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.
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.
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.
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.
Kawamori and Matsuzaki had originally designed an elaborate ending sequence for the film, which would have featured Minmay singing "Angel's Paints" while we caught glimpses of the other characters watching the concert. This sequence (and a storyboarded sequence featuring Max and Millia's wedding) were scrapped due to the budget running out. The concert sequence was later animated in The Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Flash Back 2012 (1987) and the concert sequence was finally appended to the end of Macross DYRL to complete the film as the creators had intended.