Robotech Remembrances: Sentinels
As an interlude of sorts in between rewatching the anime series that happened to have been made parts of Robotech, I steeped myself that much more fully in the indulgent nostalgia this whole experiment might well boil down to and watched not an integral predecessor to one Saturday morning cartoon from the 1980s but a tragic, fragmentary follow-up to it. In contemplating this beforehand, I had wondered a little if "Robotech II: The Sentinels" helps prove the raw power of nostalgia and "first viewings." At the time they were attempting it, I didn't know that the people whose "post-production" work had formed a project they called Robotech were convinced they could finance new animation in Japan to elaborate on their story. (After all, the people who had made Voltron got some new episodes animated through their own efforts...) Instead, I first read an adaptation of a project brought without my knowing it to a crashing halt through a toy company pulling out and foreign exchange rates shifting. Perhaps, though, having next to no "visual reality" at the time to back up the new set of Robotech novels made it easier to fixate on a string of quibbling objections to certain things happening in them (including how a small point I found quite interesting in the original novelizations seemed to have been contradicted without a real explanation...) Then, the first group of other Robotech fans I came in contact with wound up pretty dismissive of "The Sentinels" as just one more example of the stuff that followed the original series but couldn't be interpreted through a "close to hard SF" viewpoint, for all that the video made from the three episodes' worth of animation actually finished reinforced the new chronology they had worked up but just happened to leave off at a point where they could finally envision events following it completely unlike what had been intended to follow it...
However, I suppose that in the end I'm no more intent on being offended by the concatenation of contingencies that shaped the half-life of "The Sentinels" than by the preceding and interlocking concatenation that shaped Robotech itself. As well, it was somehow refreshing to encounter an altogether new perspective from someone who had a chance to encounter Robotech quite recently, became quite intrigued by a small subset of its characters, and then decided that their development in "The Sentinels" was more satisfying than in the Macross franchise itself... It's easy enough to be aware that the video doesn't get its apparent main characters (most of who have new and somehow unflattering haircuts due to the need to redesign their appearances) anywhere other than to a wedding, and to contrast that to the action in the first three episodes of any one of Robotech's three component anime series, but somehow I find myself inclined right now to be kindly and remind myself that "The Sentinels" was meant to run five days a week in syndication where the anime series only showed one episode a week. Still, I'm not quite sure all of this genuinely affects my contemplations of a sort of "Platonic ideal" of Robotech, the intellectual game of reconciling things, or looking ahead to at least somewhat more substantial component anime series to follow.
However, I suppose that in the end I'm no more intent on being offended by the concatenation of contingencies that shaped the half-life of "The Sentinels" than by the preceding and interlocking concatenation that shaped Robotech itself. As well, it was somehow refreshing to encounter an altogether new perspective from someone who had a chance to encounter Robotech quite recently, became quite intrigued by a small subset of its characters, and then decided that their development in "The Sentinels" was more satisfying than in the Macross franchise itself... It's easy enough to be aware that the video doesn't get its apparent main characters (most of who have new and somehow unflattering haircuts due to the need to redesign their appearances) anywhere other than to a wedding, and to contrast that to the action in the first three episodes of any one of Robotech's three component anime series, but somehow I find myself inclined right now to be kindly and remind myself that "The Sentinels" was meant to run five days a week in syndication where the anime series only showed one episode a week. Still, I'm not quite sure all of this genuinely affects my contemplations of a sort of "Platonic ideal" of Robotech, the intellectual game of reconciling things, or looking ahead to at least somewhat more substantial component anime series to follow.