Shadow Chronicles and "ethnic gesture"

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Hey, maybe they were separated at birth.

One of the things that Carl Macek talks about in the commentary track to Codename Robotech, the movie condensation of the first third of the Macross saga on one of the Robotech extras DVDs, is how they retimed and edited the animation as part of the dubbing process to eliminate what he calls "ethnic gesture." (And no, that doesn't mean mean how furriners give the finger, either.) He's referring to gestures, motions, or silly faces that are distinctly Japanese, or else specifically animé tropes; back then they wanted to make Robotech look as American as possible, or at least avoid confusing people. (Examples of the sorts of things that got eliminated included Annie's eyes becoming hearts when she saw someone handsome, or Rand bumping his head and making a big-eyed, big-mouthed face.)

This is, in part, why I find the above picture so amusing. Anyone who watches a lot of animé is probably familiar with the gesture that the above pictures represent: closing one's eyes and smiling to denote real or feigned embarrassment, often accompanied by sweatdrops either on the smiler or on the consternated person who is the object of the smile. And it's all over the place in Shadow Chronicles. I'm kind of surprised that we didn't get the sweatdrops, too—after all, we did in Prelude to the Shadow Chronicles.

There are other little animéisms, too, like the fish-eye lens effect used on Alex Romero a time or two when he's startled into incoherence or asking if Marcus is out of his gourd. But the closed-eyes smile is the most obvious.

I'm not complaining about it, mind. Just really amused, given that part of the whole point of the original Robotech adaptation was cutting that sort of thing out. I would be inclined to guess the change is because the American public is more used to that sort of thing now, what with animé having made it so big over here in the last few years, but thinking it was an intentional change is probably too big of an assumption. I imagine it was just one of those things that happened in the animation process and nobody really even noticed it was there.

Vince Grant: remarkably young for his age

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So here we see that Vince Grant comes from the state of America. I suppose geography lessons are not considered all that important when you're battling over entire star systems…

But the funniest thing to me is that his age is given as 36. That would mean Vince was born in 2008, fathered Bowie at the ripe old age of 5, and was all of 14 when the SDF-3 headed for deep space in 2022.

On the other hand, he does look remarkably well-preserved for the late-40s-to-early-50s age that he technically should be in 2044. Relativistic travel slowing the aging process? A result of exposure to protoculture radiation and shadow-dimensional fields? (After all, if they can increase bust size dramatically in the female, perhaps they just cause slower aging in the male? Oh, but wait—that wouldn't account for Rick Hunter, who looks about a million years old now.)

Incidentally, the tiny text at the top of the screen is, as nearly as I can make out, "Note that you need a verification code that will be sent to your e-mail to be able to activate your user…" So we find that the Neutron-S missiles are actually detonated by web forum registration software.

Props to Darkwater from The Unofficial Robotech Reporter for pointing the age and state things out to me.

Oh, and by the way, any Robotech fans who don't read the robotech.com message boards and so forth, check out Space Station Liberty to see what future shows I've got scheduled. There's some good ones coming up. I've also posted a couple of pre-recorded shows lately.