Yack Deculture! A Macross: Do You Remember Love? 4K Blu-ray Review

What’s the single most important anime work to you? To me, there’s no contest: it’s the 1984 Macross: Do You Remember Love? film that defined the potential of animation to tell the biggest, boldest stories imaginable. Ever since we got the Macross 4K Blu-ray [product link] in stock on the site, sales have been brisk. I finally sat down to watch the film, and thought I’d write up why seeing this amazing work in 4K was so special to me.

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A review of the Macross: Do You Remember Love? 4K Blu-ray

The Macross: Do You Remember Love? 4K Blu-ray is Amazing

What was it like, watching this legendary film for the first time in 4K? Getting glasses for the first time in my life was the only way I could think to describe it. I’ve got a 65-inch OLED Sony TV, and the film was glorious to see in all its incredible, detailed beauty. There’s a whole class of expressive four-syllable adjectives used in Japanese, and the one that came to mind while watching this release was kukkiri.

Sound was also greatly upgraded from any versions I’ve watched in the past, with the incredible songs and BGM composed by Kentaro Haneda taking center stage in my living room. Considering how important sound and music are to this movie, this was extremely welcome. Considering that I’ve been watching this film regularly, going back to a 5th-generation VHS copy and some bootlegged DVDs, I was certainly happy with this release.

Why is Macross: Do You Remember Love? the “best” film in anime history? Read my blog post here!

Improvements In Coloring In Macross 4k Blu Ray Release

Upgraded Visuals and Colors

The Macross: Do You Remember Love? film was always very dark, to the point that it was very hard to see poor Claudia in the scene where Roy kisses her forcefully in the restaurant. Thanks to the magic of HDR, the lighting has been greatly improved, and all the colors and details of the film are clearly visible, both in this scene and pretty much all the others.

Is it perfect? Unfortunately, no. There were occasional shots that looked blurry, thanks to the vastly improved detail of the Macross 4K Blu-ray resolution. According to Reddit, these issues were part of the original film negatives being shot out of focus. The blur is essentially like if you wear thick glasses and catch an image through the thick part of your lenses. You notice it, but only if you’re paying close attention.

The film is 100% free of censorship!

I’m happy to report that the movie is 100% uncensored. Previous releases mosaic’ed out the scene of this guy getting decapitated, which was extremely annoying to longtime fans.

The Background of Macross

The Super Dimensional Fortress Macross series was created in 1982 as a continuation of the “Real Robot” genre begun with 1979’s Mobile Suit Gundam. This meant telling stories that went beyond trying to sell robot toys to children by adding realistic military grit and political intrigue into the world of giant robots. But in the same way that Yoshiyuki Tomino basically made Gundam because he was angry at the staff of Space Battleship Yamato and wanted to steal their popularity, there was a lot going on in the background while Studio Nue was making Macross for us.

Mecha designer Shōji Kawamori wanted to out-Yamato the Yamato, so he made the SDF-1 so huge, it basically used a conventional warship as one of its arms. Japan’s idol world positively exploded in the early 1980s, and Kawamori and his university buddy Haruhiko Mikimoto wanted to create an anime that could bring idol culture to anime. Lynn Minmei was specifically designed to represent popular idols like Seiko Matsuda and Akina Nakamori, right down to the dresses she wore.

Why Is Macross: Do You Remember Love? an Important Film?

The film was unique to early anime fans for a lot of reasons, including:

It’s the best re-telling of a story, ever. It’s like if you’d only watched the campy 1960s Batman TV show, then someone handed you a copy of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns for the first time.
It tells a huge, dramatic story. While slice-of-life anime about girls who need to find a fourth member or their club will be closed down are cute, I was always drawn to the huge, dramatic stories anime like Macross could offer. Even the title is dramatic: when the original name of Battle City Megaroad was discarded, a Shakespeare-loving producer at Big West suggested something similar to Macbeth, merged to “across” to represent the vastness of space.
It helped globalize anime. Before Sailor Moon, before Akira, before even Nausicaä would get any kind of commercial release, early fans had their VHS decks spitting out copies of this movie for their friends.
Romance at its core. Macross was the first anime love triangle that made us organize into Team Misa or Team Minmei… and it was our first exposure to the sharp pain of NTR.
It launched the career of Hideaki Anno. The film helped launch the illustrious career of one of Japan’s foremost directors. Anno would go on to bring us Gunbuster, Nadia, Evangelion, Shin Godzilla, and many other important works.
It made anime all about the music. If you’ve ever obsessed about buying music CDs with songs sung by your favorite anime characters, you can thank Macross for setting the standard.
A merchandising success. In the same way that the success of Planet of the Apes licensing helped set the stage for the success of Star Wars, Macross DYRL was the first anime film so big that it made as much money from plastic model kits and music albums as ticket sales.
It’s fantastically creative. A city inside a spaceship whose gravity fails, causing everything to fall sideways? Taking a girl on a “holographic date” before whisking her off for a flight in Saturn’s rings? That’s some next-level creativity.

The zero-G shower scene will always be special to me.

Macross: Do You Remember Love? showed me my first anime boobs. You never forget your first.

Macross Do You Remember Love? 4K Blu Ray Release

The Macross 4K Blu-ray Release Details

Details of the Blu-ray release: you get two versions, the 4K Blu-ray and the standard 1080p Blu-ray, the latter being identical to the 2016 release. The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray includes HEVC encoding. You get multiple audio formats, Liner PCM stereo, DTS-HD Master Audio with 5.1 surround support. The package includes an original illustration by Haruhiko Mikimoto, plus the Tenshi no Enogu music video from Flashback 2012 with digital upscaling.

Best of all, this release has full subtitles in English and Japanese. So you can enjoy the film with full, natural subtitles.

Thanks for reading this blog post about the awesome release of the Macross: Do You Remember Love? 4K Blu-ray boxed set. If you’re an otaku of this era, I can’t recommend it highly enough, especially if you’ve got a big TV and a 4K player (or plan to pick one up in the near future). Find the release here, or browse all our anime Blu-rays here!

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