First of all, for SUDIF01, here all the Force Five info he requested:
Force Five was a dubbed anime anthology series of sorts, released in 1980 by Jim Terry Productions. Each of the five shows used to create the daily Force Five package was trimmed down from its original run to 26 episodes each. Every show was run once a week on a specific day of the week, meaning if you only liked one show, you could watch Force Five once a week and follow your favorite show.
Grandizer (original title: UFO Robo Grendizer, 1975) originally had 74 episodes, and was the SECOND sequel to the ORIGINAL pilotable robot show, Mazinger Z (1972), created by Go Nagai. (The first sequel was Great Mazinger, and I don’t think it was ever released in the U.S. or Canada.) Interestingly, the original Mazinger Z series was finally released five years later (1985) under the title Tranzor Z.
Gaiking (original title: Ozora Maryu Gaiking, or Demon Dragon of the Heavens Gaiking, 1976) ran for 44 episodes. It had a wounded baseball player piloting a robot with a gold skull for a chest to take revenge on freaky demon guys. Freaky little show.
Starvengers (original title: Getter Robo G, 1975) originally ran for 90 episodes, and was ALSO a sequel to an anime first—Go Nagai’s original Getter Robo (1974), the first robot show where the giant robot resulted from the combination of smaller vehicles. A recent sequel, Change! Shin Getter Robo, will be released by ADV Films in July.
Danguard Ace (original title: Wakusei Robo Dangard A, or Planetary Robot Dangard A, 1977) originally had 56 episodes and was created by Star Blazers (Space Battleship Yamato) and Captain Harlock creator Leiji Matsumoto.
Spaceketeers (original title: SF Saiyuki Starzinger, 1978) originally ran for 64 episodes, was also created by Matsumoto, and was based on the Monkey King legend that Dragon Ball and numerous other shows (such as Bandai’s “Monkey Magic”, or to some degree, the more adult “Goku: Midnight Eye” series that Urban Vision recently released on video) were based upon. It also is the only one of the shows not to feature giant robots.
With ALL that info out of the way (culled from either having watched the shows in question or my handy copy of the 1994 book “The Complete Anime Guide” by Trish Ledoux and Doug Ranney), I’d like to point out that there were a heck of a lot of anime shows here in the States before Robotech. The aforementioned book lists at least fifteen different shows released prior to Robotech’s 1985 debut. Many were forgettable, but some—including Astro Boy (the first anime series EVER), Gigantor, Kimba the White Lion, Speed Racer, Battle of the Planets, Star Blazers, and Voltron—are still fondly remembered to this day.
To be honest, you can’t discount Voltron, since it was popular enough to succeed where Robotech would later fail—World Events Productions, the group that brought it to the U.S. actually commissioned new story-filler episodes that meshed its two component shows (Go Lion and Dairugger XV) together. However, it also failed where Robotech succeeded—the show was so heavily censored that people who were killed were either robots or were “badly wounded”, alcohol always became “juice drinks” or something like that, and some subplots seemed to go out the window for one reason or another and ended up being glossed over by the dub. Watching it today, many of the censors are comically laughable, whereas Robotech’s few major censors are merely jarring at their worst. (I refer here to when Zor Prime shoots down the last of the Robotech Masters—he fires the shot, then we cut STRAIGHT to the Robotech Master’s fallen body. It’s a jarring and simply edit, but the meaning is left WHOLLY intact—he shot the bastard in the back, plain and simple.)
Robotech didn’t pave the way for anime to come on television. It did open up the minds of an entire generation of “cartoon” fans to the heights that animation could reach, however, in terms of design and storytelling. No, unfortunately the road to U.S. TV anime was paved by Pokemon and supported by the late-coming success of Dragon Ball Z. (God knows it was on TV long enough before it finally took off ...) Combined with its recent success on video (paved by Ranma 1/2, supported by Neon Genesis Evangelion and any number of features like Ghost in the Shell and the Street Fighter II animated movie), it is this unpleasant little show’s fault that we have become inundated with mangled anime as of late (i.e. Cardcaptors, Fox’s version of Escaflowne, and an unfortunate number of up-and-coming newcomers).
One last thought before I retire to bed, in reference to BlueTrim‘s cousin’s comments: Gundam was, in fact, the first to take pilotable robots in general seriously as tools of war. Before Gundam, giant robots were super-powered, god-like weapons piloted by young kids or teens to take on demon hordes or Godzilla-style monsters. However, Gundam (not Gundam Wing—GW is a Gundam spin-off which was released in Japan in 1995 and is currently available in the U.S. on VHS & DVD) made giant robots into military hardware for the first time in anime, and was heavily influenced by the powered armor used in Robert Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers. However, Macross (the first generation of Robotech) was revolutionary for extending this “serious tool of war” concept to transforming robots—specifically the VF-1 Valkyrie, still one of the most realistic transforming robot models ever created. Before that, no self-contained transforming robot (that is, a robot that transforms without any additional parts into another form) was ever used in a semi-realistic war setting. (The original RX-78-2 Gundam did combine with a seperate fighter craft to form alternate combat modes, but most of those were ridiculous-looking and were an amalgam of two seperate craft.)
And to further correct your cousin, BlueTrim, in the late ‘80s Gundam’s popularity actually soared to its peak, starting with the release of the second Gundam TV series—Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (50 episodes)—in 1985, and continuing into the second sequel the following year (Mobile Suit Gundam Double Zeta, 47 episodes), and a theatrical film that wrapped up the series’ original heroes’ story in 1988 (Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack). Ever since, Gundam has been an institution the size of Star Trek, while Macross (as far as I can tell) has long been more akin to something like Battlestar Galactica or Babylon 5—well known within the genre fanbase, but not nearly as well-recognized outside it. (At least, when my sister mentioned it to the mother of her host family when she was staying abroad in Japan, the woman had never heard of it, but naturally knew about Gundam.)
