Category: TV
Robotech: The Gateway Anime
I was an impressionable 10 year old when the animated TV series Robotech first premiered here in 1985. Back then the TV landscape was very much different that it was today, especially with kid’s cartoons. Now, cartoons air 24/7 on a variety of specific channels and via streaming services too. But back in 1985 cartoons only really aired Saturday mornings and for a few hours after school on one or two channels.
I hate to admit it but looking back for the most part cartoons of 30 years ago weren’t very good. Until I started rewatching cartoons as an adult I thought most of the ones I used to watch as a kid were brilliant. And while I might still love say classic G.I. Joe and Transformers cartoons, the stories these two shows told were cliched and childish where even though characters were trying to kill one and other no one really got hurt and no one ever died.
That’s part of the reason Robotech is so memorable to me, why it’s so different from its contemporaries.
Robotech told one long story over 85 episodes and three different series. Characters in Robotech grew and changed and shockingly enough some actually died. Watching Robotech again today I’m amazed at just what weighty subjects the show told. It’s almost like Robotech was an adult themed show in the guise of a children’s cartoon. And the design and art of the show was like nothing I’d ever seen before outside feature film animation.
Years before computer 3D effects would make such things easy Robotech had jets that could turn into robots fighting alien ships which must’ve taken countless hours to animate by hand.
The story of Robotech is deceptively simple. On the eve of a third world war a gigantic alien spacecraft crashes onto the Earth and the governments of the world unite to explore and figure out uses for this new technology. Fast forward a few years to the launch of the SDF-1, a gigantic ship built from the wreck and tech of this ship when the aliens who lost the ship in the first place come looking for it. But when we use this new “Robotech” technology to fight back it malfunctions and sends the ship to Pluto where the survivors of the battle must fight their way through the solar system to get home.
And this was just the first series. The other two dealt with the continuation of this war into the future to a post apocalyptic end.
To a kid who’d grown up assured via cartoons that the good guys always win and that the bad guys can always parachute out of their exploding helicopters before hitting the ground, Robotech came as a bit of a revelation. I’d never seen anything like it before and I’m not sure there’d been any show up to that point to deal with all the stuff in Robotech before.
Even so, there were only a few of us at school who were into Robotech. The show aired at the staggering early time of 6:30AM against things like the early news and the farm report. It was on so early that I used to get up, watch Robotech and go back to bed for an hour before I had to really get up for school.
So, at least in our area, Robotech was never as popular as the other cartoons even though there were the usual tie-in comic books, toys and action figures to go along with the series. After the original Robotech series ended that was pretty much it for Robotech for the next few years.
While Robotech is still very much outside the mainstream for people like me who grew up with the show or came to discover it later it was world changing. I don’t think after seeing Robotech I could take other cartoons that didn’t take on real-world topics like Robotech as seriously as before. Where’s the fun in watching a show like Voltron that also had gigantic robots facing off against aliens when each week’s episode was almost a mirror of what had come before when I could be watching Robotech instead?
It’s been a few years since the last time I sat down to watch episodes of Robotech and probably decades since I’ve watched the series as a whole. But if this is any indication as to how much the series meant, no, means to me whenever I play a clip of the Robotech title sequence and the synthetic violin strings start up there’s a chill of excitement that goes up my spine where I’m 10 years old again up too early to catch my favorite cartoon on TV.
More Robotech > Super-Deluxe Japanamation!
Quotes of note – Hannibal: “Ko No Mono”
Hannibal Lecter: “Traditionally during this meal we are to place shrouds over out heads hiding our faces from God. I don’t hide from God.”
Margot Verger: “I’m not opposed to a male influence — as long as it’s not my brother. He’s not good with children.”
Hannibal Lecter: “Occasionally I drop a teacup to shatter on the floor. On purpose. I’m not satisfied when it doesn’t gather itself up again. Someday, perhaps a cup will come together.”
Mason Verger: “I’m concerned about the next generation of Vergers, aren’t you?”
Margot Verger: “I’m just trying to survive this generation.”
The Assets, the perfect model of dysfunctional network TV
Earlier this year ABC premiered the series The Assets based on real life CIA agent Aldrich Ames (Paul Rhys) who in the 1980s was working for the CIA but spying for the KGB. As CIA assets in Russia begin being arrested and executed for treason, CIA officer Sandy Grimes (Jodie Whittaker) hunts the mole not knowing that the traitor is literally sitting a few feet from her desk.
Never heard of The Assets? You’re not alone.
The Assets was John le Carré-lite and I was genuinely interested in where this eight episode limited series was headed. Except after two low rated airings ABC pulled The Assets from their lineup and effectively canceled the show.
Which was bad enough, only I never got the sense that ABC was all that keen on airing The Assets in the first place.
I’m a guy who watches a lot of TV and actively follows the comings and goings of TV series as a hobby. In any a given week I probably watch something like eight to 10 hours of new programming, but in all that programming I only saw a promo for The Assets once. And that was on a cable channel, not ABC. And I never saw any web or magazine ads for the show either.
This totally mystifies me. If ABC didn’t have confidence in The Assets then why put it on the air in the first place? And when they made the decision to air it why didn’t they promote it properly to at least give it a chance of finding some footing in the highly competitive modern television landscape?
This sort of thing doesn’t happen on either basic or pay cable. There, you know that if you invest time in a series it’s not going to be cancelled out from under you in the middle of a season. It’s not that cable series don’t get cancelled, they do. It’s that they’re only cancelled and pulled from the lineup after a full season has aired, not just a handful of episodes.
There used to be a day when the networks were known for airing quality and innovative drama series, but other than a few interesting shows those days are long gone. Now the networks have abandoned quality and interesting dramas to the cable channels and instead rely on tried and true (and boring) procedural shows where the good guys always win and the plots are all recycled from shows stretching back over the last 60+ years to the westerns of ‘ol.
Which means that viewers have slowly started not taking chances on watching new network TV series like The Assets and skip them entirely. Why take a chance on any network drama when most that airs there is dreck anyway and anything that might be interesting could be cancelled and pulled from the schedule at any moment and be gone for good?
With The Assets being just eight episodes long and me being interested in the material I was in for the long haul with the series to the end. An end that I don’t think will ever come.
And to be honest I’m not sure if The Assets was destined to be one of the great series or not. Just two episodes of TV isn’t much to go on but just the idea that a network would cancel something before it had a chance to find its footing or build an audience from word of mouth is frustrating.
There used to be a time when the networks would “burn off” the remaining episodes of cancelled shows like The Assets during the summer TV season when there was really nothing else on, but now that the summer season is full of reality shows that doesn’t much happen anymore. What will probably happen is that ABC will instead run the remaining six episodes of The Assets online before the shows slips into total obscurity, and/or the entire The Assets series will end up on the Amazon or Netflix streaming services at some point in the future.
It’s like the networks are getting really good at training the viewers to not watch their channels, so good job ABC, lesson learned! Visit me online at DangerousUniverse.com.
Ten years on and Battlestar Galactica is still one of the best
Back in late 2003 the newspaper the Fort Wayne Reader was just starting up and I was asked to write a pop-culture column for them. Work was started on the paper months in advance of the first issue being published and one of the things the publishers of the Reader did in those early days was to reach out to TV networks and cable channels for screeners of TV series and movies to review for the paper.
That’s how I got to watch the new Battlestar Galactica TV mini-series a few weeks before everyone else.
Though the copy we received was missing some special effects shots in places, I was none-the-less “blown away” at how good the mini-series was when I was totally prepared for it to be a bust since it had suffered from months and months of negative publicity beforehand. Fans, myself included, didn’t like the idea that a sci-fi classic was being rebooted without the participation of the original creator nor the fact that one of the lead characters of the original series was now going to be played by a (gasp!?) woman!
I think what we forgot to take into account was that it’s the 21st century so why not shake things up a bit and have a woman play a role originally meant for a man? And while we might have some nostalgia for the original 1970s Battlestar Galactica series, looking back in retrospect the series wasn’t all that great so there was a lot that could be improved on.
But from the moment in the new mini-series that the Cylons came pouring out of space in search of vengeance against losing a war decades earlier against humanity I was hooked and couldn’t wait for the next part of the story. Simply put, BSG was one of the best sci-fi shows ever and probably one of the best TV series of all time too. It’s certainly one of the best series of the first decade of the 21st century. BSG dealt with all sorts of taboo subjects like abortion, terrorism, genocide, military rule, etc., etc., etc., that was all done in the guise of sci-fi so it didn’t come off as that controversial. In fact I’m not sure there’s been ANY series sci-fi or not since that’s dealt with as many heavy subjects as BSG did throughout its run.
And let’s not forget to what the TV landscape was like when the BSG series premiered in ’04. Shows like Lost, Veronica Mars, The Wire, The Sopranos, Arrested Development and the UK version of The Office were all airing new episodes when the BSG series started. To say this was an extremely special time for TV would not be an understatement. I don’t think we’ve had such quality of shows on all at once since then.
I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that the Sci-Fi Channel didn’t have much hope in BSG attracting viewers, that’s why the BSG mini-series premiered in December of ’03 with the regular series not starting up until months later in October of ’04. I think Sci-Fi was caught by surprise that the mini-series was so well regarded by critics and fans alike, was watched by so many and received as many accolades as it did. Heck, the mini-series received three Emmy nominations — when does that happen EVER for sci-fi?
One of the things I liked best about BSG was that series creator Ronald D. Moore began recording commentary podcasts that would be released after each new episode aired. These podcasts revealed behind the scenes goings on at the show, what was cut from each episode and where scenes were filmed and how things were tied together. I can only imagine the amount of work Moore put into each episode and then to also invest time recording podcasts on top of all his other duties too was immense.
Now that I think about it, the only way I can relate to how much I loved the series, how much I enjoyed each new episode, was that BSG was so good it literally hurt when each new episode ended.
In the last decade the Sci-Fi Channel, now Syfy, hasn’t aired anything to the quality of BSG. While other networks draw viewers with shows like The Walking Dead (AMC), Doctor Who (BBC America), American Horror Story (FX) and Falling Skies (TNT), all sci-fi/horror series that would seemingly be at home on Syfy, instead that channel has come to rely on cheap reality shows like Fangasm, Ghost Mine and Heroes of Cosplay and cheaply made movies like Sharknado in order to fill the hours. And while these shows might garner some viewers, they’ve also driven away hoards of sci-fi loving viewers like me to other channels. I used to love the SCI-Fi Channel for its programming like BSG, Farscape, MST3K and Sliders to name a few. But honestly, Syfy has changed so much that I can’t say that I’ve watched all that much on that channel the last five years.
But all is not lost. There are several shows scheduled on Syfy in 2014 that look like they might be a return to the greatness of series like BSG. One of which is a Ronald D. Moore created Helix that’s set to debut Friday, January 10. The same time BSG used to air “back in the day.”
All episodes of Battlestar Galactica are available for streaming on Netflix and Amazon and the series is also available on Blu-ray.