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Super Dimension Fortress Macross
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alt title(s): Macross 
The seminal series that introduced the whole trope of Transforming Mecha, Super Dimension Fortress Macross originally started as a parody of Humongous Mecha series (notably Mobile Suit Gundam) but evolved into a "serious" series of its own. The name was originally to have been Super Dimension City Megaroad; one producer, a Shakespeare fan, wanted to name the fortress Macbeth. Macross was the compromise.
The show was originally scheduled to run for 48 episodes, but budget cuts due to a sponsor dropping out then forced a projected cut to 26. However, with a last-second infusion of money from Tatsunoko Productions (which inadvertently spawned a never-ending legal headache for all involved) and the realizaton that the show had become a huge hit, ten more episodes were hastily tacked on.
In North America, it was combined with two other series to form Robotech.
Spawned a number of sequels and spinoffs: Macross: Flashback 2012 (an extended music video for Minmay, which also acts as an epliogue for the series) Macross Plus, Macross 7, Macross Dynamite 7 (OAV), Macross Zero (OAV) and Macross Frontier, the last of which recently finished airing and will have a movie extension coming out at some point. There's also an OVA and manga series named Macross II that was made without the original creators' authorization, and has since been placed as an Alternate Continuity. In 2009, a manga adaptation of the original series was started, drawn and written by Haruhiko Mikimoto, that kept the original designs (though often favoring those used in the movie) while jettisoning some of the more Zeerust aspects (everyone finally has cellphones in that far-off year of 2009, for instance) One trope that is seen across all of the Macross series is the Love Triangle. In fact, it has been described by Shoji Kawamori, mechanical designer and co-creator of the series as a "love story set amongst the backdrop of great battles."
This show provides examples of:
- The Ace (Max)
- After The End (However this version has a major modern city, complete with all the personnel you need to reestablish a technological civilization, surviving and working to rebuild.)
- Aliens Made Them Do It ("I demand you show me how this 'kiss' process works!")
- All Just A Dream
- Alternate Continuity: Macross II: Lovers Again.
- Applied Phlebotinum
- Attack Of The 50 Foot Whatever (The Zentraedi and Meltrandi)
- The Battlestar
- Big Brother Mentor (Roy, just Roy)
- Bilingual Bonus (The three Zentradi spies are named Warera, Loli, and Conda, which put together reads as, "We have a Lolita Complex" in Japanese...whether or not they actually do is never said.)
- Bishonen (Max; arguably, Lin Kaifun and Conda Blomco)
- Bittersweet Ending: the series came to its conclusion with Hikaru and Misa getting their fairytale ending. Minmay decides to accept this and moves on with her life, even so, the couple remains on good terms with her until they all mysteriously disappear in 2016 with the Megaload-01.
- Bridge Bunnies (Sammy, Kim, Vanessa, Claudia, and at first Misa. The original ones!)
- Broken Bird (Misa)
- The Captain (Gloval)
- Captain Crash (Hikaru gets his Valkyrie trashed a lot)
- Capulet Counterpart ( Miria, for Max)
- Character Development (and how!)
- Christmas Episode: with exploding Santas
- Chronic Backstabbing Disorder (Khyron/Quamzin, known as "The Ally Killer" by the Zentradi themselves)
- Clip Show (At least two)
- Cool Big Sis (Claudia)
- Cool Plane: The reason for the franchise's existence.
- Crowning Moment Of Awesome: Typical reaction upon first seeing the Daedalus Attack: "Dude, did the Macross just punch a battleship in the face?"
- The movie also features a jaw-dropping fight sequence between Max and Miria, followed by a Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming.
- The whole Do You Remember Love? sequence, for the music and for being pretty much a Crowning Moment in anime history.
- Crowning Moment Of Funny: Hikaru calls Misa an Obasan in his first meeting with her (over the radio). Later, after he signs up with the military, he meets her in person with the sudden realization that she's now his superior officer. Cue an Oh Crap and Hilarity Ensues.
- Crowning Music Of Awesome: The final attack in the movie features the song "Do You Remember Love?".
- Cute Monster Girl (Zentradi are Human Aliens, but the males range in appearance from ugly to average to handsome, with the occasional odd skin tone and/or cybernetic aspect, while the female Zentradi are always depicted as beautiful. Do You Remember Love? is probably where this trope is the strongest for Zentradi design)
- Dark Skinned Redhead (Exsedol's original design, though his personality is very much not the usual kind)
- Deconstruction (The early episodes were basically Deconstructive Parodies of shows like Mobile Suit Gundam (in fact that was originally the point of the entire show) but later on once the show got somewhat serious it delivered an absolutely massive deconstruction of not just mecha anime but war stories in general by showing that culture - proving to the enemy that you're Not So Different and that both sides deserve to live - is what really leads to proper conflict resolution as opposed to the total annihilation of the enemy that was so prevalent in the show's day. The message resonated deeply with the Japanese public and the industry and the show's effects are felt to this very day.)
- Die For Our Ship (Minmay would surely get much less shit if she wasn't interested in Hikaru, thus "cockblocking" him and Misa)
- Dragon Ascendant: Quamzin
- During The War
- Green Skinned Space Babe (Or better said, Greenn Haired Space Babe)
- The End Of The World As We Know It (subversion: our heroes actually fail to save the world from destruction, although they make the destroyers pay immediately afterward)
- Eva Fins: the SDF-1 Macross, who has shoulder spikes that double as a Wave Motion Gun.
- Fan Nickname (for the guy currently in charge of the series no less, Shoji Kawamori is known among some fans as the Hory Froating Head)
- First Episode Spoiler: Although it's not included on any of the DVD releases, the original television run of the first episode had a cobbled-together opening designed to hide the fact that the fighter planes are, in fact, Transforming Mecha.
- First Girl Wins (in an unexpected way)
- Five Man Band
- Handsome Lech (To a degree, Roy. He did become very loyal to Claudia once they hooked up, though)
- Hand Wave
- Heel Face Turn (Miriya)
- Hong Kong Dub: The Movie got one of these
- Humongous Mecha Macross itself after jump problems
- Idol Singer (Minmay - Kyun, Kyun! Kyun, Kyun! My boyfriend is a pilot! )
- Jerk Ass (Minmay's cousin, local Soapbox Sadie Lin Kaifun, to the point where he berates Misa for rescuing him and Minmay from rogue Zentradi through force despite the fact that nobody was hurt and the alternative was giving them a warship that would have let them hurt innocent people. It's no wonder that much of the fandom has labeled him The Scrappy.)
- Killed Off For Real (Roy Fokker and Hayao Kakizaki. The former's death scene is a Tear Jerker capable of forcing Manly Tears from even the most macho of men.)
- Kissing Cousins (Kaifun and Minmay, to a degree)
- Loud Of War (The singing of Lynn Minmei was a psychological weapon of mass destruction to the Zentradi. In a meta-subversion, the voicework for Minmei's singing in the English adaptation Robotech, however, is considered by some to be so god-awfully grating that they accept the Zentradi view.)
- Love Triangle (Misa/Hikaru/Minmay), this was the main story, an unsual concept for the time, with the SDF-1 being the setup rather than the primary focus.
- Loving A Shadow ( Misa almost falls for Minmay's cousin Kaifun because he looks a lot like Riber, the fiancé she tragically lost)
- Macross Missile Massacre
- Meet Cute: Hikaru's first response to Misa is to call her an "old lady", however by the end of the series they've proposed. Millia wants to kill Max pretty much right off the bat for being a better pilot than her, and they later get married as well.
- Meganekko (Vanessa from the Bridge Bunnies team. Max is a male example.)
- Mundane Utility (At one point, a Valkyrie's gunpod is used to light a cigarette for a nearby Zentraedi.)
- My Brain Is Big (Exsedol's retconned form)
- Myth Arc
- Naive Everygirl (Minmay)
- Nuclear Weapons Taboo (The series, up until Macross Zero always refers to nuclear weapons as "Reaction Warheads")
- "Reaction" is actually a mis-translation. It's meant to be "Reflex". The same term is also used for the nuclear drives on UN Spacy ships, so it's pretty much a nuclear taboo, period.
- No, the "reflex" thing was the Robotech mistranslation of "reaction", which was then also applied to the drives and the macross gun. I have never heard about the opposite.
- Off Model (Due to outsourcing for budgetary reasons, some episodes are wildly, wildly off model and look absolutely terrible. Most infamous is the knife fight between Max and Milia, which should have been awesome but ended up being embarrasing.)
- Photo Montage (The ending sequence, a live-action segment which shows a hand turning the pages of an album of Minmay pictures. Uniquely, it turns out the hand belongs to Misa and the same thing happens in episode 28)
- Pimped Out Dress (many of Minmay's stage outfits)
- Poor Communication Kills
- Possession Implies Mastery (Averted in that the crew of Macross barely understand a portion of what the ship can or can't do, making each major move with a different function a dangerous shot in the dark that works just often enough to make it seem to their enemies that they could be tactical geniuses)
- To be fair, Bruno Global is a tactical genius - he's just also really. fucking. lucky.
- Post Script Season
- Pretty In Mink (some of Minmay's stage outfits)
- Punny Name: Aside from the aforementioned Zentraedi spies, you have Captain Bruno Global, whose race and accent are so ambiguous that it is completely impossible to tell where the hell he's from.
- Ramming Always Works
- Red Oni Blue Oni (Milia/Max color coded mecha too)
- The Red Sonja (Milia)
- Ret Con (Most of the character and mecha redesigns from Do You Remember Love? were eventually incorporated into the main continuity, replacing the original designs)
- Science Fiction
- The Scrappy: Minmei and Kaifun.
- Shapeshifter
- Shout Out: (To the original Mobile Suit Gundam, Captain Harlock, Lupin III, and others}}
- Roy's (later Hikaru's) Valkyrie fighter and Skull Squadron, with the black tails and skull and crossbones, honor the real life VF-84 fighter planes and their iconic color schemes.
- Snap Back (The city inside the Macross is shown to be seriously damaged in many space battles,
not to mention every time the ship transforms. It's always fine in the next episode.)
- Then again, the city inside was rebuilt taking the ship's transformation into account after the first time, and some of the battles take place months apart (about seven months pass between episode 6 and episode 7, and almost two months and ten episodes for the next battle to damage the city).
- So Okay Its Average: Lovers Again. With the glaring exception of its soundtrack.
- Sorting Algorithm Of Evil
- Soapbox Sadie (Kaifun/Kylie is one of the rare male examples)
- Spell My Name With An S (Many Zentradi names are designed to be completely impossible to reproduce in Japanese so as to sound more alien. This has led to some... interesting attempts to romanize them. Closer to home are the many arguments over "Ichijou" versus "Ichijyo", "Focker" versus "Fokker", and "Lynn Minmay" versus "Lin Minmei".)
- Considering that the aircraft manufacturer is named Fokker
 and Roy's a pilot, who could argue and be taken at all seriously?
- The character that makes up Minmei's surname got changed in the Chinese dub of the series? Why? This Troper can offer an explanation. The character for "Bell" (The original) and the character for "Grove" (The dub) have the EXACT SAME pronunciation in some Chinese dialects. For more, go to the My Hovercraft Is Full Of Eels trope and scroll down to the Chinese section.
- The Spock (Exsedol)
- The Squad
- Stripperific Both averted and played straight. In the original TV series, female Zentradi soldiers wore uniforms essentially identical to the male ones, which were loose-fitting and covered the entire body except for the head and hands. However, the females' pilot suits for their Powered Armor were originally skintight, though fairly non-Stripperiffic otherwise...but the retconned female suits emphasize their sexiness and femininity much more. However, in all incarnations the Zentradi female powered armour itself is very bulky and only roughly humanoid.
- Super Robot Wars (Alpha and Alpha Gaiden)
- Take Off Every Zig
- The Other Darrin (Inverted across languages: Minmay's voice actress is the same in the original Japanese version and the ADV Films (Macross) dub.)
- Tear Jerker: Roy Fokker's death, especially when they show Claudia's reaction.
- They Look Like Us Now
- Title Theme Tune: MAA-KU-ROS! MAA-KU-ROS!
- The Tokyo Fireball
- Too Dumb To Live: Roy Fokker: "Medical treatment? Since when do injured pilots need medical treatment? Let's go eat some salad!"
- The Power Of Rock: Usually J-Pop in the main series, but music is the key to winning any conflict for good in the universe. Macross Seven takes it up a notch...
- Transforming Mecha: From Jet to jet with arms and legs, to humanoid.
- Un Canceled, giving us the "Two years after" story arc that was able to resolve the love triangle, as well as other plot threads.
- Unlucky Childhood Friend: ( Riber and Misa knew each other since childhood and were engaged to marry. Then, some time before the events of the series started, he disappeared... and later, Misa finds out he's been Dead All Along.
- Wagon Train To The Stars: The SDF-1 and the subsequent colonial ships, especially the Megaload-01. The New UN took these as precautions in case of future Zentradi or Supervision Army attacks and to ensure humanity's survival.
- Wave Motion Gun
- Wham Episode ( Roy's death. Followed by Kakizaki's death and the almost destruction of the Earth.)
- Weasel Mascot Minmay's young cousin, Yocchan, seems to be jettisoned in favor of one of these, a rabbity-weasely...thing named Koge, in the new manga adaptation.
- Your Mileage May Vary (regarding Macross II - it's either a mediocre rehash of the DYRL movie or an unassuming sequel. Either way, the music there is still worthy of carrying the Macross name.)
- Zeerust We will still have LP records in the future, and no cellphones or Internet (though we do get cool self-propelled payphones and vending machines...) Avoided in the new manga adaptation, which, handily, is being drawn and written the exact year the events in the show were supposed to take place.
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