People who study marketing know that competitions often come down to two companies, like Coke and Pepsi for carbonated sugar water or Mac and Windows for consumer operating systems. And for old school anime fans like me, I think Gundam and Macross fill a similar duality. Gundam is the “Star Trek” of the anime world, the groundbreaking franchise without which nothing after could have come, which tells a reasonably realistic story about mankind colonizing space, developing mecha suits called mobile suits and evolving into Newtypes. Macross is the series that throws realism out the window, instead telling a more emotional story with impossible transforming mecha and interstellar wars whose outcomes are invariably determined by a song. Ever since my son was small, we’ve had fun being Gundam fans together, watching the various series and doing father-and-son stuff like building model kits. When he borrowed my copy of the Macross Ultimate Frontier for the PSP, he played through all the levels then asked to see the show, so now we’re having fun viewing the major Macross series together starting with Macross Frontier. And I’ve borrowed his copy of Gundam Battle Universe, a fabulous game made by the same staff in which you play through every battle from the One Year War to Char’s Counterattack. Anime has really brought us together.
About the best live-action Macross we’ll ever see, from a pachinko commercial.
