robotech

Also made into a series of books by Jack McKinney, which is either holy or sacreligious depending on whether you take the cartoon series as a starting-off point or the be all and end all.

Only thing I didn't like about the series is that all the fighting, all the bloodshed, all the violence all came to naught, since it was a rule that wars could only be won by love and merry singing.

The vehicles flown in Robotech were called Veritech Fighters and could transform into three configurations namely: fighter, guardian, and battloid. The first was pretty straightforward, with the characters flying some beautiful looking craft (I'm not sure, but they looked very similar to a chunky F-14 if I remember correctly). The battloid config was basically a fully extended mecha (the intro sequence showed it off handsomely). The guardian configuration was most interesting to me, as it was a kind of half-and-half, with the legs and arms extending out the back and wings of the aircraft respectively, but the nose didn't fold out. In this config it glided around the city streets doing its deed. That's about the kewlest stuff I can remember. B)

By comparison, the Transformers looked like a bunch of pansies next to the Veritech Fighters.

Robotech was the first use of the concept of the transforming robot. The idea was later picked up by transformers and gobots. Later the Veritech VF-1S (as seen in Robotech) was used as the basis for the toy version of the transformer "Jetfire", the only Autobot that could fly (at the time anyway).

Created by Carl Macek from three unrelated anime series, Robotech caught the imaginations of thousands of young people, and sowed the seeds for the anime revolution further down the road when they reached college age and began to have the resources to find other anime with the help of the Internet. In the way that marijuana is said to be the gateway drug to harder stuff, Robotech (and to a lesser extent Voltron, Starblazers, and Battle of the Planets) proved to be future anime fans' gateway to the world of fansubs, fan conventions, and, for some, fan fiction such as Robotech: The Misfold or Objective: Reflex Point.