About 25 years back, someone gave me a bootleg copy of CLASH OF THE BIONOIDS, which, I understand, is a HEAVILY-butchered (to the point of near-incoherent) edited version of MACROSS: DO YOU REMEMBER LOVE? Many years later, I bought a copy of the latter. I've got both out and intend to watch them back-to-back, to really see and compare the difference.
They have a long tradition in Japan of redoing movies as TV shows and vice-versa, often with wildly drastic changes in the character designs, art styles, and stories. I believe in this case, MACROSS: DO YOU REMEMBER LOVE? came first, followed by a 26-episode MACROSS tv series. A major change was, in the feature, Earth was apparently wiped out in the opening scenes (or before them), while in the tv series, about 95% of Earth is wiped out, abut 20 episodes into the show. The scenes in episode 52 of STAR BLAZERS where Prince Zorda goes completely stark raving mad, and in retaliation for the Earth DARING to stand up to him, decides to destroy everything, was nothing compared to this. Zorda took out a few cities, but the attack in the MACROSS series actually destroyed most of the Earth's cities in a single episode. It was monstrous.
A VERY peculiar thing happened when MACROSS came to America... it was combined, after-the-fact, with 2 completely-unrelated other series, structured to make it look like one big, long epic saga, with 20-year-gaps between the 3 sections. And they renamed it ROBOTECH, to tie it in with a previously-existing-but-unrelated toy line. I don't think it really worked. Especially when they took the major concept of MACROSS-- "protoculture" (the extremely "alien" concept-- to the aliens-- of men and women living together and "co-operating"-- and turned it into some kind of "technology" thing. It just didn't make sense, it was never properly explained, and when I found out the original meaning of the word, before it was bastardized for the US market, it just made me shake my head in dismay.
What was infuriating to me was, the Philly station running the show, about halfway thru, decided to run 2 episodes a day. One in the morning, one in the afternoon. And you had to watch BOTH to follow the story. I swear, these TV programmers must all be drug addicts, the kind of decisions they make. Before I found out what had happened, I'd wound up recording EVERY-OTHER episode in the 2nd half of the run. (GRRRRRRRRR) So my collection, or half of it anyway, makes no damn sense at all to watch.
On top of that, I never did tape the 1st episode... though, about 15 years after I was taping the series, I ran across it on cable, by accident, before I knew it was coming on. So I was finally able to see it, but still don't have it on tape. I do have the comic-book based on that episode, though, and read it at least a year before the show ever turned up on American TV. (Go figure.)
MACROSS seems to be a TV series that was immensely popular when it first ran in Japan, but one which they've never quite managed to do a proper sequel to. SOUTHERN CROSS, which became the 2nd part of the "ROBOTECH" series in the US, was described to me as a "BAD sequel". ROBOTECH 2 got about 5 episodes into production before the studio doing it went bankrupt. MACROSS II-- completely unrelated to ROBOTECH 2-- also only lasted a handful of episodes.
Eternity Comics, for quite along while, was "adapting" the un-filmed ROBOTECH 2 as comic-books. it started out nice... but then, they got bogged down by countless specials, one-shots, mini-series spin-offs, etc. All of which diluted and distracted from the main story... which may account for why they NEVER FINISHED the story. If all that talent had focused on knocking out episodes of the main story, maybe the damned thing could have been finished by now.
By the way... most strange may be the ROBOTECH comic published briefly by DC, based on the toy line put out some time before MACROSS was ever bastardized and turned into "ROBOTECH" for the U.S. market. (This stuff gets so confusing, my friend Kevin, who's really into it, is the only one I know who can keep it all straight.)
