Grendizer & Co.
Japanese Super Robots are a typical product of the second half of the 70s: I suppose that one of the reasons of the hold they've immediately had on me came from the passion I already had time before for the mythical movie characters like Godzilla or Gamera (not casually both oversized and Japanese...). On the other hand, at that time the Walt Disney movies used to leave me fairly unsatisfied, being (with same remarkable exceptions) definitely too mushy: the Far East newcomers filled a double void in that they represented the first massive attempt to bring science fiction (despite of its own kind) into animation and to transfer this wealth of images and stories from the usual channels of diffusion, namely cinema and comics, to television.I begun following the TV series since the early days but I can define myself a fan of the first spawn of Super Robots; just to make it clear, to me robots like Daitarn or Danguard already resides at the borders of the aristocracy of the steel giants and even the celebrated Gundam saga itself stops just to the RX-78 prototype. When I was about 15, my active interest for anime begun progressively to cool off, also because of the unpleasant and irritating sensation that, riding the huge success of the genre, the newer robots were created with the purpose of merchandising exploitation in mind, looking more and more like colorful, shining, needlessly complicated toys.
Surfing through the web I've visited many sites of people who has collected lots of informations about every aspects of the Super Robots phenomenon: catalogs, statistics, datasheets of robots (!), sound tracks, detailed list of characters and episodes, lyrics of the leading and trailing tunes, together with news about authors, animators and so on. Though I find all this stuff very interesting and amusing, my true attraction is for the robots in themselves: screenplays, stories and human characters seldom captured me very much.
One word about the robots' names you'll find in this pages. With respect to the original inspiration of the first "release" of this site, I've quite changed the line: as you could see from the page introducing the robot's galleries, I've substantially broadened my vision adopting the English version of the names as the main nomenclature (also supported by the observation that in the Japanese literature itself they are natively referenced in this way), flanking it with the correspondent Japanese pictograms (I only hope not to have written bad words!) but not abolishing completely the Italian names.
Anyway, now as then, it's fair to say once again that, after all, images do the real talk.