Headscratchers / Super Dimension Fortress Macross

Headscratchers for Super Dimension Fortress Macross.

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• This show is supposed to be set between 2009 and 2012, right? So where are all the Dubstep remixes of Lynn Minmay's songs? This show isn't realistic at all!
  • This being the early eighties version of what 2009-12 would be like? They probably hadn't thought of dubstep back then...
  • For an in-universe reason, it's never heard pre-timeskip because the viewpoint characters are the guys less likely to listen to them, and after the timeskip they were all too busy rebuilding the planet for that.
  • There was a war. Maybe the people who developed and popularized it in our timeline got killed...
  • As said above, Macross is strictly "The future according to the early '80s", and even more so "the future according to the early '80s in Japan". It's the same reason that in the same general time period on the other side of the Pacific, Battlestar Galactica (1978) and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century posited that people would still be grooving to disco and jamming to electronic glam-prog in the far future...
• Where does the "If mice could swim..." poem comes from, or who wrote it? It has to come from somewhere...
  • If you put the ISBN number that appears above it in the Gratuitous English into Amazon's search engine, it does come up with a real book which could be the source: ''If Mice Could Fly'' by John Cameron.
    • The publication details match up with the exception of the year, naturally.
• In episode 9 Lynn orders irish coffee. Why does no one bat an eye at a young teen ordering a cocktail?
  • Because they've been invaded by aliens, warped across the solar system, and stuffed inside a battlecruiser still being pursued by said aliens. Who doesn't need a drink after that?
• In episode 18, Hikaru was not only assigned Roy's Valkyrie, but command of Skull Squadron. Why was he not promoted to major then and there?
  • Because he didn't have over a decade of military experience like Roy did? Even in the real-world it can take time for your rank to catch up to your responsibilities, particularly during times of war.
• Why does the Macross use over-the-air television? I suppose there's an advantage to letting everyone use their old TV sets, but all TVs in 2010 (and most in 1982, when the series was made) are cable-ready, and the engineer corps already laid cable all over the interior of the ship to allow the phone system to work (unless those are wireless as well?) Not only could the signals interfere with military communications, the plot of Miss Macross relies on this happening!
  • There are two ways we could go with this...
    • Thinking Watsonian, they may not have had the infrastructure ready to give what was essentially a massive ad-hoc refugee ship cable (or at the very least, it was something that would have been way at the bottom of priorities, though that brings up many other questions about the city in the ship that we shall gloss over and accept for the sake of plot...). Further, it may have just been easier to do over-the-air broadcasting for some reason.
    • Not to mention that this IS a divergent universe (as far as I know, a giant spaceship didn't crash-land in the extreme southern edge of the Ryuuku chain, inadvertently sparking World War Three) so maybe something happened to the cable infrastructure during the Unification Wars. Maybe it became Lostech.
  • Meanwhile, from a Doylist perspective:
    • While cable was coming into its own in '82, it was far from omnipresent^note The first CATV networks went online in 1948, but they were strictly broadcast network repeater systems for regions where TV signals couldn't reach, it wouldn't be until the early to mid-'70s that cable as we know it began to emerge with the founding of HBO. Even in America it wasn't unheard of for families to not want to go through the hassle or costs of getting cable installed^note no matter how much their teenage kids shouted "I want my MTV!".
    • Further, the majority of the world still used over-the-air broadcasting (I'm not sure what the timeline even was for the introduction of either CATV or full-on cable in Japan, it may not have been something in the Japanese zeitgeist in 1982) so traditional over-the-air was something familiar for most audiences.
    • Also, MBS was a terrestrial over the air network, so there's probably "go with what ya know", or at the most^note if Japan had cable at the time perhaps a sense of "Yeah, Studio Nue, could you guys NOT rig your awesome transforming spaceship for cable, thereby avoiding making a competing means of broadcast look cool?"
    • And as mentioned in the original question, it was necessary for the plot of an episode to work.
• Why did the two mechanics who discovered the blood-soaked shrapnel protruding from the seat of Skull One never tell anyone about it? Roy himself was ambling away, they could've run and caught up with him and told him to see the medic.