Why are Voltron and Power Rangers more mainstream and popular in the West than Gundam and Evangelion?

[Seto Kaiba]

you got my attention with Gen Lock. from what i've gleamed in the internet, it seems to be rooster teeth's attempt for a new IP to cash caw now that the supposed material for RWBY is soon to be exhausted. it's got some big names to it. one of which is Koiichi Yamadera. oh and David tennant too. and another thing, there still not much info about it right?

There's a trickle of new information coming... something about it popped in my Google News feed this morning, about them having hired Dakota Fanning and Michael B. Jordan for it.

going back to Voltron, isn't it only popular again because of the netflix version and social media like tumblr? erase it from existence and the only peeps who'd rememeber it are those who grew up with the original version.

Pretty much, yeah... that was the thrust of my "surely you jest" style reply to the OP vis a vis Voltron's alleged popularity.

Even then, Voltron: Legendary Defender hasn't done that much to raise Voltron's profile. It's still one of those shows that is only really remembered by people who grew up watching it, and even then they only remember part of it. Specifically, they only remember the series that was adapted from Beast King GoLion. Practically nobody outside die-hard fans and mecha enthusiasts remembers the second series built on Armored Fleet Dairugger XV. I think I saw one pop culture reference to it in about 30 years... and that was a joke on Robot Chicken about how lame the series was. It says a LOT that Voltron was in such dire straits that it did a crossover with Robotech a couple years ago, before Legendary Defender "aired".

on robotech, an Ace combat Channel who also dabbles in macross material, recentl covered a Robotech book.i was surprised it mentioned the original macross along with the original air dates of its episodes. is this a later development in robotech material?

The Udon artbook for Robotech's "Macross Saga"?

Yeah, that's new... it's one of the slew of poor-quality products Robotech is churning out to make a last quick buck before the license expires. That it acknowledges Macross at all is a new development, but for the most part Udon just reprinted fan-generated crap that was part of the old official Robotech website. It's the latest effort to have a proper artbook, which still falls way short of the quality of Macross artbooks from 35 years ago never mind ones published today. (It's like a mockbuster version of Macross Perfect Memory with less than 1/3 the content. The experience of actually reading it, as a Macross fan, feels like being rickrolled.)

Say, does anyone here have any prior experience with tabletop mecha RPG? Whether is it playing with GURPS, Mekton, MechWarrior, or HeavyGear? There are surprisingly many people playing these things.

Yo.

Funny story... comparing the old Palladium Books Macross II RPG to the OVA and researching corrections for the wildly inaccurate game's stats and setting materials was what got me started as a translator about 17 years ago. The domain that's currently home to the Macross Mecha Manual was actually one I'd originally purchased to run a phpBB forum specifically for groups who were using (heavily modified) versions of the Palladium Books RPG system to run games set in the Macross universe. I myself ran a game for seven years.

One of the few useful things to come out of Robotech was that Palladium Books RPG, which alongside their later Macross II game became the foundation for dozens of homebrew Macross RPGs. People are still producing and maintaining stats databases for that system for Macross mecha even now, albeit with radically different ideas about maintaining game balance and fidelity to the differences in performance between generations of mecha. The number of groups playing has died down a bit, since BBS's have fallen out favor with the rise of social media, but you'll still find plenty of groups running games online.

[Henyo]

haven't watched Season 8 of Legendary defender but going from the videos showing up on youtube's recommended for you thingie, things got worse in all manners. there are like a lot of X of things wrong/what went wrong with the entire series' run. id prefer to be remembered for doing a lot of things right than the exact opposite. this also applies to Power rangers when Saban got back the license. Samurai, which i never finished BTW, was Meh. Megaforce was SUPER MEH(this one i did finish. go figure)

DIno charge was okay for the most art. Ninja steel...went both ways for me. let's see how the Gobuster adaptation will fare now that the ball is with Hasbro.

that seems to be the trend nowadays in the internet huh? the popular series nastier/bad aspects are the more well know things about them. i'm looking at you RWBY. shipping is too much of a serious business with its fans.

[tHeWasTeDYouTh]

I guess all of you talked about this already(as i am late to the conversation) but growing up when power rangers came out I can say that it was insanely popular(I was in second grade). I remember people buying the toys all over and since we got a new power ranger series every year it remained a constant thing. Gundam was pretty popular too as I know Adult Swim happened because they wanted to show the uncensored version of Gundam Wing. The first day of Adult Swim they had more views at night of the episode of Gundam Wing than during the day(remember reading specifically) As for Evangelion non of my friends ever talked about it but I remember watching the show on a tv channel called Locomotion that had a ton of anime (it was a anime channel for latin america). As for Voltron I really cannot remember how I knew about it but I knew what voltron was as a kid. I remember my best friends dad telling us about voltron one day when I had dinner at his house but that is all(and I already knew what voltron was and this was in 2003 or 2004)