Robotech: The Movie was a strange recommendation of the goog's. 

 This is not to be confused with the Robotech special in 1986 which was an extended clip episode.  

The robotech special might have been an extended edit of episode 14 Gloval's report.  It aired on a Saturday when season 1 was still having its 1st showing, but this conflicts with the memory of it airing in 1986.  It only exists in lion memory since there are no goog results for it.

The movie is some kind of ambiguous reconstruction based on HD blue ray footage of different shows & low definition DVD footage of season 2.  Part of the confusion is what generation X calls blue ray is what millennials call a DVD.  The footage was actually reused in many other shows.  Reusing footage in different shows was uniquely japanese.

The mcguffin was what would be considered an unrideable bike in reality, but what makes for a decent visual.

This is the shot from season 2 which resembles the modern starship factory.  They were a bit more vertical than the traditional 80's side mounted space plane, but still very anchored in the space shuttle design.  

Robotech always consisted of A props & B props.  A props were meant to be sold as toys, had distinguishing features, & had to be based on believable mechanics.  B props were fillers & never became toys.  What lions see are manely fillers.  Even the hero bike prop never got significant glamour shots the way A props traditionally did.  

The bike in season 3 was a kind of A prop that was backed up by the alpha fighter.  It was never fully intended to support the series alone, yet here they were basing a movie on just the bike.  Bikes are a common theme in Japanese cartoons, but Akira didn't come out until 1989.

To be a true Robotech prop, it has to be an A prop, it has to fly in space, in the atmosphere, & transform into a humanoid.  The Movie was a bit low tech.

Cockpit visuals were a bit of a fascination for younger lions.  The cockpit was worn like a suit.  There was a dream of someday owning or creating a vehicle with such a bubble cockpit.  The practical limitations of solar heating, rollover protection, windshield wipers, glare, ventilation, tend to lead back to the old fashioned car cab.

What a strange recombination of the original characters into different roles, the same way they did in episode 17 Phantasm.

Another thing which made Robotech work was the role of the humans as students turning a gigantic technical page from aliens, not fully knowing how to use their newfound alien technology.  

Someone's making big money on models & toys for 80's cartoons, probably not the designers or the mechanical engineers but Harmony Gold.  Rick Hunter would be at least 60 if he really existed.

Your license fees at work.  Apparently all the film masters of the original series are in that building. That building was built in 1964 & the aerial view shows its predecessor being demolished.  Harmony Gold must have been there since it was founded.

Besides a film vault, the building seems to be manely used as a theater nowadays.  The Harmony Gold sign manely denotes the theater.  No longer does a CEO of Harmony Gold sit in an office in that building & eat a salad soaked in lemon dressing.

 The Robotech series was redigitized again in 2021.  Apparently, they've been successful on the copyright front since no torrents of any of the remasters exist & they're only streamable on https://www.funimation.com/ for a subscription fee.

This guy is actually Greek.  That's where a lot of the weird credits came from.

That's his sister.  Figured out she was the vocalist on "Only a fool" & a lesbian.  

Today, she owns a salad dressing producer.  Who knew the taste of Robotech wouldn't be Japanese food but Egyptian.  To avoid spoiling the magic, don't read the personal tweets of the Agramas.

Most of LA is middle eastern.  The famously jewish cohort of directors is but a small corner of egyptians, arabians, libians, palestinians.  Lions wouldn't be aware of this fact for another 30 years after seeing the names.