Robotech

Original Air Date: 1985

Network: Syndicated

Talk about a vast and expansive sci-fi franchise. Three different, and unrelated, anime series were combined to create the world of Robotech. The technology aboard an alien ship that crashed to Earth is used to help the human race develop robots that are used to fight off alien invaders. That was the basic premise. But due to the fact that the three cartoons were separated in their characters and themes, three different generational "wars" were created to explain the new heroes and adversaries. There is way too much to get into here regarding the entire saga of Robotech and the movies and such, but just know that it was one of the first pieces of anime to come over to America with a ton of its violence and sex left intact. It was pretty mature stuff when compared to the hijinx of The Smurfs to say the least. Most of the earlier anime that we got, like Astro Boy and Speed Racer, were softened for American audiences and had a lot of the more mature themes and scenes removed, but Robotech had a bunch of that stuff left in. Anime purists might like to trash Robotech as a patchwork Franken-show that crapped all over the original separate stories to create one big unintended masterwork, but for us it changed the way we looked at cartoons and raised the bar for storylines and violence. Plus, we probably wouldn't have been able to follow the original shows anyway.