some of the background music was altered for different scenes. However, something went wrong on the video side. The image was now zoomed in too close. It's still 4x3 (or 1.33:1), like a regular television image; it's just that the image has now been blown up, and parts are no longer able to be seen. I've put together a few examples below. Click on them to make 'em bigger.

 

VERDICT: Yes. This edition has the correct ratios (just like the Remastered Edition)

So all in all, this is the same as the Protoculture edition. It may be a Re-Remastered Protoculture Edition with some of the music restored to what it originally was in 1985, but it still has the same good points of having the correct ratio and added footage, and the same bad points of the changed sounds and openings. But on the plus side, that volume of bonus features sounds SWEET.

Thanks to Lisa for doing all the detective work to try to appease this cranky old fanboy!!

Robotech - "To the Stars Special Edition" fanvid by Jaeson Koszarsky

The SDF-1 & SDF-2, together at last.  Composite by Jaeson Koszarsky.

Spoiler Level: High

Reba West, the voice actress for Minmei in Robotech, posted this little gem on her blog this week.  It's a fan-edit of the final episode of the first generation (aka The Macross Saga) which, if you're a Robotech fan, you know is a bit of a mess.  The dialogue refers to the new SDF-2 a lot.  The only problem is, there was no SDF-2 in the original footage.  So the finished product just left a lot of fans confused.  I explained events to a friend of mine like this:  Khyron sees the SDF-2, mistakes it for the SDF-1 and fires upon it, it's destroyed, then we cut to Lisa running through the halls of the SDF-1.  I honestly think that's what Harmony Gold and Carl Macek (or whoever wrote the actual script for that episode) intended.  But you really have to stretch your imagination for the scene to work.

Well, thank heavens for Jaeson Koszarsky.  Using modern composite technology, Jason has actually put the SDF-2 in to the footage.  Now it really, honestly works.  If I worked at Harmony Gold, I'd see what mountains I needed to move to make this the official version on all future Robotech releases.  (But knowing HG, they'll probably pull it from the web.)

The episode is posted below.  Jason Koszarsky has posted it as an entire episode, and I definitely recommend watching it that way, but the key moments are at 8:21 and then from 15:22 onward.  Great work, Jaeson!


Lisa launches SDF2 from jaesonk on Vimeo.

Carl Macek, 1951 - 2010

Carl Macek 1951 - 2010

It's no exaggeration to say that this man changed my life.

In late March of 1985, Joy and I had just broken up... again. V and Otherworld, the only science fiction shows on television, had just been canceled. I got in a fist fight after school, which needless to say I lost, and in a fit of rage and despair I came home and ripped all my posters off my walls, and spent quite the next few days curled up on my bed ignoring the world.

So after a week or two of this I saw an ad for a new cartoon series called Robotech, boasting "a story to rival Star Wars." Yeah, we'll see about that, I groused, and watched it out of curiosity. It had an interesting start, and I was surprised that there were no parachutes when the jet fighters blew up. I was even more surprised when it ended on a cliffhanger.

So I came back the next day... and that one ended on a cliffhanger too.

Day by day, week by week, I had to find out what happened next. And just like Scheherazade and her 1001 Arabian Nights, it kept me alive and looking forward to the next day. No matter how bad things got, I still had that half hour every day.

Robotech was a cut above any other cartoon on the air. In a time of sanitized, heavy-handed, interchangeable stories, Robotech dared to buck the system and present its story as a multi-generational serial of the Earth at war, showing both the excitement of space combat and the gritty reality of the loss and tragedy that comes with it. Lead characters were killed, there were honorable military leaders you respected and dishonorable ones you despised, and 70% of the entire population of the Earth was wiped out on camera. It had characters that grew and changed, and you felt like they were real people. Oh, and it also had a cross-dressing rock star.

Robotech pulled me out of that depression. The first thing I hung on my bare walls was this picture of the SDF-1 that I found in a Starlog magazine:


So I tried to learn all I could about this show, and the man who was at the forefront of it all was Carl Macek.

Carl Macek ran a comic shop in California. He was a fan of animation and knew the kind of storytelling that anime had going for it. But until that point, any attempts to bring anime into the US always met with it being toned down. The continuity was removed to make the episodes interchangeable, deaths of characters, minor and major, were removed. (Star Blazers gets kudos for being the first to keep the serialized storytelling intact, but they still removed most if not all of the character deaths.) And so when Harmony Gold got the rights to the Japanese anime Macross, Carl Macek became the one to try to bring this show to America with its heart and soul intact.

There were concessions that had to be made. The show had to be 65 episodes long to meet syndication requirements, so it was combined with two other unconnected shows. But even this was done by tweaking the shows to keep the serial format going and to make it a mulit-generational epic. The name had to be changed to "Robotech" because they were being funded by Revell, a model kit company who had bought the rights to many of the Macross model kits, and that was the brand name they were selling them under. And the character names had to be Americanized because people just didn't have faith that audiences could handle names like Hikaru Ichijo and Stick Bernard. If anyone else had been in charge of this project, it could have been another Force Five, but Carl Macek pushed to keep what made these shows special alive.

I got to meet Carl Macek at the Creation Robotech Convention in Valley Forge PA, October 18, 1986. He was very forthcoming about the way the American animation and television industries worked, and how tough it was for a show like Robotech to compete with the big boys that were on the air at the time like He-Man and ThunderCats. He talked about how he had to fight with the model company to have Stick become Scott, when they really wanted him to be named Spike. But he also talked about how rewarding it was to see that there were people who appreciated it, and how "the best was yet to come."
How right he was.



I saw him twice more after that, at Robocon 10 in California and another Creation con where he debuted the Sentinels video. He was so patient with me. After I got his autograph and he was leaving, I followed him just pelting him with more and more questions, and he patiently and politely answered them all while we walked.

He went on to co-found Streamline Pictures, which was dedicated to translating anime movies into English so they could reach a wider audience. I remember making trips to the Roxy Screening Room in Philadelphia with my friends to see Akira, Laputa: Castle in the Sky, and my favorite of all, Lensman.


Because of Carl Macek making Robotech, I made some long-lasting friendships. I met A.J. at a con in a video screening room showing "Codename: Robotech," and he was a huge part of my life during my late teens and early twenties, and we're still friends to this day. I met Derek on the AOL Robotech message boards, and he's practically family-- in addition to he and I being friends and just enjoying hanging out whenever we can, he married my wife's best friend, and taught my daughter how to build and shoot fireworks.

Because of Carl Macek making Robotech, Joy and I got into anime so much we started our own business, Joy's Japanimation, which provided my livelihood for nearly ten years and took me all over the country. It's still there to this day, being run by our friend Steve-- a friend we made because of Joy's Japanimation, just like Danielle, Amy & Craig.

Because of Carl Macek making Robotech, my daughter is named Mylene. When Joy was pregnant we were close to naming her Miriya, until Joy suggested we name her Mylene instead, who was Miriya's daughter from the Japanese sequel Macross 7. I loved the idea, and our daughter became Mylene Elissa Goodnough.

Because of Carl Macek making Robotech, I was able to look at the character of Lancer / Yellow Dancer and say to myself, you know what, maybe it's not so terrible that I can't be as butch as all the other guys. Lancer's still tough when he needs to be, and he's totally at peace with his feminine half. It helped me accept myself for who I am.

When I entered college, I had to write a letter saying what my goals were. I had no idea what my goals were (still don't, for that matter), but I was hoping for a career in film production. So in writing the letter, I decided that I didn't want to be like Stephen Spielberg-- I wanted to be like Carl Macek. Someone who may not have the fame and fortune but has created something worthwhile that really touches people. And when I look back on my life now, and I think of the store and the friends I made because of it and my daughter... I think maybe I have.

Carl Macek changed my life.

Lonely Soldier Boy II: An Acoustic Album - by Michael Bradley

Being a Robotech fan, I was always jealous of the Japanese anime music industry. If you had a hot show, you got soundtracks, remake albums, image albums, live albums, drama albums... being a Macross 7 fan, I loved that Fire Bomber released Live Fire!! and Acoustic Fire!! and always wished that my favorite anime singer of all time, Yellow Dancer, would get the same treatment.

Well, thank the stars for Michael Bradley, the singing voice of Yellow Dancer. When he discovered that he had a following because of his work on Robotech-- especially among soldiers and their families for the song "Lonely Soldier Boy" -- he started playing the songs at conventions and set to work on a remake album, redoing the Yellow Dancer songs in a more modern-day style. He wanted to put Yellow Dancer on the cover and have it be an official Robotech album, but Harmony Gold's legal department wanted such a huge cut of the album sales that it would have been unprofitable for him. As a result, the album was released simply as Lonely Soldier Boy. It came out early this year, and has been one of my favorite albums of 2008.

When Michael Bradley then announced he was going to follow it up with an all-acoustic album, I was all smiles. At long last, Yellow Dancer was getting the treatment I always thought he deserved. (Err, she deserved. S/he. ...Never mind.)

What I didn't expect was Lonely Soldier Boy II: An Acoustic Album to be what is possibly the best Robotech music album, ever. These arrangements are just breathtaking. In addition to the five songs he did as Yellow Dancer, Michael Bradley has also included acoustic versions of the other songs he worked on for Robotech and Robotech: The Movie. Many of these tracks just leave me speechless. I got that little tingle down my spine that I used to get when I was 16 and these songs were all new.

You can hear samples from both albums (and of course order your own copies) at michaelbradleymusic.com.

Macross Frontier - episode 15: "Lost Peace"

First and foremost, I need to give a great big hearty THANK YOU to Mike for hooking me up with with the rest of the series and the proper codecs to make them work. Thanks, Mike. You rock.

Ahhh, it's good to get to see Macross F again. I've missed this show. And this was the perfect episode to come back to-- half clip show, but the recap is all from the newly revealed "bad guys" perspective, so it was a good refresher for my memory and yet still works as an important episode giving you new information.

The scene with Sheryl and Ranka both serenading Alto at once was absolutely priceless. This is probably the best Macross love triangle yet, since all three are friends with one another.