It's 2, 3, 4, Or 5 Anime Shows In 1!

The 1980s were a time of experimenting with entertainment, plus trying to find something that fit the post-Star Wars juggernaut of media. One of these was from the wizards at Mattel in a line-up called Shogun Warriors which refurbished toys from the Japanese company Popy. The eastern import founded by Bandai had a wide selection of giant robots and giant monsters from various anime and tokusatsu titles that were rewritten for the American market as being all part of the same brand. It got an official comic book set in the Marvel Universe with a trio of their mechas. This got the ball rolling for incorporating anime with American toy shelves that of course lead to product lines like Transformers and Gobots, both of which combined different Japanese toy properties under a single label. For the better part of the early to mid-80s, there were five different TV shows that saw the light of day on American tubes, some of which had toy lines of their own. Whereas Mighty Orbots was an original creation for network Saturday morning television, these other shows were anime titles that were repackaged for English audiences. The theme all of them shared is that they were more than one separate series spliced with another to make for an entirely different but still slightly similar show. Here are five shows that could not beat the actual "robots in disguise".

Macron-1 came out in 1986 by Saban Entertainment as a two-hit combo of the anime titles, Go Shogun from 1981 and Subspace Operation Srungle from 1984. The only one of these to get any exposure outside of this show was a movie sequel to Go Shogun: Time Stranger which was so far removed from the original story that it becomes totally unnecessary to watch one after the other. Macron-1 took place simultaneously in parallel universes with two different groups of heroes fighting a pair of villains from the opposite reality. In the year 2525(no, really!), pilot David Chance enters another dimension plagued by the evil organization called GRIP lead by the big bad Darkstar and his cyborg ally Orion. Darkstar enters the universe Earth is in, leaving Chance behind in the other one. GRIP now plans to attack both realities with Darkstar invading Earth and Orion heading up their campaign back home. The scientist Dr. Shegall leads a unit with the mission to repel Darkstar while Chance forms a rebellion against Orion and the remaning GRIP forces which the collected name for this multiversal defense team is Macron-1. Shegall's team had a giant robot to handle Darkstar whereas Chance's rebels had their own mechas. Most of the series was from redubbed footage of Go Shogun, and in some countries the entire Srungle anime was completely left out. A total of 26 episodes were produced for America with only 20 of them ever getting a home video release. The most intriguing thing about the series was it featured pop songs of the time by Michael Jackson, Phil Collins, Bananarama, and Tears For Fears, even though none of this soundtrack ever got used on the VHS release. Macron-1 was one of the biggest oddities in English dubs despite its cast going on to become veterans in the field.

Harmony Gold was a distributor that began in 1976 with controversial releases like the Shaka Zulu miniseries. They got Carl Macek in the early 80s to produce some of the booming new anime programming to be broadcast on American television. They wrangled together three unattached anime series, two of which were part of Tatsunoko’s Super Dimension trilogy. This consisted of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Calvary Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada which was another Tatsunoko sci-fi mecha series. Each series made up its own story arc taking place sometime after the other with an intermediary time skip in between. The name Robotech was first used by the model kit makers at Revell as Robotech Defenders which got its own short DC Comics series that was made up of mechas from Macross and Orguss. Since Revell had the rights to the Macross mechas, they formed a co-license of the name Robotech and some of the merchandising rights. Matchbox was responsible for the initial wave of Robotech toys which included mechas, action figures, and fashion dolls that was picked up by Playmates in the 90s and added to their line of Exosquad which was an unrelated American property. The literal storyline for the Robotech TV series itself was one long ongoing saga that had several different retcons throughout its chronicles. This included a planned midquel series called The Sentinels which only got a compilation movie of the leftover footage, plus a pair American-original sequels titled The Shadow Chronicles and Love Live Alive. One other property added to the Robotech roster was “The Movie” from 1986 that was really the first Megazone 23 OVA rescripted into having a small connection to the Robotech TV series much to the regret of Carl Macek who called it one of the worst experiences of his career, which includes Heavy Metal 2000. The basic story of Robotech follows the original Macross series while picking up about a generation later with Southern Cross and Mospeada. In it, humankind encounters its first alien race of giants called the Zentradi while fighting back in transforming mecha. The two races unite and confront their original creators, the Robotech Masters. This leads to another invasion of Earth by the Invid race where a ragtag group of survivors defend the world while most of humanity’s military takes up arms in deep space. The Robotech legacy is probably one of the longest running in American history roping anime fans and even anime-haters into its ongoing epic.

After Robotech, Carl Macek tried to give the Leiji Matsumoto universe(or “Leijiverse”)another chance on American television since Star Blazers dazzled sci-fi fans in the 70s. In 1985, Harmony Gold took two completely unrelated titles and Cronenberged them into a single form. One show was Space Pirate Captain Harlock from 1978 with the other being Queen Millennia from 1981. Unlike Robotech with each series being given its own story arc, Captain Harlock And The Queen Of A Thousand Years splices material from both shows. They wanted to just do one of Captain Harlock, but with his first TV series having 41 episodes, it wouldn’t fit the necessary slot of 65 episodes, and Toei was asking too much for the Harlock sequel series. To resolve this, they spliced footage from Queen Millenia in with the first Harlock series to make for this two-headed beast. Harlock wasn’t adjacent to Millennia’s timeline when these series first came out, although this was later retconned in the Leijiverse as being slightly related to each other. Harmony Gold wasn’t given the luxurious amount of time they did for Robotech when it came to writing the storyline into any kind of unified coherence. The characters from one series would almost never be in the same shot as the other that gave viewers whiplash. The plot for the American series was Harlock being a renegade freedom fighter that sailed the skyways in his space bound pirate ship that was solely responsible for protecting the Earth from a race of living plant women called the Mazones. Harlock keeps taking the blame for all the Mazones attacks while trying to help the outcast Princess Olivia from regaining her throne of Millenia from the Mazones’ allies. Nothing of the American cut ever made the transfer to home media, largely because it got way less exposure than Robotech did, so unless you saw it while it was running, you’ll have to settle for bootleg copies on internet archives.

Not having any connection to the Shogun Warriors toys which helped fuel the fandom for the shows they came from, Force Five was a collection of five different mecha series. Force Five played weekdays for a single season from 1980-81 on select stations mostly in the northeast by Jim Terry Productions. A different title played on each weekday for a total of 26 weeks, making 130 episodes overall. All five of the series had a total of 39-74 episodes, meaning that several episodes were either left out completely or some edited into single screening. Three of the anime titles were created by Go Nagai, including Gaiking, Getter Robo G, and Grendizer which was originally supposed to be Mazinger Z that didn’t see an American release on its own until years later under the label Tranzor Z. The other two titles that made the lineup were by Leiji Matsumoto consisting of Starzinger and Danguard Ace, neither of which are fully connected to the established Leijiverse. There was no merchandise bearing the label of Force Five, even though there were some VHS collections of the series in their own compilation film, as well as the Getter Robo G dub gratuitously renamed Robo Formers by FB Productions. There was no crossover with any of these titles, so it wasn’t necessary to watch every one of the series if you only had a liking for one or two of them. Aside from Starzinger, all the rest featured giant robots, so it would have been simple to just tag one of the numerous mecha knockoff toys that plagued stores in the 80s with the Force Five logo.

The most popular of all the gestalt 80s American anime releases was of course Voltron, also known as Defender Of The Universe. This was shown in syndication in 1984 by World Events Productions which integrated unrelated anime shows dealing with combiner robots, a concept that Power Rangers made a cool mint over. The main anime series that most everyone is aware of was Beast King Go Lion usually referred to as the Lion Voltron where five pilots from Earth find their world decimated and then captured by the wicked Gaira Empire. The five of them escape and become the pilots of the giant mecha Go Lion which is made of a quintet of huge robot lions. The henshin-themed anime broke tradition by killing off one of the main team members in the first few episodes and replaced him with the standard space princess character. The Lion Voltron is the one most Americans are familiar with, but at least one other anime series made up for the second half of it, Armored Fleet Dairugger XV that out here was known as the Vehicle Voltron series about a space battleship of explorers whose main defense against the evil Galveston Empire was a huge robot comprised of fifteen vehicles, some which were cars, but all of them were capable of flight and surviving in space. A good portion of America never even received the Vehicle Voltron chunk of the series even though both Voltrons made 52 episodes each. Over a year after both series were completed an original TV special was animated specifically for American audiences which finally united both teams titled Voltron: Fleet Of Doom. There was a third anime series planned to add to the franchise was Lightspeed Electroid Albegas that most Americans are aware of because it was always the Voltron toys left over in retail stores, but the series never made western airwaves. The Lion Voltron hit a serious groove among 80s pop culture, so much so that there were two separate sequels created specifically for U.S. fans, as well as a lengthy hit remake done decades later for Netflix. When most otaku think of early Super Sentai shows, Voltron has inaccurately but securely set its place in the backdrop of the Japanese superhero genre.