Hi,
Forgive me if this has been discussed before (it probably has), but I’ve searched on Google and couldn’t find anything about it. I just signed up here to ask this question as I’m sure someone here will know the answer for sure.
I used to watch this series in the mid-1980s in my country. It was dubbed to my native language, but otherwise the same as the original TV version of the U.S. Harmony Gold Robotech series.
I recently wanted to watch it again after all these years, so I purchased the Region 1 set ROBOTECH: THE MACROSS SAGA. The first thing I noticed when starting to play the first DVD is that the intro is totally different. Some scenes are the same, but many have been replaced with random scenes from the series. What is the reason for this? Were Harmony Gold not able to acquire the rights to some of the material from the original shows used for Robotech and therefore had to use random footage in place of some of the scenes when reconstructing it for DVD, or what?
I also noticed the credits during the introduction looks nothing like the original. The fonts are different, the credits appear in different locations, there are new sound effects and cross faded fonts and shadowy effects, etc. Basically not much looks the same.
Even if the entire intro was reconstructed from scratch (or were these changes deliberate?), it looks as if Harmony Gold did not even try to make the intro identical to the original one.
I haven’t really watched the show yet, because these changes annoyed me greatly, but I’m fixing to watch it soon. Anyways, I’ll ask this too, just so I’ll know what to look out for: Since the intro is so different, can I expect the show itself being the same way? Random changes here and there? If yes, what changes were made?
Last question: Is there any DVD version of Robotech (in any country) that does include the original show and opening / credits etc? I noticed there are many editions of the show, in many countries (UK, Germany, France, Russia etc) - are they all 100% identical (apart from the language track) and are all based on the U.S. DVD edition with the fake intro?
Are all U.S. releases of Robotech the same or do some differ in any shape or form?
I found some DVD release for sale on Amazon called “ROBOTECH: THE CLASSIC COLLECTION VOLUME 1” which contains (according to the front cover) “Original U.S. Broadcast Version”, but it says not available. It’s also not on eBay. Was this set never released or what? If yes, where can I get it—and if I buy this, do I get the classic intro? Was there more than Volume 1 released?
Thanks for reading and I’d appreciate any answers to my questions from you experts.