Showing posts with label Giant Robot. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Giant Robot. Show all posts

Sunday, October 18, 2020

Shin Super Robot Sunday: Mazinger Z vs. Devilman



Mazinger Z began airing in 1972 and finished in 1974. 92 episodes is a long time in weekly television installments. On July 18, 1973, in the middle of that successful run, a 43 minute movie was produced by Toei Animation which would cross over with another Dynamic Production series created by Go Nagai. The result was Mazinger Z vs. Devilman. 
 
Mazinger Z was already covered on this project, so today we get to focus on Devilman. In 1971, Go Nagai wrote and illustrated a horror manga called Demon Lord Dante about a student who is merged with the body of an ancient demon. Dante initially ended when the magazine it ran in, Bokura Magazine, was discontinued by the publisher, but Toei Animation approached Nagai for an anime adaptation which evolved into a new manga (and related anime) called Devilman. 



Devilman (the manga, which ran in Weekly Shōnen Magazine) is the story of Akira Fudo, a teenager who learns of the existence of demons who are trapped in hibernation beneath the Earth and will invade soon. Akira is merged with Amon, the most powerful of these demons. As Devilman, Akira fights against the demons and wages an internal war of good vs evil as he struggles to control Amon. 
  
           
 
In the anime (which began airing on July 8, 1972, several months before Mazinger Z), the demon invasion is still planned, and Devilman is sent to Earth, where he possesses the body of the recently deceased Akira Fudo. There he learns the meaning of love and rebels against his people, and becomes a transformation hero (who can grow to giant size) to fight the demons. Both versions were successful, and while the anime was significantly toned down from the manga to be more kid friendly, they're essentially alternate universe stories of each other. Both carry the trademark Go Nagai mix of hot-blooded protagonists, cool monsters, hot chicks, and hot chicks who are cool monsters. 
 
Devilman aired for 39 episodes, and the franchise would see multiple manga down the line, as well as OVA miniseries, a spinoff series called Devilman Lady, a live action movie in 2004, and most recently the somewhat divisive Devilman Crybaby from 2018 (which aired on Netflix).

          
 
Which brings us up to speed for Mazinger Z vs. Devilman. 
 
While fighting the robotic monsters of Dr. Hell, Koji Kabuto in the Mazinger Z and Sayaka Yumi in the Aphrodite A accidentally unleash the beautiful female demon Sirene from the earth. The demon flies away before anyone can do anything, but not before beeing seen by Akira Fudo, who turns into Devilman to chase after her. 

Dr. Hell, seeing a potential ally, also follows, and frees a bunch of demons in the Himalayas. The two sides cut a deal. Dr. Hell will help defeat Devilman, and Sirene will help defeat Mazinger. Akira tries to warm Koji, but makes fun of Mazinger's inability to fly, so they get into a heated motorcycle race that ends in a tie. 


Then the bad guys attack and Devilman rescues Mazinger, Mazinger rescues Devilman, and when the situation gets hopeless, Mazinger Z gets its major upgrade: the Jet Scrander. That's right, the Jet Scrander appears in this movie before its debut in the show. With the day saved, the two part as friends. 


The movie is a fun bit of light entertainment that feels like a two-part episode with a higher animation budget. It doesn't exist in either show's continuity, instead acting as a kind of “what if” team up. It would, however, open the door for more crossovers between Dynamic Production series down the line. 

      

Next time on Shin Super Robot Sunday: Toho goes green.

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Sunday, September 06, 2020

Shin Super Robot Sunday: Zone Fighter



Toho Studios wasn't done with 1973 after Godzilla vs. Megalon. The studio had successfully ventured into tokusatsu television programming in 1972 with Warrior of Love Rainbowman (a name that will come up again later), and 1973 saw a new live-action superhero series with direct ties to the Godzilla franchise: Zone Fighter. 

The show famously included Godzilla as a recurring guest character, but also Godzilla villains King Ghidorah and Gigan, and a number of episodes were directed by Toho feature film directors Ishirō Honda and Jun Fukuda. The show began broadcasting on Nippon Television on April 2, 1973, but despite its pedigree, only lasted 26 episodes before cancellation. 




Zone Fighter, or Ryūsei Ningen Zone (literally “Meteor Human Zone”), tells the story of the Zone family, fugitives from the destroyed planet of Peaceland who fled to Earth and disguised themselves as the Sakimori family. However, the aliens who destroyed their planet, the Garogans, have come to Earth, and the Sakimori children, take up the fight to save their adopted planet.

       
 
The primary hero is the eldest son Hikaru Sakimori, who can transform into the masked Zone Fighter by shouting “Zone Fight Power!” He can additionally transform into a gigantic 62 meter (204 ft.) tall form by shouting “Zone Double Fight!” His sister, Hotaru Sakimori, can transform into Zone Angel, and their kid brother Akira Sakimori, can turn into Zone Junior. Neither Angel or Junior could become gigantic. Their dad, Yochiro Sakimori, is an inventor who works for a toy research institute, providing the heroes with various gimmicks and weapons. 
 
Zone Fighter himself takes obvious design cues from Ultraman, but with a predominantly silver and blue color scheme with red trim. Abilities include flight, defensive and offensive energy projection, grappling, wrist-mounted missiles, and even teleportation. Like contemporary giant heroes, he has a time limit on his giant form before he runs out of energy. And like the Ultras, Zone Fighter is not a robot, but a dude who can get huge. 
 
The Garogas are skull-faced aliens who aren't huge either. Instead, they launch their dreaded terror-beasts from space to Earth in rocket pods, like a kaiju ODST. The terror beasts are usually giant monsters or cybernetic mixtures of monsters with various metal parts bolted onto them. 


One of the terror-beasts, Jikiro is a full robot. Appearing in the second episode, Jikiro is launched to Earth to attack a weakened Zone Fighter, and nearly succeeds in killing him. Jikiro is a 78 meter (256 ft) tall metal monster with a hunchbacked, reptilian head and magnetic powers. It also has an adorable parachute that deploys after he hits atmosphere, allowing him to land safely.

       
 
Being a monster-of-the-week, Jikiro was destroyed, but he was rebuilt later in the series as Super Jikiro, with more powerful armor and weapons before being destroyed once more. 


Zone Fighter is an interesting side story of the Showa-era Godzilla franchise. Cancelled amidst poor ratings and an oil crisis, it nevertheless exists as an official part of Godzilla continuity taking place after Godzilla Vs. Megalon. After fleeing Earth, Gigan was captured by the Garogas and used to attack Earth, and he was killed by Zone Fighter. There were a few manga that ran alongside the show, but after its run the show drifted into obscurity. 

       
Curiously, in 2015, the YouTube channel Daikaiju Legends began a fan project/sequel series to Zone Fighter (called Zone Fighter) which uses American actors for the human cast and stop-motion action figures to represent the monsters and heroes including Zone Fighter and a bunch of Ultraman characters. Its odd, and the acting leaves no question that its a fan-film, but the stop motion effects are an interesting workaround to not having suit actors and miniature city sets, and the production quality jumped several levels of sophistication in the intervening five years.



 
Next time on Shin Super Robot Sunday: Senkosha Productions goes from a King to a Baron.

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Sunday, June 21, 2020

Shin Super Robot Sunday: Fireman



In 1973, Tsuburaya Productions released several shows as part of the company's 10th anniversary. The first one to see release was Fireman (or Magma Man in some markets), which began airing on Nippon Television on January 7, 1973, running until July for 30 episodes.

         
 
In Fireman, a string of natural disasters strikes the Earth, and giant mutant dinosaur appear and wreak havoc. Standing against them is the Scientific Attack Force (SAF) and their young archaeologist recruit Daisuke Misaki. Misaki is actually a member of an underground race of humans from the lost continent of Aban, which sank below the surface 12,000 years ago. Scientifically advanced, Misaki can use an object called the fire-stick to transform into the 50 meter (164 ft) tall Fireman to battle against threats to the Earth, both native and alien. 
 

Fireman himself is something of an inversion of the Ultraman formula. Red with silver highlights, he fights with similar flight and grappling abilities. Naturally, his energy attacks are all fire themed, and instead of a color timer limiting his giant form, his people have lived underground for so long that he can only sustain his giant form for three minutes at a time before sunlight will kill him. 
 

What's interesting is that the actor for Daisuke Misaki, Naoya Makoto, would later play a more famous red suited tokusatsu hero in 1975: Tsuyoshi Kaijo AKA Akarenger in Himitsu Sentai Gorenger, and the very first Red Ranger in the storied history of Super Sentai. 


More important than that (for our purposes here at least), is episode 10 of Fireman: The Iron Monster that Attacked Tokyo. In the episode, an alien from the Baranda race attacks (naturally) Tokyo with the Baranda V robot. Baranda V is a 51 meter (167 ft) tall piloted robot. In addition to general stompiness, the robot features an array of weapons from powerful chest guns, finger lasers, electromagnetic levitation, a force field, and most interestingly in a post-Mazinger Z environment, a rocket punch attack. 

         
 
The biggest show from Tsuburaya's big anniversary year would be Ultraman Taro (which has a lack of giant robots), but Fireman had a respectable run and would eventually see a spiritual successor of sorts several decades later. As for the third Tsuburaya Productions show from 1973, that's the topic for the next Shin Super Robot Sunday. 

Next time on Shin Super Robot Sunday: Aces and Nines.

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Sunday, May 17, 2020

Shin Super Robot Sunday: Mazinger Z



Throughout the course of this survey, giant robots have appeared in two forms: an enemy to be defeated by the hero, and a powerful external sidekick to the hero. 

Mazinger Z would add an entirely new dynamic to the Mecha genre. 

Go Nagai, the pen name of Kiyoshi Nagai, began working as a manga artist in the 1960s. In 1968, he was invited to be a contributor to the very first issue of Weekly Shōnen Jump (intended as a competitor to the already successful Weekly Shōnen Magazine and Weekly Shōnen Sunday magazines aimed at teenage boys). His contribution was Harenchi Gakuen (Shameless School) a high school sex comedy series that inadvertently created the ecchi genre of manga. Controversial at the time, it proved to be a big success for Nagai, because if there's anything teenage boys like, its sex jokes and boobs. Despite outraged PTO groups, the series would eventually spawn multiple live action and animated adaptations, and the success of the comic allowed Nagai to start up Dynamic Productions in 1969 to manage his business relations and contracts, and it evolved into a kind of studio, with Ken Ishikawa joining the same year as an assistant and becoming a major manga artist in his own right (more on him in a later entry).

      

In June of 1972, Nagai's Devilman manga began, and in July an anime based on it began airing. A horror-action series that would become one of his flagship franchises, the anime was significantly toned down for television. The same year, on October second, Mazinger Z debuted in Weekly Shōnen Jump and a subsequent anime series from Toei Animation would begin airing on December third. 
 

 A fan of Astro Boy and Tetsujin 28-go, Nagai added a significant twist to Mecha. The hero, a teenage boy instead of an adolescent or young adult, would pilot the robot from inside as a kind of alter ego. Giant heroes fighting monsters were not new. Giant robots with pilots were not new. Teenage heroes were not new. Combining all three of those element together was new. The pilot was now the superhero, and the giant robot was his costume. The Super Robot had arrived.

     

The hero in question is one Kouji Kabuto, a motorcyle riding average teenager with a kid brother Shiro, living with his grandfather Juzo Kabuto. Juzo is a scientist, and has been secretly building a giant robot, Mazinger Z, to combat the coming threat of Dr. Hell, a former colleague who went mad after discovering the ancient ruins of the Mycenae Empire and their mechanical beasts. 

Dr. Hell makes a power play to assassinate Dr. Kabuto, and succeeds, but not before Juzo gives Kouji control of the 18 meter (59 ft) tall robot, telling him he can have the power of a god or a devil with the robot. Without any training, Kouji's first attempts to pilot the robot are disastrous, until he teams up with Professor Gennosuke Yumi, the leader of the Photon Power Laboratory and former colleague of Juzo, and Yumi's tempestous daughter, Sayaka.

     

Sayaka has her own robot, first the Aphrodite A and later the Diana A, and Kouji is later joined by high school rival/biker/braggart/comic relief Boss, who gets his own robot later, the comical Boss Borot. 

Kouji fights his way through Dr. Hell's army of mechanical beasts and the mad scientist's lieutenants like Baron Ashura (a man and a woman merged together through bizarre superscience into a literal half-man half-woman), Count Brocken (a Nazi officer with a monocle whose body carries around his disembodied head), and the anime exclusive Viscount Pygman (a muscular tribal warrior with the upper torso of a pygmy where the head would normally be). 

Dr. Hell's into some weird stuff.

     

The manga and anime would bake a number of story tropes directly into the genre. Kouji is a hot-blooded hero with more courage than sense, which gets him into, and subsequently, out of danger. Sayaka is equally hot-blooded and she and Kouji bicker constantly, mixing arguments where they slap each other with moments of genuine care for each other. Kouji calls out most of his attacks, with his most signature move, the rocket punch (itself drawn from Giant Robo) becoming a signature element in mecha stories moving forward. Mazinger Z gets an upgrade partway through the series (the Jet Scrander, which allows him to fly). Sayaka gets an entire new robot after the Aphrodite A is trashed too many times. Not to mention things like a super metal alloy that allows the robot to survive punishing combat, and the oppai missiles, which are literal boob missiles. 

Mazinger Z was a smash success. The manga would run in both Weekly Shōnen Jump and Boken Oh (another shōnen magazine) until 1947.The anime itself would air for a staggering 92 episodes, concluding in September of 1974. Mazinger Z toys brought a new level of merchandising synergy to an animated franchise, The anime industry, which was in a general decline at the time, would rev up in response to the success of Mazinger, and the Super Robot boom of the 70s would follow.

     

Mazinger Z would see significant overseas success, as well. The show was exceptionally popular in Spanish speaking regions, from Spain to Mexico. So popular, that in the 1980s, a 40ft tall statue was built in Tarragona, Spain at the entrance of a planned suburban development. The suburb never materialized, but the statue still stands. 

     

In the US, a cut down version would be aired in Hawaii with an English dub for about 30 episodes. Notably, it had an English version of the theme song sung by the original singer, Isao Sasaki.

     


The anime would see a second release in 1985 as the heavily edited Tranzor Z, by Three B. Productions Ltd. Only 65 of the 92 episodes were aired, and everyone's names were Americanized, which was typical for the era. Hence, Kouji Kabuto became Tommy Davis, and so on. 

Releases of the actual show have been hard to come by over the years, with an infamously bad Hong Kong subtitle lovingly referred to as the "Crabstick Sub" as one of the few ways to watch the show in the past. In 2013, Discotek Media announced a Western DVD release for the series (along with other Go Nagai-created series like Devilman and Cutie Honey).

     

As the functional equivalent of Superman for the Super Robot genre, Mazinger Z has become a staple of the Super Robot Wars series of crossover strategy games from Banpresto. Super Robot Wars deserves its own entry because of how complicated it can get, but in brief, its a long-running series of tactical strategy games (in the vein of Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics) that features multiple Mecha series and their plotlines colliding in a crossover storyline. Mazinger, in one form or another, has appeared in every installment of Super Robot Wars, not counting the Original Generations series (again, its complicated).

     

Its not an exaggeration to say that Mazinger Z was a sea change for Mecha as a genre. Its success led to an immediate shift in giant robot storytelling and most subsequent Mecha series were an imiation or reaction to the kind of stories Mazinger Z was telling. This includes the birth of the Real Robot genre at the end of the 1970s. 


Go Nagai hit a goldmine with a combination of pure heroism, cool robots, freaky monsters, and beautiful women.

     

Next time on Shin Super Robot Sunday: Mitsuteru Yokoyama returns. Again.
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Sunday, February 23, 2020

Shin Super Robot Sunday: Ultra Seven



Eiji Tsuburaya has come up a few times already for his work with Toho Studios as a special effects director with a long and storied career that began in the 1920s. Arguably most famous for his work on the original Godzilla films and his pioneering work in “Suitmation” (the technique of putting an actor in a monster costume and destroying a miniature set), he was a mainstay at Toho during the company's rise in the 50s and 60s. In 1963, he founded his own visual effects studio, Tsuburaya Productions. While still continuing his work with Toho, the new studio would release Ultra Q, a black-and-white 28 episode long horror series in the vein of The Twilight Zone (with a significant presence of monster costumes), which led directly to Ultraman, released that same year.

Ultraman ran for 39 episodes (40 when factoring in a pilot episode) and was in color. Wildly successful, the show featured an extraterrestrial giant merging with a human to save his life, who could then transform into the giant superhero Ultraman to defend Earth from giant monster threats.



In October of 1967, the sequel series to Ultraman would air: Ultra Seven. Originally intended as a standalone show, it was folded into the Ultra series in pre-production and featured suit and monster designs by Tohl/Tohru Narita, who worked with Tsuburaya during the late 60s.



The plot is similar, but different from the original Ultraman. Instead of merging with a human host, this show's Ultraman came to Earth from the Land of Light in Nebula M78 (an actual nebula and part of the Orion constellation) and rescued a guy, then took his form and calling himself “Dan Moroboshi” joined the Ultra Garrison, an organization dedicated to defending the planet from alien invaders as its sixth major member. Using an eyepiece called the Ultra Eye, he can transform into his true form, a 40 meter (131 ft) tall red and silver giant superhero dubbed Ultraseven because he was the unofficial “seventh member” of the Ultra Garrison. Equipped with a staggering array of special attacks and abilities typical for a tokusatsu superhero, the show was an even bigger success than Ultraman. It ran for 49 episodes and featured even better ratings than the previous series. Ultraseven is one of the most popular characters of the entire Ultraman metaseries, and holds a high rank as one of the Ultra Brothers. Dan Moroboshi's actor, Kohji Moritsugu is still active and frequently reprised the role in more recent Ultra shows.

Cool guy status notwithstanding, Ultraseven is like all the other Ultras: a giant dude, not a robot. Unlike the original Ultraman, Ultra Seven introduced giant robots into the mix.



Nurse, or Narse, is a giant robotic space dragon that serves Alien Wild, a collector of human souls. The dragon can transform in a flying saucer form, but was ultimately ripped to pieces by Seven.





Crazygon is an asymmetrical scavenger robot built by the Alien Banda race to collect machinery. In practical terms, the robot rampages around a city and puts cars into its torso with a giant claw arm.






A race of near-humans called the Alien Salome built an imitation robot Ultraseven in their scheme to conquer Earth. Eventually the real Seven would escape captivity and defeat the robot with the help of Agira, a capsule monster ally.





What's a capsule monster? In the show, its a series of three artificial monsters that Seven can summon from a capsule to help him fight. Two of them, Agira and Miclas, are more bestial in form, while Windom is a more obviously robotic creation. Windom was reprogrammed by the Alien Kanan race into fighting Seven before being rescued, and then later fell in another battle. The entire concept of monsters that could be miniaturized in a portable storage device and then deployed to fight on behalf of the owner would be one of the major influences on Pokemon years later.






Lastly, and probably the most iconic of Ultra Seven's giant robots is King Joe. Deployed by the warlike Alien Pedan race in an attempt to conquer Earth, King Joe was deployed as four piloted ships that could combine into a 55 meter (180 ft) tall mecha that trounced Seven in their first fight until it was knocked over and unable to get back up, like a turtle, and transformed into flight mode to get away, like a different turtle, until eventually being defeated by Seven in a harbor. The robot's odd name was in reference to the lead writer of Ultraman and Ultra Seven, Tetsuo Kinjo.


Originally planned as the final Ultra series, Seven's success guaranteed that another show would get made, but it would be several years before another Ultraman series would air.



Next time on Shin Super Robot Sunday: He tried to kill me with a forklift!


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Sunday, February 16, 2020

Shin Super Robot Sunday: King Kong Escapes




The road to 1967's King Kong Escapes is a curious and twisting one. The original 1933 King Kong is a certified masterpiece of special effects and adventure. In the early 1960s, King Kong's original animator, Willis O'Brien, outlined a Kong sequel where the giant ape fights a Frankenstein's Monster in San Francisco. A film producer by the name of John Beck got a scriptwriter, George Worthing Yates, turn it into a script, then shopped it around. Toho Studios bought the script, then had Shinichi Sekizawa (a Toho regular who would write several kaiju films for the studio) re-write the script, and Frankenstein was replaced with Godzilla. Original King Kong co-director Merian C. Cooper evidently tried to sue to stop the production (and felt insulted that Kong would be portrayed by a man in a suit instead of as a stop motion puppet), but the movie went ahead anyway, and 1962's King Kong vs. Godzilla (from director Ishirō Honda and special effects supervisor Eiji Tsuburaya) would become the third entry in the Godzilla franchise, the first in color, and a smashing success that revitalized Godzilla into an entertainment powerhouse.


This begat a 25 episode 1966 television series co-produced by Videocraft (the original name of Rankin/Bass Productions. Yes, the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer people) and Toei Animation called The King Kong Show, where a friendly Kong teams up with kid hero Bobby Bond, and they have adventures where they thwart the machinations of the evil Dr. Who (no relation).



What matters here is that one of Dr. Who's attempts to defeat King Kong takes the form of Mechani-Kong, a piloted giant robot.




This then leads to the main event of this post: King Kong Escapes. Released in Japan in 1967 and 1968 in the U.S., it was co-produced by Toho and Rankin-Bass, directed by Ishirō Honda with Tsuburaya as special effects supervisor again.


The movie completely eschews the boy adventurer plotline in favor of a more traditional mad scientist kaiju storyline. Dr. Who is the mad scientist in question, who is digging up the highly radioactive Element X at the North Pole and is using the gigantic Mechani-Kong to do the work, but the radiation is too much and the robot Kong breaks down. With his financier Madame Piranha breathing down his neck to get results, Who manages to get to Mondo Island where the real King Kong is chilling out and fighting dinosaurs, and hypnotizes Kong to bring him back to the North Pole to dig up Element X.


Through the intervention of a joint US-Japan task force, the plot is uncovered and King Kong escapes and swims to Japan, where he and the repaired Mechani-Kong 2.0 have a final showdown at the Tokyo Tower while a beautiful young woman's life hangs in the balance because that's what you do with King Kong stories.



The movie version of Mechani-Kong is a great design. Measuring 20 meters (65.62 ft) tall and a solid gunmetal gray instead of brown, this version possesses great strength, a belt of large grenades intended for digging but also useful for destroying other stuff, and bright lights in the head that can either blind or hypnotize the real Kong.

This would be the final King Kong movie project from Toho Studios, but not for a lack of trying. The studio tried to get a remake of either of their King Kong movies off the ground in the 90s, but without the likeness rights it went nowhere. Mechani-Kong would, however, make an appearance in the 1992 manga series Godzilla, King of the Monsters from Kodansya Comics. There, Mechani-Kong teams up with MechaGodzilla in a two on one fight against Godzilla, but both are defeated.




Next time on Shin Super Robot Sunday: Seven, Seven, Seven, Seven.

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