So many people never learned or don't properly appreciate just how ahead of its time Robotech was for America when it came to animation. I was born in 76 so all I ever had until Robotech came out in 85, aside from a few like Thundarr the Barbarian, Voltron, Transformers, and GI Joe, which was all still rather sanitized for young kids. lol Like in GI Joe you could bail out of ANYTHING and treat it like hopping out of bed. Bahahahaha! Ten billion laser blasts and not one person actually shot. :) All the rest took that even further like Disney, Hanna Barbera, Loony Toons, and about the most violent thing was lol, all of Tom and Jerry. All in all it was cartoonish harmless violence. Then Robotech comes along and says hold my beer and frags most of humanity in almost literal hellfire and SHOWS IT. lol It was like buckle up butter cup, I'm going to show you what war really looks like. This was not your mom's cartoon so to speak. It went so far as to kill off main characters in a time where nobody ever dies in most TV shows and sure as hell doesn't in cartoons. I'm in my 40s now and it's hard to remember that far back, but I think when Roy Fokker died it may very well of been the first time in my life watching something gave me an actual visceral reaction. It opened the door for so many other great shows that treated animation as merely another art form. Not something that has to be for kids. It's a shame what Harmony Gold has done to the franchise.
@@thotslayer9914 Yes to Gundam, no to the other. But Gundam didn't air in America until way after Robotech, and IDK about the other but I suspect it's the same.
I remembered seeing the ships charge up for firing, and I was still convinced that there was going to be some cheap last-minute save, only to see them fire. All my brother and I could react was mutter in horror, "Oh my God! They actually did it!"
@@mpm1125 no, even that wouldnt have been enough agaisnt the Invid, any spare troops and equipment would have been used agaisnt the Masters whose Colony ships wasted the SC fleets , the Masters themselves said it, Mankind didnt reserve troops to defend agaisnt the Invid cause they didnt know they were coming until the Masters told them
@@shadowmaverick15 I think the only difference is that the Invid Regis was open to negotiations even at her peak of domination. The Invid species is the only one wich values more the natural enviroment than war itself. So even if that race was one hell of a parasitic plague, they at least, had a heart so to speak. Humans, Zentraedis and even the Masters themselves took turns killing each other just for the sake of power way more often than any kind of Invid kill in the universe.
I just saw this series a few days ago. Binged it. I remember thinking when the Zentradi showed up, "Haha I'd just attack Earth, not the Macross" and then he commands an attack on Earth. I'm like "ok well grand multi episode battle, nice" and he fucking DECIMATED the Earth. I still can't believe they did that.
@@El.broder actually it was a good idea to bring the whole fleet cus I don't think the Zentradi knew about the Grand Canons on each major continent on earth. Quite unfortunate that the Humans where not able to use all I think 7 or 8 grand cannons, most of them where damaged from the attack. Plus there was on on the moon but I don't think anyone was operating it at the time.
@@mrdriver2988 Last time i checked only one Grand Cannon was operational, hence why it was the only one used, the rest werent finished by the time the Zentraedi showed up, if they had Dolza's fleet would have received a very warm welcome by the RDF the moment they showed up and didnt reply to radio communications
@Evil Doctor PorkChop I saw it in the early 90s and it was shocking too, anime and cartoons weren't this catastrophic back then so it got us unprepared.
I was a kid in the 80s and remember watching stuff like this attack, Roy dying then Ben getting vaporized the very next episode. It was a harsh but important lesson to learn that sometimes the good guys don't win and may even die. I could only roll my eyes when I watched GI Joe. No deaths, not even a drop of blood in that show.
I was a kid in 2006 (10 years old) and my stephfather said to me "So, do you like anime? (I was watching DBZ), see this" and put Macross on DVD. Three things happened that day: -I falled in love forever with anime. -I falled in love forever with Macross, Mechs and Space operas. -I love, but also felled really affected and shock with this scene. Specially when the soldier and the girl die together.
Everyone is freaking out over the devastation of Earth, but here I am flummoxed that they made a weapons platform so heavy that it can't even take a step without crushing the hull plating of the ship it's deploying from.
I have all 3 generations on hard drive. Havent watched them in 30 years or so. I remember getting home from school just in time to watch, record and pause during commercials on the Betamax player.
GI Joe cartoon - a hundred jet fighters are shot down and we see a hundred parachutes Robotech - 4 million Zentraedi warships appear out of hyperspace and nearly wipeout all life on the Earth's surface.
In the actual Macross version they actually annihilated all human life on earth, all that was left when they returned to earth was mutated animals and rad-wasteland. Nothing, there was nothing left at all and Rick and Lisa had to take rad medication to stay alive. It was even more devastating to watch them go through a ruined and deserted earth. Still though that soldier protecting the girl as they are vaporized sticks with you. Watched this as a kid when it first came to the USA as Robotech.
@@thegrayone5666 it's also why all of the series after it apart from the other two made into Robotech were about Colony Fleets. And making contact with the other species the Protoculture created, since they were basically our sister species. My personal fave are probably the Ragnans, who're amphibious and have short fins and gills, but're otherwise human. A lot of them were only to happy to allow humanity and the Zentraedi with them to settle on Ragna, and signed up with the UN Spacy in large amounts to help out other colonization fleets. Nearly every Macross series post-first contact with the Ragnans has always had them as an integral part of the crew and flight corps.
This scene alone, the bombardment, singularly sparked my interest in space, getting off this rock as fast as we can, and the idea of creating and maintaining actual defenses in case someone DOES come to visit with a Big Stick.
We need to get the fuck off earth, settle some colonies in this system and bolster our home system asap. I fully believe theres life out there, some good & some, well, lets just say NOT what the creators of Mass Effect would have us believe of a “united” galaxy. Humanity needs to rise up, immediately.
I remember how freaking intense this was when it first aired in the U.S. I couldn't believe a "mere cartoon" would show death on this scale or deal with the aftermath. Between this, "Mach Go Go Go" and "Gatchaman" I became an anime fan for life.
I was also worried that live-action yamato seemed a bit too nishizaki-like. The old yamato was a combination of nishizaki (plot, ship, technology) and Leiji Matsumoto (characters, design, emotion).
What I really want to see is yamato 2199 and yamato 2201, two recent animated remakes of the first two series of space battleship yamato. They look gooooood.
I recall reading someplace (in Jack McKinney's Robotech novelizations most likely) that when the Grand Cannon fires it destroys more Zentraedi warships in that single moment than all of their other warships ever lost combined.
This was the best episode of the series when the planet Earth gets attacked. Earth gets devastated but still fights back, but it still doesn't sanitize the war, when people get killed they get killed and the few scenes show it.
In the 80's up through the 90's we'd called this being Dolzad as in, you just got Dolzad because whenever we roleplayed or played any game it usually resulted in one side going into MAD or games just resulting in whoever could Dolza the other gamer first if we got locked in a stalemate or wanted denial of resources to gain footholds or advantages.
I remember as a sheltered kid in the 80’s on a steady diet of He-Man and Transformers watching this it just blew my mind. People dying even kids with cities and ships full of crews vaporized. Yeah it was traumatic but you have to grow up sooner or later.
Hey at least we could handle this stuff not like the new current sissy gen which they would shit themselves in their pants and would not be able to handle this.
I was in my early twenties when this came out . I was hooked on this thing called Anime . Also met someone who had some of the uncensored comic books from Japan that was translated to English . He let me read the collection that he had at the time and would bring over a new set that came directly from Japan , after he read them first of course .
I was a few years out of High school when ROBOTECH aired on US TV. I grew up in the late 60s early 70s and was exposed to shows like Gigantor, Kimba the white lion, Speed Racer, and Marineboy. Then came Space Cruiser Yamato aka Space BattleshipYamato-Star Blazers. First, there was the movie on TV around 1978, afterward had to settle for the likes of Battle of the Planets, which was a watered down version of Gatchaman, and then my freshmen year of high school Star Blazers. After I graduated in 83 I had to settle for Voltron until ROBOTECH came along. WOW! I was hooked and still a fan in my late 50s.
Best part of the entire series for me. It's really well directed, animated and the musical score is perfect. And of course, the performances of all of the voice actors is phenomenal at the beginning here.
Goes to show, aliens are always badass when they get to earth and throw the first punch, but the old human race, with our extreme knowledge of mass destruction, always ends up landing the knockout blow that puts the invaders down for good.
Well, for a while at least. Hummanity in this universe defeated the zentradi twice, then the robotech masters, but couldn't withstand the might of the invid as Earth was literally beaten down so hard by the past wars that there just wasn't really anything left to give agaisnt the next enemy. Luckily though, good old resistance and guerilla war managed to push back the invid to take earth back, but it was really the invid themselves that chose to leave. They didn't really have to because they still clearly had an advantage. Admittedly though, yeah hummanity sure put up one hell of a fight.
Even as someone who has watched this for the first time because I didn't follow Robotech much as a kid, this is still an amazing scene with the tension building up to the GIGANTIC FLEET preparing to fire at Earth. Previously it had been established that if the Zentreadi were serious about wiping out humanity, they'd do it. And the dub didn't pull any punches, the bombardment annihilated most of humanity.
I was shocked when Earth was actually bombarded into oblivion. I thought they were gonna full some amazing trick and Earth would be saved, but no. Earth was lost. Over 6 billion people were wiped out along with almost all plant and animal life.
Years later after I purchased the DVD set for Robotech, I watched the destruction scene over and over in slow motion. The animation was amazing for it's time. I was 14 when I saw Robotech on tv; I couldn't believe they showed the practical annialation of the human race in a kids cartoon.
I'm can't help but imagine how intense it was first aired in the mid 80s during the Cold War with the fear of Nuclear annihilation. Scary stuff for kids to exposed to. I was much too young but my brother introduced me to this show when it reaired in the mid 90s in Cartoon Network. My reaction would pale to how a 80s kid would react.
I wonder how much of the fleet the Grand Cannon took out? It may not have been able to get all of them, and they may have destroyed it, but the Zentraedi knew they had been in a fight when it got done.
I remember there was an original art book to go with this version of he series and even it tried bridging the other 2 unrelated series together. The Zentreadi actually fought the Invid some thousands or millions of years in the past which was how Breetai lost his eye. If HG (Harmony Gold) did things right I would have loved to see either a prequel series of that happening or eventually the 2 sides would clash. But as we all know HG just messed it up and they made sure that no one else could even expand on the series in any way without lawsuits, even though supposedly they recently decided NOT to renew their claim to it.
Also find it odd they need full magnification to noticed the sky-raping beam of death. One thing I find is annoying is would it kill the VA's to fucking emote? The Zentraedi just sterilized 70% of the planet and the humans are "Oh darn, they killed our friends and loved one, how inconveniant."
@@RamdomView To be fair Homeworld did a similar scene about a billion times better and that wasn't exactly in an era of cinematic experiences in games. The funny part is instead of having someone fail to emote the did really good at having the VA seem like they were suppressing said emotions. So everyone was stone cold professional and it made it really eerie to hear someone talking about the results of an implied brutal interrogation in a complete deadpan or how the crew under your character reacts the the event similar to this one that takes place. There is always a hint of emotion there, just enough that you understand the character understands what is happening.
well, this first part of robotech is like the wine, just get better with time, the massive three person driven reflex units (like tanks) and the military athmosphere plus superb music and this scene of the massive attack I had never forviged, it impressed me to much when i was a Kid, still the power of the destructive forces unleashed give me the cringes, what a great anime this was, I am glad to had the opportunity to see it as a child.
This, & Space Battleship Yamato, A.K.A. Star Blazers here in the U.S., the after school rush to get home & Watch, theses were more important than Homework!!😂🤣😁😎
@CK Lim You wanna go crazier? In Macross, Exedol said back in their heydays, Zentradi had about 1-2000 fleets like Bodol Mainfleet. That means their number back then were at least 4,8 billion ships. Can't remember if that was before or during the galactic civil war.
When i saw this episode when i was kid, i was thinking fire the freaking cannon first but then i realized that the whole destruction, the planet and the alien fleet was kinda amazing. 😜😜😜😜😜😜
The crazy part? That's not even the whole fleet. That's just the equivalent of the covenant's high charity defense fleet. And that devastation was just one volley, not a continuous barrage.
@@jasonleetaiwan Think of it as the primary fleet directly commanded by the Zentradi high command. A fraction of their galaxy wide empire. The Zentradi Empire was simultaneously fighting Earth, Robotech Masters, Invid, and Vajra. And a quoted "million ships" was considered a "quick reaction force" to simply bombard Earth into oblivion. While the Robotech trilogy is not canonical to the actual Macross saga, with specific series plots and side stories lost due to the world wide Harmony Gold ban. Careful translation of the series always pointed the fact that during the Earth v. Zentradi first contact war the Zentradi was in the midst of a civil war with the Meltradi (primarily female) faction, upstart remote Zentradi commanders inciting coupes for the rank of high command, and fighting a multi front war against some unknown enemies in deep space. Macross 7 introduced the civil war factions both pre-war and post-war. Macross Plus showed the first contact war Remnants. Macross Frontier and Delta introduced the Vajra.
@@LuoSon312_G8 Never heard of Vajra. That is from Macross only? Because I never heard of that in Robotech. Why are you combining Macross and Robotech? They are separate entities.
@@jasonleetaiwan The Robotech series rushed the story a bit, forcing the original Macross writers to stop the series post release and rewrite alot of it; the civil war factions had became the Robotech Masters, and the Invid were an offshoot of the Vajra. Vajra are basically space bug bioweapons the size of a Destroid or a Battloid; the most powerful fighter types being able to take on smaller warships, with even smaller variants about the size of a person or a car. Unlike the Invid who are mechanized battle armors who's biggest variants are only as big as a tank piloted by a still unknown biomechanical biped species.
And people wonder why some of us just shrug off things like this. "sonny, in my day we had multiple cartoons that showed genocide" (robotech and star blazers)
I think though out of those 4,8 million ships only around 65,000 had reflex weaponry, not all Zentraedi ships had these guns built in.. This is because of the complexity of those weapons and mass production even in the "golden age" was smaller for the Zentraedi fleets than the Supervision Army. And if anyone wonders the SDF1 is a rebuilt ship of the Supervision Army.
Not in Robotech it isn't. In Robotech, it's the battle fortress of Zor, a unique vessel unlike any other in existence. This is a point where Robotech and Macross fundamentally diverge.
I wish that the Grand Cannon's firepower was more clearly demonstrated. It IS meant to be a devastatingly powerful weapon (at least in the Robotech continuity), albeit ultimately quite unequal to the task set for it. The Zentraedi are supposed to lose a very noteworthy number of ships in that return of fire, perhaps a hundred thousand -- enough to explain Dolza's reaction at there being a return shot at all and also putting everything a bit more towards caution for a moment.
According to the novel version three hundred thousand Zentraedi ships were outright destroyed by the shot with many more disabled and helpless. In that one shot the Zentraedi sustained more casualties than at any time in there entire history.
Too bad they weren't able to fire the Grand Cannon repeatedly. If they could quickly fire shots, they might be able to force a retreat of the Zentradi.
The entire planet has been glassed and they don't give two shits for it. It reminds me of Leia's reaction to the destruction of Alderaan. These people are either too strong, or sociopaths.
4 million enemy ships with the ability to nuke a city from orbit 8 billion lives. That's not a war that's not even a battle that's a struggle for just survival. There more likely to just react to the fight on hand then worry about how many just died in that attack. They need to survive the fight right now because there is literally nothing they can do for the people on earth. They already understand that the death of all those people is out of there control but what they can control is if they survive or not.
@@ATP2555ify A reference to how lasers/extreme heat turns sand to glass. Hence if you 'glass the surface of a planet' that literally means burning it down to bedrock and turning it to glass.
Anyone in 2023 watching this? Hoping Sony gets it together with a live film adaptation, or a series. Word is that it's finally in development after years of legal wrangling . Will they have the courage to present this the way it was? Imagine this if it's done right, in a proper film franchise, or streaming series. Forget zombies and comets, THIS is an end of the world scenario truly horrifying.
The fun fact is that only like a small ammount of Zentradi ships fired onto earth. Out of the 5Million ships from the zentradi fleet only like 100000 fired onto earth. If all the Zentradi ships fired idk if there will be an Earth left.
The battle would have been a bit different if the rest of the canons had been made too, one was simply not enough to take them all out, but the full count would properly have cleared most of the skies. Depending on how far from Earth some of the ships would have been.
@@4600norm The canon takes a long time to spin up the first time to carry the charge, they properly started when the fleet jumped in but the canon was barely finished, as in they where still building it when they fired it.
I remember thinking, how will earth defend, what the catch, what will they pull out of the bag, the earth always wins ... or just makes it ...... I could not see how to get out of it .. annnnd. No blew the planet away ... all of my what stuck in my mind forever ...
This moment has seldom been equaled in sifi literature and never in film. Alien invasion, yea that is bad. How many ships...? ... ... over 4 million ! It was mind blowing when I saw it as a kid, and I think it always stuck with me as an example of a "real" serious attack by an alien race. In almost all sifi we are dealing with an enemy who has a few mega powerful ships, or a few hundred "space battleships" but what defenses can you build to stop millions?
ROBOTECH AUDIOBOOK 1 GENESIS! Experience ROBOTECH in the theater 🎭 of your mind 🧠! 🗣 🎤 📚 ROBOTECH BOOK 1 GENESIS AUDIOBOOK. The origin of the SDF-1 th-cam.com/video/k0k4eZt_TTo/w-d-xo.html
So many people never learned or don't properly appreciate just how ahead of its time Robotech was for America when it came to animation. I was born in 76 so all I ever had until Robotech came out in 85, aside from a few like Thundarr the Barbarian, Voltron, Transformers, and GI Joe, which was all still rather sanitized for young kids. lol Like in GI Joe you could bail out of ANYTHING and treat it like hopping out of bed. Bahahahaha! Ten billion laser blasts and not one person actually shot. :) All the rest took that even further like Disney, Hanna Barbera, Loony Toons, and about the most violent thing was lol, all of Tom and Jerry. All in all it was cartoonish harmless violence.
Then Robotech comes along and says hold my beer and frags most of humanity in almost literal hellfire and SHOWS IT. lol It was like buckle up butter cup, I'm going to show you what war really looks like. This was not your mom's cartoon so to speak. It went so far as to kill off main characters in a time where nobody ever dies in most TV shows and sure as hell doesn't in cartoons. I'm in my 40s now and it's hard to remember that far back, but I think when Roy Fokker died it may very well of been the first time in my life watching something gave me an actual visceral reaction.
It opened the door for so many other great shows that treated animation as merely another art form. Not something that has to be for kids.
It's a shame what Harmony Gold has done to the franchise.
Born in '73. The GI JOE comic book and Robotech changed me for sure.
Thundersub
"Blue Noah"
@@thotslayer9914 all way after robotech (in the US at least)
@@thotslayer9914 Yes to Gundam, no to the other. But Gundam didn't air in America until way after Robotech, and IDK about the other but I suspect it's the same.
As a kid, I was IMPRESSED that a 'cartoon' would allow genocide to be inflicted on earth and the 4 million ship number.
It's definitely NOT GI Joe where they fired weapons all the time and nobody seems to get hurt much or die until the animated movie!
@Naofumi Iwatani Hiroshima and Nagasaki kinda made war horror a fact of life.
@@AvengerII parachutes and ejection seats are 100% reliable in GI joe I remember
As a kid i was always intrigued by "Protoculture" in this awesome series.
@@ronaldsanfran Most of humanity experienced the horrors of war.
I remembered seeing the ships charge up for firing, and I was still convinced that there was going to be some cheap last-minute save, only to see them fire. All my brother and I could react was mutter in horror, "Oh my God! They actually did it!"
Alien: destroy most of the population on earth and irrevocably mess it up.
Humans: "....Alright then... our turn."
no puedes caer sin devolver el golpe.
Could have used all those humans and Zentradi against the Invid.
This is how you get the imperium of man.
@@mpm1125 no, even that wouldnt have been enough agaisnt the Invid, any spare troops and equipment would have been used agaisnt the Masters whose Colony ships wasted the SC fleets , the Masters themselves said it, Mankind didnt reserve troops to defend agaisnt the Invid cause they didnt know they were coming until the Masters told them
@@shadowmaverick15 I think the only difference is that the Invid Regis was open to negotiations even at her peak of domination. The Invid species is the only one wich values more the natural enviroment than war itself. So even if that race was one hell of a parasitic plague, they at least, had a heart so to speak.
Humans, Zentraedis and even the Masters themselves took turns killing each other just for the sake of power way more often than any kind of Invid kill in the universe.
'Emperor Dolza, we have detected a high energy reaction coming from the third planet.'
Dolza: 'Third plan....wait...what...'
What gets me is the shot of the two Soldiers on the Tank getting vaporized a second before the Tank blows up.
That's sad too but the kid and soldier is way worse
Intense heat before the shockwave.
I just saw this series a few days ago. Binged it. I remember thinking when the Zentradi showed up, "Haha I'd just attack Earth, not the Macross" and then he commands an attack on Earth. I'm like "ok well grand multi episode battle, nice" and he fucking DECIMATED the Earth. I still can't believe they did that.
The Zentradi did a 200IQ move
@@mrdriver2988 maybe if they didnt bring the whole fleet
@@El.broder actually it was a good idea to bring the whole fleet cus I don't think the Zentradi knew about the Grand Canons on each major continent on earth. Quite unfortunate that the Humans where not able to use all I think 7 or 8 grand cannons, most of them where damaged from the attack. Plus there was on on the moon but I don't think anyone was operating it at the time.
@@mrdriver2988 Last time i checked only one Grand Cannon was operational, hence why it was the only one used, the rest werent finished by the time the Zentraedi showed up, if they had Dolza's fleet would have received a very warm welcome by the RDF the moment they showed up and didnt reply to radio communications
@@El.broder it was al fleet under Dolza's command. other Emperors have their forces but were still not knowing of Earth and Earthlings.
Minute 3:29. Several years passed and I'm still affected when the soldier hugs the girl to protect her ...
Akuma Bakemono me too :/
yes! me too
I came here for that scene. whoever came up with that shot is a genius.
Same here
Yeah, that's really a moment. It takes what could be a board-game style attack and makes it instantly human.
Me too. When I first saw it, disturbed me
“When are we going to Zentraedi Prime?”
“I don’t know, but we’re burning it down when we get there.”
Nick The Undying modern warfare reference
Nice reference
"When the time is right Corporal. When the time is right."
@@renrekilo2785so whats the reference....
@@artken4901 the fact you can't put 2 and 2 together with other comments here is sad
imagine being a kid in 80's and reacting at this images. that was creepy. very impressive and shoking
@Evil Doctor PorkChop I saw it in the early 90s and it was shocking too, anime and cartoons weren't this catastrophic back then so it got us unprepared.
I was a kid in the 80s and remember watching stuff like this attack, Roy dying then Ben getting vaporized the very next episode. It was a harsh but important lesson to learn that sometimes the good guys don't win and may even die. I could only roll my eyes when I watched GI Joe. No deaths, not even a drop of blood in that show.
I was a kid in 2006 (10 years old) and my stephfather said to me "So, do you like anime? (I was watching DBZ), see this" and put Macross on DVD.
Three things happened that day:
-I falled in love forever with anime.
-I falled in love forever with Macross, Mechs and Space operas.
-I love, but also felled really affected and shock with this scene. Specially when the soldier and the girl die together.
it was fucking awsome!!!
As said kid in the 80's watching this when it first came on, I dropped a brick in my pants.
Everyone is freaking out over the devastation of Earth, but here I am flummoxed that they made a weapons platform so heavy that it can't even take a step without crushing the hull plating of the ship it's deploying from.
The Monster. It's basically a walking battleship turret.
yeah that really detracts from the overall experience...they cannot be fixing the floor everytime they deploy it.
In earlier episodes, they didn't walk but hovered.
@@hot2warm I believe they have rollers on their feet.
Allow me to introduce you to the wonderful world of WW2 German tank design.
I have all 3 generations on hard drive. Havent watched them in 30 years or so. I remember getting home from school just in time to watch, record and pause during commercials on the Betamax player.
3 generations?
You have my interest
GI Joe cartoon - a hundred jet fighters are shot down and we see a hundred parachutes
Robotech - 4 million Zentraedi warships appear out of hyperspace and nearly wipeout all life on the Earth's surface.
In the actual Macross version they actually annihilated all human life on earth, all that was left when they returned to earth was mutated animals and rad-wasteland. Nothing, there was nothing left at all and Rick and Lisa had to take rad medication to stay alive. It was even more devastating to watch them go through a ruined and deserted earth. Still though that soldier protecting the girl as they are vaporized sticks with you. Watched this as a kid when it first came to the USA as Robotech.
@@meatybtz Geeze no punches pulled..
@@thegrayone5666 it's also why all of the series after it apart from the other two made into Robotech were about Colony Fleets. And making contact with the other species the Protoculture created, since they were basically our sister species. My personal fave are probably the Ragnans, who're amphibious and have short fins and gills, but're otherwise human. A lot of them were only to happy to allow humanity and the Zentraedi with them to settle on Ragna, and signed up with the UN Spacy in large amounts to help out other colonization fleets. Nearly every Macross series post-first contact with the Ragnans has always had them as an integral part of the crew and flight corps.
This scene alone, the bombardment, singularly sparked my interest in space, getting off this rock as fast as we can, and the idea of creating and maintaining actual defenses in case someone DOES come to visit with a Big Stick.
It's definitely a powerful scene where humanity is rendered insignificant in size and technology (and probably age) in comparison to the Zentraedi.
We need to get the fuck off earth, settle some colonies in this system and bolster our home system asap.
I fully believe theres life out there, some good & some, well, lets just say NOT what the creators of Mass Effect would have us believe of a “united” galaxy.
Humanity needs to rise up, immediately.
@@Fudgeoff6628 th-cam.com/video/O1CQ7Vwz8Eo/w-d-xo.html
@@Fudgeoff6628 A "Pinesalad Productions" parody dub of "Farewell to Tenderness" ("To the Stars") would probably have used your first paragraph .
@@Fudgeoff6628 the Dark Forest theory as an answer to the Fermi Paradox. You know assuming they aren't already here.
I remember how freaking intense this was when it first aired in the U.S. I couldn't believe a "mere cartoon" would show death on this scale or deal with the aftermath. Between this, "Mach Go Go Go" and "Gatchaman" I became an anime fan for life.
Don't forget Space Battleship Yamato, which started with most of the surface of the Earth destroyed by constant bombardment. Pretty wild.
@@ianwestc Loved that show! You ever see the live action version? They nailed that too.
@@boradis I have not seen the live action version . TBH, it looked a bit like a battlestar galactica knock-off. :-D
I was also worried that live-action yamato seemed a bit too nishizaki-like. The old yamato was a combination of nishizaki (plot, ship, technology) and Leiji Matsumoto (characters, design, emotion).
What I really want to see is yamato 2199 and yamato 2201, two recent animated remakes of the first two series of space battleship yamato. They look gooooood.
Watching that cloud vaporize; one of my favourite pieces of animation.
I have always thought that it looked like the battle star galatica in cloud form
I recall reading someplace (in Jack McKinney's Robotech novelizations most likely) that when the Grand Cannon fires it destroys more Zentraedi warships in that single moment than all of their other warships ever lost combined.
Zentraedi: i destroyed 70% of your planet
Super Cannon: so u choose DEATH
It didn't do enough damage to the total number of Zentradi ships. The Zentradi littraly surround the earth with ships.
Yeah but it did knock hole big enough for the sdf to punch straight throw thier command base winning the battle
35 years later and I still get the chills.
Im 41. Same sheet
This was the best episode of the series when the planet Earth gets attacked. Earth gets devastated but still fights back, but it still doesn't sanitize the war, when people get killed they get killed and the few scenes show it.
You do realize if an advanced species do visit Earth and declare war, it's not gonna some Hollywood invasion but a total wipe from orbit.
In the 80's up through the 90's we'd called this being Dolzad as in, you just got Dolzad because whenever we roleplayed or played any game it usually resulted in one side going into MAD or games just resulting in whoever could Dolza the other gamer first if we got locked in a stalemate or wanted denial of resources to gain footholds or advantages.
Ha, sounds like how my brother and I played Risk when they released the version with nukes. I'll have to remember getting Dolzad.
I remember as a sheltered kid in the 80’s on a steady diet of He-Man and Transformers watching this it just blew my mind. People dying even kids with cities and ships full of crews vaporized. Yeah it was traumatic but you have to grow up sooner or later.
Hey at least we could handle this stuff not like the new current sissy gen which they would shit themselves in their pants and would not be able to handle this.
I was in my early twenties when this came out .
I was hooked on this thing called Anime . Also met someone who had some of the uncensored comic books from Japan that was translated to English .
He let me read the collection that he had at the time and would bring over a new set that came directly from Japan , after he read them first of course .
I just love that blast from the grand cannon
i'm here again lol
I was a few years out of High school when ROBOTECH aired on US TV. I grew up in the late 60s early 70s and was exposed to shows like Gigantor, Kimba the white lion, Speed Racer, and Marineboy. Then came Space Cruiser Yamato aka Space BattleshipYamato-Star Blazers. First, there was the movie on TV around 1978, afterward had to settle for the likes of Battle of the Planets, which was a watered down version of Gatchaman, and then my freshmen year of high school Star Blazers. After I graduated in 83 I had to settle for Voltron until ROBOTECH came along. WOW! I was hooked and still a fan in my late 50s.
Best part of the entire series for me. It's really well directed, animated and the musical score is perfect. And of course, the performances of all of the voice actors is phenomenal at the beginning here.
In essence, Macross did not went to save Earth from the Zentradi, but simply to save what the Zentradi had MISSED.
Goes to show, aliens are always badass when they get to earth and throw the first punch, but the old human race, with our extreme knowledge of mass destruction, always ends up landing the knockout blow that puts the invaders down for good.
Well, for a while at least. Hummanity in this universe defeated the zentradi twice, then the robotech masters, but couldn't withstand the might of the invid as Earth was literally beaten down so hard by the past wars that there just wasn't really anything left to give agaisnt the next enemy. Luckily though, good old resistance and guerilla war managed to push back the invid to take earth back, but it was really the invid themselves that chose to leave. They didn't really have to because they still clearly had an advantage. Admittedly though, yeah hummanity sure put up one hell of a fight.
yes. there are not many cartoons or books written with different plots.
@@natheria4933 Noooooooo. MACROSS forever! Screw robotech!
I absolutely love that this feels so much like "crisis narrowly averted" right up until, y'know, it's not averted
Even as someone who has watched this for the first time because I didn't follow Robotech much as a kid, this is still an amazing scene with the tension building up to the GIGANTIC FLEET preparing to fire at Earth. Previously it had been established that if the Zentreadi were serious about wiping out humanity, they'd do it.
And the dub didn't pull any punches, the bombardment annihilated most of humanity.
When you realize your playing on max difficulty and you haven't unlocked the Minmay defence yet.
Oh, the "Minmay Defense System (R)", ... sheesh, thanks for reactivating an old PTSD over that bullshit-fest known as Macross II.
@@PointReflex hey when I'm really really really drunk I absolutely love Macross II so lay off it
I was shocked when Earth was actually bombarded into oblivion. I thought they were gonna full some amazing trick and Earth would be saved, but no. Earth was lost. Over 6 billion people were wiped out along with almost all plant and animal life.
All of earth is destroyed... "VERY GOOD THEN, WE WILL BEGIN THE COUNTDOWN AT ONCE"
1:17 when your mech so thicc she buckles the floor under her awesomeness 😂🙌🏻
Heft is always a good sign of quality lol
Doesn't make sense given they're in low Earth orbit and the gravity is controllable aka shouldn't be turned on in the LOADING DOCK
Now THAT is an extinction-level attack by the Zentraedi!
Years later after I purchased the DVD set for Robotech, I watched the destruction scene over and over in slow motion. The animation was amazing for it's time. I was 14 when I saw Robotech on tv; I couldn't believe they showed the practical annialation of the human race in a kids cartoon.
Back story when the grand cannon fired the zentradi lost more ships in that one instant than ever before.
And it still wasn't enough.
I loved this show when I was a kid. Uses to wake up to watch it at 6am. It got me out of bed.
Best cartoon series on TV in the US...ever! 👍 👏
Her: Our sensors can't fix on all of them.
Him: ...I have to go now.
LOL!!!
The Destroid Monster was always my favorite, wish you saw more of them in the show.
I'm can't help but imagine how intense it was first aired in the mid 80s during the Cold War with the fear of Nuclear annihilation. Scary stuff for kids to exposed to. I was much too young but my brother introduced me to this show when it reaired in the mid 90s in Cartoon Network. My reaction would pale to how a 80s kid would react.
I wonder how much of the fleet the Grand Cannon took out? It may not have been able to get all of them, and they may have destroyed it, but the Zentraedi knew they had been in a fight when it got done.
Invid looked at this and thought, "Aw, that's cute..."
Japan has the most grounded and realistic takes on war.
Given what happened to them in the 40s, I can see why
@@newdivide9882 It's what they did to others first that's worse.
The absolute best 80’s animated tv series. Pure war from different perspectives.
Still Nothing like it. It Needs a feature film!
I remember there was an original art book to go with this version of he series and even it tried bridging the other 2 unrelated series together. The Zentreadi actually fought the Invid some thousands or millions of years in the past which was how Breetai lost his eye. If HG (Harmony Gold) did things right I would have loved to see either a prequel series of that happening or eventually the 2 sides would clash. But as we all know HG just messed it up and they made sure that no one else could even expand on the series in any way without lawsuits, even though supposedly they recently decided NOT to renew their claim to it.
The most realistic serie (destruction,casuality,war and history)
that freaking grand reflex cannon, so fucking epic we need shit like that pronto
Also find it odd they need full magnification to noticed the sky-raping beam of death. One thing I find is annoying is would it kill the VA's to fucking emote? The Zentraedi just sterilized 70% of the planet and the humans are "Oh darn, they killed our friends and loved one, how inconveniant."
These were the early days of English dubs.
@@RamdomView To be fair Homeworld did a similar scene about a billion times better and that wasn't exactly in an era of cinematic experiences in games.
The funny part is instead of having someone fail to emote the did really good at having the VA seem like they were suppressing said emotions. So everyone was stone cold professional and it made it really eerie to hear someone talking about the results of an implied brutal interrogation in a complete deadpan or how the crew under your character reacts the the event similar to this one that takes place. There is always a hint of emotion there, just enough that you understand the character understands what is happening.
They missed my favorite bit with that.
"The whole planet!"
"Have they all been destroyed?"
"...probably. "
"Oh No!"
0:45 taking the impending annihilation of Earth so casually! 😂
He's a Zentradi. He has likely seen many planets be blasted before.
lol right! that man said well, this is it. that was a true we're screwed, but eff it reaction.
Wait a Sec! 4 MILLION SHIPS!?!?
Damn, the Overkill-Win in terms of Fleet Size is one of the Reasons I love Macross!
well, this first part of robotech is like the wine, just get better with time, the massive three person driven reflex units (like tanks) and the military athmosphere plus superb music and this scene of the massive attack I had never forviged, it impressed me to much when i was a Kid, still the power of the destructive forces unleashed give me the cringes, what a great anime this was, I am glad to had the opportunity to see it as a child.
Couldn't agree with you more!
This was in syndication at the same time that cartoons like GI Joe and Transformers were airing. Think about that for a moment.
La devastación representada en esta secuencia es brutal, la primera vez que la vi tenía unos 12 años! Fue impresionante!.
This, & Space Battleship Yamato, A.K.A. Star Blazers here in the U.S., the after school rush to get home & Watch, theses were more important than Homework!!😂🤣😁😎
For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.
Honestly I liked the original sound FX better over this improved version...
3:17 tiny little dinky Earth ships firing away, likely tickling some nearby Zendraedi ships as the other 4 million warp by
but the grand cannon destroyed 1,000,000 ships in that one shot killed more zendraedi than any enemy before
@CK Lim
40 million lol, not very fortunate of Earth getting mixed up with the mess
@CK Lim You wanna go crazier? In Macross, Exedol said back in their heydays, Zentradi had about 1-2000 fleets like Bodol Mainfleet. That means their number back then were at least 4,8 billion ships. Can't remember if that was before or during the galactic civil war.
Fascinating. There is a cursor arrow on the screen.
When i saw this episode when i was kid, i was thinking fire the freaking cannon first but then i realized that the whole destruction, the planet and the alien fleet was kinda amazing.
😜😜😜😜😜😜
As a kid from the 80’s watching this blew my mind. I knew this was not your typical after school cartoon!!!
The crazy part? That's not even the whole fleet. That's just the equivalent of the covenant's high charity defense fleet. And that devastation was just one volley, not a continuous barrage.
Wasn't this the main fleet?
@@jasonleetaiwan Think of it as the primary fleet directly commanded by the Zentradi high command. A fraction of their galaxy wide empire.
The Zentradi Empire was simultaneously fighting Earth, Robotech Masters, Invid, and Vajra. And a quoted "million ships" was considered a "quick reaction force" to simply bombard Earth into oblivion.
While the Robotech trilogy is not canonical to the actual Macross saga, with specific series plots and side stories lost due to the world wide Harmony Gold ban. Careful translation of the series always pointed the fact that during the Earth v. Zentradi first contact war the Zentradi was in the midst of a civil war with the Meltradi (primarily female) faction, upstart remote Zentradi commanders inciting coupes for the rank of high command, and fighting a multi front war against some unknown enemies in deep space. Macross 7 introduced the civil war factions both pre-war and post-war. Macross Plus showed the first contact war Remnants. Macross Frontier and Delta introduced the Vajra.
@@LuoSon312_G8 Never heard of Vajra. That is from Macross only? Because I never heard of that in Robotech. Why are you combining Macross and Robotech? They are separate entities.
@@jasonleetaiwan The Robotech series rushed the story a bit, forcing the original Macross writers to stop the series post release and rewrite alot of it; the civil war factions had became the Robotech Masters, and the Invid were an offshoot of the Vajra.
Vajra are basically space bug bioweapons the size of a Destroid or a Battloid; the most powerful fighter types being able to take on smaller warships, with even smaller variants about the size of a person or a car. Unlike the Invid who are mechanized battle armors who's biggest variants are only as big as a tank piloted by a still unknown biomechanical biped species.
@@LuoSon312_G8 Macross was finished in 1982. Robotech wasn't released until 1985. There was no conflict in the release schedule.
Like all good things,they don,t last!I grew up with this!They will never make cartoons like this,anymore?That was a classic!
Aliens: Attack their life points directly.
Humans: You've activated our trap card!
Magic Cylinder or any of the Mirror Force cards
The grand finale of 2020
@Rowen Thomas I guess it's the only way to start 2021 with a clean slate! *shrugs*
Impressive
And this was on day time TV for us Gen-x kids.
And people wonder why some of us just shrug off things like this. "sonny, in my day we had multiple cartoons that showed genocide" (robotech and star blazers)
I think though out of those 4,8 million ships only around 65,000 had reflex weaponry, not all Zentraedi ships had these guns built in.. This is because of the complexity of those weapons and mass production even in the "golden age" was smaller for the Zentraedi fleets than the Supervision Army.
And if anyone wonders the SDF1 is a rebuilt ship of the Supervision Army.
Not in Robotech it isn't. In Robotech, it's the battle fortress of Zor, a unique vessel unlike any other in existence. This is a point where Robotech and Macross fundamentally diverge.
@@h0neyglaz3d So basically, some VIPs official space yacht.
I wish that the Grand Cannon's firepower was more clearly demonstrated. It IS meant to be a devastatingly powerful weapon (at least in the Robotech continuity), albeit ultimately quite unequal to the task set for it. The Zentraedi are supposed to lose a very noteworthy number of ships in that return of fire, perhaps a hundred thousand -- enough to explain Dolza's reaction at there being a return shot at all and also putting everything a bit more towards caution for a moment.
According to the novel version three hundred thousand Zentraedi ships were outright destroyed by the shot with many more disabled and helpless. In that one shot the Zentraedi sustained more casualties than at any time in there entire history.
Too bad they weren't able to fire the Grand Cannon repeatedly. If they could quickly fire shots, they might be able to force a retreat of the Zentradi.
@@TheBigExclusivein the novel they fired it four times.
3:38 That image is from the first episode when the original fortress arrived to the Earth.
That very first line... Old Toonami fashbacks.
The entire planet has been glassed and they don't give two shits for it. It reminds me of Leia's reaction to the destruction of Alderaan. These people are either too strong, or sociopaths.
Γιάννης Νικολάου no, voice actors sucks
4 million enemy ships with the ability to nuke a city from orbit 8 billion lives. That's not a war that's not even a battle that's a struggle for just survival. There more likely to just react to the fight on hand then worry about how many just died in that attack. They need to survive the fight right now because there is literally nothing they can do for the people on earth. They already understand that the death of all those people is out of there control but what they can control is if they survive or not.
Or they are in shock
Glassed?
@@ATP2555ify A reference to how lasers/extreme heat turns sand to glass.
Hence if you 'glass the surface of a planet' that literally means burning it down to bedrock and turning it to glass.
Anyone in 2023 watching this? Hoping Sony gets it together with a live film adaptation, or a series. Word is that it's finally in development after years of legal wrangling . Will they have the courage to present this the way it was? Imagine this if it's done right, in a proper film franchise, or streaming series. Forget zombies and comets, THIS is an end of the world scenario truly horrifying.
doesn't look like 70% looks like 99% to me
As a kid watching this it was so intense to watch. Man it really takes me back to watching SDF Macross (not Robotech)
Episode 27: Force of Arms
Episode 27 costs 77.00 to own/
The fun fact is that only like a small ammount of Zentradi ships fired onto earth. Out of the 5Million ships from the zentradi fleet only like 100000 fired onto earth. If all the Zentradi ships fired idk if there will be an Earth left.
Only a few tens of thousands had reflex cannons.
i CRY IN THis episode T_T
So epic!
I cryed in roy Fokkers death scene
Was 10 years old bk then...nostalgic
When everybody else is freaking out, I'll probably be laughing like a maniac lol
The battle would have been a bit different if the rest of the canons had been made too, one was simply not enough to take them all out, but the full count would properly have cleared most of the skies. Depending on how far from Earth some of the ships would have been.
If the Grand Canon network was complete Dolza's fleet would have been decimated , sadly only one was in operation by the time the battle happened
They also should have fired first.
@@4600norm The canon takes a long time to spin up the first time to carry the charge, they properly started when the fleet jumped in but the canon was barely finished, as in they where still building it when they fired it.
Now witness the power of this ARMED and Operational planet!
I remember thinking, how will earth defend, what the catch, what will they pull out of the bag, the earth always wins ... or just makes it ...... I could not see how to get out of it .. annnnd. No blew the planet away ... all of my what stuck in my mind forever ...
3:40. Macross island just cant get a break....
this is what i believe to be an extinction level event
The Wonderful 101 put this to Shame. The Gethjerk had a fleet the size of a Solar System.
4:28 Humanity: Our turn fucker!
This moment has seldom been equaled in sifi literature and never in film.
Alien invasion, yea that is bad. How many ships...? ... ... over 4 million !
It was mind blowing when I saw it as a kid, and I think it always stuck with me as an example of a "real" serious attack by an alien race. In almost all sifi we are dealing with an enemy who has a few mega powerful ships, or a few hundred "space battleships" but what defenses can you build to stop millions?
ROBOTECH AUDIOBOOK 1 GENESIS! Experience ROBOTECH in the theater 🎭 of your mind 🧠! 🗣 🎤 📚 ROBOTECH BOOK 1 GENESIS AUDIOBOOK. The origin of the SDF-1
th-cam.com/video/k0k4eZt_TTo/w-d-xo.html
You know it's on when humans build something that looks like it came from aliens.
That MAC-II though... "Sir, we're stuck"
As a child I was blown away by this
Jesus Christ. Talk about overkill!
Well, time to rewatch this again.
Now that I'm older, I realized the narrator always has to explain what we're watching like the dummies we were.
The grand Canon was shocking
Where have you been when khyron the backstabber attacked? Did you serve with the brave men of the earth defence forces to battle the insidious invid?
They got the right kind of numbers down for what a high Type II/Low III civilization is capable of, no measly few dozen or hundred ships.
7 billion, reduced to 700 million in just a few seconds.
Just one tenth of the global population survived the Rain of Death.