Macross is widely regarded as a classic of the genre, combining the tropes of giant transforming robots, apocalyptic battles, wartime romance and victory through bubblegum pop music. It featured character designs by Haruhiko Mikimoto.
The story concerns a city-sized alien spacecraft that crashes to Earth in the early 21st century. Humans rebuild the spacecraft just before a fleet of alien warships arrive (the Zentraedi), determined to recover the first ship. Meanwhile, a young pilot comes of age and struggles with a love triangle between a bubbly pop singer and a dedicated bridge officer.
The name of the series is same as the name with which the feature spacecraft was given, though it is typically shortened to SDF-1 Macross, since it was the first Super Dimension Fortress. The word Macross comes from a combination of the words Macro Space Ship in reference to its relatively massive size (though when compared with the alien ships in the series it appears like a tug boat).
A feature film, subtitled Ai Oboete Imasu Ka? (Macross '84: Do You Remember Love), was released in 1984, with a condensed version of the storyline and cutting-edge animation. (A shortened, English-dubbed version of the feature was also released to video as Clash of the Bionoids, though this is largely lambasted.)
The primary characters of this series are:
Several sequel series and one prequel have followed, following two different timelines - a "real" one and a fictional one within the main sequence. The main sequence consists of (in chronological order):
The Macross movie and Macross II were declared an alternate universe, and in Macross 7 it is revealed that they were actually a movie and mini-series produced after Space War I (the original Earth-Zentraedi conflict).