Bee Train Medabots: To Fight Monsters We Created Metabee

(It's funny, I only started jumping on that meme like a year after the movie came out, even though it's easily the best thing that happened in 2013.)

One of the all-time greatest super robot/mon anime, and one of the least well-remembered, is the original Medabots. Part of what makes those 52 episodes what they are is that the studio that made them, Bee Train, has some of the craziest work policies in the world, chief among them being that they apparently brainstorm by getting drunk.

Regardless of their methodologies, the series was incredibly fun because it loved taking stupid or crazy ideas and running with them.

For instance, when the main villain breaks out a gigantic baby-shaped robot (yes, really) to destroy whatever city it was they were in at the time, the roughly-knee-high-to-a-normal-adult protagonist robots of the series were pretty helpless to stop it. So the helpful professor guy whose company builds Medabots says "I thought he'd try something like this" and orders his employees to unleash...



...a giant version of Metabee, the main character robot.

But rather than being autonomous like most of the robots, this one needs a pilot, that being Metabee.



...Who wasn't quite on board with the idea of piloting himself at first, though the beam-up ray didn't exactly give him much choice, now did it.

When he ends up in its cockpit, it turns out that this chamber has a lot in common with the cockpits of some of the later '80s-era Gundam mobile suits, which is only one of the numerous references to other anime that sneak into the series. (There's an amazing sequence from the first episode that blatantly references Guyver and also arguably Sailor Moon and Pokèmon in the span of a minute and a half... and then towards the end of the episode there's a reference to Evangelion. There's probably others I didn't recognize.)



But controlling a Medabot is a multi-person effort, especially when it's gigantic. The protagonist, Ikki, would usually use his Medawatch to "control" Metabee*, but it wouldn't be compatible with this thing, right? So what's he going to-



...Oh.

Ikki comments that it's a little big for his wrist, but it turns out...



...that's not where this one goes.

By the way, the other protagonist Medabots all climbed into the giant Metabee and helped copilot it.

*The scare quotes are because Metabee isn't exactly open to being controlled.

-Signing off.