I Remember Love

I was watching TV one lazy morning in the summer vacation of 1997 when I chanced to switch channels to ABS-CBN. On the screen I saw an old anime or cartoon, I wasn't sure where it came from then, because the characters spoke in English and were of different nationalities, but they were drawn in an old anime style possibly from the '80s since the local networks were a decade or two behind with their anime. Later I learned that it was from 1982, two years before I was born. Notwithstanding the age disparities, I, a 12-year-old incoming high school student at that time, was mesmerized by the fighter planes in the show. It was just a few years earlier that I had watched Top Gun and I remembered how its combination of music and visuals made a pulsating awesome depiction of high-speed dogfight action. Finally I had found its anime equivalent, or more accurately, I found the origin of that concept.









To be honest, I was slightly let down, just slightly, mind you, when the planes started transforming into robots. About a decade worth of watching kiddie shows had already enabled me to identify robots as overused insta-cool storytelling tool. In all fairness though, the show I was watching was actually one of the originals that had revolutionized the robot genre--or now more commonly known in anime as "mecha"--by introducing the concept of transformation.









There were more factors that had made me like it. Not only were the abovementioned transformable or variable fighters capable of dominating the atmosphere, they could also fly in space--in space! And they "landed" on none other than a big bad-ass carrier spaceship with a really powerful gun. This lone ship had to contend with alien giants possessing thousands of ships scattered across the Solar System and bearing bad-ass enough mecha and other military hardware of their own. I had been fascinated with capital ship combat, and the show having such premise, the young geek that I was would have been more than satisfied.

Still, there was more.

The alien adversary was bent on capturing the lone spaceship of the humans, for they suspected it to hold secrets they had long forgotten. The ship was, in fact, of alien origins that was reverse-engineered. Inside the ship was a city of civilian refugees where the human element of the story occur: people celebrate culture, listen to music and fall in love. The young "innocent" me never paid enough attention to the love triangle of the main characters, but a later viewing impressed upon my grown up self that it was fine space opera that had me coming back for more even after the big battles were over. Eventually, the aliens would stumble upon these human stuff and discover things about themselves. Could music, culture and love be the key to ending the war?

For me, the answer to that question remained on hold for almost a decade. Just when the planet Earth was surrounded by millions more enemy ships for the climactic battle, the series looped back to the first episode. This was one of the sins of ABS-CBN. I had heard spoilers, but I had to wait until the existence of YouTube to finally see pure awesome--a battle among many battles and scenes in the series that had haunted children of my generation and the generation before me.

The beauty of this series was that it could be enjoyed at different levels. This post predominantly described my shallow enjoyment as a child. Future entries would discuss further the profundity that I had comprehended as I grew up in experience and wisdom. This and perhaps the fact that it had successfully blended a number of my interests (for instance: spaceships, outer space, aliens, war stories, fighter planes, music, romance, apocalyptic themes, technology, United Nations) had made it my all-time favorite anime.

Twenty-five years later, the series had become a franchise consisting of two other TV series, two movies, two original video animations (OVAs), and many video games and mangas (comics). The soundtrack albums had launched the careers of composers, pop idols and rock stars. Its influence had helped shaped the anime industry for the past two decades. Behold the anime, Super Dimension Fortress Macross.

I am Dave, also known as CaptGloval or Gloval in anime circles, and I remember love.


Image Credits
- First nine images are screenshots from the SDF Macross OP (detext version, video source)
- Next three images have been shared in the AnimeSuki Macross image thread