It'll Never Fly

I finished watching the original 3 seasons of Robotech the other day, and I thought I’d come out of hibernation to tell all y’all what I thought.

I watched Robotech as a kid, and remember it being really cool. It had fighter planes that could transform into giant robots and back again, and motorcycles that could turn into battle armour while driving. Like most things one remembers about their childhood, it’s never as good when you go back to revisit it 20 years later. I had long forgotten a lot of the specific details about Robotech, only that there was a guy named Rand, some blonde chick, some other guy, the cool motorcycles, and an enemy called the Invid. Apparently, everything I remembered about Robotech was in the third season, and that it was probably my favourite.

Now, after a nearly 20 year Robotech drought, having watched the entire series back-to-back on DVD, I have to say the 3rd season is probably my least favourite. Sure the motorcycles are still cool, and the Invid are a great opponent, but it was the thing that 7-year-old kids don’t pay attention to that 27-year-old kids do that made the 3rd fall short in my eyes. And that is the plot. There were far too many episodes where the group would end up in a town, discover some threat to the town, overcome or defeat said threat, and move on to the next town. I can’t really blame Harmony Gold. They were using whatever material they could from Genesis Climber Mospeada, which seems to have been left pretty much intact. I guess any failings I have with The New Generation are because of apparent shortcomings in Mospeada.

I would have much rather had Harmony Gold stick to the episodes having to do with the trek to Reflex Point, but that probably would’ve shortened season 3 considerably.

All in all, I think season 2 was the best. It seemed to be the most consistent as far as sticking to the plot and keeping the big picture in mind. It was also the most heavily edited from its original, Super Dimension Calvary Southern Cross. No slight against Macross, which was the basis for the first season of Robotech, and went on to spawn many wildly successful spin-offs, sequels, books, etc…, but speaking from within the confines of just the three seasons, The Robotech Masters had just the right mix of character development and action. Season 1 was quite action packed, but suffered from the same plight affecting season 3; too many episodes that just had no bearing on the overall plot. Plus, that stupid ditz, Minmei, annoyed the hell out of me.

It seems ADV Films has started releasing re-mastered versions of the Robotech series. Might be worth looking into.

If you enjoyed Robotech, you might also like Robotech: BattleCry, Z.O.E., and Z.O.E.: 2nd Runner.

Damn, I can’t get past 23.7 seconds.

Just got my notice in the mail today from Register.com to renew my domains. I’m going to try transferring them over to Go Daddy and save myself a few BGMs. Hopefully, my domains won’t disappear into the ether and turn up as porn sites somewhere.

I’ve downloaded the beta of OmniWeb 5, and fixed the style glitch that was causing my site to not render properly with it. Odd that both Safari 1.0.1 and Firebird 0.7 didn’t have a problem. I thought OmniWeb 5 and Safari were supposed to be practically the same.

Also, I’ve tried out Unison some more, and will be posting an update to my review fairly soon that lists some corrections, as well as more enhancement requests and compliments.

Update: John Gruber’s review of the OmniWeb 5 beta resolves the confusion I had over Safari 1.0 and OmniWeb 5.

I’m in the process of trying to limit the amount of cruft in my blog entry URLs. It’s involving some minor rewrites to the code that generates the links as well the code that parses the incoming URL. There may be broken links or strange link behaviour while I migrate to the new method and phase out the old one.