Cosplay US 01612

G iant walking fighting machines, like so many beloved science fiction tropes, can trace their origin back to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. But whereas a couple of Brits may have invented them, it was the Japanese who took them seriously. They called them mecha, and now we do, too. Cartoon fans of A Certain Age will remember Gigantor (“Bigger than big! Stronger than strong!”) from the early 1960s. Gigantor may have been the first giant robot anime distributed on American TV, but Jimmy Sparks’ metallic BFF was more day-saving deus ex machina than mecha. Mark Gibson, in his A Brief History of Japanese Robophilia, credits the prolific manga artist Go Nagai’s Manziger Z as the first mecha. Both the eponymous manga and anime debuted in 1972. There was a small but steady trickle of mecha media during the rest of the 70s as writers, animators and audiences alike tried to wrap their minds around heat sinks and neural links. Then the floodgates – or, rather, the mechbay doors – opened. Mobile Suit Gundam, which dropped in Japan in 1979, served up complex politics-driven plots and was less about the machine than the men inside them. Still, it would all have been for naught were it not for the toys. The Gundam series caught the eye of plastic model makers Bandai, who commenced producing frighteningly detailed versions of the Gundam mecha for enthusiasts to assemble and paint (a hobby now referred to as “Gunpla”). Despite the show’s hasty cancellation in 1980 due to low ratings, enthusiasm for the new kits sparked a quick resurrection. Bandai went on to become the largest toy manufacturer in Japan and have a hand in both the production and distribution of the many Gundam series to follow, creating one of the richest legacies in all anime. The Macross and Robotech series debuted in Japan in the 80s, but back in the U.S., giant robots really took off by getting small. The game company FASA Corporation brought mecha to the tabletop in 1985 with its BattleTech miniatures game and spawned an unlikely and uneven entertainment empire that ranged from a Saturday morning American cartoon series (bad!) to networked, early VR “BattleTech Centers” in which players entered cockpits and dueled other “mechwarriors” around the country (so awesome it hurt!). (Fun Nerd Fact: FASA originally called their mecha game BattleDroids until they received a letter from LucasFilm’s legal department, recommending otherwise...) If Gundam gave mecha anime its brains, then Neon Genesis Evangelion gave it soul. The anime famously brought Christian

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Photo by Dara Phan