I live two miles from work. So, I either walk during the nicer weather, or I take the bus. This has allowed me to develop quite the healthy appetite for podcasts. One of my recent additions is the Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR, and being a pop culture junky, this is right up my alley. They typically talk about a movie, television show, or important pop culture event from the past week, and another topic, typically from user suggestion from the previous week. This past week, the topic was the death of characters, and it is a topic that has always been interesting to me.
Growing up, I was your typical television kid. I watched EVERYTHING, and while I was into your typical 80's cartoons like Transformers and He-Man (not going to lie, but I enjoyed Jem and the Holograms, too), I also watched repeats of classic sitcoms like Maude, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Munsters, etc. My tastes tended to run to the more sophisticated side of humor, but the vast majority of my stimulation did come from television, much to my mother's consternation.
This all changed around 1985, when I stumbled across a new cartoon called Robotech, which literally changed my life. It was 85 episodes of epic space opera, which turned out to actually be three Japanese anime shows, with very little in common other than the space setting and large, battling mecha, that were translated and re-written to create a (somewhat) cohesive three generation storyline. Of course, watching it now, the story creaks under the weight of trying to get these shows to work together, but for a 10 year old kid, it was amazing.
Bringing this back around, the one thing that was fairly unique about Robotech is the mature way it handled the storyline. At the heart, it was indeed a love story, with soap opera style tropes like love triangles and the like, but it was also the home of an inter-racial storyline, which even in the 80s was not that prevalent on television, and the intergalactic war had consequences. In the 36 episodes of The Macross Saga, which is the first segment of the series, there were two major character deaths, the complete irradiation and mass genocide of the Earth, and in the final episode, some very beloved supporting characters lost their lives, and it was all handled adroitly. I remember reaching the episode concerning the fate of Roy Fokker, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. It was very different from the cartoons of the day because even though there was fights between good and evil, there rarely were consequences to those battles. Plus, everything wasn't black and white, there was nuance to how the invading Zentraedi armada was handled, and the fact that I am still a fan to this day, proves that it certainly captured my imagination.
On a trip to St. Pete Beach for Spring Break, I recall browsing a book store and coming across the first four novelizations of Robotech, which I purchased right away. This is where everything changed for me. This is where I started to become a voracious reader. If it had not been for this weirdly constructed anime, I think my path would have been quite different.
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An additional note on character death, because I do not want to give it short shrift, even though the choices made to kill off characters had nothing to do with storyline and everything to do with toy sales. Sitting in a movie theater alone watching Transformers: The Movie, I was rocked by death after death of favorite characters. Indeed, in the first 5 or 10 minutes, Iron Hide, Ratchet, Wheeljack, just to name a name a few, were unceremoniously offed by Megatron and the Decepticons. They didn't use any special weapons either, which means the preceding television series could have been very different. Of course, then came the biggie, the death of Optimus Prime. It is true that Hasbro wanted to refresh the brand, which is why there was this bloodletting, but the death of Prime totally backfired on them, which lead to his resurrection a few episodes into the "new" season, though not after a truly horrifying episode called "Dark Awakening," which took place on the Autobot mausoleum ship. I still can't watch that episode. Too damn creepy...
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