Sunday, January 05, 2020

Shin Super Robot Sunday: Giant Robots: The Early Years


Robbie the Robot. Cultural Icon. Smooth Operator.

Not a giant robot


This project was born from several factors: 1) a lifelong love of giant stompy robots going back to Voltron and Transformers re-runs, 2) a semi-casual Twitter thread on Sundays appropriately named #SuperRobotSunday, and 3) my preference for longer form content as opposed to the character limits of Twitter. Thus, the failed Super Robot Sunday is reborn as Shin Super Robot Sunday, a historical survey of giant robots and mechs.
 
However, in order to conduct a survey of mechs through the ages, we first have to define what a “mech” is. A giant robot is easy enough to define. Its a robot. That is giant. Robbie the Robot, for all his charm, is not a giant robot. But a giant robot can also be a mech, like in the case of Gundam or BattleTech. Where the robot is directly operated by a person, usually from a cockpit or internal control unit. “Mecha” is a Japanese abbreviation of “mechanical” and was broadly applied to any mechanical devices before also being applied to a genre of fiction that is centered around the use and application of giant robots, piloted robots, giant monsters, cyborgs, and other advanced technology, usually in an application of some kind of super science. Its a broad category with a lot of wiggle room that includes Japanese tokusatsu (live action special effects dramas) series like Godzilla, Ultraman, and Kamen Rider as well as general cyberpunk where the focus is centered on humans dealing with advancing technology. The big, meaty center of the genre, however, remains mechs and other giant robots.


Here's Tobor the Great defending America from Communist spies. 

Also not a Giant Robot.

For the purposes of clarity, I'll be referring to the genre as “Mecha” and to piloted giant robots as “mechs.” Power Armor, which is similar to mechs in that it is a suit operated by someone inside, is different by virtue of being smaller, and also “worn” by the operator as opposed to “piloted.” Iron Man uses a suit of power armor, but the Hulkbuster armor is closer to a mech. The lines can blur, and there are mechs that have more than a little bit of biological elements to them, mechs with relatively hard science powering them, mechs powered by science so vague it might as well be magic, and mechs powered by actual magic. 


The Top Hat that started it all


The roots of giant robots go surprisingly deep. Artificial humanoids go back as far as Talos from Greek myth. In 1868, Edward S. Ellis published The Steam Man of the Praeries, a dime novel about a pair of characters who encounter a steam powered metal man invented by a teenager and they get into adventures. 





Curiously enough, the titular Steam Man would see a five issue miniseries from Dark Horse Comics in 2015. The Steam Man was written by Joe R. Lansdale and Mark Alan Miller, drawn by Piotr Kowalski, and colored by Kelly Fitzpatrick, and has a truly giant robot sized version of the Steam Man fighting against giant monsters and alien threats. I only recently found out about this comic, so I can't speak to its quality, but a giant steam powered robot in a top hat punching Martians in the face has got to count for something.


In 1880, Jules Verne published La maison à vapeur (The Steam House) which features a giant steam-powered, piloted mechanical elephant that pulls a house on wheels. H. G. Wells' 1897 serialized novel The War of the Worlds features the Martian Tripods, which while not described in great depth, but are piloted by the Martian invaders and qualify as early mechs.

 
In 1920, Czech writer Karel Čapek wrote the play R.U.R.  (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti or Rossum’s Universal Robots in English). The play debuted in 1921, and gave the world a name for these mechanical men: Robot. Karel credited his brother Josef with coming up with the name, deriving it from Czech words for “forced labor” and “slave.” Fitting, considering the robots of the play (closer to cyborgs or androids as we understand them in fiction) are used as thinking tools until they rise up and KILL ALL THE HUMANS.  




Japan enters into the genre in 1931 with Ōgon Bat (Golden Bat). Named after a cigarette brand and wearing a gaudy outfit with a groteqsque golden skull, Ōgon Bat was a product of the Kamishibai street performance industry (basically illustrated panels narrated by a storyteller) who is considered Japan's first costumed superhero character and is arguably one of the first in the world, debuting the same year Walter B. Gibson began writing The Shadow, and predating The Phantom by three years and Superman by seven years. Ōgon Bat was successful enough to spin off into manga (Japanese comic books, for those not familiar), a 1966 live action movie starring Sonny Chiba, and an anime series (Japanese animated show, for those not familiar). The hero isn't a mech, but had a villainous piloted humanoid robot named Dai Ningen Tanku as an adversary. I managed to find this clip of a Kamishibai slide show featuring Ōgon Bat defeating a giant robot at sea. Youtube's auto-generated subtitles are...lacking, but enough to get the gist of the plot.  









Speaking of Superman, the second episode of the Fleischer Studios cartoon featured giant robots. The Mechanical Monsters was released in 1941. A mad scientist uses an army of giant robots to commit crimes. The robots are notable for being large, capable of transforming into a flight mode, and having enough storage space in their torsos to carry one Lois Lane.  
 







1948 would prove to be a fateful year. French animation director Paul Grimault and screenwriter/poet Jacques Prévert began production on The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep (based on a Hans Christian Anderson story). Production suddenly halted in 1952 and the movie was released in an unfinished form. A low-budget English dub was released for the 1952 cut called The Curious Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird. Through a series of travails, Grimault eventually completed the film as Le Roi et l'Oiseau (The King and the Mockingbird) in 1980. In the film, the cross-eyed tyrannical king King Charles V + III = VIII + VIII = XVI rules the kingdom of Takicardia harshly and has a piloted mech that features prominently (and destructively) in the story's climax. The movie is considered an animation classic, and the co-founders of Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata were heavily influenced by it. 





The early history of giant robots is fascinating to track down, because information is so scant and spread out across a variety of adventure story mediums. However, 1956 would change the course of giant robots, and establish Mecha as a genre of its own. 

Next time on Shin Super Robot Sunday: Bigger than big! Taller than tall!


Sources












No comments: