Super Dimension Fortress Macross S1E1: "Booby Trap"

This review was comissioned by @LilyWitch


Macross is probably the second most important name in the history of the "mecha" genre as we know it today. It came out just a few years after Gundam, and made similarly lasting additions to the mech toolbox that countless other works have reused since.

One of these additions was the popularization of transforming mechs. Macross didn't invent this concept, but from what I can tell it was one of a handful of more-or-less-contemporaneous Japanese works to try it out. The western Transformers line was inspired by the same immediate Japanese predecessors within the same few year period; I guess you could say that Transformers spread the idea to western children's media, while Macross spread it into the Japanese military scifi space.

Another of these additions is a particular visual flourish involving cluster missiles that I'm sure you've all seen in a million different things.

Unfortunately, that's all I know about Macross. Unlike Gundam, this isn't a franchise I caught a series or two of on Toonami as a kid. I'm going into "Booby Trap" - the pilot episode of the first of many Macross animated series - virtually blind. I've got to say though, "super dimension fortress ___" is the best set of descriptive qualifiers ever.


Unlike modern anime series, that do all sorts of weirdness with when and where their OP's appear, Macross does things normally right from the start. No teaser, no intro-less pilot, what you see is what you get. Which is just as well in this case, because I think this might actually be one of my favorite anime intros ever.

Not because it's visually breathtaking or musically exceptional. The visuals *are* good, at least by the standards of the time, and the techno-jazz-y music *is* fairly catchy, but what makes this OP exceptional rather than just competent is its concept and direction. We start out with what looks like a modern fighter pilot inside of a modern cockpit. Then, an external shot of his craft taking off from an aircraft carrier, and both his plane and the ship are slightly futuristic looking. Once he lifts off though, we see that the carrier's flight deck is by far the least futuristic-looking part of it, and that the ship is itself airborne. Next are the action shots, featuring the 20-minutes-into-the-future looking planes betraying their true nature and unfolding midair into mechs and other specialized war machines, and engaging much weirder-looking (alien?) vehicles in the defence of imperilled cities. Finally, the craft fly skyward, spurring the camera to fly up into space so we can see the laser fire being exchanged by massive spacecraft as they fight for orbital control. The lyrics accompanying this are - in addition to being delivered in one hell of a suave voice that frankly outshines its instrumental accoutrement - about humanity rising to the occasion of an existential threat and venturing out into the heavens to grow into its own.

The story concept being communicated here wasn't exactly a novel one even back in 1982, but the pieces of the intro all just fit together so well at communicating it. The tone, the scope, the time period and timeframe, it's all so clear and so elegantly presented just from this OP. I have to respect that degree of clarity and consistency.

The episode starts with a meteorite's arrival on Earth. It's a big meteorite.

Fortunately, it comes in on a sharp diagonal over the open ocean, and skims the surface for a while before slamming into the side of a desert island. Because of this, there's only a global ecological crisis and an immediate human death toll in the low millions, rather than a global mass extinction event and the end of human civilization.

Maybe this is just a modern blind spot, but I feel like scifi very rarely acknowledges just how fucking horrific an orbital impact actually is once you start looking at meteorites bigger than dust grains or pebbles. To put things into perspective, the 1908 Tunguska incident involved an asteroid about as big as a medium-sized building, and luckily it exploded in the atmosphere instead of actually hitting the surface at full speed. 12 megaton explosion. Magnitude 5 earthquake. Think about how many scifi stories feature bigass spaceships crashing at apparently freefall or faster speeds, and how the effects are usually depicted, or rather not depicted.

Well, whether or not that actually is more common in modern scifi than it was a few decades ago on average, it's NOT the case in Macross.

A lot of the imagery is very evocative of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. To the point where I'd be wondering if there was a thread of influence there even if this wasn't a Japanese work.

Anyway, as the dust settles a voiceover explains that in 1999, the Earth was struck by a 1.2 kilometer long alien spacecraft. None of the aliens survived the crash, but their ship stayed in one piece, and at least much of the technology within remained intact. To make things even grimmer than the environmental catastrophe induced by the crash itself, examination of the vessel clearly revealed it to be a heavily armed battleship, and that it had been disabled and sent on its terminal trajectory by battle damage.

Alien life was real. Alien life was spacefaring. Alien life was warlike. Perhaps this disaster was actually a blessing in disguise, giving humanity a chance early warning of what lurked beyond the atmosphere.

It was decided that humanity needed to create a united front and improve its technology as fast as possible if it were to have any chance of surviving an intentional visit from whoever built and/or disabled that ship. Of course, this would be easier said than done. Decades of war ensued as nations and ethnic groups fought for what they thought was their rightful slice of pie under the new order.

However, to humanity's credit, the warring nations managed to keep the joint excavation and study of the alien wreck going even through the thick of these conflicts. Responsible minds were put in charge of the project, which ensured that technology was not stolen and information was not hoarded. A contributing factor to this was the fact that the alien ship seemed potentially reparable, and fixing it seemed like a much bigger and much faster boost to humanity's odds than disassembling it and spending decades trying to make inferior copies from scratch.

After a painful decade, things settled down. The narration doesn't make it clear how equitable the new EarthGov ended up being, but at least it was stable. So much manpower and resources had been directed into restoring and studying the alien ship that the island it crashed on became the site of a large city. The ship itself, dubbed the Macross, is just now being repaired to the point where they think they can lift it off again.

Wonder where they got the name "Macross" from? I assume it'll be explained at some point.

Also, going by the series' title, I'm guessing the ship can fly through more than just outer space. "Super dimension fortress" makes it sound like the thing can also travel to parallel universes or something. We'll see, I guess!

The voiceover ends, and the camera settles into the streets of Macross City. The citizens are watching a celebratory fireworks display to mark the completion of their great work. Granted, not all of the witnesses are so thrilled about this.

The mayor of Macross City is understandably worried about the city's future now that its raison d'etre is finished and their entire economy is about to literally fly out into orbit. On one hand, legit. On the other hand, with the amount of infrastructure and expertise this city must have concentrated in it by this point I think EarthGov would be wise to immediately put them to work building some new ships* from the ground up using what they've learned. It'll probably be more efficient to start building ships in orbit at some point, but that point is still quite a ways in the future.

*They probably don't know how to replicate all the components, and even if they did it might require resources Earth doesn't have. But even so, just using the stuff they DO understand, I suspect they could start working on static defence satellites or resupply shuttles or the like. Should be enough to fuel a civil economy and then some.

Next, we're introduced to some of the Macross' new crew. With some exceptions such as the rigid and hilariously appropriately named Captain Global, it seems that many of the crew have spent the last few days partying. Being among those chosen to actually fly the thing makes them basically rock stars amid these festivities, so now they're heading in to their first launch in the wake of 72-hour alcohol and semen binges. The ladies running the comm stations on the bridge seem to have been among the worst offenders.

Also, a bunch of the crew have apparently hooked up with each other during said festivities, which I'm sure will do wonders for crew coordination and chain of command in the event that they have to fight the aliens.

Granted, humankind has had a really rough decade. I'm not going to grudge any of these people their coping mechanisms.

The soap opera chit-chat in the communications hub is cut short by the arrival of an unscheduled aircraft. When hailed, the pilot identifies himself as Hikaru Ichijyo, and says that he has special invitation to fly here from the Macross' fighter squadron commander and (at least, according to the Comm department gossip) single most chronic attendee of the rum and semen buffet, Major Focker. His invitation code checks out, and I guess it includes permission to arrive in his own aircraft, so the communications staff give him his landing instructions and then go back to gossiping over who snorted the most cocaine out of whose urethra.

Out on the massive courtyard, we meet this Major Focker character. He was a hero fighter pilot in the recent Unification Wars, and he's drawing (quite egotistically) on that as he narrates a celebratory flight demonstration; a squadron of the brand new alien-technology-influenced Valkyrie aerospace fighters are maneuvering overhead. The demonstration is interrupted by the arrival of a dorky-looking little one man prop plane that invites itself into the middle of things.

Holy fuck that guy is lucky he didn't get his ass shot down the instant he came close.

Hikaru, who Focker is almost certainly regretting inviting even more than he's regretting that fourth double-shot semen cocktail he was convinced to swig last night, swoops down and buzzes the crowd, amplifies his voice to embarassingly greet his old friend Focker hello, and then reveals his dopey prop plane's secret rocket engines and blasting off to race (and briefly outpace) the valkyrie fighters. While also flying dangerously close to them.

This is being treated a loooot less seriously than I'd have expected, given the genre and vibe of the show so far. I guess we're going to be reconciling at least some cartoon silliness alongside the serious high-concept scifi stuff. As it is, Hikaru gets a royal bitching out when he eventually lands, but he isn't arrested.

Granted, even making allowances for cartoon silliness, this entire operation seems pretty lackadaisical and loose. Which is surprising, considering the political climate. With the amount of resentment likely lingering here and there about whatever resolution the Unification Wars reached, terrorism seems like it should be a pretty big concern.

Anyway, Hikaru turns out to be the late something-teen son of an old flight buddy of Focker's, and after the well-deserved bitching out the two start talking more friendly like. We learn that Focker was a part of some experimental aircraft testing group before the wars, and that his former team members are disappointed that he didn't come back to them after the end of the hostilities. It's not stated outright, but it's kind of implied that Hikaru's dad died at some point in that decade and that Focker has been a kinda sorta surrogate father figure to him.

Well, Focker tells him the same thing that he's told all his former test flight buddies many times already; the war made him see things differently. He's a fighter pilot now, and he's going to keep being one, because it's possible humanity is going to have sore need of those pretty soon. Then, to Hikaru's amusement, Focker stops talking because there's a woman trying to wrangle her son away from the vending machines a little ways in front of him, and the way she's bending down really highlights the curve of her ass.

On that ominous note (the possible war with aliens coming up, not the ass), we cut to somewhere out in space, where a fleet of ships that look like spiky pickles with glowing warts all over them is dropping out of hyperspace.

On one hand, these guys don't look at all like the forbiddingly well-armed battleship that crashed on Earth. On the other hand, they're ugly and have an intimidating musical lietmotif, so it's probably safe to assume that they're at least as warlike as those other aliens. Assuming that they aren't the ones who shot the not-yet-Macross down in the first place, of course.

The following internal shot of the lead ship's bridge teaches us two important things in quick succession. First, that these aliens are extremely humanlike. Not even bumpy foreheads or weird skin colors or the like, at least that I can distinguish. Second, that they are indeed the ones who shot down the ship now rechristened Macross. Which is bad news for Earth, because they've just detected the signature of that enemy ship they thought they destroyed eight taarns ago powering up on a nearby planet.

Especially weird, considering that this region of space is no longer even considered contested territory. Concerning. Well, the spikey pickle fleet commander doesn't want to jump to conclusions, so for now he sends a scoutship to approach Earth and see if it can figure out what's pinging their sensors and how many teratons they should toss at it.

Heh, I guess the best case scenario is that the pickle guys are impressed by what we managed to do with a blasted hulk using only our primitive techbase, and decide that we're useful enough to not oppress too hard. But I doubt that that's how it'll go.

Back on the island, Focker is letting Hikaru sit in the cockpit of one of those new valkyries. Sigh....well, we all know how this is going to end up going. On a less tiresome note, just as he's supposed to give a speech to the assembled celebrants, Captain Global receives an urgent message. Gravitational anomalies have been detected, centered on a point near the moon. Similar gravity weirdness was recorded ten years ago, immediately before what would become the Macross ploughed into Earth.

He walks away from the stage before he can even step out onto it. All other ship personnel are promptly instructed to do the same. The festive atmosphere begins giving way to confusion and anxiety.

Speaking of confusion and anxiety, there's another concerning development going on aboard the ship. An almost certainly related development. The Macross has suddenly shifted its forward hull plates into firing configuration, and it's started charging up its main weapon. By itself.

Alarm becomes panic as they try to reverse the arming sequence, with no success. They clearly didn't tame the alien computers nearly as well as they thought they had; whatever layer this automatic action is being controlled from, it's beyond their ability to access.

Captain Global hurries into the bridge (hitting his head on the doorframe as he does, notably. Very short door I guess. Probably implying that the aliens are slightly shorter than humans) and tries to help them just shut down the entire ship. No use. Macross fires a railgun shot that breaks through the island's coastal hills, vaporizes a long line of seawater, and flies off along the Earth's curvature at the enemy target that it detected moving into its sights.

Either the Macross can aim its ostensibly fixed spinal weapon without having to turn in place, or the scout pickle's approach vector was just phenomenally coincidentally unlucky. Unfortunately for the pickle crew, and probably just as unfortunately for humanity, it's a direct hit. The scoutship is destroyed.

The first human casualties of this conflict, we soon learn, have already been suffered. There wasn't a large city district placed right under the trajectory of that shot, but there was a city district there. Was. Past tense.

Across the solar system, the alien commander very reasonably takes this as confirmation of a major enemy presence on the third planet. The pickle armada may or may not have been hostile to humanity to begin with, villainous framing aside, but after what just happened, well. It's hard to judge the commander for his next order.

Even if the humans know how to send a communique that the fleet will be able to recognize as such, I doubt the commander is inclined to be talked down after he just lost a ship. Frankly, I'm not sure there's anything we could tell him that wouldn't just sound like a trick to buy us time to line up the next shot and take more of his people with us. Humanity is now, tragically, at war.

Aboard the Macross bridge, Captain Global laughs grimly as he realizes what just happened. They might have repaired the alien ship, but there are at least some parts of the ship that never got the memo. The computer thinks that it's still a dead hulk floating in space. And, what better way to fuck with the enemy's attempts to loot your wrecked ships than to leave a dead hand firing contingency in place. If ship is hulked but can still shoot, it is to automatically do so as soon as something recognizable as an enemy is in front of it, totally automatic. It's a booby trap for enemy salvage operations, but in this case it might be humanity that really got caught in it.

The pickles come bearing down on earth, weapons charged, fighters emerging from their hangars in massive swarms.

The Macross, now back under human control, catches the aftermath of the shot at the same time as the various human-build sensor stations around the world. The alien ship that had been causing gravity fluctuations near Luna is now an expanding cloud of debris, and multiple other ships are now coming in hot, not even trying to be stealthy.

It almost feels like the Macross is mocking them. Faux-innocently handing itself back over to their control and displaying the situation it just got them into so they can properly dread what's coming. It *isn't* mocking them, of course, there's no intention or sentience behind what just happened, but it's the vibe. Mankind getting smacked down for its hubris.

Unfortunately, with it looking like the aliens are going to come in shooting, leaning into that very same act of hubris seems like the least bad option. Captain Global orders all hands to battle stations and preparations made for liftoff. They'll have to roll the dice on the hope that this isn't a large alien force, and that the Macross won't fuck them over again with an even worse surprise once they try to use it in battle.

...

That last one is most definitely not a guarantee, honestly. If some of the ship's computers still think that it's a drifting hulk whose only remaining use is to take as many enemies down with it as possible, then it's *very likely* that poking it the wrong way will set off a self-destruct explosion.

...

As everyone on the entire planet earth flies into a well-justified panic, we return to orbit. It looks like even though Earth decided to prioritize restoring the alien tech over replicating it, they still managed to replicate some impressive bits. Aside from those souped up valkyrie planes, it appears that we have a few armed spacecraft sitting in orbit. They're nowhere near as impressive as Macross, of course, and I doubt they can even travel very far from the planet, but still, it's more than I expected. Give Drs. Vahlen and Shen all the money, seriously.

Even more surprisingly, the volley of missiles that the human ships fire not only strike home, but also manage to destroy one of the leading alien ships.

That...I am not sure how the hell they're supposed to have managed. If the pickle aliens are using the same techbase as their enemies, then their ships should have hulls that can withstand planetary impacts with only minimal damage. Nukes are barely going to be mosquito bites against something that tough.

...ah, heh. Okay I'm dumb. The explanation comes just moments later, and it really should have been obvious. The alien commander looks as flabbergasted at what just happened as I'd expect, until his pint-sized adjutant informs him that those missiles are from a wildly different techbase than everything else about the ships that launched them.

Basically, those ships' missiles were taken from the Macross' ammo bays. Seemingly an exception to the "restore-rather-than-strip-for-parts" policy. Either because the Macross had plenty of surplus missiles, or because the launchers were irreparable. Like I said, I should really have been able to infer that on my own, heh.

So, the pickle guys got another nasty surprise from that missile barrage, but unfortunately for us they have enough ships on hand that it doesn't discourage them. And, as the aliens themselves just pointed out, those defence ships are much more primitive than the missiles they carry; once the pickles shoot back, Earth's homemade warships are destroyed pretty much immediately.

On the surface, as Macross begins its launch sequence, Captain Global soliloquys bitterly about the way this ended up playing out. At his meeting with the EarthGov defence council yesterday, the one directive they repeated to him over and over again was that if Macross' launch brings it into contact with alien spacecraft it is absolutely not under any circumstances to initiate hostilities. It was everyone's hope, during the entire bloody process of global unification and the ungodly resource sink of repairing Macross, that the aliens wouldn't seek conflict with us and that none of this would ultimately be necessary. And now, the goddamned ship just went and fucking decided to seek conflict FOR us. Repairing it did the exact thing everyone was hoping it would help us avoid.

I feel like there might be a lesson in there, about militarization encouraging an adversarial mindset and picking up a hammer making everything start to look like nails. Basically the opposite sentiment of "if you want peace, prepare for war." I'm not sure that it's a lesson I personally agree with, but it's one worth thinking about at the very least.

Granted, I can't say with any confidence if that actually is the show's intended message until I know what the pickle aliens would have done without this provocation. The aesthetics and meta-signalling around them are pretty grim, but their actual actions thus far haven't been unreasonable. So, it really depends on who exactly we just accidentally'd a war with.

For now, the invaders are curious enough about what they've just stumbled into on Earth that they don't just start opening up on the still-surfaced Macross with their capital weapons. Instead, they position their ships out of the battleship's line of fire and start swarming the island (and perhaps other sites on Earth's surface as well? It isn't clear) with fighters. So far, this seems promising for humanity's survival prospects; the picklemen are more likely to conquer and occupy you than just glass your planet and call it a day. They've also finally spotted the Macross and the immense industrial city built around it, and start piecing the story together. Additionally, while the Macross has all the design hallmarks of the picklemen's sworn enemy, the Supervision Army, this particular ship class is one they have no records of.

Interesting. Maybe this was a Supervision Army prototype, or perhaps a specially made one-off meant for a unique purpose? What would explain why it had such extravagant dead hand defences. If the special mission it was meant for was along the lines of a long, gruelling infiltration of enemy territory, then that might also explain why it was carrying so much ammo.

In any case, Admiral Pickle is shocked that a species as primitive as this one was able to reverse-engineer the Supervision Army's technology so quickly. It's damned impressive. And also damned dangerous. The way he phrases it is weird, though.

"The lost technology?" Could be a translation hiccup, but I don't think so. A line later, they also mention something about "reaction weaponry," and mutter darkly again about those missiles.

The way that the picklemen have been talking about the Supervision Army in general doesn't make it sound like their enemy has a big tech advantage on them. If it turns out that both factions are fighting in the wake of a dark age or over the ruins of a more advanced precursor species, though, then they might well be competing over lost tech. Since this whole line of discussion was kicked off by them not recognizing the Macross' ship class, it could be that the Supervision Army dug up some ancient goodies - these "reaction missiles" and possibly other stuff - and built a special ship to mount them on. That might be another reason they're being careful with this attack and trying to recover rather than destroy the ship.

Thinking about it more, it also opens up a lot more story possibilities. If Earth has its hands on something one-of-a-kind that the aliens (potentially including other factions besides the pickles) don't want to risk destroying, then that gives them a reason to not just steamroll us the instant we annoy them. Which allows humanity a lot more agency, and thus story potential, then it would otherwise have in this scenario. So yeah, I'll bet that's it.

Alien fighters swarm dawn into the atmosphere, rolling over the island like a cloud. The mayor of Macross City looks like he might not be getting such great economic prospects afterall, because the city - particularly its industrial centers - starts taking a real bitch of an aerial bombardment. The VTOL craft like the valkyries are able to take off and try to engage the attackers, but all the older model fighter planes on and around the island are never even able to launch due to the invaders' efficient targeting of runways and plane catapults. Naturally, Hikaru is still sitting in that valkyrie cockpit when the shit hits the fan. And, naturally, that valkyrie's pilot gets blown up on his way to the vehicle.

So, the thing that was obviously going to happen happens. Hikaru takes to the sky and tries to...um...okay, I actually have no idea what he's planning to do short of ramming an alien fighter and hoping that kills both of them instead of just himself. I'm pretty sure fighter planes require just a weeeee bit of extra training that stunt flying does not, you know?

Around him, the air battle rages. And appears to be significantly less one-sided than I'd have expected.

The humans are actually scoring some kills. And evading some shots. Either the more advanced technology doesn't scale down to fighter-size, or the humans have managed to miniaturize and mass produce a lot more alien tech than I thought. X-Com was definitely the right reference to make.

In the midst of this chaotic battle, Hikaru manages to get Focker on the comms, and Focker takes the time to give him a long animu pep talk in the middle of this life-or-death battle against an overwhelming enemy in which Focker's wingmen supposedly need his attention and leadership.

I guess we have to be a shonen anime again for a while now. Wake me up when we're ready to switch back again. :/

On the bright side, Hikaru gets shot down almost immediately. Thank god. Wouldn't it have been insufferable if he didn't? His valkyrie is still mostly intact, but one of his wings got a bunch of laser holes punched in it, and you can't really stay balanced with a perforated wing. As he spirals downward, sure he's about to die, he gets a transmission from one of the party girls on Macross' bridge who's running flight control. She asks him why the hell he isn't transforming into landing mode if his fuselage and engines are still intact. He asks her what the fuck she's talking about. She isn't sure why a valkyrie pilot would ever NOT know this, but nonetheless walks him through the transformation sequence. He shifts from plane mode to mech mode just barely in time to engage his now jumpjet-positioned engines and slow his fall enough to land upright. He still hits the pavement hard enough to take some damage, but his mech is still at least mostly functional, and he's alive.

End pilot.

To get the obvious complaint out of the way first, Hikaru's story is badly mismatched with everything else in the pilot. While Super Dimension Fortress Macross isn't exactly a gritty R-rated seriousface big boy military scifi story to begin with, it still hews a lot CLOSER to that flavor of verisimilitude and that sense of consequences. Hikaru seems like the protagonist of a show meant for much younger audiences, and the adult characters start acting more like they're in a kiddy show when they interact with him. Which is extra annoying when he also seems to be getting the biggest spotlight in an otherwise ensemble cast show.

Now, with that addressed.

While the alien invasion and the power dynamics between invaders, humans, and spaceship-that-humans-don't-quite-control are plenty interesting, I feel like the most interesting part of the pilot was the buildup. "An alien battleship crash lands on Earth, warning us of potential conquerors prowling the void. What happens next?" Frantic unification wars. Boomtowns springing up around UFO crash sites. That's not a milsci or adventure show premise. That's the pitch for an old school literary scifi novel, think Asimov or Clarke.

Macross is a big franchise, so I'm sure there's some piece of Macross media that explores the Unification Era in depth (and even if there isn't an official one, there's got to be fanfic writers who rose to the occasion and did a not-completely-terrible job). I hope to get my hands on it someday when I have the time to give it a proper read/watch on my own time, because man, I could read an entire novel series about the rise of Macross City, the unique culture that springs up around a core of scientists and engineers living in the shadow of a grim alien monolith, and the conflicts of interest that emerge as a military research project becomes a civilization.

As for the part of the timeline that the show itself is focusing on, well, it's harder to say. The pilot was mostly setup. I really liked that setup, but by the end of the episode the story was already moving past it, and I haven't yet seen enough of whatever comes next to have strong opinions. The quirky bridge crew seem fun, at least. The (extremely humanoid, it bears repeating. I wonder if the story is doing something with that?) invaders were also interesting enough from what little was shown of them. Especially how, for all the audience knows at this point, the people in the pickle ships could just as easily be the good guys in this greater interstellar war.

The visuals are dated, obviously, but they've got charm. Really, it's a sobering reminder that major anime productions didn't always have the budgets that they do nowadays; less of a mark against the series, and more of a reminder to be grateful for what we have now. The music, likewise, makes up for any minor jank in sheer, unapologetic enthusiasm and charm. "Charm" is a word that keeps coming to mind when I think about the production values from pretty much any angle. It's flawed, but not in a way that it feels right to complain about.

Like I said before, the political stance that the show seems to be taking so far isn't one I tend to agree with. It isn't one that I can just comfortably reject out of hand either, though. I guess it might be best to see it as a warning. A caveat to attach to the importance of power, with "power" once again being defined as "access to violence." A gun wants to be fired. If someone is trained to fight, then on some level they'll probably be a little frustrated if it never ends up coming in handy. That's the booby trap to beware of.