Genesis Climber Mospeada

Rating:
Summary: Okay series, weak subtitles
Review: A few words about the revisionist history I see in the Amazon review above. In recent years, the story has been propagated that the three series that made up Robotech were all failures in their Japanese incarnations. While it's true that Southern Cross tanked, Macross was the most successful animated series in Japan EVER at the time, and Mospeada, while not a huge hit, wasn't a bomb, either. It had a loyal fan base, it spawned an impressive toy line, and even a retrospective special set one year later entitled "Love Live Alive," featuring videos set to new songs by the Yellow Belmont character, along with some new scenes of life after the Inbit invasion. This ongoing smear campaign seems to have surfaced right around the time of the rerelease of Robotech on DVD, as its creators still, nearly 20 years later, try to excuse and/or justify their re-write job, hoping young fans won't know the facts.

Like many, I grew up watching Robotech. This series was a favorite of mine-when I was sixteen. It now seems a rather run-of-the-mill alien invasion story with some really nice mech designs. The differences from the Robotech version are not terribly huge most of the time, though some episodes were rewritten quite a bit. My fave episode from the Robotech version, about a half-cyborg killer named Dusty Ayers (Rainy Boy in the original) turns out to have been re-written extensively, and was never a revenge story at all. Robotech's writers apparently thought they should whitewash the moral ambiguity of the story. Typical. And the hero is no longer a borderline psycho; he doesn't name the amnesia victim they find after his dead girlfriend at all. On the other hand, I have to say that the American version of the Annie/Mint character actually was better; in Robotech, she occasionally spoke a sentence that WASN'T about getting married. And having a real female actress for Yellow's singing voice isn't even a tiny bit believable. It's an average series; not great, nothing bad. The bikes are still awesome. It just doesn't affect me like it once did.

The main complaint I have is with the subtitles themselves. I don't know where ADV gets this aggrandized rep, but the subs are often incorrect, or so clumsily worded as to be unintelligible. There's also no excuse for having so many subtitles onscreen at once that they fill half the screen. Six lines of text at once is sloppy and absurd. You should at least have the option to turn off the phonetic "karaoke" subs for the songs, which I've no interest in singing along with. A few names are spelled in a rather iffy way, too. "Stig" is supposed to be "Stick," and "Houquet" is a desperate attempt to get a remotely feminine-sounding name out of "Fuke." Plus Mint's last name is either "Rouble" or "Rubble," depending on what episode you're watching. Amateurish. One would hope for better quality out of such a supposedly respected outfit.

Rating:
Summary: A Surprisingly Different Experience.
Review: I grew up with the Robotech Trilogy version of the Mospeada television series and didn't think I needed the unaltered, Japanese original. But, I must say it's like watching a completely new story. Not that there are many differences between the Robotech and the original show. It's all about a difference between what American audiences and Japanese audiences wanted from their television shows. The music and dialogue is different. The whole mood of the two series' are polar opposites in some respects. It's surprising how different the same show can atually be.