Zenkaikon, King of Prussia, the Scanticon Hotel and Convention Center. March 18 to March 20, 2011. This year at Zenkaikon there was a panel discussing the impact of “Robotech” edited and translated by the company “Harmony Gold” in the late eighties. Helmed by writer and producer Carl Macek, it was a combination of three different Anime series edited together into one. The series were “The Super Dimension Fortress Macross”, “Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross”, and “Genesis Climber MOSPEADA”. Macek’s translation and combination of those three series is considered widely controversial by fans due to the severe elimination of the Japanese cultural elements from the original three series, and with the way the three series were cut and pasted into one. With the 25th anniversary of Robotech having been in 2010, it was worth another look. The panel went over many little known facts. An example would be the reason that so few of the people involved in the production of Robotech are known to this day. It is because Robotech was a non-union production in Los Angeles. If they had used their real names in the credits, the cast and crew could have been blacklisted by the union. However, so many years later, the majority of the original cast and crew have come forward and spoken on the subject. The original Robotech was an anime that took the US by storm, making the future proliferation of Anime in the United States possible. This panel was a one-time event at Zenkaikon 2011.
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