The producers, at the time of production, were not legally allowed to make this film appear to be a sequel to the Japanese series "Super Dimensional Fortress Macross (1982)" or use any of its main characters. To avoid this appearance, characters from the original "Robotech (1985)" such as Minmei ("Minmay" in the original Japanese) and Lisa Hayse ("Misa Hayase") were scrapped due to their similar sounding names. The one returning character, "Rick Hunter," was able to be used because his name sounded nothing like the original Japanese ("Hikaru Ichijô") and his appearance was drastically altered as to not resemble the original character. This was also the reason why Maia gave her heritage as "half alien" instead of being more specific (half Zentraedi, being the daughter of Max and Mirya).