Imagine looking through a dusty storage warehouse to stumble across envelopes labeled "MOSPEADA" and "Southern Cross." Only to find out that the contents are pre-production materials for Super Dimension Calvary Southern Cross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA. Later to be known in the world of Robotech as The Masters Saga and New Generation respectively.

This is exactly what happened to Roger Harkavy while looking through a friend's collection after learning that he had acquired some assets from Imai Kagaku a defunct manufacturer of toys and model kits.

Genesis Climber MOSPEADA

MOSPEADA was a property being developed by Artmic, a Kichijoji based animation and design studio. One would think that MOSPEADA抯 "Normandy meets Starship Troopers" concept would be an easy sell in the wake of the real robot revolution started by Mobile Suit Gundam, but Artmic had one advantage over other studios when it came to dealing with Imai: Artmic founder Toshimichi Suzuki was the nephew of Imai抯 president, so it抯 not hard to figure out how the studio got their foot in the door. The primary artists who worked on MOSPEADA were Shinji Aramaki and Hideki Kakinuma, with planner Masayoshi Kubota also contributing some material. Whenever possible, the identity of the artist has been noted, although many of the model sheets lack credits.

Southern Cross Artwork
Southern Cross seems to have taken a much less direct route from the pen to the screen. The initial file folders lack the Southern Cross title, and are simply marked "Science Fiction Sengoku Saga."

(Sengoku refers to Japan抯 Sengoku Jidai, a period marked by conflicts between feudal states from the 15th to 17th centuries.) The sketches show the various factions that would be fighting each other, clad in heavily samurai- influenced armor, blending tradition with high technology. It seems that Imai wasn抰 too receptive to the original concept and attempted to graft giant robots onto it (understandably, because in 1983 robots meant sales). Unfortunately, the Ochiais and I discovered that the text in the initial Southern Cross model sheets was beyond our ken. Despite the presence of two native Japanese speakers, we were not professional translators, and the text relied heavily on archaic kanji that was difficult for us to translate effectively.

Harkavy breaks up the paper into sections. Each envelope that he finds labeled M1-M4 for MOSPEADA and SC1-SC3 for the Southern Cross. The entire document is 118 pages downloadable as a PDF from GoogleDocs (8977K).

The comic strip is from a Gakken catalog showing retailers how to market transforming robot toys to kids (Strip Pending Translation). As you can imagine a lot of effort went into creating the paper. Each page had to be scanned page-by-page. Harkavy is accepting donations via paypal here.

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MEMO1DOMINION wrote on January 04, 2010

Title: FIRST, I WANT TO THANK Roger Harkavy Roger Harkavy, HISTORY TO BRING THIS TO LIGHT GOES WAY BACK. A GREAT FAN WITH THE HELP OF OTHERS COLLABORATION WITH AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Preliminary guidance with identifying the contents of this material was provided by Tadayuki Osumi,Matt Alt, Hiroko Yoda, and Egan Loo. All of the final translations in this document are the result of weeks of hard work by Hidekazu and Nobuko Ochiai. Additional last minute assistance was graciously provided by Shinji Aramaki to help me polish it up before I clicked the last button. AND PLEASE HELP OUT ROGER FOR HIS WORK WITH A DONATION. GOING TO ASK ROGER PERMISSION TO MAKE A BOOKLET TO SHOWCASE AT COMIC CON FOR ALL TO SEE UP CLOSE AND ACCEPT DONATIONS THERE. NOT ONLY IT IS A GREAT FIND BUT A OF A FAN WHO ALSO SHARES THIS WITH US. HOPE HE GETS MORE PROPS IF THE WORK GETS INTO PALLADIUM AS WELL. SOMETHING HG/PALLADIUM WILL HAVE TO WORK OUT NOW WITH THESE FINDINGS. WILL ASK HG AT THE CON AT END OF JANUARY IN SAN FRANSISCO. WILL UPDATE LATER. IF YOU HAVE QUESTIONS ABOUT THIS FILES TO ASK AT THE PANEL I WILL. AND IN VIDEO. HEHEHE http://forums.palladium-megaverse.com/viewforum.php?f=9