1984 9:00 on ABC: MIGHTY ORBOTS

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

1984 brought us a revolutionary cartoon on your local ABC affiliate at 9am, The Mighty Orbots! In short, it was a cartoon about a guy in the future who built some robots that could combine in to one giant robot to fight crime and it was AWESOME! aurora77recently gifted me with a delightfully high-quality bootleg DVD of the entire series and let me tell ya, this is one of the few 80's cartoons that COMPLETELY lives up to the hype in my head! Unlike most every other 1980's Saturday Morning cartoon, The Mighty Orbots got to have a resolutionary FINAL EPISODE where (SPOILER)The Bad Guys got blown up, which was the main struggle of every episode. The Robots and their personalities evolved through the series as well, which was just so refreshing - none of this "This week I learned a valuable lesson about the TRUE meaning of 'Family', which I vow to completely forget about by next episode" nonsense.

You may notice that with the animation and style and look of this show, it looks an awful lot like one of those Anime import dubs like Star Blazers or Robotech. And there's good reason for that...

The Mighty Orbots was created in a joint collaboration of TMS Entertainment and Intermedia Entertainment in association with MGM/UA Television. It was directed by veteran anime director Osamu Dezaki ("Astro Boy", "Lupin The 3rd") and features character designs by Akio Sugino ("Golgo 13", "Gaiking"). Produced by TMS Entertainment, the show ran for 13 very popular episodes - but not popular enough for it's time slot, directly opposed to the Saturday Morning Juggernaut known as The Smurfs. The (comparatively) poor ratings plus a lawsuit from Tonka Toys (who rightfully claimed that the BIG ROBOT looked *exactly* like their licensed Six God Combination Godmars (technically part of the GoBots line even though they never made a toy of it for the US as far as I know) lead to a single season of pure awesomeness :)

Comments

[evil-overlord.livejournal.com]

oh man, I TOTALLY LOVED 'Mighty Orbots', and you are SO VERY LUCKY to have your own copy now, no matter how it came about! I'd certainly love to get my hands on them myself... XD

Stupid Smurfs. Stupid lawsuit. It would have been nice to have more episodes....

[janusfiles.livejournal.com]

I remember this rather fondly. I have to admit, I think my favorite part was the theme music.

There is one thing that they never really explained. Most of the time, the Orbots are human size, right? So when the combine into the "Megazord" version (don't remember what it was called at the moment), how do they suddenly become large enough for Rob and Ohno to enter it?

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

It's all in the animation :) When they combine to form Mighty Orbots (that was the name of the giant robot, I kid you not - it was *not* the collective name of the bots themselves as is usually assumed and popularly believed), their faces and features stretch and distort will all you can really see of the original bot (which were originally called "Broots" in the super-rare pilot episode) is the color scheme. This means that they're made at least *partially* from a super-malleable alloy and/or gazillions of Nanobots :)