Trivia / Macross Frontier

General

• As noted on the front page there were quite a few interviews that were actually fake. Some of the information from the interviews include:
  • Hiroshi Ohnogi has nothing to do with Macross Frontier. Any Macross Frontier Interview which includes Hiroshi Ohnogi is fake.
  • The belief that Ranka was created before Sheryl is not true. Sheryl's character was created before Ranka's.
    • Similarly the belief that the love triangle was originally planned to be Ranka being fought over by Brera and Alto is also not true. While the original love triangle was two guys and one girl this was still in the planning stages before they decided on the characters.
  • Kawamori never once gave the Shrug of God in regards to any of the characters or their relationships to one another. Those were a part of the fake interviews.
  • Kawamori never said the ending was a Marry Them All ending. Kawamori never even implied that, in fact he jossed many of the dialogues that could have been taken as meaning that Alto loved both girls.
• The claim that Kawamori had very little to do with the last episode of the TV series is unsupported. In his fanbook interview, script writer Hiroyuki Yoshino observed that everyone involved in planning the last few episodes had started feeling the same way: that it didn't need to end with Alto choosing one girl or the other. In fact, some of them even started to joke that, "If Alto were to behave naturally, he'd like the sky more than either girl anyway."
  • Furthermore, unlike commonly believed, Yoshino did not specify out right who Alto favored either (although this may have changed since the second film was released).
  • Note that, according to Kawamori in his Wings of Farewell Complete Book interview, the ending of the films was the one closest to the ending he had originally thought up. However, he has not specified exactly how close it is to that 'original' ending.
• Even though the movies are supposedly NonSerialMovies, Kawamori does endorse the movies, especially the second one which resolves the love triangle as the end of Macross Frontier.
• Ever since it made its debut in Super Robot Wars with Super Robot Wars L, it has been in every SRW game with the exception of NEO until it was retired in the International Era, mostly due to the then-problematic licensing of the Macross brand internationally. (Delta was also very new at the time, but the BB Studio staff couldn't get assets for it ready in time for V in any event, and then politics came into play.)

Specific

• Acting for Two: Houko Kuwashima voices Canaria Berstein and Nanase Matsuura.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Klan Klan has been pretty consistently popular in the Macross fandom and the mecha fandom in general, mostly because she's very funny, has a pretty heartwarming romance with Michael and also manages to be a total badass when the story calls for it.
  • Bobby Margot, the resident Camp Gay ship controller of the Macross Quarter is also very popular for his Hot-Blooded bouts in some of the battles and the ridiculous piloting skills he has. He quickly got the GAR badge of honor on /m/.
• Late Export for You: The two Frontier movies released in Japan in 2009 and 2011, while North American screenings weren't scheduled until June 2022, 13 and 11 years after their respective releases in their home country. Then, in July 2022, the TV anime itself was announced to be offered on home video outside Japan, 14 years after its Japanese broadcast.
• No Export for You: Holy moly.
  • Despite how incredible the show ended up being, the show ended up falling victim to the infamous legal snarls surrounding the Macross franchise; nobody ever said a word about even considering bringing it over, even after the show DVDs, soundtracks, and related paraphernalia matched or shattered decade-old sales records in Japan (and this is for "anime" goods in general, not just Macross stuff). There was hope for some time that intense industry-wide pressure from everyone else (looking to strengthen the overall market with another prominent release) would make the various combatants in the Macross legal snarl play nice, but as time ground on it began to look impossible. Until...
  • ...Until the the manga version came to the US. Which wasn't much, licensing-wise, but still.
  • ...Until the Japanese Blurays for the Frontier movies rather pointedly had English subtitles — ones that were clearly handled by native-English professional translators (and who arrived on the project via a nigh-madcap journey).
  • ...Until, following the landmark Bigwest-Harmony Gold deal of March 2021, everything was finally sorted out, and in June of 2022, the Frontier movies were shown in theaters in special one-night engagements. They became the first Macross media to be officially exported outside of Japan, and specifically to the United States, in more than twenty years.
  • ...and then the TV anime itself was finally announced to get a release outside of Japan, specifically North America.
• Playing Against Type: Kikuko Inoue playing...Grace!
• Shrug of God: Subverted if you have the Blu-ray version of Macross Frontier; in the commentaries, Kawamori actually gives you plenty of hints on how the love triangle will end.