It was a relaxed Saturday morning in Anime Herald’s Discord server. While a good bit of the community’s East Coast residents were preoccupied with shoveling the fresh January snow, fellow AH Contributor Mark McDonald (better known as “Tapes”) had somehow dug up anime history. He shared a photo of a large box filled with copies of Family Home Entertainment’s (F.H.E.) VHS releases of Robotech’s first three episodes alongside golden-clad clamshells containing Betamax copies of Harmony Gold’s pilot for what was once called Space Fortress Macross. All the tapes were new old stock, still wrapped in the original plastic and unopened. This was the kind of find you’d often pay a pretty penny for on the secondary market.
So that begs the question: Where did McDonald find these tapes?
According to him: on sale in the Crunchyroll Store.
Given the magnitude and ubiquity of Crunchyroll as a force in the industry, seeing nearly forty-year-old VHS and Betamax tapes was something I didn’t have on my bingo card. It’s a storefront one would expect to primarily host merchandise for the latest anime hot commodities. I had seen the pilot tape on the Crunchyroll store a handful of years ago, but dismissed it as an interesting curio at the time. Thanks to McDonald’s rediscovery of them, I now was curious to learn the story of how these pieces of anime history appeared in such an unlikely location. However, what’s even more fascinating is the tale of the man who initially discovered the tapes and how they intersected with his lifelong love of Macross.
Before I spoke with that gentleman, I had a bit of digging to do first. I initially reached out to McDonald to ask how he found the tapes. He wasn’t exactly sure how he had come upon them, but he had a few ideas.
“So I’m trying to remember this. And I vaguely recall seeing someone post about it on Twitter, but can’t find the post. It could be that’s incorrect, or maybe they deleted their Twitter account in that time period, but I did find something…”
He proceeded to link me to a tweet posted by @RobotechNews on December 23, 2022. It contained an image that advertised the various Robotech wares available for sale in the Crunchyroll Store, with the pilot tape prominently displayed in it. He also mentioned the high likelihood that he saw the tapes advertised in an email for the store or through his normal searching. He occasionally finds out of stock and rare goodies through those methods—the Dragon Ball Z Anniversary Blu-ray set being one of those finds. According to McDonald that set was a pre-order only item as part of a crowdfunding campaign.
Speaking of emails, I created a support ticket with the Crunchyroll Store in hopes they might be able to answer a question or two. The incredibly kind support team did an amazing job in their attempts to put me in contact with someone who may be willing to speak with me but that trail ran cold. While I thought their involvement here to be extremely unlikely given the tapes were in the store prior to their acquisition by Crunchyroll, I reached out to the folks at Right Stuf Anime in due diligence. I received no response.
However, I did receive a response after I was put in touch with Creative Sphere’s Tom Bateman. A self-described lifelong fan of both Macross and Robotech, Bateman currently works alongside the rest of the Creative Sphere team in their efforts to assist the Macross series in its ongoing worldwide take off. He served a key role in coordinating Fathom Events’ recent screenings of Macross Plus Movie Edition and the Macross Frontier film duology. Before all that, and more relevant to this story, Bateman served as Harmony Gold’s Robotech Brand Coordinator from January of 2000 to May of 2007. It was within their offices that he discovered the tapes, but I soon learned that Bateman’s relationship with those tapes started long before he found them in a pair of dusty boxes.
It was when a thirteen-year-old Bateman had encountered a peculiar toy clogging Southern Californian retail shelves in the early 80’s.
“The classic Takatoku Battroid Valkyrie toys were on store shelves. It was the most amazing toy I had ever seen.”
His young mind was blown away by the packaging’s art of the futuristic transforming fighter jet that lived within. He couldn’t read any of the Japanese text that covered the box, but the words “Battroid” and “Valkyrie” were printed on it in English, alongside a logo that piqued his curiosity: “Macross.” He had to find out what exactly “Macross” was and found himself walking into a Buena Park model shop that carried Japanese models kits. The clerk knew exactly what the kid was looking for, but Bateman admits he was more fascinated with the screenshots of animation on the side of the box than the models themselves. Specifically, he remembers seeing a poster that hung in the store—an illustration of series protagonist Hikaru Ichijo and Roy Focker’s Valkyrie with the SDF-1 Macross looming in the background.
“The name ‘Macross’ is burned into my brain. I gotta see this.”
Unfortunately for Bateman, there was nowhere he could watch it on American television and the nascent Home Video market was still an expensive one. He learned this firsthand through his father’s experiences working at one of the first video rental stores, The Video Shoppe in Sedona, Arizona.
“Back then a VHS tape was like eighty bucks and we’re talking eighty bucks in 1982 dollars. That’s a lot of money. I mean a blank VHS tape was twenty dollars.”
A few years later, Voltron and The Transformers had started airing. As a maturing young lad who loved cartoons, Bateman thought the robots he saw on-screen were cool, but he yearned for a series with meatier, dramatic storytelling; akin to the gripping dramas he watched with his family, like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan or The Thorn Birds. That’s what he wanted to see in animation—to be touched by a story as deeply as Spock’s death had. He hoped that something would come along to fit that bill; maybe that Macross show perhaps? He would soon run into that name again on the newsstand.
“Then there was the advertisement for the Macross video tapes. I remember it was Epic Magazine, which was a science fiction magazine. It wasn’t into the movies and stuff like that, and it wasn’t literary, but it was more like it would feature art of sci-fi artists.”
Within the pages of this Heavy Metal-esque publication, Bateman came upon the advertisement for the golden-clad Macross VHS tape for $39.95 through mail-order. He wanted this tape so bad, but he didn’t have the money for it nor would his Mom be ponying up for a VCR anytime soon. Knowing it existed, he desired to see the show one day. That day would be right around the corner.
“I think around four to six months later, Robotech comes out. I remember seeing the commercials and seeing the transformable fighters and I’m like ‘that’s Macross!’ I know it says Robotech, but that’s Macross!”
It was everything Bateman hoped it would be. He found himself becoming one of many enthusiasts, hungry to get their hands on anything like the amazing series they had just seen. Not just adaptations of anime, but anime as it was originally presented. While flicking through the phonebook one day, Bateman and his brother saw an ad with a familiar name attached.
“It says ‘Carl Macek Gallery’ and I know the name ‘Carl Macek’ because I watched Robotech. And I say to my brother ‘that’s gotta be the same guy.’”
Macek’s gallery wasn’t too far away from their home, so the Bateman brothers hopped on their bikes and rode over to the store in Orange, California. The boys walked through the doors and asked “Is Carl Macek here?” only to be met by a “He’ll be here next week” from the store clerk. Bateman’s attention was soon taken by the trio of posters that lined the gallery’s walls. They were original promotion posters from the three series that Robotech amalgamated—Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada. The same clerk then leaned over to the boys and said,
“You can see this stuff if you go to Books Nippan up in LA.”
After a fateful bus ride to Books Nippan, Bateman was in for life. While stationed in Japan with the Marines (a post he specifically requested), he built a sizable foundation for his collection. He primarily focused on books and laserdiscs, as the latter was still way cheaper than any sort of tape—especially in Japan. Upon returning to the states, he became active in the SoCal anime scene, most notably attending Anime Con ‘91—better known today as Anime Expo. In 1995, the Bateman brothers tried their hand at organizing their own convention with Robocon 10, a celebration of Robotech’s tenth anniversary. Bateman told me it was “quite the adventure.”
“The first person we talked to was Carl Macek and got him on board. He gave me Tony Oliver’s number, Steve Kramer’s number, and all of a sudden one voice actor would lead to another.”
With a stacked list of guests behind it, the event drew a great turnout according to Bateman. The successful convention was his first time working with and getting to know some of the people at Harmony Gold. This drew the attention of then Harmony Gold Vice President of Business Development Alan Letz.
“Around 1999, Harmony Gold reached out to me. Specifically Alan Letz, reaches out to me and says ‘Hey, we’re looking to relaunch Robotech’ and asked me to come on board for consulting.”
Bateman was initially approached for his expertise with the material and his enthusiasm to help the brand grow. Through his efforts, he was brought on as a full-time employee at the dawn of the new millennium and eventually became Robotech’s Brand Coordinator.
“But before that, I’m doing a lot of cataloging stuff. You know, you’re always finding stuff looking in their archives and that’s where I found the video tapes.”
On this particular venture into the Harmony Gold archives, Bateman had insisted that he and his crew take a look through one of the side rooms on the basement floor. Inside, they were greeted by stacks of dusty boxes, old documents, and a lot of junk. However, two gigantic boxes grabbed Bateman’s attention. He proceeded to open one of them.
“It’s full of these VHS of Robotech that was released by Family Home Entertainment. It wasn’t a VHS box, it’s these big thick ones.”
The packaging was oddly reminiscent of the large boxes pornography would often be sold in and not dissimilar from a big box PC game either. According to Bateman, this was just the packaging style of the time; before the production of VHS tapes had become affordable enough to justify smaller boxes. Each of these F.H.E. tapes contained a single, 30-minute episode of Robotech. With their three volumes, F.H.E. had only released the first three episodes of Robotech’s Macross Saga. Bateman counted up about one-hundred tapes between all three volumes; all still in the plastic wrap and in good condition.
Moving on to the next box, Bateman discovered the tape he longed for as a boy… Though something was a bit off.
“Then there was another box that had all these gold Macross tapes. ‘Oh, these are the original Macross tapes!’ and I’m thinking ‘Oh great!’ Open them up and they’re Betamax… They’re all Betamax tapes.”
The defeated challenger in the format wars of yore, slain by VHS—Betamax. Though Bateman was shocked to learn that the box was nothing but Betamax, they were still some of the very same tapes he had seen available for mail-order in that Epic Magazine ad. He counted up somewhere between eighty to one-hundred of these pristine tapes, but was adamant that there were no more than one-hundred total. He had a new question now: what to do with his discovery?
“Oh, that’s so cool! I’ll take one! So I took one, put it on my desk at Harmony Gold and thought it was really curious. At that time I was also running the robotech.com store and was essentially the manager. I said, ‘why don’t we take these and put them for sale in the store?’ and for some reason, it took a long time to get that approved.”
Not many of Bateman’s coworkers seemed to share in his enthusiasm. While those treasures eventually made their way to the robotech.com store front, Bateman was unsure if they were listed just before or slightly after his departure from the company in May of 2007. He wasn’t sure if there was much fanfare around the listings either, but knows he would have pushed it if given the opportunity. He pointed to Robotech’s twentieth anniversary in 2005 as a potentially great time to have released the tapes, but admitted that sometimes you just miss the boat on things.
“You know, time passes and you kinda miss your window.”
Fast forward to today. Bateman was shocked when he learned that his discoveries were now in the Crunchyroll store after all these years. Even more so that someone wanted to talk with him about it.
“THAT’S STILL FOR SALE?! They still have that?!”
Aside from barcode stickers applied for inventory purposes, the tapes he now saw on the Crunchyroll store were virtually untouched from the last time he saw them. Bateman pointed out that those stickers were most likely applied by Imagine Fulfillment Services, who had previously worked with the robotech.com store. As for why the tapes are in they’re current storefront, Bateman had the same hunch as I did: it was a result of Harmony Gold’s partnership with Funimation established in 2019, right before the latter was acquired by Crunchyroll in 2021.
“From what I understand and I have no inside information, they (Crunchyroll) have essentially taken over operations of Robotech by and large. Certainly the Robotech.com store, that has been taken over and moved over to Crunchyroll.”
In addition to CDs, mugs, and artbooks, that migrated inventory included those very tapes. At the time of this writing, all of the remaining tapes have left the Crunchyroll store. However, the listings are still available to view for the time being.
Over the course of our conversation, Bateman and I occasionally waxed nostalgically over the gorgeous art that adorns many home video releases—Laserdiscs especially. Though that enthusiasm was overflowing at the end of our chat, I could tell that his passion for the cartoon that changed his life was unmatched.
“It’s going to be nice to see Macross being released over here officially. It’s been a long time coming and I’m excited to be a part of that. So it’s kind of resurrecting my old… You know, bringing back the old feels again of that desire to see Macross be released over here.”
