‘Macross Frontier’ is now available on Hulu.
What with, almost, all macro now available on Hulu, it’s worth revisiting the saga’s huge popularity and what that means now Gundam internationally.
In the early 80s, macro came on the scene and pretty much blew most of its competition out of the water. Gundam it had just managed to get off the floor after the TV series had flopped, and a single shot of a film trilogy and model kits had saved it.
macroon the other hand, it tackled the true new robot craze head-on, not only with its narrative, but also with the more believable handling of its mech, created by Shoji Kawamori and Kazutaka Miyatake. This was then supported by amazing transformable toys and model kits, along with something Gundam and the other anime mecca was missing: a large amount of music.
Gundam and its ilk worked because its mech design suited the tendencies of super robots and real robots. He channeled elements of the samurai into his mecha design, and the anime was mainly there to promote sales of the mecha model kits.
macro it was a very different animal in comparison. Not only did it have the right kind of military-leaning designs, but it also ditched all the samurai elements and treated the mech like actual vehicles.
The fact that the VF-1 Valkyrie was very clearly inspired by the F-14 Tomcat also helped establish its mechanics in the minds of viewers. macro it was also linked to the transformative robotic toy craze of the early 80s in Japan Diaklon AND Micromanon which many of the same mechanism designers worked.
So why does this hasty history lesson have anything to do with today’s global anime market?
Gundam it didn’t really and properly come west until 10-15 years ago. Yes, some spin-off series were released, but they weren’t from the main Universal Century timeline. Consequently, the cultural backbone of Gundam it was not established in the US until recently.
You also still have the problem that Gundam The design of the mechanism is still channeling elements of samurai armor even today, which is great for Asia, but there is less cultural overlap with the US.
In fact, Gundam has covered a lot of ground in the last decade due to the use of its model kits, which the anime, now more widespread outside of Japan, helps to promote.
In contrast, macro turned to the West in the mid-80s as Roboticsand many of the mechanisms also ended in BattleTech and later MechWarrior games. The mechanisms are also based on American military aircraft, for the most part, and have a much greater cultural scope compared to Gundam and his samurai design motifs.
That means macro has been part of the cultural background in the US for much longer than that Gundam and it makes more cultural sense.
This means that, after many decades, macro the boom of the 1980s may happen again in the US.
However, much of this still depends on merchandising, and a large part of the toys and model kits macro handled by Bandai, who do not own the intellectual property for macro and thus are less motivated to promote it Gundamwhich they own. The other aspect of this is that the original macro TV series and movie Do you remember love? are still landlocked in Japan.
These points are by no means trivial obstacles, but the difference now is that almost all of them macro is available to stream on Hulu. There are also many other companies involved in the marketing of toys and model kits, and we haven’t even touched on the huge musical component to it. macro
In short, the next few years will be very interesting, and if people think Gundam it’s locked outside of asia, they really don’t know their anime mech history at all.
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