When I was a kid, I had two real choices for cartoons before school: Robotech and GI Joe. There were some pretty significant differences between the two shows, and I think these differences are to blame for certain aspects of my personality; there’s a reason I own two different DVD versions of the full series and the original white box VHS edition of the third season.
Note: for those of you that are unfamiliar with Robotech, it was a redubbed conglomeration of Superdimensional Fortress Macross (aka “Macross”), Armored Space Cavalry Southern Cross (aka “Southern Cross”) and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA (aka “MOSPEADA”)*. It was primarily three linked war stories involving Earth being invaded by aliens with giant robots, who were then fought off with more giant robots. Trust me, it’s goofy at times but a lot better than it sounds.
In GI Joe, a crisis was nearly always solved in 22 minutes with the application of enough consequence-free violence to wipe out the military of most European countries, and make a serious dent in even the US Army. The few exceptions were multi-part episodes that probably would have wound up with a few Generals and Admirals being lynched by the population afterwards, and a few token episodes that were either comic relief or smelled of “oh christ, if we don’t do a sappy episode about the power of love, the censors will pull the show.”
In Robotech episode crises were solved in 22 minutes, often with violence but not as regularly as in GI Joe. The violence was also almost never consequence-free like it was in GI Joe. In the first or second episode of Robotech, there’s a great scene where a pilot is flying his Veritech fighter along a freeway, and a Zentraedi battlepod appears on the other side of the canopy from the “camera” (yes, I’m aware it’s animation). You see the particle cannon cluster aim right into the cockpit and open fire, and the last thing you see before the explosion is the pilot convulsing as he’s obviously being killed. Halfway through Macross, Roy Fokker (he’s basically a cross between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Zorro; he serves as Rick Hunter’s mentor and “big brother,” so you know he has to die for the Hero’s Journey to work, and he’s that guy that all the guys want to be and all the girls want a piece of) is killed in action. It’s one of the most shocking scenes I can remember from TV I was allowed to watch at the time.
Contrast this with GI Joe, where no matter what happened you’d see a parachute or people climbing out of a vehicle right before it blew up and they rewrote the movie (animated, not live-action) so Duke wasn’t killed by Serpentor, but instead went into a coma. Watch the scene without sound sometime and tell me he’s still breathing when Scarlett and Hawk are reacting like they do.
There are a lot more examples of the difference in violence’s consequences, but these are two easy ones.
Also on the subject of violence, the characters’ motivations were completely different between the shows. In GI Joe, pretty much every character was a gung-ho, guts and glory, let’s shoot us some people because they’re wearing the wrong color types. Robotech made a point of showing real motivatons for why the characters were flying around in multimillion-dollar death machines, usually that they were forced into it by circumstances. When Lynn Kyle tried to portray the RDF as a bunch of warmongering assholes, he had an entire restaurant of pilots telling him in no uncertain terms that they’d joined the RDF because if they didn’t the Zentraedi would have killed everyone aboard by now. One of them had a great line (paraphrased) about how he “sure didn’t join because he loved death and devastation.” Southern Cross was a little different in that the ASC personnel were volunteers, but it was shown more as them seeing it as a civic duty; they knew the Tirolians would show up eventually, and SOMEONE had to be part of the defense forces. The few guts and glory warmonger types were shown as serious pieces of shit, NOT heores by any stretch of the imagination. The books even made the claim that General Leonard was such a bastard because he was quite literally making up for a lack of balls. The team in MOSPEADA was kind of a ripoff of the French Resistance from WWII; two former military pilots (one a transvestite rock star), a mechanic who had deserted after watching his friend be killed by the Invid (he had a few great moments showing what that had done to him psychologically), a biker, a survivalist, and a seriously broken teenager they kept around because they knew she’d be toast without them. None of these guys were exactly GI Joe material, even Scott at his most fanatical moments wasn’t Mr. Patriot.
Interracial and even interspecies romance was an integral part of the background. Roy Fokker was a blond white flyboy. His girlfriend Claudia Grant was a high-ranking black officer of the SDF-1. The only mention made of their relationship was that they’d obviously been together for quite some time. That he was white and she was black was never mentioned in the entire series. It was simply a non-issue.
Later in Macross, Miriya (or one of her pilots, it’s not entirely clear which) kills Roy and spends the next few episodes trying to kill Max Sterling because she’s told he’s an even better pilot than she is (they’re basically the best pilots of their respective species). They end up getting married; Max literally asks her out on a second date as she’s trying to stab him in a park on their first date. At their wedding the Captain gives a great speech about how the Zentraedi have been killing their friends and family for several months now, including Miriya. Everyone is freaking out trying to figure out if Captain Gloval is trying to get his ass kicked by some of his pilots, when he points out that Max and Miriya are getting married; if they can get past that, it’s not impossible that humans and Zentraedi could find a way to stop killing each other.
In Southern Cross you had Dana’s weird romance with Zor; she was the daughter of Max and Miriya, and he was a clone of a dead Tirolian, making this an interspecies romance between a mixed-race human-Zentraedi girl and alien boy. In MOSPEADA you had Scott and Ariel, and Lancer and Sera. Scott and Lancer were both human REF pilots, Ariel and Sera were alien princesses (for lack of a better term). It’s also hinted that the reason the Invid Regess was such a fire-breathing bitch was because of how her former boyfriend Zor (the guy Dana’s Zor was a clone of) royally screwed her over about thirty or forty years before; he defoliated her homeworld, deliberately destroying her entire species’ food source (it could also be used as a super power source; the entire series is about recovering the last known viable source of this plant in the universe), so she retaliated by doing everything in her power to wipe out his species. Sounds fair to me.
There were plenty of strong female protagoinists in the series as. Lisa Hayes was the XO of the SDF-1, and by the time the series ended she was one of the highest-ranking human officers. The reason Rick calling her “old sourpuss” (exactly twice) was so funny was that she was the last person on (or off, by that point) Earth you’d dare say that to. Claudia was a high-ranking officer of the SDF-1; she took no shit from anyone, ever. It was made pretty clear that without those two the entire ship would have fallen apart. Azonia was the commander of something like a third of the combined Zentraedi Adoclas fleet. Nova Staori was an intelligence officer with the Global Military Police; she was not only the last person on Earth you’d want after you, but she probably WAS the last person on Earth a lot of people had after them. They played her as a semi-villain (basically the cop that was always on Dana’s case), but she was definitely a worthy foe. Marie Crystal was a hardcore fighter jock for the ASC. In MOSPEADA, you had Rook Bartley, a former biker (her former gang beat the Hell out of and exiled her; she got back at them later) who got pissed off at the Invid and carried out a one-woman war against them across South America.
None of these were exactly “I am grrrl, hear me roar” types, they were decently-written, complex characters (OK, Azonia was kind of a roaring type but she was Zentraedi; that’s in their DNA) who happened to be female. Most notably, aside from Rook’s nude scene (completely innocent in context) in one episode of MOSPEADA none of them ran around in bikinis or cheesecake armor like pretty much every female character in GI Joe. Also, none of them existed solely to be Character X’s girlfriend. Sure, you had Lisa and Rick’s weird love triangle thing, Claudia happened to be Roy’s girlfriend, Marie had this weird thing with one of Dana’s pilots (Sean, I think) where he hit on her the entire series until she finally agreed to go out with him, and Rook wound up with Rand in the last episode, but all of these relationships were actually developed in the series and came across as pretty realistic. It was never a case of “Me manly man, me beat up bad guy, now me take you as prize.” One of the things that made Roy’s death so moving was that right before he got into his plane he and Claudia were discussing their plans for the evening (yeah, it’s a standard-issue plot device, but it worked) and she came out to the living room with her famous pineapple salad just in time to have him pass out on her couch from internal bleeding. Then a couple years later there was a scene with Lisa and Claudia where how much Claudia missed him came up. The whole thing came across as a real couple.
You also had a few obvious exceptions, but with the exception of Minmei none were exactly bimbos and even Minmei had a fairly complex personal arc after the Zentraedi Holocaust.
One of the most tragic characters in the show was Annie LaBelle. She was kind of the team mascot in MOSPEADA, and “clingy” doesn’t begin to describe her. Her first appearance had her sobbing because her boyfriend of the week had just dumped her because he was sick of her, and she immediately tried to latch onto two different guys in the next two episodes. That was kind of her pattern over the rest of the series; she’d find a guy and fall madly in love with him, only to have it fall apart by the end of the episode (except when she ran off to become a jungle princess, which lasted two whole episodes before they found her following them after having left her “beloved”). She was annoying enough at times that on occasion you really wished the Invid would have finished the job in the second episode. It came out (most notably in her birthday episode, but there were other bits and pieces here and there, especially in the books) that she was so clingy because her family had been killed by the Invid and every time she’d tried to find a new one something horrible would happen; the resistance group was the closest thing to a family she had. It was really hard to dislike her after that.
Another damaged character was Scott Bernard. The first episode of MOSPEADA more or less opens with him proposing to his girlfriend. Ten minutes later, he watches her ship explode. He spends the rest of the series having all kinds of psychological effects, up to and including hallucinations, as a direct result. Calling him “haunted” is an understatement. His hatred for the Invid is borderline-suicidal at times, FAR beyond even the “balls the size of grapefruit and a brain the size of a pea” syndrome you sometimes encounter in his type. On a few occasions it’s pretty clear he’d be OK with being killed by the Invid as long as he could take a few of the bastards with him.
You didn’t see that kind of character in GI Joe. Sure, they’d occasionally have an episode where someone would be pissed off because someone close had been hurt by Cobra, but that was about it. And without fail, any of these issues would be magically resolved by the end of the episode.
And then you had Lancer, aka Yellow Dancer. Lancer was a pilot (ASC in the books, REF in the show) who was shot down in the opening days of the Invid invasion and nursed back to health by a girl who found him in his crashed plane. When the Invid showed up looking for survivors, she dressed him up as a girl to hide from them. They kept up the ruse to get him out of danger. Then he ran with it and assumed the alter ego of a female pop star. The interesting part of his character was that while he was definitely weird (they occasionally played him for laughs), he was also obviously respected by the rest of the group. They also didn’t make him a stereotypical drag queen. He was definitely straight despite his habit of dressing up as a woman, and his very occasional “flaming” moments came across as a combination of comic relief and him staying in character as Yellow Dancer. Again, a more complex character than anything you’d have seen on American TV at the time.
Back to the subject of consequence-free violence… Halfway into Macross, the Zentraedi fleet shows up to make the human race extinct. 4.8 million starships, some of them several miles long, all defolded over Earth and fired an energy cannon salvo that hit like a few million multi-megaton nuclear weapons. It was also called the “Zentraedi Rain Of Death,” and for good reason. Depending on the source material, they either killed everyone on Earth (except for two survivors in a hardened base in Alaska) or just billions of people**. The rest of the Macross segment was about the survivors rebuilding the Earth after this. The Earth was also devastated at the end of Southern Cross (among other things, antimatter bombardment by the Robotech Masters), and before MOSPEADA (the Invid didn’t exactly make a soft landing). It wasn’t the GI Joe model where doomsday is averted at the last second through applied Phlebotnium.
So basically, my choices were a propaganda film designed to sell toys and get kids to join the Army, with cardboard characters and plots that would insult a nine year old, or a show with complex characters, multi-episode story arcs. One taught kids “violence is cool and fun, and nobody ever gets hurt in war,” while the other was written by people for whom Hiroshima was a living memory, who showed quite the opposite side of the story. One showed that it was OK to hate people just because they were from another country (the October Guard episodes being a prime example of their hamfisted attempts to weasel out of this) and that women existed mainly to look good and serve as rewards for a job well done, while another had interracial and interspecies romances even across enemy lines as perfectly natural; as far as I know Robotech didn’t have any openly gay characters***, but it WAS the late ’70s when the component stories were made.
*: I mention this specifically so some dolt doesn’t come along ready to unleash righteous fury upon the idiot who doesn’t know this. It’s happened, and I always have fun explaining that I’ve seen pretty much every Macross series and movie in the original Japanese, and probably know more about the background than any sane person should.
**: the show’s voiceover implies the only survivors on Earth were Lisa Hayes and TR Edwards, leaving the people aboard the SDF-1 to repopulate the Earth, while the books and RPG “merely” have the Earth being carpet-nuked and devastated rather than the equivalent of a KT event. I favor the latter scenario because parts of the story simply don’t make sense if the only survivors are aboard the SDF-1. Specifically, there wouldn’t be the global civilization shown in Southern Cross and MOSPEADA. MOSPEADA specifically has a full civilization existing in South and Central America that’s culturally distinct from the SDF-1’s culture, and it had only been twenty or thirty years since the Zentraedi Holocaust at that point. There was also the tribe living around the hydroelectric dam in one episode of MOSPEADA; that shows non-SDF-1 survivors of the Zentradei Holocaust.
***: Lancer doesn’t count because as far as I could tell he was straight despite his crossdressing, but Macross included openly gay characters in later installments, and they’re written as characters, not “the token gay guy.”