The Mike Toole Show

Return to Super Robot Island

I got to watch Gaiking this week!

A vanishingly small few of you are nodding enthusiastically, because you're decrepit and old like me and can watching Gaiking on TV as children. Back in those days, we got our anime fix on broadcast and cable TV, and a blessed few TV stations in the US got a package of shows called Force Five. Force Five was awesome! It was a package of five separate anime TV series' brought to us by producer Grendizer on Thursdays (still my favorite of this bunch) and Gaiking on Fridays. Seeing the iconic hero robot again reminded me that Gaiking was a very welcome sight when I was little, because that meant it was Friday and the weekend was here! Thirty years later, I'm watching Gaiking on the computer screen, it's subtitled... and oh yeah, it's a totally different Gaiking.

That's right internet, today we make our brave return to the Island of Super Misfit Robots, to once again bear witness to the heroic metal men (and women!) that thrilled throngs of kids decades back, but have faded from the consciousness of modern anime fandom. Last time, I had an easy excuse to visit this topic, as it allowed me to spotlight Jun Kawagoe, is actually a direct sequel to the original, complete with hookups to the original story (now 50 years in the past) and appearances from the old show's characters. I think that this is pretty awesome, but at the same time - did kids watch this show, or was it honestly aimed at the fortysomething office workers and truck drivers who loved the original as children? Who was Kotetsushin Jeeg for, exactly? I mean, besides myself - like its predecessor, this show didn't get a US release, but it was widely fansubbed during its broadcast, and it was kinda too good for me to ignore. Sadly, this just isn't the kind of show that can really succeed commercially in North America, so those fansubs are probably all we're getting.

The final entry in this trio of super robot originals and their recent remakes (combining all 3 would probably make a pretty badass robot, don't you think?) would be Evangelion stew, Dancougar was chock full of the stuff, with the ever-present idea that the titular robot was some sort of demigod waging war against other godly robots.

Of course, comparatively, the three original stories and their remakes discussed above are quite high profile. After all, two out of three of them got some sort of release in English on these shores! But do you Charge Man Ken. Astroganger doesn't have that level of infamy, but it's still a rough affair with a very unique super robot at the forefront.


Speaking of so-bad-it's-good, I can no longer keep silent about 1977's Magno Robo Ga-Keen, or as it's known around these parts, Magnos The Robot. In fairness, the series itself ain't that bad - directed by the legendary Tomoharu Kadomatsu, it featured a remarkably weird-looking robot that used an array of magnetic weapons and power-ups to save the day. It was the first super robot show to feature elaborate, drawn-out stock footage sequences for its transformations and attacks - in an era where not a single episode of Grendizer could go by without Duke Freed doing that weird arbitrary chair-spin to launch the robot from the saucer, Kadomatsu would up the ante, with sequences of the show's two heroes jumping and piroetting as they transformed into their hilariously ugly robot counterparts and floated up to augment and pilot the heroic robot itself. These bits could go on for minutes, and while I now think this approach is unforgivably cheap, I did really like repetition when I was a little kid, so maybe guys like Kadomatsu were on to something. The thing about Ga-Keen, though, is that it was clumsily edited into a 90-minute TV movie for distribution on American TV and home video. This amazing piece of work featured some of the most bizarre dialogue rewrites I've ever seen (the main villain is called "Xerxes Tire-Iron Dada"), and seems to be an endless highlight reel of the show's clumsiest, most strangely-animated moments. I think my favorite bit would have to be the part where Magnos, unable to muster the energy to fly, reconfigures into a wheeled version that looks like some sort of super robot paraplegic. Astoundingly, this film has been issued on DVD multiple times, so start searching those bargain bins for it!

If you look at Magnos and think "Nah, that one just isn't ugly enough," then Blocker Corps. IV: Machine Blaster is the show for you. This series hit the airwaves a year before Magnos, but boy, is it uglier! The plot is standard fare involving four stereotypically heroic characters (hot-blooded guy, quiet guy, little kid, and fat guy) and their enormously weird-looking robots. One of these robots is called Robocles, which may actually be the best name for a robot in the entire world. Speaking of awesome names, the show's main villains are called Hellqueen the 5th and Kai-Buddha. I guess it's not surprising that this show's contemporary Getter Robo G had to up the ante by including Space Hitler as one of the bad guys! Anyway, Machine Blaster was unably popular in Italy, where it went under the title Astrorobot Ypsilon, and features an absolutely mindblowing special attack. See, when the going gets rough, Ishida and the other robot pilots don't form Voltron or launch rocket punches, they combine into an unstoppable ring of deadly power by doing this:

I literally cannot believe that we in the English-speaking world were robbed of this goodness, and forced to watch Laverne and Shirley meet Fonzie and his Talking Dog and They're All in the Army for Some Reason instead! Anyway, the parade of awesomely weird super robots isn't finished yet. From that same famed year of 1976, the incredibly busy Gō Nagai would team up with the infamous and previously-mentioned Knack Studios to create Groizer X - or as I call him, Fat-Bot.


You need to be a little careful around Fat-Bot. Don't talk about his weight, or his heavy breathing, or about the massive, endless trail of empty Doritos bags and Mountain Dew bottles behind him. Because if you do, and he gets a little mad, he'll transform into a giant jet bomber and level your entire city. Groizer X did his chubby robot-into-jet act for 36 episodes; the show didn't make waves in Japan or Italy or the Spanish-speaking world, but somehow it got pretty big in Brazil back when the place was under military rule. Maybe it's because they called the series "The Space Pirate" instead of "Ha Ha, look at this Weird Plane-bot." Thing is, Groizer X has persisted just enough that he's gotten a couple of awesome new toy versions and a cameo in Yasuhiro Imagawa's amazing Shin Mazinger TV series. Gone, but not forgotten!

Man, 1976 was a good year for weird super robots. It must've been because I was born that year. If that's the case, then I really have to apologize, because Dai-Apollon would be my fault. Wait a minute, Dai-Apollon is awesome! In that case, I really have to take credit for it. Er, anyway, Dai-Apollon is awesome mainly because it... it's a football super robot. And I'm not talking about soccer football, either, I'm talking about gridiron goddamned football. Take a look:


Yeah, that's a super robot, and he's wearing a football helmet! Dai-Apollon even wields a football-shaped sword, and the robot is controlled by a pack of orphaned kids who have their own amateur football team. Probably the best part of the entire football motif is that it's fused weirdly with super sentai sensibilities, so heroic leader Takeshi gets to wear a red football uniform (with pads and everything - if you look closely, maybe you can make out Pat Patriot on the shoulders!), while the girl is stuck in a pink uniform. The kid summon their robot by chanting "U! F! O!" cheerleader-style, and the launch sequence is completed when Dai-Apollon reaches up and locks his helmet grille into place. It's pretty awesome stuff, though typically roughly animated, and without it, we just might have never gotten Eyeshield 21! Like some other shows of this era, Dai-Apollon never got shown on TV in English, but there was an oddball 90-minute VHS edit entitled Shadow World. That's one that's worth tracking down.

The marshal of this parade of super robot awesomeness will be... heck, let's go with Urashiman.


Of course, I can't round this column off without a surprise guest. If the three robots I mentioned first are kind of like a Getter Team of combining robot remakes, then this one would be the Texas Mack counterpart - a smaller, weirder affair that is somehow even cooler than the main guys. The actual anime I'm talking about here would be fujoshi bait. Whatever, it's all good-- super robot anime just isn't common enough in this part of the world, and I applaud Media Blasters for ending the drought with the flavorful Mazinkaiser SKL.

In my original column on this subject, I said that I'd definitely be doing a second and third entry, because you need at least three to create an awesome combining robot column. I'm not even sure I need to stop at three, to be honest, because I've still got God Sigma and Gowapper 5 and Gordian and Gingaizer and Trider G7 and tons more to talk about. In any event, mark my words - we've returned to the Island of Super Misfit Robots once, so if we keep to the schedule, we'll be coming back and going Beneath the Island of Super Misfit Robots sometime soon. Until then, gang, say your prayers, take your vitamins, and keep looking for awesome super robot toys and cartoons!