Oddly, when the show had a brief run in the US as Tranzor Z, sequences featuring that particular weapon - a mainstay in the original - were hastily cut out. And while the show took a big step forward for robot gender equality by prominently featuring not one but two female robots in major supporting roles, they had to endure that most humiliating indignity - the oppai or “boob” missiles. Kouji pilots Mazinger Z from the cockpit of his “hover pilder” - a small hovercraft - which explains the distinctive, crown-shaped opening in the robot’s head. The art style is round and cartoonish very different from the more industrial designs found in Gundam or Macross.

'I didn’t equate giant robots with weapons, I wanted to give a teenaged character a suit of armor that would turn him into a hero.'īut there are a host of peculiarities to Mazinger Z that have fallen by the wayside over the past 40 years. Hell’s weekly mechanical beasts - ancient robot monsters from a pre-Grecian civilization. The story more or less revolves around Kouji fighting off the evil Dr. Mazinger Z is forged out of Super Alloy Z (whose critical component, Japanium, can only be found at the base of Mt. The series followed the adventures of Kouji Kabuto, the hot-headed, motorcycle-riding 16 year-old and pilot of the series’ namesake super robot. Like many of the country’s biggest manga properties, Mazinger Z first hit newsstands in Shonen Jump, a weekly comic anthology that was also the starting point for everything from Kinniku Man to Naruto. Right now, the Osamu Tezuka Memorial Museum in Hyogo, Japan is hosting an exhibit of Nagai’s work, and it shows both how different Mazinger Z was from anything that came before it, and how much it impacted everything that's come since. Mazinger Z was the first series to put a teenaged protagonist inside the cockpit of a giant robot, and Toei’s 1973 animated series became a huge hit domestically, both in terms of ratings and in merchandising revenue. But those robots’ strength was always just out of the reader’s grasp. By the time the series debuted in 1972, readers had already been dazzled by incredible robots like the remote-controlled Gigantor (Tetsujin 28) and especially the sentient Astroboy (Tetsu-Wan Atom). What you might not realize is that if you follow the giant robot timeline back, a lot of the elements that we associate with the genre can be traced to a single comic - Go Nagai’s Mazinger Z. Sure, they dealt with a lot of the same themes as Transformers, but underneath there was some darker, more serious storytelling going on. For the millions of kids that grew up outside Japan in the 80s and 90s, shows like Voltron, Robotech, and later Gundam Wing were an introduction to a whole new style of cartoon. It’s hard to think of a more quintessentially Japanese contribution to animation and science fiction than the giant robot.

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