Tobey Maguire to adapt ‘Robotech’

“Spider-Man” star Tobey Maguire is planning to produce and possibly headline a live-action film based on the ’80s anime series “Robotech.”According to the Hollywood Reporter, Warner Bros. is anxious to pit the shape-shifting robots known as mecha against Dreamworks and Paramount’s recent hit, “Transformers.” Presumably, Maguire would play Rick Hunter (pictured above left in a screenshot from Harmony Gold Productions), a young pilot who stumbles into a world of aliens and giant transforming aircraft. Robotech hasn’t exactly been idle since the ’80s, however. There have been numerous book and comic adaptations as well as “lost stories” in various formats. There was even a pen-and-paper RPG from Palladium and a slew of video games. An aborted new TV series became a line of novels subtitled “The Sentinels.” And early this year a sequel film, “The Shadow Chronicles,” went straight to DVD. It updates the series with modern computer animation, yet still manages to blend well with the classic episodes (also available on DVD). It tells the story of a new generation of Earth defenders returning home from a war on the other side of the galaxy to find their planet ravaged by aliens, then mysteriously abandoned and then immediately threatened again by mysterious forces.