Robotech (Seasons 1–3)

Robotech (1985) is a landmark animated series you can watch online on iFILM. American distributor Harmony Gold took three separate Japanese anime productions from 1982–1984 and wove them into a single 85-episode saga that introduced Western audiences to something they hadn't seen in animation: real consequences.

The premise centers on alien spacecraft technology recovered from a crash site on a South Pacific island. Earth's engineers reverse-engineered that knowledge into giant robotic war machines — mecha — deployed against three successive waves of extraterrestrial attack. Each wave is its own arc with its own cast, but the thread of Robotechnology runs through all of them. Characters die. Wars end badly. The next generation inherits the wreckage.

For a lot of viewers in the mid-1980s, this was the first animated story that felt like it actually mattered. Stream all episodes of Robotech (1985) on iFILM.