After many years of trying to get the best rendering of subtitles for Macross DYRL & trying to find a copy in better resolution, it finally showed up in HD on the gootubes.  Sadly, the subtitles were on top of the video instead of in the letterbox & it appears to be a theatric print.  Also disappointing to not have clean animation frames.

It was 1 of the last times yt-dlp was able to download anything.  Every attempt after May 18 resulted in a login requirement.

 It seems the lion kingdom's only viewing was a very low quality copy before 2013 with baked subtitles.  It was very dark & low def.  A better copy arrived in 2013 & the 1st copy was lost.  

The last revisit to robotech featured only stills from the TV show. 

 https://growmane.blogspot.com/2025/05/the-backflow-starship-incense-burner.html

 

 The HD print showed what a masterpiece it was.  Sadly, the lion kingdom before 2013 didn't know the robotech series was reimagined in many different forms, with retellings of the same bits in completely different permutations & none of them were authorized in US by the copyright owner Harmony Gold.  It was also a low point in the lion kingdom's fascination with robotech animation.

 Younger lion presumed it was an expansion that was supposed to fit in the original TV show, finding DYRL extremely boring & confusing.  It was kind of an expansion in how it showed a lot of what could have happened when they weren't fighting aliens & the robo technology in a more perfected state.  The TV show had them taking off from repurposed aircraft carriers.  The movie had dedicated launchers for space travel.

Fortunately, we now have 2x which was put to good use in the minmei songs.  It was definitely Minmei intensive, the 2nd worst character in the series behind Kyle.

 

Lions were reminded of an alternate future which branched off from the 80's & was built entirely on a frozen state of technology from the 80's.

 

Fortunately, the real future was based on much more advanced technology than what we had in the 80's.

 

 Completely forgot about the trip to a sterilized Earth & the sunken city. 

There was kind of a running joke in the Robotech universe that Roy Fokker always had to die.  The other running joke was the Minmei meltdown when Rick Hunter broke up.

The male & female aliens were now enemies who diverged from the human race & reproduced asexually.  Meltrans & Zentrans reminded lions of ancient religious terms like Melchizedek.  

Interesting to watch human progress in the 40 years since Robotech follow a similar path.  Humans became manely single parents reproducing via artificial insemination, egg freezing, or just billionaires performing all reproduction. Much less interaction between the sexes today than 40 years ago.

 

 

 The warped disrepair of the male ships & the pristine condition of the female ships was more clearly shown.  It was a traditional human gender gap manifested by the aliens.

 

Then we had the term protoculture evolving into multiple meanings, creative output, then a weapon, perhaps signs of how it could be used as an energy source.  Maybe the energy source depiction was derived from the way love motivates productivity.

 

High fidelity mecha animation is still the highlight of these shows, to this day.  Lions forgot for a while.  The F-14 in up armored, space faring form flies forever in anime form.

 

The reimagined SDF-1 bridge was beautiful. 

 

 

 

 

 Though it had different levels of detail, based on budget.

 

 

  

 Kind of a poignant moment when the spot in the sunken city of the romantic breakthrough was destroyed.  Movies don't make AB connections anymore.

 

 The original dominant female erotica.  It seems Max's future wife Miria died in this incarnation.

 

Pondered if modern language translation would be significantly more advanced than the language translation tool shown.  Modern computers can only replicate previous language translations, but perhaps could decipher an entirely novel language by replaying past conventions.  The robotech computers were always a bit primitive & deterministic by movie standards & certainly by today's standards.

 

 The mecha were always manually flown from inside a cockpit, very different from how war machines are driven now.  Things have evolved to drones piloted by tether from a nearby pilot.  The thing housing the pilot can be designed purely for stealthy survival while the thing carrying the weapons can be designed purely for lethality.

 The piloting was depicted as using sticks & pedals, with lots of inference done by the machine.  

 

 

 Dramatic effects were possible that aren't anymore.  Young lions always pondered a romantic affair in a cockpit but it was more like an old car.

 

 Oh what a lion would do for a wheeled ship which transformed into a guardian mode for different terrain.  Actuators would have to be damn small & lions would still be unlikely to pay the weight & size penalty.  Endurance is really short with today's best actuators.

Never forget the days we believed rocket engines would go forever on just a tiny amount of fuel.  The future was all going to be rocket engine powered.

 

Brittai's death in the final battle was more clearly shown than in the TV series.  That was a key plot point in the TV show.  

 

Then 4 minutes later, he showed up alive again & now was just turning against Boldolza.  

The final battle dropped a lot of background information from the TV series.  Sadly, a lot of development of the Meltrans was left out while the last 6 minutes ran extremely slowly.  They had a sudden budget cut.  IMDB  had a note about the budget running out & a Minmei song getting cut.  Lions fast forwarded all the Minmei songs at 4x.

Miria came back to life like Brittai.  They showed 3 zentran spies defecting, as shown in the TV series, while Brittai & Buldoza were only using the 3 spies to trick the humans into surrendering the protoculture as a weapon.  When the protoculture didn't turn up, Buldoza & Brittai attacked the humans.  The supporting bits from the TV series definitely had to be believed along with the deaths not shown in the TV series.

 

 The final battle really popped in HD.  The IMDB stills followed lion experience with a bunch of early low res screenshots from the pirated edition followed by the newer HD screenshots from the 1988 gootube edition.  The IMDB stills had no subtitles so they might have come from an authorized disk.

It was originally animated in 1984, then revised in 1988.  Additional animation of Minmei was released in 1987 but not included in the 1988 edition.  Of course, a lot of dates on IMDB have the 1987 video coming out in 2024.  Especially confusing, now that we're decades beyond the setting of the show.

Of the 2 spoilers, Khyron didn't show up at all.  Kyle was a lot more bearable. 

  These shows were really about wading through hours of boring dialog to get to the 1 lavishly animated mecha sequence.  IMDB tended to emphasize the talking heads & lesser mecha sequences.  Anime was perceived as getting a lot cheaper between 1985 & the rise of the internet.  There were a lot more animation rich movies once it was proven to be a money maker.  Computers automated most of it.

For lions, there was probably a phase during peak child bearing years when our bodies were programmed to forget the wonder of these shows.   After all the women told us to fuck off, the wonder started coming back.  Not enough time remanes to redraw the scenes, though.