Robotech: The Movie

Robotech: The Movie, also known as Robotech: The Untold Story, is a 1986 animated science fiction film created by Carl Macek, based on Robotech, the original television series and franchise created by Harmony Gold.

The film was created using footage from two unrelated anime, the film Megazone 23 - Part I and Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross.

Background
Robotech: The Movie was primarily composed of the 1985 OVA film Megazone 23 - Part I with footage from Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, the subject of the second season of Robotech, spliced in. The film was adapted by Carl Macek and Harmony Gold after Macek failed to negotiate the rights to adapt Macross: Do You Remember Love? as the subject for the film. Macek's choice of Megazone 23 mostly stemmed from it sharing similar character designs as Macross, due to them sharing character designers.

According to interviews with Macek, the project had originally been intended to be more of a straight dub of Megazone 23 with dialogue and music changes to reflect the Robotech universe. As originally conceived, it would have been set during the events of the First Robotech War (while the SDF-1 was in the process of flying back to Earth from Pluto) with the protagonist Mark Landry, a relative of Rick Hunter, finding out about the government's coverup of the SDF-1's fate, and Landry fighting to make the information known.

However, distributor Cannon Films felt there were "too many girls and not enough robots and guns," and did not like Megazone 's downer ending, either. Thus, Macek rewrote the story to take place shortly before the Second Robotech War, cut segments of Southern Cross footage into it, and commissioned animation studio The Idol Company to animate a new ending (which was later included on the laserdisc of Megazone 23, Part II). The new version involved the Robotech Masters kidnapping and replicating veteran officer B.D. Andrews to steal the memory core of the SDF-1. This new version of the film, however, left some glaring inconsistencies with the original series. In addition, this new story required bits of the Southern Cross series to be spliced in to the original Megazone 23 material. Megazone 23 was filmed on 35mm film while Southern Cross was on 16mm ... the visual inconsistency was very noticeable on the big screen.

The movie disappeared from the United States after a failed test-run in Texas that lasted only a few weeks. One cause for its poor performance was believed to be because Cannon saw Robotech: the Movie as a "kids' film". And when the demographics came back about a month after the test run, they saw that most of the audience was adults. This posed a problem, as Cannon had purchased advertising time only during child oriented programming. It was at this time that Cannon decided to pull the film until it could be properly retooled yet again. Unfortunately, before any further work could be done on the film, the bottom dropped out of Cannon Films and Robotech: the Movie only saw wide release in foreign (non-American) markets.

Megazone 23 would later be given two faithful dubs, one by Macek's Streamline Pictures in 1995, and a redub by ADV Films in 2004.

Cast
* Megazone 23 and Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross

Additional Voices
 * Bill Capizzi
 * Frank Catalano
 * Ardwight Chamberlain
 * Max Christian
 * Cam Clarke
 * Tony Clay
 * Richard Epcar
 * Milton James
 * Steve Kramer
 * Doug Lee
 * Kerrigan Mahan
 * Dave Mallow
 * Edward Mannix
 * Michael McConnohie
 * Mike Reynolds
 * Gregory Snegoff
 * Barry Stigler
 * Clifton Wells
 * Bruce Winant
 * Tom Wyner