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No, Macross was not the beginning. The original television series Robotech debuted
in the United States in 1985, predating the immensely popular Sailor Moon, and becoming for many
Americans their first exposure to Anime.
 At the time, even the word anime
was not well known east of the pacific, and for many of us, this was something entirely new. For one
thing, it was a coherent story lasting for a whole season's worth of episodes. For another —
and this was almost shocking for some of us — leading characters got killed. That sort of thing
just never happened in the universes of Daffy Duck or Yogi Bear, and it added an acute
and sometimes bitter realism to the experience. It was like a soap opera for techies.
 The series dawns when a behemoth of an alien
spaceship crashes on Earth. Over the next 10 years, human scientists and engineers not only rebuild
it, but learn the mecha technology that allow them to build the most extraordinary shape-shifter
fighter craft ever known. Unfortunately, it also plummets then into a life-and-death interplanetary
war.
 Robotech is about as epic as they come.
It spans three generations and a good chunk of the known universe, that being made possible by the
inscrutable space-folding abilities of the SDF-1, Earth's rebuilt alien spacecraft. Over the episodes
we meet hundreds of characters, including the Robotech Masters themselves. Earth is defended, and
later conquered. And pervading it all is the incredible robotechnology that is the cornerstone of
both plot and premise. In fact — though it would take a better anime historian to tell for
sure — Robotech may have been the advent of the giant robots and transforming war machines
that mark so much of the high-tech anime to follow.
Robotech is more than good anime; it is anime history. For more information go the
official Robotech Web site. | 
