So, I borrowed the complete box set of Robotech DVDs from a friend.  I am not a fan of anime, but Mike recommended it, so I figured I’d give it a shot.  I thought, “Hey, giant robots that turn into jets and also half-robot half-jet things… Can’t go wrong there!”  And under normal circumstances, you really can’t go wrong there.  Unless you include one of the most annoying characters from any show ever made, ever.

I am speaking, of course, of Lynn Minmay.  She is orders of magnitude more annoying than, say, Dawn Summers from Buffy. Or Orko from Masters of the Universe. Or Snarf from Thundercats. Hell, even Scrappy Doo has nothing on Minmay when it comes to making me want to claw my own eyes out and jam railroad spikes in my ears.  Minmay makes Scrappy Doo look like goddamn Billy Dee Williams!

First of all, it’s the way she blithely toys with the affections of poor idiot pilot Rick Hunter!   It’s sickening!  If she’s Japan’s conception of an ideal woman to have sex with, I’m surprised there are any people left in Japan at all.    If Robotech is any indication of Japanese dating, couples must just decide in advance which one is going to be the irritating one and which one gets to be the mopey one.  Then, apparently, they meet at a coffee house once a day to play the emotional equivalent of rock-paper-scissors: “Irritating annoys Mopey!  Mopey depresses Naive!  Naive confounds Irritating!”  They never taught us about any of that in Japanese class in college.

Anyway, back to Minmay and the way she insists on singing that one horrible, horrible song episode after episode… It’s worse than anything Yoko Ono ever recorded.  It’s like if Yoko Ono discovered golden tablets in a hole in the ground that told her how to write the worst song ever written, recorded the vocals with a bad head cold, and then it was orchestrated by Yanni on one of his off-days, and they ran the whole thing through some sort of Pro Tools auto-detuner plugin.  And yet, Minmay finds a reason to sing that song at least once per episode.  Maybe it’s to toughen Varitech pilots up in case they come up against some experimental Zentraedi weapon that explodes people’s heads with awful noise.  I don’t know; I haven’t watched all of it yet.  But I’m gonna keep watching, just in case Minmay gets crushed under a building when the SDF-1 changes form.

That leads me to another question… When the SDF-1 does undergo its modular transformation, is the city inside it destroyed every time? And if so, why the fuck do they keep rebuilding the city in exactly the same way?  And can’t the captain give them more than, say, ten seconds of warning before their city’s destroyed?  Just as a courtesy.

C’mon, Mike, I need some answers here.