So... once upon a time, in the bad bad days of American television, the golden goal was syndication. Syndication meant you had amassed enough episodes that you could package them up and sell them to independent broadcasters and affiliates, with your own deal for each broadcaster, forever and ever amen. Syndication is how most people saw Gilligan's Island after its brief initial run. Syndication is the money stream that caused Star Trek to flourish. Syndication was the end goal of Babylon 5 - at one point J Michael Straczynski begged his fans to write in and let him get through Season 5, it's all he had ever come up with, it was the brass ring at the end of the rainbow, it's the thing that would make them all rich if only they could get there.

Harmony Gold,a low-rent pillager of foreign content, saw the marvel that was Super Dimension Fortress Macross and knew that it was a cheap-ass way to compete with Transformers and Gobots. Only, tragedy! There are only 36 episodes of Macross, not even half of the bare-minimum 80 episodes you typically need for a syndication deal. So Harmony Gold grabbed Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross - Part 3 of the Super Dimension series to Macross' Part 1. But that only got them to 59 episodes. So they also, for reasons that probably boil entirely down to money, grabbed Genesis Climber Mospeada.

Macross and Southern Cross share heritage. They kind of work together sort of. Southern Cross is garbage, really, but Macross is kind of entertaining. They come out of the team that put together Space Battleship Yamato. Mospeada is another creature entirely. That team eventually went on to do Appleseed and damn near every mecha you've ever seen. And in a television universe in which GI Joe hits nothing, where for some reason He Man and Skeletor trade jibes at the end of every show, Rick's girlfriend dies. Everybody dies. The triumphant counterinvasion whereby humanity retakes Earth from the Invid FAILS in the first fuckin' ten minutes of the show.

So Harmony Gold sort of wove this narrative whereby there's protoculture and aliens want it and the Zentraedi are created by the Robotech Masters who stole it from the Invid and time passes or some shit but in order to make Mospeada work with the narrative of Macross - because it most decidedly doesn't have the narrative of Macross - they had to edit the shit out of it. Change the order. Leave entire episodes out. Butcher the fuck out of it.

Which is a real shame.

Set aside the fact that one of the protagonists in Mospeada is a cross-dressing torch-song-singing refugee fighter pilot named Yellow Belmont. Set aside the fact that the upstanding male official protagonist makes the wrong choices nearly every time. Set aside the fact that Cowboy Bebop's love of Jazz and standards comes from Mospeada.

Mospeada is an achingly ambivalent story of a human race that's really kind of okay under their alien overlords, and what that means for a resistance that's trying to free them. And I can't think of another example where that's been tried across all of science fiction.

It's not a masterpiece. In many ways it's often not good. But there aren't many anime that make you think.