In the TV series the Zentraedi's dialouge was automatically translated into Japanese. Here they speak an actual made-up language and subtitles are provided for the audience. Much like Klingon in Star Trek, of which a word wasn't spoken until they appeared in the first movie.
This movie has become caught up in numerous legal disputes on both sides of the Pacific (the most prominent, although by no means only one being the copyright dispute between Big West/Studio Nue and Tatsunoko/Harmony Gold), and it has been said because of this, there might never be a legitimate United States release of the film on DVD.
One of the airplane models in Hikaru's quarters is a North American XB-70 Valkyrie. The VF-1 Valkyrie is the main fighter aircraft of Macross.
During the scene where Minmay and Kaifunn are in the emergency shelter at the beginning of the film, the autograph hound is a caricature of Shoji Kawamori, the film's director.
When Minmay and Hikaru are running through Macross City, one of the billboards is actually a bumper sticker for the San Francisco radio station KMEL. While Kawamori was in SF, he became a avid listener of the station.