Recently, over the holiday break, my sister-in-law pulled up the opening episodes of She-ra, a distaff spinoff of the He-Man series. Key take-away? the first two episodes feature absolutely no She-Ra heroics. Instead, she has been mind-wiped, or something, by the bad guys and is actually an officer in the bad guy army. The plot of the first three episodes are based on the face that He-Man has to leave his own universe to set things right. Not exactly a girl-power start.
A few months ago, I watched the movie version of Space Battleship Yamato, better known in the US as the serialized Starblazers. The basic plot is this: Aliens from a planet nearly 150,000 light-years away are bombarding the Earth with radioactive comets, and the planet will be incapable of sustaining life within a year's time.
Stop. Right. There. My seven-year old brain at the time - because this was the kind of child I was - wondered how the hell these aliens could even aim meteors from a planet so far away that they only wold have seen proto-human chimpanzees at that distance. Answer? They were directing bombardment from Pluto.
Anyway, some chick from planet near the bad guy planet sends her sister with plans for "wave motion" technology, which allows for 1) faster-than-light travel, and 2) some kind of energy cannon the length of the ship. What do the Earthlings do? They build this advanced alien technology into a World War II battlecruiser. That's right. They find a Japanese battleship in the desert - used to be the ocean - and turn it into a spaceship. For crying out loud, they picked a battle cruiser from the side that lost the war.
Anyway, hilarity and hijinks ensue. They travel to the alien planet that supplied the handy technology, pick up some Arm&Hammer radiation cleaner, destroy the fascist dictatorship running the evil empire, and return home. Periodically, they fire the Wave Motion Gun, which was the only reason to watch the show.
Finally, a few words about Robotech. I hardly got to see this series when it was on, but it was the Cadillac standard of serial animation when I was a kid. It was actually based on three difference Japanese series, sewn into one epic 85-episode narrative. That' approaching Lost-level story arcing, if Lost were actually based on Survivor, Alias, and half the intellectual property of Sid and Marty Kroft . . .which it kind of was. Anyway, it runs like this:
The first section lands a giant alien space fortress on Earth, which the humans promptly adapt to their own uses just as its original owners (rather, the repo men employed by the owners) arrive to pick it up. Our hero joins the air force and goes from noob to wing commander in the space of about three years. He alternately data a singer/actress and a fellow officer who's a bit older than him. Eventually, the Earth is all but destroyed by a final attack by the aliens. They are defeated by the human's alien space fortress flying into the middle of the enemy fleet while blaring an epic 80s power ballad about giant robots fighting for their planet, or something.
The next segment picks up a few years later focused on a teenage girl who is in charge of a tank platoon, apparently on the basis that her parents were war heroes - who, it should be said, abandoned their daughter to go into deep space looking for more aliens to kill. Over the course of the series, she falls in love with an enemy spy, her best friend falls in love with an alien musician, and in the meantime the aliens attack using giant robots riding on flying sleds. Also, everyone rides futuristic motorcycles without helmets.
In the final series, elements from the space force that left Earth return to liberate it from some sort of alien hive-mind that lives in crab-shaped battle armor. Everyone rides motorcycles that transform into flying battle armor. They fly and fight in ungainly fighter planes that transform into robots. The best part is that one of their best fighters is a glam-rock transvestite - not in a female impersonator sort of way either. I mean, his entire music career is as a woman, and this serves several early plot points. I attribute this state of affairs to later ideas I developed about gender, as well as my fixation with David Bowie.
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