Trivia

The codename for the Macross bridge is Gunsight One. Gunsight One was a Gundam fan club founded by some of the staff members (such as creator Shoji Kawamori and character designer Haruhiko Mikimoto), mecha and anime fanatics on their own right.

The names of the Zentradi spies Warera, Rori and Konda form a complete sentence in Japanese. When rendered into Japanese words, this comes out as "Warera rorikon da". In English, the sentence means "We're pedophiles".

When the AnimEigo DVD release was being prepared for release in the United States, there was serious discussion of adding a Zentraedi language track as a bonus. The idea was scrapped.

Among other production headaches, the master copy of one nearly-completed episode was reportedly accidentally left on a train by a courier, forcing the staff to search for the footage - otherwise they would have to reanimate all this, at a considerable cost in time and money. They found the reel, and so disaster was averted.

The series' production history was a turbulent one: Originally proposed in 1979 after the success for Gundam, the series was sponsored by a group called the "Wiz" corporation, who were prepared to fund a 48-episode run. However, by 1981, Wiz had gone out of business, and the Macross seemed to be in permanent hiatus. Big West, an advertising agency looking to branch out into animation sponsorship, approached Studio Nue about the project, and sponsored it. However, they insisted on a leaner budget, not convinced that the show would pan out as profitable. Big West pared the episode count to 23 episodes (meaning the series would have ended with the battle against Bodolza). Even then, Big West found that the series was going to run more expensive than they had bargained for, and to secure more money, entered into a partnership with Tatsunoko Productions which included international distribution (hence "Robotech" (1985)). When Macross debuted in October 1982, the stunning success convinced Big West to green light an extension to 36 episodes, allowing the staff to end with the "two years after" story arc.