I think everything mentioned on this page has been mentioned either in #anime or actually covered in #animeclub, so you are a liar liar pants on fire.

DK can probably give chapter'n'verse on mecha better than I can, but American exposure started with Robotech and Voltron, both of which ran concurrently with Transformers and Gobots. Which...

Okay. So things are gonna get esoteric for a minute. This is a big stupid link that makes things more esoteric. Bottom line, Hasbro made TV shows to sell toys because Reagan made it legal. This opened the floodgates for every toy line GenXers freak out about, including MLP, Transformers, GI Goe, etc. Hasbro slammed together a whole bunch of Takara toys into a narrative called "Transformers" that only makes sense when you consider that somehow, a handgun needs to be a villain capable of taking on a fucking semi truck. These were franchise shows, which means they weren't run on any particular network, which meant that the shows were whatever so long as the toys could be sold.

There was a cheaper way to get toys into the US without having to create a whole show, however. Grab an existing show with enough episodes and launch it. Voila, Voltron. It would have worked with Speed Racer and Astro Boy earlier but Reagan hadn't gutted the law yet. Unfortunately a lot of Japanese shows never make syndication (70 episodes). Their entire runs are like 26 episodes. So Harmony Gold had to take three disparate series and weld them together into something called "robotech." It worked sort of like this: the first series is about humans vs these giant people called Zentraedi. The second is about humans vs. the guys that built the giant people, called "robotech masters". The third series is about humans vs. this weird collective race of jellyfish called the Invid that were like chased out of their homeworld by the Robotech Masters and actually aren't that bad, aside from the whole world domination thing. As arcs go, it ain't terrible, but it ain't great.

The first series welded into that mess was Macross. This is what most people think of when you say "robotech" - the Macross saga. I've never watched it. I found it boring. However, it has the most toys. Shit, through weird wranglings, one of them even made it into Transformers. It might be great. All I know is the toys were the same form factor as GI Joe, which was fuckin' dope on the playground because take this, Cobra.

The second series was "Southern Cross", or "Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross." It was fuckin' unbearable dubbed. I've never had any interest in trying to watch it. I don't even think there were toys.

The third series was "the New Generation" but everyone just called it "the Invid" and there were cool toys but not nearly as many and of the three, it's the least youth oriented so the kids didn't care much. There were toys, but they were rare. And they would fuck GI Joe up something fierce.

For me, it was far and away the best. For one, the narrative was really fuckin' adult. The protagonist's girlfriend dies episode one. Not "is kidnapped" not "is lost" not "is shot with a GI Joe laser to parachute to safety" she fuckin' kicks it because her entire fuckin' ship explodes. So does the whole goddamn fleet. Any kid's show that starts with massive battle casualties can't be all bad, right? Especially in a "knowing is half the battle" world where somehow, nobody so much as gets a scratch despite throwing arsenals at each other for half an hour at a time.

Also, the industrial design is tits. Everyone rides around on supadope motorcycles that definitely presage Akira (and turn into rippin' battle suits). The jets are way cooler than Macross, which really, all look like F-14s. And all the episodes end in this weird morally ambiguous place that was right at home next to Kung Fu, which was also in syndication.

I have no idea where Robotech lives these days. They tried to restart it as Sentinels which I never saw. For a while, Tobey McGuire was trying to launch Macross as a movie, written by Larry Kasdan of Raiders fame. I'm going over to a kind-of friend's house day after tomorrow for a birthday party; he's literally got a room full of Robotech shit, some of it worth thousands.

I know that teh torrentz will get you damn near anything.