My Cultural Diet

Both an adaptation and reinterpretation of the original Macross series, Macross: Do You Remember Love? essentially takes everything you love (and hate) about Macross and distills it down into a single two-hour-long movie. All of the expected characters are present, including Hikaru Ichijyo, Lynn Minmay, and Misa Hayase (and their romantic triangle), but significant changes are made to their backstories. Significant changes are made to the journey of the SDF-1 space battleship, as well, as it tries to return to Earth while battling the Zentradi alien warrior race, who are also fighting a civil war of their own. Macross titles are inherently melodramatic, but Do You Remember Love? is even more so, and as a feature-length film, it’s also surprisingly graphic in places. The film culminates in a massive space battle during which Minmay sings an ancient alien pop song to rally the troops. The discrepancy between the orgy of destruction and the swoon-y ballad, which contains such sentimental lyrics as “Do you remember the time when our eyes first met?/Do you remember the time when our hands first touched?/That was the very first time I set out on the journey of love,” is wildly ridiculous — and I kind of love it. Your mileage will, of course, vary. (Nerdy sidenotes: Do You Remember Love? is not part of the official Macross canon. Rather, it’s treated as a fictional movie that’s popular in the Macross universe. 1992’s Macross II is set after the events of Do You Remember Love?, and as such, is non-canonical, too. Do You Remember Love? was also re-edited, dubbed into English, and released here in the States circa 1986 as Clash of the Bionoids, which I definitely remember seeing in toy stores as a kid.)

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