Tuesday, November 5, 2013

LA WEEKLY ARTICLE ON ROBOTECH!


LAWeekly has a profile of the Robotech franchise and here is an excerpt.

Robotech was a new idea for U.S. television as well as a work-in-progress. Because it was an amalgamation of three different series, each with a unique score, Robotech required all new music. That new score wasn't complete until 26 episodes into the series. The musical accompaniment for the first handful of episodes was essentially a rough draft. It wasn't until the series went into its third round of reruns that the music cues from that first handful of episodes were fixed. For a while, the sound of Robotech's original run had disappeared. "Nobody bothered to save the master tapes of the original mix because it was always perceived that this was an incomplete version of the show," says Yune. Years later, the Robotech team was able to retrieve those old cues thanks to a fan who had recorded the series onto VHS cassettes years earlier.
The show's novel approach garnered a lot of fans, some of whom have remained loyal throughout the years. In its original run, Robotech overcame a lot of the technical obstacles that were in its way. But, the show's inventive style of storytelling lead to one big problem. "It created a whole new universe storyline for which the Japanese would never make a sequel," says Yune. "They might make a spin-off of the individual series, but this merged storyline, which is something that was just in Carl's head."