Circa 1984, when Voltron and the Transformers first appeared in the States. This shit was expensive, man. I had a couple of Gobots, the poor man’s Transformer, but by ’85 I’d moved on to the much more sophisticated Robotech.
The space opera format and those gnarly Veritech fighters had me at hello, and all the guys had mad crushes on Lisa or Minmei, or both. I vaguely recall Matchbox’s Robotech toy line, but I was moving away from action figures at this point.
I still remember the episode where Ben dies and Max, eyes closed in his darkened cockpit, makes the sign of the cross. Nobody had ever seen anything like that in a cartoon before.
Here’s the clip.
(Image via the NTFA Forums)
(Video via Malrenolds)
2 Warps to Neptune 
I feel like there was more to that sequence. Do you know if this was an edited version? I thought he took some damage which was why he couldn’t get back into net mode in time. Anyhow, no one had ever seen anything like it because they never made anything like it before or since. I still remember all those GI Joe cartoons where everyone magically jump from a moving car, plane, helicopter, etc., whenever it got destroyed. Lame. Robotech killed like 90% of their main characters before it ended.
I just watched the full episode on Netflix. There’s a cut between the part with the steak and all the action, but the sequence is all there.
I forgot about Max’s girlfriend, Miriya, who was also hot.
I had a good friend who could not believe that I wasn’t into the Robotech cartoon. Believe, he tried and tried to get me into it, even offering to lend me his VHS tapes filled with taped episodes. Nope. I was more into the spacecraft concepts and toy line if anything (I always remember the words UN SPACY), but had no patience for the plot.
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