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.

The Many Forms of Bort

One of the more interesting characters from the "lost" cartoon Mighty Orbots is Bort.

This is primarily because he is one of the relatively few robots with extensive shapeshifting (as opposed to transforming) abilities. This in itself would not really make him unique, but as all of the individual Orbots grant their powers to their combined form, Bort happens to be one of the most versatile and useful members.

This, for reference, is Bort.

This, for additional reference, is also Bort. He's pretty good at that shapeshifting shtick.

This is also Bort, changed into a beam projector of some kind as part of a complicated scheme to restore Orbot team member Ohno to her robotic body after a villain transformed her into a human (they can't combine into Mighty Orbots without Ohno, see).

And here's Bort as a laser-tipped circular saw whilst fighting said enemy.

Here, however, is what is clearly the pinnacle of Bort's shapeshifting skills: The loveseat.

(Most of these screenshots are taken from the episode The Wish World; the last one is taken from the episode Prehistoric Planet, hence the significantly lower quality image.)

Sadly, he clearly doesn't appreciate his own skills here; he promptly dumps Bo and Boo on the floor when he realizes that a good TV show is coming on.

-Signing off.

Hasbro-er, Unicron-Devours the Gobots

I found this video a long time ago, and I wish it had better video quality. The bad sound quality, on the other hand, enhances it a bit in my mind.



If you don't know what I mean by poor sound quality enhancing the audio, there's a bit in the TF:TM soundtrack rip that strikes a dischordant note, and it somehow suits the scene perfectly.

If you experienced the original Transformers, you've probably encountered their early competitors/prototypes, the Gobots. (More information here.) The Gobots' descent into relative obscurity is mostly deserved-their cartoon was like Scooby Doo with giant alien robots instead of people dressing as ghosts all the time. (Okay, it was more serious than that. But the quality was fairly similar.)

It should be noted, however, that the Gobot footage in this video is from the one piece of Gobot fiction that was actually pretty decent, Battle of the Rock Lords. (Yes, their best fiction involved them crossing over with guys made of rock who turned into rocks. Get over it.) Some people will probably try to shoot me for saying this, but I think BotRL was slightly better than most episodes of the Transformers cartoon I've seen. (Helpful hint: You can't shoot me through your monitor.)

And it's not like Gobots was a bad idea-Transformers is essentially the same one, but different. (The main variation comes from the Gobots being human cyborg alien robots, whereas the Transformers are living robot alien robots.) It's just that Gobots had an atrocious execution of the idea, whereas Transformers had a resonant and effective one.

Just to prove that there were occasionally nifty Gobots, here's a clip from an episode of the cartoon:



Pathfinder (the female spaceship) and Buggyman (the... buggy bad guy) are two of the three greatest Gobots. Buggyman is more competent and has more attitude than the entire rest of the villainous cast combined (later in the same episode, he singlehandedly rescues his incompetent leaders from four Guardians, although the animation could be interpreted as him killing them and committing suicide, as he was using a gun that conferred invisibility on its targets), and neither he nor Pathfinder have ugly Gobot faces. The other coolest Gobot is another Renegade named Bugsie, who is cool because 1) his toy looks like the devil (his appearance in the cartoon was decidedly different, although still nice), and 2) we never see him get clobbered like the rest of the villains. (At least, not in the only appearance of his I've seen, from Battle of the Rock Lords. Of course, this was because he kept mysteriously vanishing during fight scenes where the Renegades were supposed to lose, only to mysteriously reappear afterwards, often retreating from the same battle he wasn't seen fighting in.)

Probably the worst part about Gobots, though, is that Tonka, its original propietor, wasn't very bright when it came to legal issues. Why?

They claimed that Mighty Orbots (see intro here) was infringing on their copyright, but ignored Transformers. This is incredibly stupid for a host of reasons.

1. Mighty Orbots had far more in common with costumed superheroes than Gobots. The robot transformations were from robot to bigger, stronger robot that looked similar.
2. Mighty Orbots had more in common with Voltron than with Gobots, as a team of robots that combined into a bigger robot. (Granted, Gobots did this later on in their franchise, and so did Transformers, but it was simply the natural evolution of any long-running robot toyline with links to Japan.)
3. Transformers had almost everything in common with Gobots, the only truly significant difference in concept being the whole cyborg vs. robot thing. The execution differed only in quality, no matter what other Transformers fans might tell you.
4. Transformers cleaned Gobots' clocks in marketing, product charisma (most Transformer toys were considerably bigger than most Gobot toys, with creepy exceptions, and also had cool weapons and stuff, which Gobot toys did not), and of course the media (aka the marketing).
5. Mighty Orbots' toyline was apparently never produced (just as well-it would have been awful), and only a single thirteen episode season of the series aired because of Tonka's lawsuit.

I'm sure I could go on, but I won't, because hardly anyone cares about Gobots. Or Orbots.