Reaction: Macross ...in English!!

Many moons ago I stumbled on a craptastic VHS tape at a local shop entitled "Macross: Clash of the Bionoids." To this day I'm not too sure what a "bionoid" is supposed to be, but I did discover that this was indeed arguably, the worst English-dubbed anime in the history of... well, dubbed anime. But this blog entry is not about that shameful edition of the Macross movie.

I'm going to talk a bit about the new English Macross DVD that's due out tomorrow. By way of a little inventory error at my local comicbook shop, I managed to snag a copy yesterday afternoon....

As you may have heard, Harmony Gold has spent years in legal battles protecting their alleged ownership of the Macross brand because of its inclusion in the 80's cult classic Robotech. For years they've tried to keep the original uneditted Macross locked away (and in its native Japan). So it came as a surprise that over 20 years down the line, HG would suddenly turn around and release, not only Macross uncut, but with remastered video and sound and in English to boot.... for the first time reverting our whiny brat "Rick Hunter" back to the original heroic "Ichijio Hikaru."

What amazed me, despite having followed the industry gossip for months, was to finally be able to hear the words from her own mouth: how a young Mari Ijima found herself a cult icon when she first recorded the role of the maiden "Lynn Minmay" for Macross... and then finding herself in a recording studio to do the English version of the same character 2 decades later.

The Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack was great - the dubbing... well, pretty good, poetic license aside (ADV-Films saw fit to include an interview with the translator so that he could defend certain choices he had to make; an altogether rare instance in the business). One complaint: seems that ADV didn't have all the original masters... one of the bonus features was the original 1984 dub of episode 1 (before the idea of chopping it up into Robotech was conceived) and that version has a piece of ambiance music during Minmay's first appearance at the air-show which was in the original Japanese track... however it is conspicuously absent in the new 5.1 rerecording. Speaking of which, I was also somewhat miffed that the Japanese track is actually a 2-channel stereo track and not a full 5.1 remix (I could've sworn the packaging said otherwise). Still lots of fun all around.

A minor side note - I went through some of the preview trailers on the disc and stumbled on the clip for Godannar. The clip is a hilarious summary of the first DVD release including an out-of-breath announcer trying to describe everything that's happened so far. Check out the site if you've got time. It looks like fun - lots of old-school giant robot action, cute anime girls (with suitably insane amounts of fan-service), stereotypical macho heroes trapped in goofy relationships... New school meets old school, if you ask me.