Anime purists hate Carl Macek for turning Super Dimension Fortress Macross into the odyssey that is Robotech. As I talked about in the Video Review of Clash Of The Bionoids and plan to also bring up if I ever get to make the Video Review of Robotech II: The Sentinels pilot movie you have to remember the time this show came out. There was no anime media fandom like there is today. At best there were fans of Godzilla movies or Kurosawa films but Japanese animation wouldn’t really become popular in the US until the “Japanimation” boom of the 1980s, and even then it took two more tries for anime to get the solid following it has today. And shows like Robotech paved the way for that. With too few episodes for a proper weekday series and too many for a weekend series Macek and producers Harmony Gold grabbed two more shows, the unrelated Super Dimension Calvary Southern Cross and totally unconnected Genesis Climber Mospedia, and tried to put them together not as an anthology but as a connected timeline bound together by the same giant transforming robotic vehicle technology and the mysterious element called Protoculture that made it possible. You can not fault Macek and his team for a lack of creativity because they were very creative.
However, slamming three shows together like this leaves a few problems, like not being able to reuse characters. Other Macross series either hadn’t used any of the old characters or hadn’t come out yet. (Macross II didn’t even come out until the 90s and the only other options they had was the re-imagining Do You Remember Love, which became Bionoids instead of a Robotech movie, and some music video collection called Flash Back 2012.) Trying to explain their absence without killing beloved character off-screen meant having to explain what happened to the heroes of the First War when the Robotech Masters and Invid arrived as well as things like Dana’s vision, where Scott Bernard’s team came from, and so on. Robotech II: The Sentinels was intended to be that explanation but plans fell through and it didn’t happen. The story was continued in novels by Jack McKinney as well as comics published originally by Malibu Comics imprint Eternity Comics and later by Academy Comics, Ltd.
It was during the Academy Comics run, in the August 1995 issues of all their titles at the time, that Todd Hill made a four page interview with Carl Macek, discussing what was planned both for The Sentinels and in the future. Since I just reviewed the issue of The Sentinels it appears in this felt like the appropriate place to post and discuss the information learned. Hopefully the watermarks don’t distract…nature of the game on the internet…but I won’t be discussing every answer. You can see them all for yourselves. However a few comments in particular did get my attention.
