A Geek History of Time - Episode 253 - Robotech's Anime-ted Past Part II

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

Music See people when they click on this they'll see the title so they'll be like poor Ed. What does that even fucking mean? However because it's England that's largely ignored and unstudied. He had a goddamned ancestral home and a noble title until Germany became a republic. You know, none of this highfalutin, you know, critical role stuff. So they chewed through my favorite shit. No, I'm not helping them. I'm gonna say that you're getting into another kind of, you know, Mediterranean or psyche

archetype kind of thing. Makes sense. Also trade winds are a thing. Ha ha, just serious. Like, no, he really has a mad on it. We'll go upon a tangent as we keep doing. Like, yeah, this is how we fill time. This is a geek history of time where we connect Nurgury to the real world. My name is Ed Blalock.

I'm a world history and English teacher here in northern California. And I don't know if you can hear it on the other end of the microphone or not, but I am I upper respiratory up in my sinus's illness that stole my sense of smell for not quite two whole weeks. And I tested negative for COVID like half a dozen times. But yeah, my sense of smell went away on a Tuesday morning during my prep period. I noticed it as it was happening because I was actually eating my breakfast

as it just went poof. And last night was the the first night that it mostly my sense of smell and taste almost completely came back and I have never been so happy in my life to have orange chicken as I was last night. Like like a would something fell into place or something like fell away. And it was a transcendental experience having it come back. So yeah, that's where I am. My morale is a whole lot better now. And I apologize to our audience for any sniffling you may have heard in our last episode and probably will hear hear hear hear good how about you well i'm damien harmony i'm a us history teacher at the high school level

up here in northern california uh and i finally figured out how to properly print out miniatures and terrain via my 3d printer So a couple years back hell yeah a couple years back my kids and uncle bought them a 3d printer for kids kind of thing and Okay, like how can we repurpose that a bit to do stuff that we all want to do and It's kind of sat fallow producer George came and helped me out quite a bit and didn't know he could. He and his child, they do a lot of resin printing and things like that, which is pretty amazing.

And then my co-star and the host and referee of Capital Punishment, he came over because he was, he prints like just for funsies all the time. He said, hey, I got some ideas for this thing. Can we try it? Absolutely. And we spent a large chunk of yesterday just going over the printer and and trying it and then trying it again. and you can kind of see this like progression of the evolution of us being able to do it Yeah, it was pretty cool. So All right, I tested it out and printed a sci-fi wall that I found a file for somewhere and it worked really really well

So I'm very happy to to be able to do that. That's awesome. So is it a is it a like a plastic spool pretty well like okay filament. That's where it's like for Very cool. Yeah, so I'm very happy about that showed that to my kids today. They were happy awesome. Yeah Anyway, when last we talked There were big duins going on economically in Japan. Yes. And it was bleeding its way into the toy market, or rather, there were huge

reactions against Japanese economic success on this side of the Pacific by people who had forgotten that World War Two basically made it so the rest of the world was 20 years behind us. And then in the 30 years, they some of them started catching up. And yeah. And and it was it was very scary to a number of people. Interestingly, they didn't they didn't raise the same alarm bells when Germany started catching up or when the UK started catching up.

But for some reason, the Japanese miracle was especially frightening. And I don't know. Yeah. And I mean, there's there's the obvious explanation. I kind of wonder if the repidity of it might have. Well, I don't know, repitity. Germany also had a pretty fast.

I was going to say. Yeah. Germany's success is a thumb in the eye of the Soviet Union. And you literally have a city broken in half and you literally have a country broken in half over that ideology. That's a good point. Yeah. So I could see. All right, yeah, that makes sense.

I could see Western Germany's success being our success. England's success kind of being our success because those are both NATO countries now that being said You also didn't have 60 70 years of just entrenched anti English and anti German sentiment writing through our laws and and Yeah, California and especially sensibilities, but yeah, particularly most of America's sensibilities regarding Asian immigrants and then Japanese immigrants more specifically in California.

Yeah. So and we've talked before, we took, you know, briefly kind of talked in the last episode, but we talked in more detail in the Battle Tech episodes about the kind of cultural fascination that also happened at the same time. There was the Shogun miniseries in 79 or 80, which was a huge big deal. Interestingly, Netflix is going to be doing a remake of that as a limited series next year in 2024. And a part of me kind of wonders, you know, hmm, I wonder why they've chosen that like we do here. You know, why why are we seeing that again now? Um, but it was it was a huge cultural moment, you know,

mini series in in 80. Um, there was and I believe on Netflix, there was a samurai TV series that went up in the last two, three years. Yeah. So it could just be a, oh, that succeeded. Let's bring back something that we already have access to or. Yeah. And I think I cheaply, but that doesn't mean that's the only thing. Like, why is there a samurai movie?

Well, and I think that might be in response to the Viking TV series is that are going on so There could be a few things at play. Yeah, as well as the fact that abe is Dead was assassinated If I recall correctly by the the What are those people I don't want to say the basically the followers of some young moon

Oh Church yeah unification church wasn't that tied to was it was a unification church or was it Umstun Rickio Because there's there's a different cult that's Japanese The folks that did the rice and attack in the subways. I'd have to look it up. But yeah, he, yeah. So yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of different things. I could say something about the fact that here in our pop culture, Japanese animation, anime and manga have become a mainstream thing. Like you can go into Barnes & Noble and they have like five shelves dedicated to manga. And so seeing live action, you know, Japanese cultural drama, I mean,

admittedly, it's based on a novel by a Western author, but it's a Japanese subject matter. Just kind of seems like they might be doing the math and going, you know what, this is a property we could potentially make money off of safely, you know, based on that. So who knows? I mean, it could be any number of things kind of going on that. So who knows? I mean, it could be any number of things kind of going on there. But back in the late 1970s, early 1980s, Japanese culture was exotic. Japanese culture, like they perceived as being a rising force. And so there was this fascination. And so as I mentioned, kind of to, you know, briefly recap the last episode, we see, you know, basic cable stations

dipping into Japanese animation series as a way to fill time. And then that, you know, they realized that they get viewers by doing that. And so that opens the road up for more of the same. And so when I left off, based on this kind of fascination, Hasbro executives visited the Tokyo Toy Fair in 1983, or Tokyo Toy Show, saw the Diaclone and Microchange toy lines from Takara Tomi, and they said, okay, we're going to market this new toy line. They did what they had already had success doing with the G.I. Joe toy line. And they went to Marvel Productions and Sunbow Productions

to to make another cartoon series right now in the case of the Transformers show They then went to Toei animation studios in Japan Who was the studio of their there an anime studio that was already very well established? They were an old name in anime. And they were actually the studio that had produced the Mazinger Z series, which was one of the ones that had been picked up by Nickelodeon and turned into Transor Z here in the States. So the Transformers cartoon series

was produced by Marvel Productions and Sunbow partnering with Toei. And Toei were the primary animators for the first season of it. It's an American cartoon series to advertise Japanese designed toys that is animated by the same studio that created Mazinger Z on which Transwar Z was based. So it's Japanese animation for an American written and developed cartoon that's based on Japanese designed toys. It's this weird kind of loop thing going on here. Yeah, I think I get it. I mean, so I mean, because you get to the point where like there's distribution studios, there's filming studios, there's stuff like that. Like I, you know,

and there was that one time that a WCW wrestler wrestled the WWE wrestler for the ECW championship on an MCW show because the judge ordered it. Like so. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not a stranger to such things, sir. Yeah. Oh yeah. So and I want to take a minute to talk a little bit about the transformers a little bit about the transformers as a property, as as the storyline got developed. And again, this was a cartoon series that was fairly transparently designed to be a marketing method for a line of, I don't know, roughly six or seven inch tall, you know, toy cars that transform into robots in back, right? Right. And the writing, so the animation is being done by Toei Studios.

So if you look at the art style of the show, I hold the Transformers responsible for an entire generation of nerds. It's like a gateway drug for getting into anime. OK. The storylines are very Western. Remember that we have we have two two sides. Right. We have the Autobots who are all good guys. Remember that we have we have two two sides, right? We have the Autobots who are all good guys. OK, there are some of them who are a little more sarcastic. There's some of them who are, you know, kind of kind of shoot from the hip.

You know, a little bit run off the rails, don't always follow orders, kind of guys. But they're all good guys. Right. Like there's there's not an anti hero amongst any of guys, but they're all good guys. Right. Like, there's not an antihero amongst any of them, right? And then on the other side, we have the Decepticons, who are the bad guys. Notably, only Decepticons took the form of aircraft. At least at first. Right. And until you had the aerial bots. Yes. And also, oh, God, was it it was?

I forget its name now, but it was a shuttle, a space shuttle that also was a. Right. Big lizard thing. Oh, was that one of the dino bots? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no Yeah. Yeah, I think I yeah. Yeah, I'd have to look it up. That I'm trying to remember whether it was Jen one or if that was that might have been a gen two. It was early on the cartoon. So that's OK. All right.

So in any event, you have the Autobots, you have the Decepticons on the Autobot side, you have Optimus Prime as their commander. You have Megatron as the commander on the Decepticon side. His name was Skylings. That's what it was. Oh, okay. All right. And then all of the plot lines for the show, they'll occasionally have one like the introductory three episodes. I think it was like two or three episodes long for the intro. But then every every other episode after that is 25 minutes self-contained plot, you know,

the Decepticons are always out to conquer the world, destroy the Autobots, you know, cause havoc, you know, subjugate humanity. Well, and energy on cubes. There was energy shortage, apparently. Yeah, they had to they had to find energy sources and then convert them into energy on to fuel themselves. So it was for them, for them it was like finding food. Right. Which is really interesting, which I hadn't even thought about this, but this is a TV series in the mid 80s

after we had been through two oil crises in the decade prior. And again, it's American cars for the most part, a few Italian ones. And some well, remember the RX seven was. Yeah, I was gonna say Japanese ones. Yeah, it was largely just American cars or yeah cars that Americans drove. I'll put it that way. Hmm.

Those are your Autobots. You know, yeah. Whereas yeah. And the and the Decepticons were recognizably US fighters. Yes. Twin tail, like F 15 type. Yep. Yeah. Although the OK, the Autobots, they had Skylinks.

That was the shuttle one that. Yeah, like it didn't turn into a human. It turned into a talking something or other. Yeah. But there was also jet fire. Something or other. Yeah, there was also jet fire. Remember, there was jet fire. Jet fire was a later release. Was he? Because he was not he was not there. He was Jen one, but he was not part of the original line.

Oh, OK. The original the original release line and his appearance in Marvel comics. There's a whole storyline about, oh, my God, there's an airplane who's an Autobot. Right. And he had amnesia and like right. The the Decepticons were trying to get him because obviously he's got to be one of them because like he's got wings like hell. And he was hella old, if I recall correctly. Yeah, there was some there was some issue with that. Now, the Autobots and the Decepticons were alien sentient robots

who had crash landed a long, long time ago and, you know, been in stasis. Right. And so we have a very clear moral boundary between good guys and bad guys. It's very black and white. They fight with each other like the toys all have some kind of laser rifle or some other kind of energy weapon or something and they will shoot at each other but in the cartoon you know nobody you know they get they get hit they get injured nobody ever

gets killed they can get repaired they can get fixed because they're robots, they can get fixed. And the collateral damage is never, never focused on. Like, you would, you would see collateral damage when something was about to fall on a character, right? If Sam Whitwicky and his dad were about to get crushed by masonry, you know, one of the Autobots and have to run and catch it, right? Yeah, yeah. But but you never see anything like the Avengers Battle of New York, where it's like, oh, my God, the whole city is being fucking wrecked. Right. Right. You know, the the collateral damage is not itself a story point.

Sure. Sure. OK. No, it's the stories are largely relationships between Sure, sure. Okay. No, it's the stories are largely relationships between the transformers themselves and between Spike Sam and the Autobots. Yeah. And they're, I think they had a handicap friend as well. Yeah, one of my, for whatever reason, you saying that reminded me of one of my favorite

lines from the original cartoon. Sam Whitwicky says something to bumblebee about, man, we made it out of there by the skin of our teeth. And Bumblebee blanks and goes, I didn't know human teeth had skin. And and like, you know, for a for a cartoon aimed at like nine year olds, that was like, there's some there's genuine kind of cleverness there. Like, you know, I've carried that one with me for some reason that has taken up space in my head for decades. But, you know, but it's it's very much. And animated like G.I. Joe is it's very much an animated series pointed at. Nine and 10 year

old primarily boys, right? There are very clear cut, you know, good guy, bad guy issues, bad guys are always doing something bad, good guys are always, you know, there is no moral ambiguity anywhere, right? Characters, good guy characters might have moments of self-doubt that drive them to run away or face some kind of internal challenge, but they never... Or again, just amnesia or mistaken identity. Like, oh, that's okay.

I'm mixing up, am I mixing up or was there a different name? Not Jetfire, Skyfire. Was that is that one of those that was animated? Because I know there's a mind and the difference. It might have been the difference between the comic book and the show. Yeah, because Skyfire was friends with Starscream, and they'd actually hit the earth earlier than the ship crashed. Yeah. But then Starscream like lost him or something.

I think he fell into a crevasse or something. Yeah, something icy like he he had a Captain America kind of thing. It's funny. And you went with a cap. Yeah. But but then because I remember Starscream went looking for him, couldn't find him. And then he thought out for reasons I can't remember. Yeah. And and then he helped Megatron at first.

And then. And and yeah, then he. He meets with. I think sideswipe. Yeah, I could be wrong. And then and then he realizes how bad the septicons are. Yeah. But like, yeah, and he's the he's the he's the plane, the only Autobot plane.

And yeah, he always struck me as very robotech. Because because he was, but I'll get to that. Oh, okay. Sorry. But yes, so because there's there's there's yeah, we're we got a ways to go before I can get to that point. But yes, as a matter of fact, you may recall that his design did not include a full face in the way that most of the Autobots had. Yeah. And there's a lot of red and white on him. Yeah. Yeah. That's color scheme stuff, which is a little bit less important, but the the the humanoid looking face or not humanoid looking face is a bigger deal Design wise, right?

So but yeah, my point being just that he you did have some moral ambiguity within that character because He had lost his faculties to remember. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But it all got sorted out in the end, for lack of a better term. So, and in the same way, that's the same kind of storyline that you saw all the time on the G.I. Joe cartoon. Right. You know. And I wanted to talk about that and establish that because the Transformers was not my favorite cartoon in the summer of 1985 when my dad made that trip that I mentioned back at the beginning of the last episode. Okay. All of what we've been talking about is a setup for my main subject here, which is in March of

1985, Robotech debuted at four o'clock in the afternoon after G.I. Joe, but before Voltron. From the opening notes of the theme song, it was obviously something very, very different from anything else I had been watching. Now, I want to take a minute off air for you to watch the opening sequence of the show, and I want to talk about your reaction. Okay. All right. reaction. Okay. All right. Okay. So everything you and I had been watching in the early 80s, G.I. Joe theme song, Smurf's theme song, Transformers theme song. What, what immediately strikes you as different about what you just watched compared to the rest of that?

So I would say that the most striking aspect is the lack of lyrics, the lack of catchiness, the lack of jingles. It strikes me as the music that we heard honestly could have been music that was background music for opening credits of a 70s or 80s sci-fi TV show live action. It feels very clear to me that this cartoon, which I just I watched the opening to the Robotech cartoon. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was 90 seconds long, which is at least 30 seconds longer than than any of the others. I think most of the others clocked in around 30 to 38 seconds. Yeah.

So it's like a full minute longer. Yeah. Yeah. And and it's clear to me that this cartoon was not made for children. Yeah, it's originality. Right. That that that shit ain't for kids. Like the. Yeah. The the colors that were used the like it's it is not made to market toys toward children. Right.

You know, just knowing what I know from G.I. Joe and Transformers. Like, right. Okay. To to market toys toward children. Okay. To to Margatoids to her children. Okay. So, yeah, the the Robo tech theme, it's it's orchestral. Yes. Right. As you mentioned, there's no lyrics. The the Transformers theme song immediately starts by explaining to us who are the Transformers, right? Right more than meets the eye

Autobots decepticons like it's the whole rundown everything you need to know to follow the plot of Whatever story you're gonna watch right has been handed to you Mm-hmm rather rather handily in that theme song gi. Joe same thing right? So it is not It is shit.I. Joe, same thing, right? So it is not. It is shit. G.I. Joe had actual narration. Yeah, it's true. That's a good point. Yeah. Straight up narrated it. Yeah. Just straight up explaining shit. Yeah.

And now I want to you mentioned what I find interesting that came out in your analysis was. The details, the angles and the animation in the intro, there was a lot more, I'm going to call it technical view. White so, yeah. Like the angle looking at the nose gear of the Veritech from underneath as it's about to get launched. As it's pivoting. Yeah.

Yeah, the Veritech's lined up on the carrier deck. The transformation was almost incidental to the action instead of the point of the action. Yes. instead of the point of the action. Just comparing it to the amount of cuts that were in like the Transformers. Transformers get in, show you a couple of transformations, get you the song and show you the colorful characters and how they fight against each other

and get the fuck out. This was long establishing shot. Like you see pilot McFly guy's face as he's going down the runway. Rick Hunter long. Yes. He's a hunter of ricks. Um, for for way too long. Yeah. For for me to want to buy it. Like this doesn't make any sense. It's just a guy. The only cool thing was the eyes came down, right?

Yeah, yeah. And then you see him like, I counted for like two or three seconds. It just shows the scenery going by him as he gains speed to take off. Like there's no point, there's no selling me on his toy in that because it's not active. It's not dynamic.

It's not like when you see the the transformers and they're the fight that they have or whatever, whatever that they've got going on is absolutely to show you the action that you could pretend. This does not do that. Okay. All right. Yeah. Um, and then I also want to point out to you the nature of the violence that you do see in that opening sequence

There's a lot of collateral damage They go down into a battle that's happening on a street with Weird orb like legged things. Yeah, that's Zentradi battle pods weird orb-like legged things. Yeah, that's Zentradi battle pods. That's the alien invaders. Yeah. And you literally see a character turning a corner after diving through like he turns his robot

from a plane into a legged plane, which is just weird to a robot, a full robot with a gun. Yeah. Dives through some bad guys shoots them behind him And then goes around the corner to shoot the you said Zintradi. Yeah, so to shoot one of those like there's there's a lot of Claddle damage in those So yeah, and the gunfire as we see it is very frenetic There is a lot more chaos visually on the screen.

And very notably, we see that alien invaders, battle pod get completely destroyed. Yeah. Not not, you know, taken out of action damaged, but it blows up like whoever the pilot is of that is dead. Right. Like if there's a pilot, I see I thought they were robots. No, so we're we're going to be out there's there's I'm going to be spending a lot of time in this episode talking about the the backstory and lore here because it's important to the points I'm trying to make

I also saw a weak effort at a woman Moving her hair in a way that might be beguiling But it was like it was almost like she got bored of the the gesture halfway through it Well, yeah, that's that's It was almost like she got bored of the gesture halfway through it. Well, yeah, that's that's it was. Yeah, it's a visual introduction to one of the principal characters of the series. And it's less about her trying to look beguiling and more about she's just trying to get her hair out of the way to do her job. Yeah, in the context.

Yeah, it's it's much more naturalistic. OK, in a way. Because like I say, you know, it's it's it's I don't know. They're doing an opening trailer and you're establishing a character having them wiping their nose in it. Yeah. And she was doing the equivalent of that with her hair. She's just yeah. Yeah. The way like not her pointing at a screen,

not her doing cool computer shit or yelling into a microphone. Yeah. Moving her hair like so. Yeah, that did there's there's there's a lot to be said about the treatment of women as characters in in the series and in its source material But we can get into that later. Mm-hmm. But yeah So, yeah, it is it is very much

Like you can you can tell from so many cues this this is not meant to market anything to anybody. Right. Right. And so RoboTek was a quantum leap narratively. And in terms of characterization and and all on all kinds of levels compared to everything else that I had been watching up to this point.

Robotech was like graduating into secondary school. You know, yeah. So to as briefly as I think I can get away with explaining kind of what what the storyline of it was. Prior to the beginning of the show and all of this gets explained in in the very first episode. There basically World War Three breaks out and all of the all of the different nations of the world are fighting against each other. And in 1999, if I'm remembering the timeline, right?

I'm remembering the timeline, right? Okay. There is there's a battle going on in the middle of the Pacific between, you know, aerial forces of two, two of the different alliances. And in the middle of that battle, which is narratively very reminiscent of Midway. Okay. For anybody who's studied the. In the middle of that battle, all of a sudden, an alien massive alien spacecraft like a mile long alien spacecraft comes plummeting through the atmosphere. And crashes on Macross Island in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific.

Okay. And at... And humans are fighting each other, then suddenly alien spacecraft, spacecraft crashes. Yeah. Yeah. This wreck, crash lands. And the investigation of the spacecraft shows that whoever built it has a technological base vastly superior to humanity. Shows that they are giants. Oh. Shows that, you know, and basically just scares

the crap out of everybody. It leads to an immediate ceasefire and formation, formation of a unified world government and an international coalition of scientists and military people all rushed to Macross Island in order to investigate the wreck and try to reverse engineer the alien technology. Okay. Now, from that World War Three scenario and that incident, we now time skip, I want to say 10 years, some number of years. I don't remember the timeline as well as I should. I don't remember the timeline as well as I should. And we, humanity, the United Nations space forces have succeeded in rebuilding and figuring out how it works.

They figured out how to operate and rebuild the alien worship Okay, and they have named it Superdimensional fortress one That's SDF yeah, it is isn't it So they have they have they have named it the SDF one and Our our that the plot line of the series starts proper on the day that the SDF one is going to be launched. Okay. And it's the opening ceremony of the launch and ace pilot Roy Foker, who has been part of the program, part of the rebuilding from the beginning, is in the midst of acting as emcee for a demonstration to a whole bunch of dignitaries and the people

of the city that has grown up around the ship, Macross City. He is presenting a demonstration of this is the tech that we've been able to build using this, you know, advanced technology. And it's the the Valkyrie variable fighters, which are the, you know, fighter jets that can turn into Gerwalk mode, which is the weird, you know, duck footed, you know, jet fighter with legs thing. And then they can turn into robots. Now, what they're not telling the general public is the whole reason they've built the, you know, 20-foot-tall robots is because we're going to need 20-foot-tall robots to fight against the foot soldiers of whoever these

aliens are because again the aliens are giants. So the aliens are 20 feet tall. The aliens are yeah. Robots are okay. Yeah. Sized. Oh, that makes sense.

I was in seventh grade and had been friends. I had made friends with some of the nerds in my school and we were playing the Palladium Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and then one of them pulled out the Robotech Play Players handbook. Yeah. And so there was there. And it was, you know, the days of the charts, you know, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. My T.S.R. Marvel, they had their their Palladium T.M.T. And somebody had the Robotech

role playing game, right? There was so much fucking tech spec to that. It was just. Oh, but I remember I remember talking about them saying the words and trotty and right talking about how tall they were. Yeah. This is all making making some sense. Okay. So were they blue? Were they like a weird blue? They, yeah. Uh, well, some of them were, they had, they had weird variable kind of skin tones. Okay. I'll get into it in a minute. So, um, in the middle of this, uh, demonstration, a, uh, high performance

civilian aircraft comes, you know, blasting through the airspace and, you know, pulling off these aerobatic maneuvers and it turns out this is our protagonist Rick Hunter who is a civilian airshow pilot who is like Roy Focker's you know little brother from another mother. Sure. Now Roy Focker, it's spelled like the airplane? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Did I ever tell you we used to use that airplane to swear without swearing in my geology class? Love that. Oh great. We would find so many ways to swear without swearing So that when we're getting trouble we would have the plausible deniability. Yeah, so it was yeah, what's up fucker and then yeah Get over here. What the hell? What are you using that word? What? We're both huge fans of World War One fighter planes. He calls me Sopwith. I call him Focker. What's what's the what's what? Oh, good. Man. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's great. That's it. It was. I'm trying to remember who the who the British ace was. At some point in the like early 60s. He was giving a talk to a group of young ladies, some group of you know, female students or something. And he's talking about

some part of the Battle of Britain. Was it Billy Bishop? Because he's... I don't know. I want to say it was something that might have been... I want to say the last name was like Baden Powell. But that's also Boy Scouts. But anyway, so he's maybe he's he's describing how, you know, him and his flight group were heading out and he says, and when we see the we see the Fokkers coming at us. And we'll see now, we see the Fokker's coming at us. And well, see, now you know, he's not from Manchester because he didn't say Fulker. Yeah. Well, yeah. And the, and the, and the matroness, the, you know, you know, chaperone, I guess, you

know, interjected to say, you know, I should, I should clarify girls. Fokker was, was the name of the aircraft. And, and without skipping a beat, he looked right at her and said, well, yes, ma'am, you're correct. Fokker was was an aircraft, but these Fokkers were flying Messerschmitts. Okay, Messerschmitts had to have been World War Two, though, right? Well, yeah. Yeah, this was this was this was talking about Battle of Britain stuff. But yeah, okay. I was you said a British soldier. I or yeah, I really went to like World War one aces. So oh, yeah, no, no, he was it was Battle of Britain guy. So anyway, Roy Roy Foker,

And Rick. Basically winds up well, so they're there. They have a back and forth. And then in the middle of the launch ceremony, as as the ship is about to take off. All of the crew, we cut to the crew. All of the crew, we cut to the crew and we have, you know, the ship's captain and the primarily female officers who were running everything aboard the bridge. All of a sudden, all their sensors start going off and alarm clacks on are going off. And a massive alien fleet folds into existence on the edge of the atmosphere. And they immediately, you know, send, try to send all the civilians to shelters to, you know, get away. And the Veratex to, you know, get away and the Veratex

all, you know, get, get launched and the beginnings of a battle start and in all of the chaos. Rick Hunter winds up in a Veratex and, you know, winds up kind of having a Luke Skywalker or Anakin Skywalker, you know, oh, hey of having a Luke Skywalker or Anakin Skywalker, you know, oh, hey, this is pod racing kind of moment. Sure. Sure. And. To to cut back on the amount of unnecessary detail I'm going into, the battle culminates with the SDF one The battle culminates with the SDF one trying to fold away and use the alien faster than light drive to it's like, OK, we got to we're going to get away from here, get away from

the civilians we got to get over where they're trying to go to the far side of the moon. They activate the full drive and the ship folds. But it takes with it a huge chunk of the island, including a pair of aircraft carriers in the harbor and most of Macross City. Oh, dear. Because the fold doesn't just take the ship. It's a sphere of space that it affects. Carves everything out. the ship, it's a sphere of space that it affects. It just carves everything out. And when they come out on the other side, they're not on the far side of the moon, they're

closer to Jupiter. Bit farther. Yeah. Okay. So, like... Do the Cylons track them down? Because so far what you're describing is very Battlestar Galactica to me. It is.

It is, yes. And yes, there is constant kind of having a fight off attacks from the Zentradi as they are trying to get their way back to earth. And there everybody like from the highest level of command down to, you know, the grunts in the non fighter jet robots, because there's the Veritex, then there are Destroids, which are, you know, ground pounder robots with big missile pods or gigantic cannons, whatever. And all of them from from the top to the bottom, everybody's learning how to use all this tech, because it's, you know, none of them have ever used anything

like it in battle before. The ships systems, like the human systems that we've installed in the SDF-1 are battling with the preexisting automated systems of the alien ship. And so, you know, trying to figure out how to get full control of the ship, which is kind of semi-artificially intelligent. And so it's this struggle on that level as they're trying to get back to Earth. that level as they're trying to get back to Earth. At the same time, they immediately have to round up as many of the civilians as they can get them into the SDF-1. Because again, it was built for giants and it's a mile long and it's this vast fortress of a battleship.

Okay. So there's an awful lot of empty space in it. So that means that they're able to essentially take the chunks of the city that were teleported with them and bring them inside the hull of the ship. And so Macross City, all of the civilians, everybody in there, wind up living inside parts of the SDF-1. And everything's oversized and outsized. So yeah, well, the human buildings have been brought in. So you've got human buildings in the middle of this gigantic cavernous space. Okay. And Rick winds up running into a a waitress with with, you know, aspirations to become a pop star named Lynn Minmay. And they kind of sort of have a meet cute in the middle of a war zone. Sure. And he is immediately smitten with her and she really

likes the attention he's giving her. So there's immediately a romantic plot. And as they try to get back to earth, there is always the concern of every time the Zentradi attack, whatever we do, we've got to try to keep them off of the civilians inside the ship. Okay. You know, the things that we're able to do, the weapon systems that we can bring online are limited by the fact that there's whole portions of the ship that are being inhabited by noncombatants and we don't want don't want to attract Zen Trotty attention to them.

Okay. Now the Zen Trotty. All of them are giants. All of them. They have they tend to have with a couple of notable exceptions. They tend to have with a couple of notable exceptions, they tend to have very heavy features. They've got they've got like heavy brow ridges, very pronounced square looking jaws. Okay.

Um, their their hands are kind of kind of heavy compared to compared to, you know, human Micronian as they would call us hands. And what gets revealed, the the human characters in the show don't figure this out for a while, but we the viewer figure out real fast. The Zen Trotty are literally a warrior race. They have no culture. Their only culture is war. Okay, so they're American GIs in Japan. You know, yeah. Like bigger, broader features, war culture. Yeah. Yeah. Huge weapons of war that they brought over. Yeah. You're keeping trying to keep civilians safe with them. Okay. Yeah, and they fight in very rudimentary war machines that hit really hard, but don't don't take damage very well.

Especially like the grunt level ones are very much glass cannons. Okay. And individual soldiers will wear body armor and carry like, you know, a big rifle. But, you know, the Micronian Mecca are much more focused on, you know, we've spent all this time training the pilot, we got to keep the pilot alive. So there's an ejection system, right? No, there is no such thing in any Zentradi war machine, there is an ejection system, right? No, there is no such thing in any Zhantradi war machine. There is no ejection system. It's armored enough that like, okay, you can shrug off a hit, but you know, and, and the reason for this is Zhantradi are all cloned soldiers. And every Zintraudi soldier is effectively about four years old. Oh, okay. They are they are pumped out of the clone vats as physical adults having been hit no

trained on the basics of everything they need to know. And their entire world is orders from your superior and going out and fighting and then coming back and re-arming and going back out and fighting. And that's it. Right. Like you said, there's only warrior culture. Yeah. And the only ones of them who have the opportunity to develop personalities are their officers and their generals, the ones who live long enough to be 15 or in the case of the really senior ones, they're many decades or even over 100 years old. And they are veterans of an incalculable number of campaigns that they have fought for their masters, the Robotech masters.

Okay. And who over the course of the Macross series, the first the first series of the of the Robotech franchise, we never see them, the Robotech masters, we only hear about them. We see the Zentradi, who are their their minions. So we have child soldiers who have no, no culture, no real agency, no real agency. Yeah. And another important plot point is that male Zentradi and female Zentradi are intentionally kept apart from one another. The Robotech Masters have engineered their forces so that male Zentradi have their own

ships and their own fleets and their own Mecca, and female Zentradi have their own ships and their own fleets and their own Mecca and females and Trotty have their own fleets and their own command structure and their own Mecca and they have been taught to distrust and have fierce rivalry with each other. And since they clone, you don't need them to be fucking, so. Right. As a matter of fact, you kind of don't need them to be fucking so right as a matter of fact you kind of don't want them to be right So over the course of the series

two of the Two of the commanders of these enthradi forces switch sides After after Lin Min Mei succeeds in becoming a pop star and transmissions of her performances are picked up by the Zentradi for whom the experience of a pop concert is more effective psychological warfare than anything else we have ever experienced in all the ages of human warfare against other humans.

Because it is colorful and it's musical and it's bright and like why why are you doing this? What kind of weapon is this? What kind of combat training is involved in these vocalizations? Like these are literally the conversations they're having. And the realization that hey wait a minute, there's there's more to our existence than than anything we've been allowed to do. Leads to a whole huge chunk of the Zantradi invasion forces switching sides. OK, so we have we have he'll face turn right. And then later in the series, one of the frankly psychotic

males and trotty commanders, Chiron, winds up getting into a relationship with Azonia, a one of the female commanders generals. They wind up getting psycho in love with each other and and wind up then having a they went from heel to sort of face, then they go back to heel together and try to wipe out humanity toward the end of the end of the show. And so, so there is not a these are the good guys, and these are the bad guys. Like from the beginning, we see the experience of being a Zentradi. And like there's something deeply fucked up with their, their existence, they, they, they have no culture they have been kept intentionally stunted By the people who were using them as as soldiers in any number of meat grinders, right? Sure So

And then at the end of the first series of Robotech The determination gets made after the SDF-1 gets back to Earth. Some of the Zentradi switch sides, most of the Zentradi invasion fleet gets defeated, then a group of Zentradi get discontented with living as Micronians and like they go back to wanting to be giants and, you know, breaking things. And they wind up, you know, trying to sneak attack the civilian population of Earth. And a force gets sent as an expeditionary force. It's like, okay, we've now built the SDF three. We have built our own couple of SDFs. We now have our own new super dimensional fortress

and we're gonna send it out and they're gonna try to find the Robotech masters so that we can maybe try to deal with them or maybe fight them out there to prevent them from wiping out humanity here. Right. And at the end of the first series, Rick Hunter and the woman he actually winds up with at the end of the series, Lisa Hayes, who's the bridge officer who's flipping her hair back in that intro, who at first found him utterly infuriating and just like could

not fucking stand him. Sure. At the end of the series, they're on their way to getting married. And they head off with the SDF 3 expedition. And then Earth gets ravaged by this Zentradi revolt. And that's the end of the first series. And then Robotech moves on to the second series of Robotech, which is the Southern Cross saga. Okay. Now, which is like like season two.

Or is this a meanwhile? It's a continuation. Okay. It's a continuation. The main character of the second series is the daughter of two of the characters from the first series. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Max and Maria Sterling have a daughter Dana Sterling, who is the main character of the second series.

Okay. And I'm going to talk about Max and Miriam in a second. So. From that. Overly long synopsis. This was the grittiest, darkest and most emotionally complex series my friends and I had ever seen. Okay. Two of the friends of the main character, Rick Hunter is obviously the protagonist of the first series. Two of his very good friends who we get attached to within like the first four episodes of the show. Ben Dixon and Roy Foker both die. Spoiler alert for a series

that's, you know, 40, 40 years old. And you look like you're about to say something. No, I just I think I remember Roy Foker being the one who shows up and turns out he dies of his wounds once he gets home kind of thing. Yeah. So so Ben Bendixen gets blown up in the middle of a battle. The shield, the force field function of the SDF-1 overloads and he gets caught in the blast and he is he's destroyed disintegrated by it Roy Foker Gets into a tangle with a Zentradi ace And wins and then but his but his Veratek is like totally shot up. There's holes all over it

he lands he gets out of the the cockpit and he's going back to spend the night with his girlfriend, Claudia Grant, who is a good friend of Lisa Hayes. So there's parallels between these two relationships, right? And he gets to Claudia's apartment and as he's ringing her doorbell The scene shifts to the crew working on his veritech Who look at it and go? Holy crap. There's holes blown in the back of his seat

And then we cut to Claudia opening the door to her apartment and Roy Falls flat on his face and and we see blood Through his uniform jacket, which was Boggling yeah unheard of right yeah, and he's and he's he's dead he dies and Claudia's arms And he's dead. He dies and clots his arms. And so this, like the next day, like that episode aired and the next day, that was literally all my friends that I could talk about at recess.

Like, we carried ourselves like the men of easy company, you know, after combat, we practically had cigarettes hanging out of our mouths, like, man, that was some shit, man. Like, we weren't using that language, but that was like in our heads, that was the way we felt, right? Sure, sure.

And the depiction of genuine hardship as part of war, like death on screen death, didn't didn't happen anywhere else. No, it didn't. And the depiction of genuine hardship as part of war was completely different from the fighting that we saw on G.I. Joe or on the Transformers. Right. The involvement of an actual romantic plot. Complete with romance parallelogram was was totally new. Yeah. So to briefly explain that Rick and meni I've already talked about. And then Rick also developed feelings for and she developed feelings for him, Lisa Hayes. So it's Rick,

Min-Mei and Lisa are a love triangle. Okay. And then kind of at the same time, kind of before that, Lynn Minmay's cousin, Lynn Kyle, last name is first because they're Asian, Lynn Kyle shows up and he is a romantic rival with Rick. As Lynn gets famous, as as Lynn gets famous as men make its famous. Kyle is like hanging on her and, you know, being kind of the boyfriend. And he's always like when she's on a movie set, he's always there and he's getting cast as the romantic lead opposite her.

Gotcha. And so. So there's the triangle of Rick, Min-May, Kyle. And, you know, Rick and Min-May, Rick is in love with Min-May. Min-May really likes getting all of Rick's attention. Kyle really likes Min-May's fame and money. And Lisa really likes Rick, loves Rick, Rick loves Lisa, but Rick can't make up his mind about whether he loves her more than men may or what. And like to a 10 year old, this is deep emotional complexity, right? It is a soap opera plot. And I remember, I remember my dad sitting down and watching an episode of it with me that was focused pretty heavily. There were a couple of fight scenes, but it was pretty heavily focused on the Rick Lisa Minmay triangle. If I remember my dad kind of being being bemused and kind of saying, oh my God, this is a soap

opera. And I was so offended. I was so pissed. Sure. But he wasn't wrong. Like, right, right. You know, and this is this is so much more complicated and so much more adult, like in in the in the very fact that there is there is overt romance.

Like, it's not just, well, you know, you see these two characters around all the time and, you know, we think they like each other like, no, they're working. They were kissing scene, man. Right. And, and nothing else aimed anything like that at kids at the time. No. In fact, they steered away from it every time. Yeah. And G.I. Joe and the Transformers were stuck with a structure that demanded they have self-contained episodes. Yes.

Robotech had had a had a it was a saga, right? It was this long story arc that took place over the course of more than more than two years in universe and showed multiple characters, especially Rick, because he's a protagonist, but multiple characters changed and developed over time. In the first episode, Rick is a cocky, doesn't take anything seriously, callow kid stunt pilot. Mm hmm. By the end of the series, he's a he's a real leader and a sober veteran. He is he takes

over Roy's position as squadron leader. And he is he is the guy who's looking out for his men and telling him, you know, this is the plan. This is what we're going to do. Right. Roy Foker has a full mentor arc that call it itades in his sudden shocking death. Max Sterling is the like Rick is the protagonist, and he is a really good pilot. Max is a genius pilot. He's not a commander, but he is. He is the most gifted Mac pilot there is. And he winds up. He has a plot line with myriah, who is a sent a females and trotty ace, who they run into each other two or three times, she

becomes obsessed with him because he's he's the only enemy she has not been able to defeat. Gotcha. And so they wind up having a whole arc that is a complete enemies to lovers arc that culminates with them getting married and who becomes the main character of the next series. They have a daughter Dana. And she becomes an important plot point because at one point part of their gambit to get some of the Zentradi to turn is they show, hey, you know her. She's she's one of your aces. And you know, you know him because he's he's, you know, the the Micronian killer. And by the way, here's what happens when they get together. They made a baby.

But what? You know, and and the the resounding shockwave through Zantradi, you know, society in the earth system is, you know, seismic. Um, Britae and Exidor are these two, you know, general characters. Britae is the is the force commander at the outset of series and Exidor is his strategic genius, you know, planner guy. The two of them have a wonderful friendship dynamic that like nobody else in the Zentradi society has because they're old enough that they have that they have developed that relationship.

They turn face against an even bigger set of heels. And as I already mentioned, a Zonia turns face then turns heel again after falling over Chiron. Right. And after falling in love with Chiron, right? So all of these characters have multiple facets and they are. I mean, they're they're kind of stock characters in one way or another. But they have they have arcs. They have development, right? Mm hmm.

Across all three of the Robotech series, the Southern Cross, which is the second series and the next generation, which is the third one. There are deep concepts and themes that Western animation didn't get into at the time or at least didn't approach anywhere near as directly or as deeply. First of all, I cannot restate this enough. All three series are very much anti war. Like all of our protagonists are soldiers. These are these are real robot genre military science fiction stories. But they are all coming at it from a very much these these are our heroes not because they are soldiers, but because they are doing what they have to do to protect other people. They are, you know, they're heroic because they are doing the best they can in the middle

of an awful situation. Right. Right. War is not ever a good thing. Sure. And the fact that the Zentradi crave war and the and the Robotech Masters. Sea War is just another way to subjugate everybody they come in contact with is what makes them the bad guys, right? Earth gets devastated by the Robotech Wars and we see it happening. We see, you know, the buildings being flattened and forests being turned into ash wastelands and muddy, muddy swamps.

And this is by the bombardment of the planet at the outset of the Zintraudi invasion. Then again, at the end of the war, when Qairon, you know, basically tries to burn the planet up. And the people of Macross City are explicitly characterized as refugees who are stuck literally in the middle of the fighting and we see them complaining about food shortages and about You know, where are we gonna find fuel? Where are we gonna? You know all the hardships and all the stuff the rationing they have to deal with all of the stuff that they have to all the hardships they go through are

Consistently parts of the background B plots in episodes Like it's it's there, you know I've already mentioned that Ben Dixon and Roy Foker both die on screen Dude, this is in fact I never give a reason for why they're there to invade is it just colonial? Yes. Oh, okay it is it is in in Robo tech and it's important I say that because this is in Robo tech as opposed to in the source material that Robo tech came from in Robo tech it is because when when the alien ship that became the SDF one crashed on Earth, it had been stolen by one of the Robotech Masters, one of the one of the founders of the Robotech Masters civilization,

had realized that the Robotech Masters civilization was irretrievably unsavably corrupt was going to collapse under the weight of its own flaws. And so he took the last stores of unrefined proto culture, the flower of life and brought it with him aboard this ship fled from the Robotech Master's civilization. And in the process of fleeing, the ship got shot up and, you know, escaped out of out of sight of where the where the masters could find it. And when the SDF one gets switched on in order to be launched, the SDF-1 gets switched on in order to be launched, that sends a signal out to all of the Zentradi forces in this sector of the galaxy who've been searching for however many years

that we found them and that's why they show up is because we're trying to recover the protoculture. Okay. So, Yes, there is colonialism involved. But it's more to chase down that thing. Yeah. So again, more and more ambiguity to it quite honestly, like, yeah, one thing that they're just here to colonize and take and ruin this stuff too. But it's quite another that they're looking for a thing. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, and I've, you know, the culture clash that is going on here is the Zentradi arrive in our system as an army of tank-born cloned artificial giants. Like I said, no culture but soldiering, no music, no art, no literature.

And the human concepts of culture and sexuality, which isn't like, you know, overtly sexy at any point, but the very fact that, no, no, there are men and there are women and they have romantic tensions with each other. Like these ideas shock them to their core. And it's worth noting that Chiron is a general at the old age of 15. In the Central Asian society. And the average, like I said, average Central Asian soldiers about four years old, four years out of the clone tank. Yeah, it sounds very gem Hadar. Very, yes, very much, very much indeed. And in a way, I kind of want to say that the Zentradi are trope codifiers for a lot of the ideas that we see in the

Gem Hadar. And I want to say to go old, but I know I'm wrong. And I know Sean is listening and he's he's just shaking his head at me and disappointment. But the the go out wolves soldiers in Stargate. Okay. Jaffa the Jaffa also they have families and they're and they're born and they're raised they have childhoods and all that and they're born in their race. They have childhoods and all that. They have a culture, but there's there's a lot of there's a lot of tropes that we see in the that we see codified in the Zentrata that get carried over in in these other places in these other ideas.

Okay. So by the time my father came home with the Valkyrie toy, I was hooked on Robotech. And this was a complete, it had me narratively by my optic nerves. Like at four o'clock every afternoon, that was coming on the TV. Like I was fortunate that there was no scheduling conflict with like my dad was usually still at work, of course, at that point. And my mom was not watching TV at that time of day. So I didn't have to worry about, you know, getting preempted by something else. But like, my family did not inculcate in me the habit of going to church. But Robotech inculcated in me the habit of

being in front of the TV five days a week at four o'clock. Sure. Like. And I mean, it introduced a whole new you'd introduced a whole new vista of what a story could look like. Right. Mm hmm. And so dad showed up with with the Veratec. And obviously, it just it immediately went to the top of the favorite toy list. And so dad showed up with with the Veratech and Obviously it just it immediately went to the top of the favorite toy list Yeah So now the reason for all that complexity is really well, it's it's

it's it's obvious on its face. You already you already hit on it. Right. That is to say that this was not originally written to be a kids TV series. No. It became a kids TV series here in the United States because of the animation ghetto because if it's a cartoon, obviously it's for children. Yeah. In point of practical fact, it was based on super dimensional fortress Macross, Super Dimensional Fortress Macross, a series produced in Japan by Studio Nue in 1982. Notably, the visual designer of the Mecha and many of the characters in Macross is a man named Shojo Kawamori, and he also created the Transformers characters for the Takara

Tomi To toys line. Okay. And so the series spent some time in development hell in Japan. So the studio, Studio Nui, who made it had to work with a whole bunch of partners to finally get the funding to make it and distribute it and do all of that. And so Studio Nui wound up working with two companies in the end to fund it. Big West Productions and Tatsunoko Productions. Okay. The show turned out to be a huge hit in Japan. And in Japan, it has since spawned an entire franchise

with four animated series, 10 movies, and a host of video games. And this is a place where I am going to put a pin in all of that. Okay. Because in its transition from Japan to the United States, some things happened that led to me as an adult having a very complicated relationship with RoboTech. As a nine, ten year old, it was absolutely the best thing in the world I had ever seen. Sure. As a grownup, I love the series and the company that's responsible for bringing it over here, in my opinion, should be driven into the ground and and their names

erased from history for all time. OK, yeah. And so we can get into why that is. Starting in our next episode, I like it. So based on all of that, what have you got for me in response? What are you thinking? So the series that was created with a ton of moral ambiguity was created by a ton of moral ambiguity. Yes. Like, so, no, I think, you know, the fact that again,

the animation ghetto rears its ugly head, right? So you have essentially cartoons are for kids and cartoons, ultimately, I mean, you have two trope codifiers in the 1980s, G.A. Joe and Transformers. Yeah. All cartoons thereafter were for selling toys. So not only are cartoons for kids, cartoons are the commercials for commodifying these toys. Yeah. I was just thinking of, did you ever remember Jace and the Weald Warriors? Yeah, I was just thinking of did you ever remember Jace and the wheeled warriors?

Yeah, I do remember that So those toys were the only exposure I had to that series So I actually fellow her backward into it somebody bought me those toys a well-meaning adult in my life I'm sure who didn't know what I liked Okay, and those toys had magnetic feet on the men, and the men were only like maybe an inch and a half tall. And the vehicles were smallish, and the vehicles had like magnets on them as well. So that was kind of the gimmick was that they were magnetized on the top and on the bottom.

And otherwise, they were just kind of like cool looking cars, right? Yeah. So I don't remember much from that series at all, but I do know that once I found the series, I was like, oh, okay, cool. There's a cartoon for this too. And then I was able to name the characters that I'd already had, you know, bought for. Yeah. Um, the American system was such that

the cartoon existed to sell the toys. That that was the thing. And it sounds to me a lot like, um, the the animation ghetto kept the the alarming nature of Robotech because I'm a little stunned that it actually got past sensors because you had the self-appointed parent group, you remember. They actually, despite my distaste for self-appointed groups, they actually were doing a better job than the federal government was because Reaganomics and Reagan and his FCC stuff. But it is interesting to me that because in America, we do have animation ghetto, and this did not follow the animation formula of you're supposed to be selling toys. And yeah, story simple stupid. Yeah, I do find

that that aspect especially interesting. Yeah, it is in, you know, looking at it with adult eyes. Now, the things that the Robotech series got away with were stunning. Like you say, the fact that they were able to get stuff past sensors is amazing. What is worth mentioning kind of at this point in the conversation is the original series had a lot of material that got edited out. That took all of those things even farther. Like there were some moments in Superdimensional Fortress Macross that were actually kind of sexy and the violence was bloodier. You know, and and so there it was what we saw was toned down, but even

toned down, it was like I've already said, I mean, a quantum leap. Right. For everything else. And I think part of the reason I think part of the reason it was able to get past those self-appointed groups was the fact that it was a cartoon. I think even those self-appointed parent groups looking at stuff, the preconceived notion of, well, you know, it's a cartoon, you know, what I talked about about, or what William Gibson notably talked about, about science fiction as a genre. Like you can get away with shit in science fiction, you know, that other literature won't do because, you know, people don't take science fiction as seriously. Right. And I think it's kind of, it's the same thing here. Mm-hmm.

So, yeah. Yeah. And it's it's the same thing here. So, yeah. Yeah. I was going to say the first time that you see blood in a G.I. Joe. Cartoon is the movie. Oh, yeah. And the first time you see any Transformers die is their movie. Theatrical release. If you get movie. Yeah, theatrical release.

If you get a theatrical release, people die. Right. Because largely because you wanna clear out the new, the clear out space for the new generation. Yeah. But in G.I. Joe, you see Falcon bleeding from the lip in silhouette and then you see his face and there's a little bit of blood coming from there.

So yeah, I'm not surprised, I guess, that it was ghetto-wise. And yet the fact that it did not follow the commodification formula of American cartoons. Yeah, I find that interesting. Yeah, well, to to the credit of the guy who who brought the series over and and was behind the idea to take three separate anime series and turn them into one long story arc. And I'm going to talk more about him in the next episode, but he takes a lot of shit in anime fan circles.

And I'll get into that. But to his credit, he did this as a labor of genuine love for the material. The company that bought the rights to it, like I said, their names should be erased from history, you know, screw them all. But, you know, the act of bringing the property over here here, I think came from a place of genuine love of the material. And so I mean, that's so that's another massive departure from, you know, all of the other cartoon series we've talked about, you know. So cool. Yeah. Well, what you're reading?

Well, what I'm going to recommend this time, and you can get ahold of this. I know that I encouraged everybody to try to go out and find either Superdimensional Fortress Macross or Robotech. And yeah, here in our region, for whatever reason, it's not available, which by the way, I blame on the company involved. But the comic book series, there's a relatively recent comic book adaptation from Titan Comics.

I very strongly recommend that you go out and give it a shot. Robotech from Titan Comics. So how about you? I'm actually going to recommend a pair of movies. And at present they're streaming on Netflix, but I think they'll end up going back to their studio streams. A pair of movies I'm going to recommend is

Doom and Disorder. Watch Arrival. I think you'll like it if you watch it. It's Aliens Land and it is a slow burn, not even a thriller, just kind of a slow burn drama. You would think Aliens Land and it's lots and lots of action. It's not. It's really, really well done. There's a lot of good character development and there's- Is that the one with the linguist? Yes. The link? Yeah. I have not had the wherewithal to sit because I've looked at it in bed and that's going to be really heavy. And I don't know if I'm if I'm if I'm intellectually ready for it But okay, it's your recommendation. Okay. Yeah, and then I say wreck I recommend also that you cleanse your palette with pitch perfect It is it is a fucking gem like so so much good humor in it. So much just Anna Kendrick is, is she is a treasure.

She really is. She really is. Yeah. There's something just quirky odd about her. And she's not like manic pixie dream girl quirky. Grounded quirky. It's cool. It's cool.

Yeah. So those are, those are what I'm recommending. All right. Yeah. Very cool. All right. So I know you don't want to be found, but I can be found on March 1st and April 5th. And frankly, thereafter, the first Friday of every month at Comedy Spot for Capital Punishment, where can our podcast be found? Our podcast can be found on our website at www.geekhistorytime.com. You can also find us on the Apple Podcast app or on Spotify.

And wherever you have found us, since you're listening to me right now, please take the time to give us the five-star review and hit the subscribe button and go back, take a look at our archives. We cover a little bit of everything and a lot of a few things. Very true. Cool. Well, for Geek History of Time, I am Damian Sopwith. And I am Ed Foker. And until next time, keep rolling 20s.