The project's planning began in 1980 when With Corporation, an advertising agency-like entity, commissioned Studio Nue to develop "Genocidas," a serious hard SF concept. Due to poor sponsor reception, a comedy concept called "Battle City Megaload (tentative title)," hastily created as a backup plan, ended up being adopted instead.
The name "Megaload" was devised by Kazutaka Kawamori, combining "Mega" (great road) and "Load" (overload). The original protagonist mecha was a fighter plane called "Breastfighter," and the setting of a ramen shop owner's daughter becoming a singer, which would later evolve into Minmei, was already in place.
The title was initially proposed as "Macbeth," but was abandoned due to trademark registration issues. After deliberation between "Macro" and "Mega," the final decision was made by company president Yoshimasaki Ohnishi to name it "Macross." The subtitle was also changed from "Super Dreadnought Fortress" to "Super Dimension Fortress" just before broadcast because the kanji "do" was difficult to read.
The idea of placing a city inside the warship was one that Kazutaka Kawamori had proposed during the planning of the Franco-Japanese co-production anime "Ulysses 31," but it was rejected by the French side. Kawamori himself stated: "Because there was an idea that didn't go through with 'Ulysses,' 'Macross' was able to be made."
The broadcast was drastically reduced from an initially planned 52 episodes to 23 episodes due to sponsor demands, during which all appearances of the enemy faction "Supervision Army" were cut. Through this compression process, the original theme of interweaving an idol singer's songs with a massive space war was born.
The broadcast schedule was extremely tight. In episode 11, "First Contact," animation work fell behind schedule and only key frames were photographed in a "TV kamishibai" (paper theater) state, with a corrected version including animation finally produced years later. Additionally, animation subcontracted to the Korean studio "Star Pro" had noticeably poor quality, and corrections could not be completed in time before broadcast, resulting in extreme variations in art quality from episode to episode.
Other staff members opposed Haruhiko Mikimoto's selection for character design, with Artland's animators staging a mass walkout, saying "we can't draw something designed by such an amateur," exacerbating the labor shortage.
The launch sequence of the Destroid Monster that appears in episode 27, "Love Flows," was a single cut depicting the hangar floor being pierced through, which took three months to draw by Hideaki Anno during his early days as an animator, and became a topic of discussion in anime magazines of the time.
Hiroyuki Yamaga and Hideaki Anno, who would later establish Gainax, were recognized for their work on the self-produced anime "DAICON3 Opening Animation" by Studio Nue, and came to Tokyo under the pretense of "technical training" to participate in this production at Artland. Yamaga made his directorial debut with this work, and Hideaki Anno, as well as Mahiro Maeda and Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, among others, served as key frame artists.
Rie Iizuka, the voice actress for Lynn Minmei and in-story song performer, passed her audition while waiting for her debut opportunity and was cast, debuting as a singer-songwriter after this series ended. Kazutaka Kawamori stated: "If it hadn't been Iizuka who voiced her, Minmei might not have become such an iconic idol."
The variable fighter VF-1's nickname "Valkyrie" was named after the "Valkyrie" nickname of the actual XB-70 aircraft. However, since Big West had registered this name as a trademark domestically, when writing articles about XB-70 plastic model kits in model magazines, notations had to be changed to "Valkyrie," "Walkure," and other variants, creating an unprecedented confusion in terminology.
Broadcast during Sunday afternoon at 2 PM, a time with low at-home viewership on holidays, the average viewership remained at 6.4%, but in Yamagata Television (broadcast Wednesdays at 5:30 PM), which was outside the affiliated stations, it recorded a 36% viewership rating.
The theatrical film "Do You Remember Love?" released in 1984 achieved strong video sales, ranking first on the annual Oricon video charts that year. No anime would break this record until "Kiki's Delivery Service" in 1991.
In the United States, "Robotech," a re-edited combination of this series, "Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross," and "Genesis Climber Mospeada," was produced and became hugely popular. This international trademark rights issue was finally resolved in 2021.
