Super Robot Profiles: Daitarn III

Or Daitarn 3, depending on whom you ask.



Daitarn is one of those robots whose popularity is pretty minimal in the English language, primarily since the series was never dubbed into English. There is a reasonably strong Italian-language fanbase, however (judging from the Daitarn fansites I've found, and YouTube). How strong? Some Italian fans apparently took it upon themselves to rebuild the series using computer animation. This despite some rather stiff voice acting in the Italian dub (if the clip I found was Italian and not some other language-I'm not sure, partly because the voice acting was so bloody stiff).

Anyway, Daitarn's contributions to the genre as a whole are questionable-the main feature of the series that was innovative was that the monsters of the week (called Meganoids in Japanese or Megaborgs in the Italian dub) unleashed fearsome witty banter (so claims Wikipedia), thus making them among the first super robot enemies to have personalities. Still, information on the series is pretty sketchy and hard to sift.

The series' main two important features seem to be:

1. Daitarn was cruelly overwhelming.
2. Banjo Haran was some kind of secret-agentesque guy inspired by James Bond.

How was Daitarn cruelly overwhelming? Well, first off, he was just shy of four hundred feet tall, making him one of the largest super robots of the era and still one of the largest of all time. Granted, the Megawhatnots were exactly the same size most of the time, but still-Daitarn is significantly bigger than the king of the monsters Godzilla, the universe-slayer Ideon, and nearly every other kaiju and super robot you can think of-the only exceptions to this I can think of are Danguard Ace (650 feet tall), Gunbuster (~812 feet tall), the titanic SDF-1 Macross (I'm unclear on its actual height, but in battleship mode it's about 3/4 of a mile), and the really ridiculously large things like Dark Nova/Star Giant, Primus, and Unicron (all the size of small planets). Monsters like the Evas would look like pathetic midgets next to Daitarn.

Then there's the fact that Daitarn's finisher was quite brutal-he hits the enemy with a big ball of plasma energy, which presumably would kill the Megathing quite handily, and then he kicks the other guy so hard he comes out his back.

Don't believe me? Look at this intro from some language which is not Japanese:

OUCH.

Anyway, the other thing about Daitarn? He is solar-powered, which naturally means the same thing in anime that it does in Western comics-he channels the power of the Sun.

Yeah. Banjo Haran (or Haran Banjo, either way) is supposedly eighteen, and hangs out with two hot young women, lives in a mansion, has servants and junk, and has a transforming, flying car.

Isn't it unfortunate that he flies right up where Daitarn's rear would be if he was in that mode? Also note that that's a freaking long and slow sequence.

Despite his supposed secret-agentness, he wears a very tacky bow tie. And I've decided, since I've read no information to contradict it anywhere, that Banjo is a polygamist waiting to happen. I mean, come on, he hangs out with two secret agent wannabe chicks. (Okay, one of them was supposedly formerly employed by Interpol, which makes her less of a wannabe. But Wikipedia actually described them as "playing superspies.") This is totally different from James Bond-he's always at least polite enough to only bang one chick at a time, even if he goes through them like cigarettes. (Okay, so this was technically a kid's series. He probably wasn't really having sex with them. Right.) Also, he may or may not be superhumanly strong, as he is shown in the intro symbolically shattering steel bars like paper. (No, I don't know how it makes sense either, but that's what it looks like-shattering it into pieces which fall away like paper.)

The actual backstory makes Daitarn 3 sound pretty similar to most series that precede it: The protagonist's father invented some stuff, including a giant robot, and then some bad stuff happens and the protagonist must use the robot to kick booty. In this case, his brilliant daddy invented the bad guys, too, which must have been at least a little twist back then. Also, Daitarn was made of magic metal from Mars. Yay!

I don't know why I decided to start these profiles with Daitarn, but-wait, I remember now. I actually have a beat up, die-cast Daitarn toy somewhere. (No hands or other detachable accessories except for a lonely sword-surprisingly, he can still hold it-and a damaged shoulder-blade thingy that I once repaired with superglue, but which has since come back apart. And lots of chipped paint.) That probably has influenced my weird fascination with the robot.