I'll be writing about Giant Robo when I toss up the Week in Anime post on Friday, but I get the feeling people might skip over that section, which would be a shame, so I am giving it a special highlight today.
Giant Robo is essentially the greatest fan fiction ever produced. Yasuhiro Imagawa (who directed G Gundam and the recent Shin Mazinger Z, itself a re-imagining of an influential mecha manga by Go Nagai) found that, for whatever reason (not sure, myself), he could not use any supporting characters from the Giant Robo manga in his OVA adaptation. So instead, he plucked characters from works written throughout the career of Mitsuteru Yokoyama (who wrote Tetsujin 28-go, a hugely influential mecha manga, among other series) and put them together in one crazy, exciting tale that is simultaneously an homage to the beginnings of mecha and a series that shows how much mecha evolved since its beginnings. (It also pays tribute to Wuxia stories. Think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, House of Flying Daggers and so on for modern examples.)
This is the intro that usually plays before the beginning of each episode of Giant Robo (it's a seven episode OVA, each episode ranging from 38 to 60 minutes). I love it because it's so amazingly fun and over the top -- you get a quick feel about what kind of gonzo world this is and about the epic scale of the battle between the BF Group and the Experts of Justice. (By the way, "Experts of Justice" is one of those group names that sounds hilarious now but was undoubtedly cool back in the day when superheroes first burst onto the scene and mecha stories were fresh and exciting.)
My favorite attack is the three-eyed Egyptian god mecha (??) laying waste to a city with laser bubbles (???), but my favorite moment is when the BF mooks proclaim their undying allegiance to Big Fire. These are the greatest mooks ever, right on the edge of being totally offensive but not so much that you can't appreciate them for being hilarious. I mean, they're basically Nazis with KKK-esque masks, but for some reason they all look like they're done up in blackface (during the series, not the intro). How do you get better than that?
So this is a crazy world, part Gotham City and part fantastic mecha paradise (sound familiar? The Big O owes a massive debt to this OVA), and like many mecha series, Giant Robo also features the requisite mecha tropes, including a kid who controls the titular Giant Robo, Daisaku Kusama. (Amusing/disturbing note: Kappei Yamaguchi -- who has voiced characters as diverse as L, InuYasha and Usopp of One Piece -- uses a similar voice as Daisaku that he would pull out 15 years later as Chic, the torturer employed by the Gandor family in Baccano! Creeped the hell out of me the whole time I watched this OVA.)
Where mecha series shine is in how they use these time-honored devices and character types. I mean, there are similarities among Escaflowne, Evangelion, RahXephon, Eureka Seven, Macross Frontier and on and on, but nobody would call any of those series overly similar, right? (Here's a hint: No. Unless you're an idiot.) Giant Robo shines in this way because it goes an interesting route with this: It's sort of like Watchmen in feel (except not as cerebral, and if it were focused more on the heroes in their younger years), examining the relationship between heroes and villains (and the strange sense of honor they share), the real meaning of sacrifice and putting idealism to the grinder in a gray world. Giant Robo's first episode fools people into thinking everything is black and white and easy; however, it's anything but by the end. You might not think this by the intro, but there's a legitimately good, twisty story here.
I also like the interesting mix of heroes and villains. There are of course good souls on the side of the heroes, and terrible a-holes on the side of the villains, but there are also villains who seem like decent guys and heroes who are real pricks, embittered by years of experience. And even among the good people, there's still a hard edge that has developed because of the way they're forced to view the world. Also, the heroes and villains are almost all crazy badasses with superpowers. So they all have that going for them.
Speaking of badasses, Giant Robo also has Norio Wakamoto in the first genuinely heroic role I've heard him in since Coach Ota in Gunbuster. It's always fun to support a Wakamoto character 100 percent. But my favorite character is the villain Alberto the Impact (or Shockwave Alberto depending on the translation), who is a total throwback villain complete with epic past involving a neverending series of duels with Wakamoto's character, Taisou, who destroyed Alberto's right eye in battle. Awesome.
Anyway, I love me some Giant Robo, and any mecha fan would love it, too. Pay homage to history, people!
