Macross

• 1. Introduction

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  Macross is a Japanese science fiction anime franchise about giant transforming robots, and its story begins with a wreck. An alien starship, designated ASS-1, crashes on South Ataria island. Humanity picks through the wreckage and learns to copy what it finds. The borrowed science is called Overtech. It produces robot fighters known as variable fighters and destroids, a faster-than-light space fold drive, and a repaired ship that is renamed Super Dimension Fortress-One Macross.

  Studio Nue and Artland created the franchise in 1982, and it kept growing. It now counts four TV series, nine movies, six original video animations, and several light novel and manga series, all sponsored by Big West. Beyond the screen sit 40 video games, two crossover games, and a wide range of physical merchandise.

  A few puzzles run through that history. Why was a warship carrying a whole city nearly named after a Shakespeare play? How did a pop singer end up at the center of an interstellar war? Who really built the humans and the giants who fight them? And why were later series kept from audiences outside Japan?

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• 2. A Name from Macbeth

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  Battle City Megarōdo was the first title the creators chose, and it was a pun. Read one way, it suggests Megaload, a spacecraft holding an entire city of people. Read another way, it suggests Megaroad, the long journey through space back to Earth. Japanese transliteration of the sound lets both meanings sit in one name.

  Big West Advertising, one of the project's sponsors, had a different idea. A fan of Shakespeare, the company wanted both the series and the spacecraft to be called Macbeth. The compromise was Macross. In Japanese it sounds close to Macbeth, and it still echoes the original title.

  The word itself is another bit of wordplay. It joins the prefix macro, a nod to the ship's size beside ordinary human vehicles, with the idea of the distance the survivors must cross. Next to the alien warships in the story, though, the vessel is a relatively small gun destroyer. Fans usually shorten the full name to SDF-1, or simply call it The Macross because it was the first.

  Every later series kept the habit, using the word Macross for its main capital ship.

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• 3. Machines That Transform

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  The VF-1 is the aircraft that gave the Valkyrie its name. Franchise creator Shōji Kawamori and Kazutaka Miyatake were the primary designers of this family of transformable fighters. Each one can switch between three forms: a jet or space fighter, a humanoid robot called a Battroid, and a hybrid of the two called Gerwalk. That last name is an acronym, short for Ground Effective Reinforcement of Winged Armament with Locomotive Knee-joint. Since the VF-1, the series has used Valkyrie as a generic label for all of its jet fighters.

  Kawamori had already tried the idea of vehicles that become robots with Diaclone in 1980. Macross is what made it popular. He went on to design transforming mecha for Transformers in 1986. By the mid-1980s the concept was spreading, carried by Macross: Do You Remember Love? in 1984 and Zeta Gundam in 1985 in Japan. In the West it spread through Robotech and Transformers, and Transformers later influenced the Hollywood movie industry.

  The pilots of these machines serve the U.N. Spacy, a fictional space military of the Earth Unified Government. The successor to the modern United Nations set it up to defend Earth against hostile aliens. It fought Space War I against an extraterrestrial race called the Zentradi, and later moved into interstellar colonization and peacekeeping for off-world settlements. The name Spacy blends Space with Army or Navy, and Japanese and English-language sources lean toward one or the other.

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• 4. Folding Space

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  First Lieutenant Hayase Misa of the U.N. Spacy gives the clearest measure of what space folding costs. During Space War I, which ran from 2009 to 2012, she explains that one hour inside super dimension space equals roughly ten days in normal space.

  The method works by exchange. A spacecraft first swaps places with super dimension space, also called subspace. That space is then swapped with the space at the destination, so the trip takes very little time. Crews call entering this realm a fold in. Leaving it is a defold, or a fold out.

  Macross Frontier, one of the latest TV series, adds limits to the picture. It introduces fold faults, also described as dislocations, which slow fold travel further and interfere with fold communications. It also explains that the energy needed grows geometrically with the mass of the object being folded. That is why very large objects cannot easily be folded across vast distances.

  The Zentradi who faced the U.N. Spacy across those folds were not an accident of nature.

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• 5. The Protoculture

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  Official sources date the rise of the Protoculture to 500,000 years ago. The idea first took shape during pre-production of The Super Dimension Fortress Macross, when the creators were researching cultural studies to build the plot. In the story, this purportedly extinct humanoid race was the first advanced one in the universe. It created both the Zentradi and Homo sapiens.

  About 2800 years after the Protoculture civilization began, its colonization phases produced an Interstellar Republic, similar to a galactic empire, that covered much of the Milky Way. Sixty years later a civil war split the Republic. One faction created super-Zentradi forces. Interdimensional beings later possessed those forces, and they became known as the Protodeviln, which feed on the life energy of Protoculture and Zentradi alike. Some Protoculture and Zentradi were also brainwashed into the Supervision Army.

  The Supervision Army kept fighting both peoples. The Protoculture revoked the prime directive that had banned the Zentradi from attacking it, and the war grew more intense. To avoid extinction, the Protoculture seeded uninhabited planets through pantropy and avoided conflict where they could. That effort included engineering Homo sapiens on Earth by mixing Protoculture genes with native ones. The goal was a sub-Protoculture race to prepare Earth for a future colonization, but anti-Interstellar Republic warships destroyed the genetic engineering crew almost at once.

  The final blow came when the Protoculture lost control of the Zentradi. By 475,000 years ago they were believed extinct. Yet 10,000 years ago, remnants made contact with humans on Mayan Island. They re-engineered the native inhabitants so they could use the artifacts left behind. Those artifacts included the Bird Human bio-mecha, which was tasked with destroying humanity if people were still at war.

  Macross 7, a sequel with only three returning characters from the original series, was the first to touch this metaplot.

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• 6. Songs and Singers

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  Lynn Minmay, voiced by Mari Iijima, was a singer and not a soldier. Earlier mecha anime centered on the combatants. Macross told its war from the viewpoint of civilians. Minmay became the first fictional idol singer to win major real-world success, and the theme song "Do You Remember Love?" from the film of the same name reached number seven on the Oricon charts in Japan.

  Later entries pushed the idea further. In Macross Plus, the virtual idol Sharon Apple is an artificial intelligence program that takes the form of an intergalactic pop star. In Macross 7, the virtual band Fire Bomber became a commercial success and spawned multiple CDs in Japan. Macross set the template for later virtual idols of the early 21st century, such as Hatsune Miku and Kizuna Ai.

  Music runs through almost every Macross title, often by shaping how the antagonists react to it. The protagonist is frequently caught in a love triangle with a series' idol, most notably Minmay. This approach also marks a difference from Gundam, a real robot mecha series that Kawamori admires. Gundam is far more political and direct about the horrors of war. Each Macross TV series never portrays its antagonists as inherently evil, and it shows love, culture, and music resolving their conflicts. Minor themes include culture shock, capitalism, coming of age, and nostalgia.

  Misa Hayase offered a second break from convention. In Super Dimension Fortress Macross she is one of the main commanders of the battleship, the commanding officer of fighter pilot Hikaru Ichijyo, and later his love interest. Kawamori came up with the scenario because he had not seen it in any Hollywood movie. Top Gun arrived in 1986 with a similar setup, and Kawamori remarked: "Many people pointed out that later films like Top Gun copied that idea and setting, as well as including the combination of many songs and fighters too."

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• 7. Decades of Sequels

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  A feature film released in 1984 retold the first war with a condensed storyline and cutting-edge animation. Within the franchise it is treated as a "historical drama," comparable to World War II films in the real world. Macross Plus and Macross 7 reveal that such a movie was made after Space War I. Kawamori explained the two versions this way: "The real Macross is out there, somewhere. If I tell the story in the length of a TV series, it looks one way, and if I tell it as a movie-length story, it's organized another way." An edited, English-dubbed version reached video as Clash of the Bionoids.

  Macross II, from 1992, is the one animated project made without Studio Nue's direct involvement, and Studio Nue declared it a parallel-world story. Since Macross Zero in 2002, production has been handled only by Nue and Satelight, where Kawamori is a key member.

  In March 2007, Studio Victor held a casting call for the heroine Ranka Lee in an untitled new series. Eighteen-year-old Megumi Nakajima won the nationwide singing and acting audition. The project was first called Macross 25, and a trailer shown at the 25th anniversary concert revealed the tentative title Macross F. At that concert Kawamori said the story would be set around 2070 AD, and he announced that Yoko Kanno would co-compose the music.

  The pilot aired on the 23rd of December 2007. The series was finally set in 2059 aboard a new colony fleet called Macross Frontier. Satelight produced it, and regular broadcast began on the 4th of April 2008 on the MBS channel in Japan. The last of its 25 episodes aired on the 25th of September 2008.

  A 2014 rerun of Macross Frontier ended with a teaser for another TV series, later titled Macross Delta. A casting call again chose the main singer, and the cast was revealed at an event on the 29th of October 2015. Delta is set 59 years after the war with the Zentradi began. Its plot follows a rage virus spreading through a star system, and singing idols and valkyrie fighters work together to stop it.

  A further series was announced to premiere in 2018 but had not been released as of September 2024. In 2023, a new Macross series to be animated by Sunrise was announced, and it is unclear whether it is the same project. On the 2nd of March 2025, Big West and Bandai Namco Filmworks announced that auditions for the next series' songstress had begun. First-round entries were open until the 30th of April to women aged 13-22. FlyingDog and Lantis will handle the music, and the first-round audition song is "Ai to Ai" by Fuwari.

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• 8. Robotech and the Rights War

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  Robotech: The Macross Saga reached North American screens in 1985, adapting Super Dimension Fortress Macross as the first saga of the Robotech television series, which aired through 1986. Robotech spawned its own franchise and was influential in the Western world, helping introduce the anime medium to North America.

  Between 1999 and 2003, Harmony Gold filed trademarks covering the distribution of Macross merchandise and media outside Japan. It had bought its international rights from Tatsunoko Production. A Japanese court ruling against Studio Nue and Big West found that Tatsunoko held only the international distribution rights to The Super Dimension Fortress Macross, with no claim on the rest of the franchise. Harmony Gold argued the ruling did not apply to its international rights because it was issued in Japan. It kept asserting its claim through cease and desist letters, so later Macross series were not distributed outside Japan.

  The video games felt the same chill. All were released only in Japan, with three exceptions: a Takatoku Toys handheld electronic game distributed by Incoming Trading, a Banpresto arcade game licensed by Fabtek, and a Bandai Visual PlayStation game. The North American localization of that last game was cancelled, probably because of copyright issues involving Harmony Gold.

  On the 1st of March 2021, Big West, Studio Nue, and Harmony Gold reached an agreement. Harmony Gold would stop hindering Big West's distribution of Macross properties outside Japan. In return, it would be allowed to release its upcoming Robotech film in Japan.

  Streaming followed. Starting in August 2024, Disney+ offered Macross worldwide outside the US through its Star hub, except for Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Do You Remember Love?, which stayed available only in Japan. On the 13th of January 2025 the franchise reached the US through Hulu. Disney+ carries it only in Japan and some Asian and English-speaking countries, with English, Chinese, and Korean subtitles, and no expansion has been confirmed.

  The name has even travelled beyond television. A geological feature on Charon, one of Pluto's moons, is informally known as the Macross Chasma.

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