RMWC Reviews: Shin Super Robot Sunday: Giant Robo

Mitsuteru Yokoyama had fantastic success with Tetsujin 28-go, and with the manga and show wrapping up in 1966, a brand new manga series was produced in 1967: Giant Robo. Manga artist Satoru Ozawa (of Blue Submarine No. 6 fame) was a major collaborator on the first parts of the Giant Robo manga.

The story follows young Daisaku Kusama as he gets caught up in the schemes of the villainous organization Big Fire, where he subsequently escapes with a robot designated GR-1, more simply known as Giant Robo. Taking the fight to Big Fire, Daisaku and GR-1 battle other robots like the aquatic GR-2 and airborne GR-3. Notably, the GR-2 robot has an attack where it can fire its fists at an enemy, a milestone in the genre, and the Rocket Punch will become a big deal later on.

Giant Robo's design is evolved from the portly Tetsujin-28, featuring a fitter, more “chiseled” physique, and an Egyptian style head. The Japanese wiki mentions that Ultraman and Daimajin, both from 1966, were major influences on the design. In addition to flight and immense strength, Giant Robo was equipped with more ranged weapons than Tetsujin, including finger guns. Like Tetsujin, Giant Robo requires someone to control it from the outside. To avoid Tetsujin's problem of anyone in possession of the controller being able to operate the robot, Giant Robo is keyed to Daisaku's voice and will only obey him.

Now's a good time to briefly touch on a series that is extremely important to the development of super robots, especially live-action versions: Ultraman. The brainchild of Godzilla creator Eiji Tsuburaya, Ultraman took the concept of monsters running around wrecking miniature sets and applied superheroes to them. The result was 1966's Ultraman, a pseudo-spinoff of weird tales/sci-fi creature feature Ultra Q. Ultraman was a benevolent alien who came to protect the Earth from giant monsters (much like 50's heroes Super Giant and Prince of Space) and was assisted by a support team of heroic humans. Unlike mecha, Ultraman is not a robot but a dude who can grow to giant size to take the monsters on head-on, and the trappings of support teams and alien invasions would play a huge part in the evolution of Mecha. Ultraman also has a staggering number of entries in its series and a deep, deep lore that is outside the scope of this project, but it will touch on it occasionally, and soon.

As for Daimajin, that was a trilogy of period films produced in 1966 by Daiei (the Gamera studio) where a giant stone statue would come to life and wreak havoc on evil warlords and villages.

The manga series was successful enough to warrant a television adaptation, only instead of anime, it would be live-action, and it would shift away from the spy thriller aspects into a spy thriller with alien invasion elements.

Daisaku's plot is mostly the same, only now he joins a law enforcement group called Unicorn in order to fight Big Fire, which is now the brain child of the alien Emperor Guillotine, who naturally intends to conquer Earth. The show ran for 26 episodes from October 1967 to April 1968. Like Tetsujin-28 Go, Giant Robo would also get dubbed and broadcast in America, as Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot. After an initial broadcast in 1969, the show would be in American syndication into the 1980s. In 1970, a bunch of episodes of Johnny Sokko would be cut together into a TV movie called Voyage into Space. For the US release, Big Fire would be renamed to “The Gargoyle Gang,” along with all the other characters, but the plot is basically the same.

Whereas the ending of the manga is open-ended for further adventures, the show features a pretty definitive conclusion. Emperor Guillotine attempts to use his atomic body to destroy the Earth in final gambit, and Giant Robo defies Daisaku's commands in order to sacrifice himself to fly the emperor into space, where they collide with a meteor and explode.