Protoculture Shock – Super Dimension Fortress Macross Spoiler Review

I have a tradition, in the month of March, to at least approach the Mecha genre. Giant robots are cool, there are a ton of shows featuring them, and of course it’s hard to resist the alliteration. This year, though, things are going to be a bit different… or rather, a bit more specific.

Welcome, my friends, to Macross March.

Macross is a flagship mecha series, one of the real legends. It has several major series as well as movies (which might or might not function as alternative versions of the series), OVAs, and more merch than you can shake a stick at. There are even full concerts dedicated to the music of Macross. Compared to the Gundam franchise, Macross has a reputation (whether well-founded or not) as being… a bit lighter, with fanciful transforming fighter jet mechas, more Idol singers and love triangles, and at least somewhat less existential angst at the horrible truths of war.

In the West, it also has a reputation for being very hard to watch. This is largely due to the fact that the rights to Macross were acquired by a company called Harmony Gold, who used it as one of the building blocks for their show, Robotech – re-purposing the animation of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross, along with other shows, into a new property for the Western market. And because of intense friction around that, appearances of Macross in legitimate forms have been… existent, but few and far between.

Believe it or not, the nightmare rights issue extends even farther beyond: the likenesses of several mechs from the show were licensed to game-maker FASA, and were used as part of creating the tabletop miniatures game (and ultimately sprawling franchise) Battletech, only for those units to, years later and after they’d been integrated as core elements of the setting, become “Unseen” due to the original dealer possibly not having the authority to allow that license. This resulted in years of chaos and ultimately a bitter lawsuit between Harmony Gold and companies involved in making a Battletech video game, which Harmony Gold ultimately lost.

Whether that 2018 settlement had anything to do with it or not, the legal issues directly surrounding Macross and Robotech have been worked out parent company to parent company, and as of January 2025 you can now find convenient and legitimate streaming sources for pretty much everything Macross. And so I’m going to look at, if not all of it, at least the major series entries this month. I’ll be going in release order, starting with the 1982 original, Super Dimension Fortress Macross.

Macross begins in the distant future of 1999, when a giant space battleship crashes into Earth, providing both undeniable proof that we are not alone in the universe, evidence that it’s not all sunshine and roses up there, and a cache of super-advanced alien technology to pillage. Ten years later we get the start of our proper story, after the “unification wars” that have placed humanity under a single government and the complete restoration and refit of the alien derelict as mankind’s own giant space battleship, the titular Macross.

However, all is not well at the launch ceremony that introduces us to our various major characters, as an alien war fleet arrives and the core systems of the Macross respond automatically to fire on their scouts, starting an all-out conflict between the fledgling Earth defenders and the alien expeditionary force.

So, let’s get this started proper and begin to introduce our characters. Our main character is Hikaru Ichijou, a civilian ace pilot who was invited to the launch ceremony by his now-military, hotshot, skirt-chasing ace pilot senpai, Roy Focker. He ends up in one of the “Valkyrie” fighters when the attack hits and is instructed to launch, despite his initially pacifistic convictions against being a military pilot. He’s shot down, but one of our two more important faces on the Macross bridge, First Lieutenant Misa Hayase, talks him into emergency landing the thing by executing its transformation from fighter plane to big robot. Turns out it also has a “plane with feet and arms” mode called Gewalk that’s easier for Hikaru to handle.

On the ground Hikaru ends up running into and ultimately rescuing a young woman, Minmay Lynn. Protecting her even triggers him to fight back when staring down the barrel of an alien war machine, forcing Hikaru to witness the death of its alien pilot. As, it turns out, the aliens (called Zentradi) in this are a race of otherwise human-like giants. Welcome to war (aka hell), kid.

Focker rescues Hikaru and Minmay, taking them to the Macross as, under the direction of Captain Global, it ascends into orbit. There, they clash with the Zentradi fleet, which would be more dangerous if the enemy didn’t want to capture the Macross intact.

To be fair, even though you know that this is going to be the decision that, in sparing the heroes, ultimately bites the bad guys in the rear, it’s at least reasonably sold as being not completely bone-headed in the moment, and the Zentradi do a fair job of attempting to isolate the Macross. They just weren’t expecting Captain Global to go and order a warp jump (here called a Space Fold) close to the surface, which ends up throwing the Macross wildly off target and dragging the whole island beneath it (along with Hikaru, who was doing his best to take Minmay and ditch the show) along with into the far reaches of the Solar System. Luckily, evacuation shelters in this setting are air-tight enough to get the civilians rescued, but a bigger issue seems to be the disappearance of the Fold System, meaning the crippled Macross can’t just warp back.

This is basically our setup, and since SDF Macross is 36 episodes I’m going to try to go through it a little quickly, but before I really move to just hitting the high notes I wanted to put a spotlight on the episode right after the jump. In this episode, Minmay and Hikaru are trapped in a sealed section in the bowels of the ship, due to how they got back aboard when everything went to hell. During that time, we see them explore their surroundings, find food and water as best they can, and generally try to survive. We also build Minmay’s character in a big way, discover her proficiency as a singer, and have Hikaru and Minmay form a strong bond. That’s a lot to do in 25 minutes of running time, especially when we do get some scenes of the bridge crew managing a crisis of fifty thousand surviving refugees and the remains of their home being brought aboard and situated on the Macross.

The writing here is kind of a marvel. Minmay is not a simple, one-noted character. She’s mostly a nice girl, but has a teasing side to her. She has her own likes, dislikes, hopes, and dreams that get expressed in an organic way. And you really feel like you’re starting to get to know her, and that she and Hikaru are legitimately close one way or another, after their harrowing little survival time.

Part of the reason I wanted to highlight this is because the other show from the same time frame that I’ve reviewed so far, Armored Trooper Votoms, had a big issue when it came to its character writing, particularly the female lead Fyana and the bond between her and Chirico. At the time, I held that up and partially excused it as sort of coming with both the age of the piece and the general nature of the writing (also informed by being from a time before on-demand viewing) that made most episodes skippable if you had the ones on either side.

Macross, however, doesn’t fall into the same trap. Maybe it’s because Macross seems less concerned with keeping things friendly for sometimes viewers (relying on brief recaps at the start of each episode to clue people in who may have missed one), or maybe it’s because Macross famously blends in more of the Romance genre than you’d typically expect to see in a straightforward military/mecha affair, but Minmay’s introduction holds up in a way that Fyana’s entire character… doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong, there are some bits that remind you this is over 40 years old, like when Hikaru asks what Minmay would hope to be and she answers “A bride” – something that seems to be no longer really kosher as a primary life goal – or how there’s a running joke where Misa is called an “old lady” when she’s canonically nineteen (older than Hikaru, but still…), but it mostly comes together very comfortably.

So, by one thing and another, Hikaru joins up with the military (mostly seemingly to protect and/or impress Minmay), forming a somewhat antagonistic relationship Misa in the process, and the Macross makes its way inward, back towards Earth. They make pretty good time, fighting back at Saturn and escaping a trap laid at an abandoned human Mars base. The latter of these turns into a focal episode for Misa, who has to come to terms with the fact that her first love died there during the Unification Wars. Aboard the Macross, Minmay’s star begins to rise as she wins a beauty contest to be named Miss Macross and prepares to make her idol debut.

Before the Macross can get back to Earth, Hikaru and a couple of junior pilots escort Misa on a mission where she gets out of the command room. There, they’re captured by the Zentradi, who want to understand the weird things they’ve been noticing about their “miclone” enemies. Through this sequence, we learn that the Zentradi are a purely sex segregated warrior race that no longer even know what normal reproduction or civilians are. That said, their sages are able to recognize some human behavior (after awkwardly forcing Misa and Hikaru to kiss in order to observe) as “protoculture”, to them an undefinable thing from an ancient era when their race had Miclone-sized bodies and lived in an integrated manner, which strips those who encounter it of the ability to fight. It seems to be concern about encountering Protoculture that stays the Zentradi’s collective hands from using their demonstrated power to wipe out whole planets in an instant against Earth. Well, that and wanting the main weapon of the Macross, which is something legendary to them as well, having belonged to their so-far unseen foes in the Supervision Army.

The idea of these big badass aliens having no concept of love, to the point where the very idea is dangerous to them like some kind of psychological weapon, is hardly unknown territory, but to be fair some of that may be down to Macross by this point.

The four earthlings manage to get back to the Macross, but a trio of Zentradi, shrunken down to be Miclones, are deposited to act as spies. With the admittedly difficult to believe intel on the Zentradi and the still-technically-hidden Three Miclone Stooges, Macross manages to return to Earth, splashing down in the Pacific.

There, it turns out things will not be looking up too quickly: UN brass (including Misa’s father) declare that the rescued civilians will remain aboard the Macross, and the Macross on the front line, since most of Earth has been kept in the dark about the whole alien thing. Their best attempts to get people to safety are stymied, and the Macross is ordered back into space. On the romantic front, Hikaru’s chances with Minmay seem to be receiving some double trouble, on one side from her career and on the other side from picking up her beloved cousin, Kaifun, who is even more of a devoted pacifist than Hikaru started out as. He also puts Misa out of sorts since he is evidently the spitting image of her lost love.

While Kaifun is busy being rude to soldiers and receiving Minmay’s full attention, Hikaru gets injured out of the fight and, shortly after, Focker dies from wounds sustained in action. As soon as Hikaru is back in the saddle, he loses one of his subordinates, Kakizaki, as well. On the C plot, Hikaru’s other subordinate, Max, is an incredible ace, scoring the interest of a Zentradi ace pilot, Milia, and she goes Miclone to infiltrate the Macross as well.

Hikaru and Minmay, meanwhile, keep missing each other, leaving both rather lonely. The Zentradi recover the first set of spies. Infected by human culture, they begin spreading things like music among the grunts, leading to the spies and a group of their buddies turning themselves (back) into Miclones and deserting to the Macross during a boarding attempt. The culture bug also gets Milia, as she falls for Max (after trying to kill him, admittedly)

Having the defectors opens up the idea of properly negotiating with the Zentradi, though the UN wants to put on a show of force first, even though that would be worse than useless. But how’s the romance doing?

The web gets tangled. Kaifun wants Minmay. Minmay sees him as a brother, but Hikaru manages to catch them at bad times, like spotting from a distance when Kaifun steals a kiss, or watching as he fans the flames of rumors that they’re an item during a live interview, leading to him continuing to keep his distance from Minmay and hear only one side of her mixed signals. Misa is a bit hung up about Kaifun looking like her late crush and shaking her worldview, but as the bridge crew seems to note the feelings between her and Hikaru seem… complicated, and more positive than their bickering would normally indicate. This is especially true as the Hikaru-Minmay situation continues to sour. Making matters more difficult, Misa returns to Earth to deliver their findings to the UN, and her dad is inclined to keep her safer planetside.

While she’s out, Milia and Max have their encounter… and promptly get married. Captain Global makes quite the wedding speech, and it is of course broadcast as a state event which the Zentradi in Sol are able to listen in on. The Zentradi supreme commander at their core base orders an all-out attack, but as dissent in the Zentradi ranks turns to outright mutiny, the local commander, Britai, opts to break off the whole “Blow up the Macross then wipe out Earth” attack and instead opens cease-fire negotiations with the Macross.

This enrages the Zentradi supreme commander, who brings in his main fleet of over four million ships. Macross and the Britai fleet join forces, preparing a plan to fight back… but the Zentradi enemies target Earth first, blasting the surface to ashen ruin with their alpha strike and killing anyone not in a bunker pretty much instantly. The silver lining is that “in a bunker” includes the UN base where Misa was kept and their ultimate superweapon, Grand Cannon, which fires in reply and takes out a whole sweeping sector of the invading fleet, clearing a path for the allied forces to go after the flagship.

Before the battle, Hikaru settles things with Minmay, which seems to break her heart even as both prepare to move on if they live through the day. Minmay’s live performance is broadcast on every channel to disrupt the uninfected Zentradi and bolster morale, and the battle rages. During it, Hikaru gets deorbited, and he takes the opportunity to rescue Misa, seemingly the only survivor as the base crumbles, and possibly the only survivor of Earth.

In space, Macross rams through the Zentradi commander’s giant battle moon and missiles him to hell from the inside, destroying or dispersing the fleet and ending the war. Thus, Minmay and Kaifun are together, Misa and Hikaru are together, and a battered Macross lands on the ashen wasteland of the devastated Earth.

But don’t go anywhere – this seemingly definitive bittersweet ending is Episode 27 of 36.

So, let’s start breaking down where we go from here. For one, the love triangle is not as set as it may have looked. Hikaru was ready to give up on Minmay, but this girl is queen of the mixed message: After he confessed in the past tense, and after she said she had only seen him as a friend and probably liked Kaifun, when she was asked to sing for the fleet? She decided to get rather romantic and say she’d do it only for his sake, with a deep kiss on top. And while Hikaru may have had some damn good moments with Misa at the end, enough that you’d think it was tied up despite Minmay’s schizophrenic way of saying goodbye, those kind of were pretty extreme circumstances. Still, we come back to this situation two years later where he’s still pining over Minmay despite seemingly having been right about them living in different worlds and Misa being close enough that she takes care of Hikaru’s home while he’s out on patrol.

So, that’s Hikaru and Misa in two years – still in the military because they’re trying to fix the world, and still not an item. What about Minmay herself? She’s super-famous of course, seeing as she was the idol of most of the survivors of humanity. She tours the settlements on the desert of Earth with Kaifun as her band, raising morale. Kaifun… is not doing so well of the two of them. He’s become a raging alcoholic who gets mad when they’re given what he thinks is too little in supplies and gifts for a concert, despite giving big angry speeches about how people should be self-sufficient and not accept handouts from the military he hates so much.

If you had a doubt in your mind in the first arc about Kaifun, like you credited that bad attitude or no he was kind of right about mutual understanding and the power of music leading to peace, or that he was just being true to his convictions, this re-introduction should make it clear that he’s a hypocritical jerk and probably always has been.

Minmay seems ready to dump him, which Hikaru happens to overhear in a way that could be taken as stalkerish but could also just have been that he wanted to talk after her concert and noticed that it was not the time to interrupt when they started arguing.

In terms of the main plot, while rebuilding Earth is going about as well as could be expected, the Zentradi don’t always seem to fit in, and present big, violent threats when they don’t play nice. Some of the more hawkish leaders seem all ready to organize.

One of the things I think is interesting about the second arc are how the Zentradi Insurgents… don’t just revert to their old ways. The main leaders among them, Milia’s commander and a notorious team-killing hothead, have gone from Zentradi taboos to enjoying more than a little “culture” with each other, and they’ve even learned ways of fighting that are more human, preying on psychological elements. Specifically, as they do organize, part of their insurgency includes a kidnapping of Minmay (and Kaifun). The hostage rescue puts her and Hikaru back in contact properly, which quite naturally leaves Misa a bit in the dumps.

Misa takes it out on Hikaru, he vents at her later when she’s ready to apologize, they make up… and then Hikaru breaks a date (not that he’d necessarily see it as such) with Misa to visit with Minmay. To be fair, he does it pretty reluctantly at Minmay’s goading, and he hasn’t had a chance to talk with Minmay properly since the second arc began.. On the other hand, he kind of leaves Misa hanging and causes an inadvertent interpersonal catastrophe when he does see her later. It’s not like anything goes right for Minmay either, as she barely gets to even start putting the moves on before Kaifun drags her off to do a show on no notice, which she bombs due to being down in the dumps from that. At this point, Kaifun abandons her. Minmay, of course, rebounds directly to Hikaru (ditching showbusiness in the meantime), and it looks like she’s going to have that all sewn up, imploring Hikaru to quit the military so they could live as ordinary people.

As Global reveals a plan to have humans colonize space in every direction to avoid the “all our eggs in one basket” trap, Misa chooses to give the same confession and goodbye to Hikaru that Hikaru gave to Minmay at the end of the war arc, which is exactly when the insurgency plot attacks with their freshly restored gunboat, intending pretty much to blow up the (grounded) Macross just for fun and then head off into space to wage war for the sake of war.

Minmay gets a talking to about why people like Misa and Hikaru fight, the soldiers do their best to save what can be saved, the insurgent leaders go out together ramming the hulk of the Macross after it manages one last hurrah, and with the battle over and the bridge crew still alive, we get our final scene where Minmay basically realizes that she needs to grow as a person and gives her blessing to the Hikaru/Misa ship this last harrowing circumstance got us to choose. The end.

So, that was Super Dimension Fortress Macross – the original in all its glory. How does it hold up?

First, let’s talk about elements of this show for which I will make exceptions or grade differently than I would a more modern show. The animation is the biggest entry here. Macross is from the early 80’s; its look and feel is drastically different from anything we would see today. Sometimes, it’s downright gorgeous; the uniqueness of many of the visuals, specifically the space stuff, speaks to the strength of hand drawn animation. There’s a creativity here that’s not concerned about tools or assets, because literally every frame uses the same tools and is an asset.

But, at the same time, there’s some distinct jank that would absolutely not be allowed in a modern production. Crowds are often filled with weird, lumpy blob people that have fewer and less recognizably human facial features than some emoticons. Characters move and bend in ways that they can only do because the flow of a drawing doesn’t take into account that they have skeletons or muscles. There are a lot of scenes of Minmay dancing on stage (many of which are reused), and while some of the shots and even some of the sequences look pretty good, for others… I think the blatant Miku Miku Dance ending of Frame Arms Girl, were both it and some of these Minmay scenes viewed in isolation and entirely without context, would technically be the better looking, with cleaner motions and more impressive choreography.

But… that’s 80’s TV animation. There are a lot of meme-worthy faces or poses I could screencap from Super Dimension Fortress Macross that would make it look absolutely awful, but that’s not what the experience of watching the show is. The experience of watching the show is that you have to relearn the visual language (or learn it for the first time, if you’ve not previously been exposed to vintage animation), and after you adapt you’ll notice the hitches fairly rarely.

I was prepared to give the pacing something of a free ride, or at least a modicum of forgiveness like I did for Votoms, but actually… I don’t think I need to. Macross is effectively 27 episodes of the great space war, and then 9 episodes of postapocalyptic society. It’s basically the same pacing you’d get out of a 24-episode show with a 12-episode sequel, but with more freedom to play with the numbers.

That said, I do kind of think the second arc works against it. I guess it’s nice to see how life is getting along on Earth, so we don’t leave everything ambiguously doomed, but I think something like an episode could have done that.

The arc isn’t bad in abstract, delivering romantic drama that often got deferred in the first 27 episodes while still making sure to have somebody shoot something almost every episode along the way. And while there was a bit much soap opera at times, there were also bits that were really gratifying, like getting to actually see Hikaru and Misa have more tender scenes, and in a more spiteful sense seeing Kaifun’s hard-line stance and excess anger bite him in the rear. But, again, it’s fairly unnecessary especially since we left off Episode 27 with Misa/Hikaru as our pairing and just circle back to that.

In general… Macross is a proper epic. It’s huge, and it feels huge. As I just talked about it isn’t that many episodes, objectively, but the story is packed, the emotions are meant to be big and sweeping, and the events are nothing if not impactful. Any show that can reduce Earth to a cinder as part of its climax (or at least lightly toast the surface and really sell that devastation) is at least trying. And it has loads of side characters, most of whom are reasonably memorable even if they aren’t important, serving to make the show feel like it’s absolutely full of life. Finishing it, it feels like you’ve been through something with real weight and power.

Not all of that translates entirely to quality. While I can spot Macross a couple points for basically operating on a different rubric, there are some bits that feel forced, or drag out too long. It would still feel epic without quite so many false starts or random spars with Zentradi who aren’t giving it their all.

Still, Super Dimension Fortress Macross is a strong start for the franchise. For my part, I’ll give it a B+, and in this case that means a few things. First, it’s an easier watch that has aged more gracefully than Armored Trooper Votoms, even if I think Votoms might have had a better budget. It’s certainly a show I’d recommend, at least if you’re ready for the culture shock of watching something from its era. And, it will serve as a baseline for the rest of the franchise, so I’m leaving myself room on either side. If an entry is meaningfully stronger than SDF Macross, it almost certainly deserves something in the A-ranks, while if it’s weaker, there’s plenty of grading scale down there.

If you get the chance, check out how it all started!