Super Robot Cartoon Profiles: Mighty Orbots

A series I've mentioned a few times but never quite profiled is Mighty Orbots.


Mighty Orbots is a series which bridged the gap between animation in the US and Japan. What does this mean?

Well, for one, it makes for some crazy fun.

In the first episode, some evil rock stars use their "alien music" to make a magnetic monster, which Mighty Orbots throws into a volcano on some rocky moon so hard that it (the moon) explodes.

In the second episode, the Orbots cut a planet in half, scooped out the middle, used the halves to trap a giant gas monster guy, and then welded it shut to keep him in there. (It didn't work-they had to throw him into a planet-eating wormhole later on.)

In the fourth episode, the Orbots were mind-controlled by blatant Ewok analogues, who themselves were under mind control.

The main cast of Mighty Orbots are Rob, AKA the "Orbots Commander" (it was actually a secret dual identity, which is hilariously incongruous for a few hundred reasons), Ohno, the mother hen and the component that activates the combination (she scolds and tirades an awful lot), Tor, the big dumb brute, Bort, Crunch, the dog who eats stuff (okay, he's not the dog, but he talks about as much as a dog), and Bo and Boo/Bu, the girls with energy powers. (Bo is "master of the elements," which basically means she can absorb and focus all kinds of energy; Boo is basically a robotic Invisible Woman [invisibility, force fields] who can also make more elaborate illusions and teleport.)

All together, they're like the Fantastic Four (a strong guy, a flexible/shapeshifter type, an energetic and mischievous master of elements, and the one who sounds lame but is powerful... and then there's Crunch, who eats stuff-um, yeah, he doesn't fit with this analogy) but robots.

And since they're robots, they can combine into a giant robot, conveniently called Mighty Orbots, who has all their powers. (And when I say "giant," I mean, a few hundred times more massive than the combined mass of the Orbots themselves. How? It's powered by 100% pure Japanesanimesium.)

So I guess they're a combination of the FF and the Planeteers from Captain Planet... except that Mighty Orbots came out six years before Captain Planet. Ah, well.

Anyway, as mentioned, this series is half-Japanese, half-American. This gives it one of youth-oriented anime's strangest quirks-excessive narration. The series is also, as you might guess, unabashedly goofy. (Author Michael Reaves, talking about his cartoon-writing experiences, once called Mighty Orbots one of the worst series he'd ever worked on. He seems to have taken that remark down...)

But despite (or even because of) that, I really enjoy digging up old episodes of it on video sites, because they're unselfconsciously fun.

I need to do more posts on them. Sigh.

-Signing off.