Trivia / Super Dimension Fortress Macross

• Actor Allusion: In the ADV dub, this isn't the first time Chris Patton (Max) and Luci Christian (Millia) were paired up together as love interests.
• Anime First: In November 1982, Noboru Sakaoka published a short manga of the series in the 小学二年生 magazine.
• Defictionalization:
  • An artisanal example; in episode 25, we have a wedding cake shaped like the SDF-1 Macross◊. Bandai Manager Jerry Chu was presented with a cake in the same shape at his real-world wedding. The wedding also happened to be held on Lynn Minmay's birthday.
  • A Mexican aerospace company designed a plane, named Pegasus PE-210A, which looks almost the same like Hikaru Ichijou's Fan Racer from the first episodes, a fact lampshaded by many fans in Mexico.
• Executive Meddling: The series was actually going to be called Megaroad, but an executive's love for Shakespeare suggested it to be called Macbeth. After some compromising, Macross was created.
• I Am Not Spock: Mari Iijima (who played Lynn Minmay): "Maybe you guys have NEVER been typecast as one thing for years and years in life?". And Mari is a good singer in her own right but for some people, she remains "Minmay". She claims to have come to terms with this later in her life, even saying that agreeing to reprise Minmay for the Macross English dub in 2006 was her way of reconciling herself with the character.
• Missing Episode: For about a day or so the production staff faced a very literal example, as the finished broadcast master for one of the episodes was accidentally left on a train by a courier. Fortunately, they were able to recover the film rather than have to recreate it.
• No Export for You: Despite the infamous legal issues suffered by the franchise as a whole, the original series actually averted this, as it received unedited English releases by Streamline Pictures, AnimEigo, ADV Films (with an uncut dub), Harmony Gold themselves (partnering with A&E/Lionsgate), and in Australia by Madman Entertainment. It still hasn't seen a UK release, though.
  • The hideous legal wranglings over the show did prevent Big West from selling licensed Macross toys ^note Yamato Toys' 1/72 and 1/48 transformable Valkyries as well as Valks from Macross Plus in America. They even tried selling them under another name^note "Sunwards" but the effort was still shot down by Harmony Gold. Early on, efforts were even made to stop "gray market" importation of the toys in question but this has been mercifully fruitless. The only import that actually managed to slip through Harmony Gold's cracks was Hasbro's version (rechristened as Jetfire) for the original Transformers: Generation 1 toyline.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Due to the suicide of Hikaru Ichijou's original voice actor Arihiro Hase in 1996, in all subsequent appearances he is voiced by Kenji Nojima.
  • Inverted across languages: Minmay's voice actress (Mari Iijima) is the same in the original Japanese version and the ADV Films (Macross) dub.
• Role Reprise: A very unique cross-language variation: ADV somehow got Mari Iijima to play Minmay in their English dub of the series—more than 20 years after she originally voiced the character in Japanese!
• Un-Canceled: Originally slated for 48 or so episodes, the series was cut (due to the loss of the original sponsor) to around 23, meaning the series would have ended with the climactic battle against Bodolzaa, as seen in "Ai Wa Nagareru." Tatsunoko deciding to come on board at the last minute (though that caused other still ongoing headaches), as well as a very positive viewer reaction, allowed for a reprieve, and the show was at the very last minute extended to 36 episodes, permitting the "two years later" epilogue arc, which resolved the love triangle, as well as other hanging plot threads.

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