What’s your Robotech origin story?
Mine begins in the summer of 1985,between 7th and 8th grades. Robotech aired on an independent UHF channel, weekdays at 6:00 AM. I don’t remember why, but I was up early for a few days in a row and stumbled upon the episodes Miss Macross, Blind Game and First Contact. I was really impressed with the series but with school out for the summer I was not about to get up early every day just to watch a TV show and Robotech was forgotten for a while.
In the summer of 1987, I was to go camping with my grandparents. Knowing I’d be bored out of my mind, I looked for something to read and found the first five Robotech novels. Not only did they ignite my love for Robotech but also a love of reading that has lasted my whole life. I gobbled up the rest of the McKinney books as they were released.
The kid that lived next door had Jetfire from the Transformers. Man, I really wanted one of those at the time. (That whole Harmony Gold / Hasbro / Takara / Bandai / Sunbow saga was quite the cluster-frak.)
My senior year of high school a few friends and I began to play Robotech the Role Playing Game, but it only lasted about three weeks.
It wasn’t until 1991 that I actually watched the series. I borrowed a bootleg VHS collection from a friend at a comic shop. These were at least 2nd or 3rd generation TV recordings on the 6-hour speed. You had to be a fan to watch that.
When Eternity Comics started their Robotech II The Sentinels comic adaptation, I started reading the comics and continued to buy every Robotech comic from Eternity and Academy as well as completing a collection of all the Comico issues. I picked up the first two issues of the Antarctic Press series but by this time I was tired of comics and ended up selling my entire comic collection including all my Robotech comics. My McKinney novels were eventually donated to Goodwill.
A few years ago I watched Robotech again on Crackle or Netflix. I was a little surprised at the nudity since the crappy TV bootleg I saw was edited. At the time Shadow Chronicles was on Netflix and I watched it too. I had mixed feelings on Shadow Chronicles. On one hand I enjoyed it for what it was, but felt I was missing too much of the story being as familiar as I was with The Sentinels novels and comics. I’ve still yet to see the Sentinels video.
I’ve since gotten back into comics (digital only) and have a larger digital comic collection than I ever had in paper. I’ve been reading the Titan series since its start and it’s slowly grown on me. At first it just looked like an updated rehashing of the Macross Saga and I considered dropping it but by issue four the changes introduced to the story had me interested enough to keep buying it. Now it’s become one of my favorite comics again. I’ve also purchased the digital reprint collections of Comico’s Graphic Novel and The Macross Saga. Wow, these did not age well but they’re full of nostalgia.
My biggest regret is selling my comic book collection. I’ll keep buying Titan’s reprints but I sincerely doubt they will reprint everything. And they probably shouldn’t since some of the Academy stuff was extremely low quality. I’m also planning on buying a McKinney-verse collection on Kindle or Google Play as soon as they make all the novels available. Seriously, why is The Masters’ Gambit missing on every digital platform?
OK, I’ve rambled long enough. I’d really like to hear everyone’s Robotech origin story.