Monday, July 28, 2008

Super Robot Profiles: Grendizer

One of the later robot series created by Go Nagai back in the late '70s, Grendizer had a lot going for him. There was a supporting cast member taken from an earlier series that was extremely popular (in fact, Kouji Kabuto had been the main character of Mazinger Z, a series which not only reinvented the robot-based genre but probably to some extent anime itself, and which commanded something like seventy percent of all television viewers in Japan within its time slot), the fact that it was created by Go Nagai, one of the hot commodities of the time period and the genre, and the fact that the robot was, by the standards of the time, pretty well designed and fairly original.



Not to mention, in the mini-mini-mini-series that was a nice little extra on a DVD set based on all of Go Nagai's robots teaming up and fighting for the thinnest of all possible excu-er, reasons, Grendizer teamed up with a robot fifteen to twenty years his junior to kick giant freaky Japanese mutant samurai demon booty but good.



(Yes, that was the entire series I was talking about.)

So why is Grendizer so bloody obscure by even the standards of the genre?

Here's a hint.



ARGH THE PAIN. While Grendizer's French, Arabic (!), and Italian dubs were very popular, the English dubs were close to as bad as dubs get.



PLEASE HAVE MERCY.

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