Studio: Ashi Productions
Director: Hiroshi Yoshida
(Revenge of Cronos)
Takao Kato, Nobuyoshi Habara and Kiyoshi
Murayama (Leina: Wolf Sword Legend)
Kiyoshi Murayama (Lightning Trap
- Leina & Laika)
Screenplay: Hideki Sonoda
Cast: Kazuhiko Inoue as Rom Stol,
Yuko Mizutani as Leina Stol, Hiroko Takahashi as Diondra, Junichi Kagaya as
Kirai Stol, Kōichi Hashimoto as Rod Drill, Minoru Inaba as Grujios, Shigezou
Sasaoka as Gades, Shinya Ohtaki as Blue Jet, Sho Hayami as Narration, Toshiharu
Sakurai as Triple Jim, Yousuke Akimoto as Gardi
Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles
According Neil Nadelman, a translator who worked for the defunct anime
distributor Central Park Media, Machine Robo may have been licensed by
mistake1. It is hearsay, but an amusing anecdote to sell a series
when I heard of this through a podcast Anime
World Order. This alongside the premise of this eighties anime was enough,
when he talked of this in 2007, to win me over to wanting to see this series, a
goal which took a good decade to even get to. Back in the day, when Central Park Media were still a
distributor in the United States, they had only gotten up to three DVD volumes
with five episodes on each, in a weird time when we thought separating anime
series on multiple separate releases was a good idea, before it was clearly
given up on. With the company going bankrupt in 2009 and the releases in the
early 2000s, this was not a case of the series being caught up in the collapse
of its distributor either.
People may have encountered this
series in some form back in the eighties through GoBots, a toy line which was imported over to the West during the
boom of the original eighties Transformer
franchise, which got an animated series and a film, and used designs from Machine Robo. Machine Robo itself was
originally a toy line which crossed over into animation, with Revenge of Chronos the first Japanese
series for the original country of these toys' origin. This series proved
something of an idiosyncratic creation with hindsight, as Ashi Productions' series may also be known if you had never seen it
for the characters appearing in Super
Robot Wars. Tactical strategy games which act like officially sanctioned
crossover fan fiction, these games even if only starting to be licensed
officially in the West have been translated and made available to mecha fans,
the genre in its centre, allowing one to see the menagerie in this series cross
paths with characters even from mainstream crossover franchises. Case in point,
Super Robot Wars MX (2004), for the Playstation 2, allowed these characters
to run amok in one of the bleakest stories in anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion (1997), which just
raises questions of how they cross. One can imagine, if you have seen that
film, the last stand by the character Asuka by herself against a group of manufactured
biomechs, one of its more traumatising scenes of the franchise, is suddenly
interrupted by Rom Stol, the male lead of Machine
Robot, this goofy eighties show, making an elaborate speech about good
conquering evil and telling the villains they do not deserve to hear his name.
Over forty seven episodes long, this is set on
the titular planet of robots, Cronos, invaded by an evil force called Gyandlar.
Led by Gades, they are marauding in search for the Hyribead, an ancient tool
allowing one to live forever, even if it means killing the father of Rom Stol.
After this, set up in the first couple of episodes, Rom takes the family
heirloom of the Wolf Sword, and goes with his sister Leina and comrades out to
find the Hyribead. It is a show, just to get this out of the way, where
Vikung-fu exists, combining Vikings with kung fu to make the most powerful
martial arts possible for Rom and his friends to take on the forces of Gyandla.
Gyandlar, when not having a ranking system for minions who fail and get knocked
down three ranks, have their scumbags but a surprising amount of members who
disagree with the lack of honour they show, one such figure a male samurai-like
figure Garudi, who will gain greater importance as more of his secret past
comes out. This is, openly, a very absurd show. Production wise, there is some
great designs for this robotic cast, but you also have a production which is
clearly having to produce episodes each week for over a year. The repetition of
villainous grunt designs that eventually happens has to be addressed in the
final episodes after a while, and the size discrepancies between the cast in
particular stick out. Rom, when he uses Vikung-fu's ultimate abilities, gains
two levels of robotic armour, the last turning him into a giant with a lack of
a practical size guide for characters in general between hulking behemoths and
normal humanoid sized ones. There are also things no one cared about the logic
for, such as one of Rom's comrades Triple Jim, a Transformers-like robot humanoid who, able to transform into a car,
is the friend of Leina's who is only slightly bigger than her, but when he
turns into a car is able to be used by her as an actual vehicle with
comfortable leg room. The logic of Cronos as a world does raise questions
anyway, but that needs a large part of the review to elaborate and the set up
of actually watching the show needs to be addressed first.
For starters, Machine Robo itself is very episodic,
which is not necessarily something you may have not experienced if, like me,
you tended to avoid the huge franchised through your youth getting into anime,
the ones which lasted forever, or even the fifty plus episode series. This not
that far past when Fist of the North Star's
animated television adaptation was started in 1984, important in mind to
how much the original manga for that franchise really codified tropes, and how
this originates from a toy line which would have benefitted from adding new
toys for the audience, as more characters are added over time in the show. Depicting
the whole story in forty four episodes, the last three were compilations of the
series before the next series was started on air, one just letting the narrator
describe the characters in detail, and the last two retelling the whole series
in digested form. It is telling that you can boil down the pre-Emerald City
narrative of this series, a good twenty plus episodes, down to the initial
episode setting up the premise, Rom Stol and his allies going through episodic
stories which you would have likely seen in anime before and decades after
throughout this length of programming. It is incredibly silly, gleefully so as
I wished when wanting to see this series. It does completely repeat the same
beats over the episodes without fail, in which Rom will suddenly catch villains
off guard, making an elaborate speech and then saying they do not deserve to
know his name, a trademark the show eventually starts to make jokes about, and
then beat the enemies eventually for that episode. Blue Dragon, his first
armour upgrade, is useless and needs to give way to the Vikung-fu set, which
gets the job done. His allies include the jet plane humanoid samurai named Blue
Jet, who is mostly red, Triple Jim, who has a crush on Leina but is the noble
putz in their relationship, and Rod Drill, the goofball. Leina sadly suffers
through a casual streak of sexism here as, since she is a girl, there are
numerous jokes about her being a girl wanting to enter the battles and being constantly
kidnapped/under peril, with her jealously about the many women who are
attracted to her brother raising questions about their relationship.
Thankfully, she does get good moments to counter this, and these characters do
become the real reason to enjoy Machine
Robo, alongside its goofiness. Attempting to binge this in large amounts is
detrimental to really enjoying it, whilst having taking a few months to even
finish this, I was able to soak the world and story in that I became fond of
over the time committed.
Machine Robo is helped, unintentionally and intentionally, by being
an odd duck in its world, which feels like was being fleshed out
mid-production. A place of "Romtro" apples and the "Master
Laster", cat people predating the Beast
Wars: Transformers franchise in the West, who are never seen again, and a
character named "Trim Sponsor", even an episode about a multicolour
desert where the blue sand has giant sand mantra rays, it goes through a lot of
changes as the production goes. Despite Gyandlar coming from outer space,
Cronos is initially suggested to be closer to period Japan, even with tropes of
Japanese chambara tales of noble samurai even in the villains' side, with rural
communities and that begin agriculture despite it being once said these robots
use battery sources for sustenance. There are also the robots closer to their
toy line and Transformers, and those
who are very humanoid like Rom and Leina Strol, Leina effectively just a female
character in a blue helmet and appropriate costume, her design in appearance
and long brown hair not even hiding that she is supposedly robotic. This is
before you get into how there are no humans in this world, with these the main
species in this world, and these robots going on with discussion of the
afterlife, due to how many characters will be killed in episodes, and do return
as spirits. As this story goes on, more overt science fiction tropes and fire
arms are introduced, such as an episode about a city which became decadent and
lazy due to the power it produces from a volcano, and it tries to make sense of
the two very different types of character designs only to become more
compelling for the strange juxtapositions of its plot and lore details it
throws in like multiple kitchen sinks.
It really comes obvious that,
because these are meant to be robots, you could have gotten away with some
gruesome content the television adaptation of Fist of the North Star had to work over, that you can have robots
cut in half, crushed or Rom briefly, never doing this again, pull off a Fist of the North Star technique of
causing a steel arm explode with one touch. This may seem tasteless, but it
becomes almost a sick joke that, more in the pre-Emerald City episodes, you
have characters introduced in that episode only for them to die and the leads
to morn them over their improvised graves way too many times to not seem
perverse. That one of these characters is a woman who is revealed to be a decoy
bomb made into a woman just raises more questions, in a world where these are
sentient robotic figures who just exist and non-metallic alikes as well. The
female cast in general also however show that, wanting to have their cake and
eat it, the production design the character to be as human and feminine in
design as possible, hyper-feminized in some cases as well. You do get a cool
female villainess in Diondra - imposing in her distinct character design as a
sadistic giantess in golden armour, with Hiroko Takahashi's booming voice
helping greatly - but there are many others who, still stylish in their
designs, still emphasis this. A character in Episode thirteen, a martial artist
named Ruri, despite her ball joint design is drawn as a shapely figure in
lycra, peculiar with hindsight as her tribe in her flashbacks seemingly are
born in lycra shaped to their bodies throughout life as a layer of skin, which
is one of the more idiosyncratic examples of this. It is less of a complaint
but one of the many contradictions and quirks to this show in general, and if
there are any criticisms of it, it is entirely the issue of casual sexism you
do need to put up with throughout the series if thankfully not straying into
anything actually offensive. It becomes more a curiosity as, eventually, I did
find myself trying to imagine an alternative world version of this where they
did have a Transformer-like member
of the cast who was not male and how that would change the perception of this.
The pre-Emerald City stories arguably
have the more absurd moments, or I became fond of these lovable oafs on their
journey that I started actually engaging with the story as it was fleshing out.
I cannot deny that, when I first learnt of this series, it was through an
episode of Anime World Order with the
aforementioned Neil Nadelman about
"lame anime". A long running anime podcast, that episode was recorded
in 20071 back at a time when the few DVDs released for the series
barely scratched the surface of the whole series, with the podcast lasting for
so long that they existed when Discotek
Media in the USA released this whole series in 2022 on standard definition
on Blu-Ray; back then, the enticing nature of their review was as much the
ridiculousness of the premise. It was sold on things that could be seen if you
owned those original DVDs, which got over fifteen episodes, such as Vikung-fu,
where nothing is remotely about Viking long ships or involving runes, or the
rock men, part of an interesting idea this show never leans on that these are
not robots truthfully, but humanoids that, unless you are the very humanoid
ones like Rom and Leina who cannot transform, have bodies made between a
variety of materials. That latter detail shows how this series could have
expanded into something really idiosyncratic than it already is as, by the time
of the final battle between forces of good and evil, you have characters made
of metal, rock like the rock people who can turn into boulders to crush
enemies, the fossil tribes who can even combine into a giant dinosaur, and the
abruptly introduced "Gem People", three figures who, in an attempt to
try to wrap up the plot later on, are the
guardians are sacred items which make up
and actually explain what the Hyribead may be.
The clear sense the logic was
improvised on this show helps it in the end, and I admire this is in the
context where I had a bias to wanting to see Machine Robo, and went out of my way to get the series when Discotek Media releases are a nightmare
to acquire outside the USA. Despite this bias, I was able to accept the
absurdities and got on the wavelength. It is not a show to attempt to binge all
nineteen hours plus of in a marathon, an ill advised choice simply because, repeating
the same plot structures over many episodes, this shows was meant to be seen in
snippets like its original broadcast run. Instead it becomes, with its male
narrator Sho Hayami being
appropriately bombastic, a bolt of energy just to go through a couple of
episodes at a time and witness what transpires this time, such as the episode
presenting a Transformers' Death Race, which is neat.
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The world grows as this goes,
even if some details are ignored and never talked of, making this a surreal and
fascinating world, from the horrifying Iron Eaters, a giant plant-like entity
that digests robots, to electromagnetic jelly fish floating in the air. You do
have to accept that the first opening theme tune, the awesome Machine Robo Hono'o by Martin, is replaced by one which is
cool, but both not as great and also frankly egotistical in the translated
lyrics for heroes to sing. There is also screen flashes, something which the Discotek release warns of, this issue of
strobe effects which would stop being acceptable in Japanese animation after
the "Polygon" incident of December 1997; whilst the incident has been
exaggerated in the West, there was an episode of the first 1997 Pokémon series we never got in the
West, Dennō Senshi Porygon, which
caused photosensitive epileptic seizures in people and children, and led to TV
Tokyo and other broadcasters establishing a series of guidelines for animated
programs2 which would have prevented the likes of Machine Robo having such strobe effects
as readers should be warned of.
Emerald City changes the pace
when introduced as, whilst staying episodic, this last half sets the cast in
one central location, at first defending it from Gyandlar trying to storm the
heavily fortified location, to the final act where their big bad eventually have
to step in and the final conflict begins. There does become too many characters,
likely reflecting this having links to a toy line where you needed to sell the
product through the show, but you start to be introduced to characters named
Pro Truck Racer, who remind one for all the deaths in the show these are still
characters from a series of toys for children, including a group called the
Land Commanders who combining into one giant robot. By this point, where the
production is even having jokes suddenly start to appear in a show that was
mostly straight faced, there becomes a sense of the show just being an excuse
to do whatever the staff wanted as they had to resolve what the conclusion is.
This means the Gem People are abruptly introduced, but also the sense that,
when Pro Truck Racer decides levelling a whole skyscraper to make a bridge is
acceptable logic, that the staff where just creating content they thought would
be fun. By this point, it is with the sense that they hoped the viewers who
were watching really did not care and enjoyed such a sight for its absurdity,
which I can attest to as one viewer. That the show manages to have a proper
conclusion, tied up and feeling like a real ending, is a credit, even if it
leads to a very esoteric one to continue the franchise.
Machine Robo would continue with Machine Robo: Battle Hackers (1987), which would come soon after
the last episodes for this show ended. Lasting thirty one episodes, prominently
the leads of Rom and Leina Strol would not join their friends in that tale, and
notably, whilst tragically only passing in her early fifties, Leina is a very
early role for an actress named Yuko
Mizutani who, until her death in 2016, was prolific over numerous eras of
anime as a result. It comes obvious that, for the four straight to video OVAs
that allowed fans to follow these characters, Leina was deliberately made
central to all of them even if not the dynamic lead in these episodes as a fan
favourite character, at the same time as, being made between 1988-90, Mizutani was going on to a long and
prolific career onwards. I will also mention another OVA that was just an
extra, a music video compilation, one of two, worth seeing for new material, a
comedic breaking of the forth wall with the cast out of character as actors;
seeing the cast goof off, or the villain of Grujios, a slug character in a
robot body who eventually ends up as a ghost able to possess the bodies, go gooey-eyed
over a pet kitten is legitimately funny in context to seeing the show, and a
credit that Discotek included it from
the best surviving version for their release.
To explain the OVAs, I will have
to spoil the ending of Machine Robo
from here on, that the finale has the main characters transported to an
alternative dimension after they have resolved the conflict on Cronos, the side
characters returning for Battle Hackers
but Leina and Rom Stol not returning to that series. The four OVAs, three
connected together as Leina: Wolf Sword
Legend, and a forth, really do feel like curious loose strands to loftier
ideas which never came to fruition, attempts to extend the lifespan of these characters
and especially for Leina Stol. Certainly they feel like projects to let staff
gain experience, the first OVA explicitly name checking itself as the first
directorial project for Takao Kato,
future director of Keijo (2016), the
one fan service heavy show that sounds so ridiculous it might turn a 180 degree
and win people over.
This first episode begins with
Leina literally recreating The
Terminator (1984), with Arnold
Schwarzenegger appearing naked in a metropolis in a new time zone, only
here on top of a skyscraper with the Wolf Sword. She is now Leina Haruka, and
here I wished this bizarre turn the series went into had managed to gain
traction as this is the most compelling of the four we got. She becomes a new
transfer student at a school, and gets into the kind of premise I find
compelling, unnatural figures dealing with supernatural/ horror adjacent tales
of entities targeting human beings, with Leina here immediately told when
introduced to her class she will save the world by the student everyone else
thinks is weird. It is a sudden switch to high school mystery, as girls are
going missing, captured in an Alice in
Wonderland time scape to live permanently ageless, and where I did not
expect Machine Robo to get
existential, in its villain talking about aging and the sense of time being
lost in youth. This is one of those fascinating ephemera of the OVA world that
let this tangent from an existing source happen, and barring the lack of
science fiction pieces, this story of a time eater would even be something I
would expect from an episode of Boogiepop
Phantom (2000). It also means Leina gets compensated for being kidnapped
all the time by getting to rock the Wolf Sword and fight supernatural villains,
and the end credits is a cute piece showing it all as a film Leina is an actor
in.
Sadly this was not the direction
they went with this episodes, as episode two properly reintroduces the male
cast properly who transported over, all defeated in the opening on an alien
plant by the big bad. Definitely, tragically, episode one was a complete
one-off as this is sci-fi fantasy now. Leina still decapitates a dragon in the
first few minutes, so she got more than the series, but this properly
introduces the male cast, Rom's story again here, and with the decision to turn
the more mechanical leads into humans. It is strange, for an example, to see a
Bishonen Jet, a character now with a human head on the robot body with shades,
which is a bit funny and matches the rest of the cast in Rod Drill and Triple
Jet. It was also an excuse to have cast from the series back in new roles, audibly
heard as you got used to them over this long TV series as I did. Truthfully,
however, these are not as interesting even if still watchable. It would be a
spoiler in any other context, a huge one, to admit the third OVA kills off Rom
himself, and even undercuts the incestuous undercurrent by revealing Leina was
adopted, but honestly, as an abrupt twenty to thirty minute piece, it feels
like non-canonical content for what would have been a huge surprise to witness,
with all forty episodes, in Machine Robo.
In the series, it could have possibly been a big enough surprise it might have
caused people to talk of that series with a new layer to it. More so as, for
what is an abrupt curveball which loses power just for the slightness of the
piece, it lets Leina be the hero, which would have been something that could
have made Revenge of Cronos a more
iconic series even if one with all its goofy moments.
The forth, its own individual
piece, is not at all connected to its source and has wandered off in its own
direction to the point it is weird even calling it part of this franchise at
all. Called Lightning Trap - Leina &
Laika, it is set in the then-modern day, and is about a military weapon
named Bible, with a terrorist group named Blue Mary after it. By this point
Leina is just a side character, just an ordinary schoolgirl with only one
connection to the source, one bizarre touch, when she talks about dreams of her
being a warrior fighting monsters. It is Die
Hard on a luxury plane, with Bible a biomechanical robot kept in the
luggage compartment with innocent bystanders, and emphasis placed as much on a
new character named Laika Strange, a special agent figure clearly there to try
to put over a new page in the franchise. It never came to be, and this proves a
weird end to this version of Machine
Robo. The next time, and the last, for this animated franchise came in 2003
with Machine Robo Rescue, a Sunrise production following a world
where, with age no longer preventing kids from piloting robots, a group of them
have trained to rescue people over fifty plus episode. It is also, helmed by
all people, directed by Mamoru Kanbe,
the director I know more for his horror work like Elfen Lied, which when this ended in the start of 2004 was the
series of his that started in 2004 too, a few months on from, and is absolutely
not suitable for kids.
As mentioned, the OVAs
notwithstanding as curiosities thankfully preserved, I am biased towards this
series, due to the time wanting to see it. As much due to the time to just
watch this entire series as someone mostly used to anime where, even when
episodic, sticks to twenty four episodes at their longest and reach the plot
trajectory quickly. As an older anime viewer nowadays, I was never binging the
fifty plus episode big hitters, or anything like One Piece which kept going for a decade, with the concern for the
time consumption involved. Eventually the silliness of this particular show won
me over, and I can label all the strange quirks and mistakes in this review all
with a positive viewpoint as I enjoyed even those, as much because I came to
the series wanting to see those too and enjoy them. The legacy of this series
really shows in the inclusion in the Super
Robot Wars franchise, where giant robot show fans made that series and give
respect even to a production like this, something I can myself say in that my
love for this, as much for the unintentional, was sincere and well rewarded
with the context of knowing what I was wanting to watch after all this time.
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====
1) Anime
World Order Show # 63a – Totally Lame Anime With Neil Nadelman, podcast
episode for Anime World Order,
released December 6th 2007.
2) Animated
Program Image Effect Production Guidelines, published by TV Tokyo on their website.
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