Mecha anime and manga

Mecha anime and manga, known in Japan as robot anime (ロボットアニメ, robotto anime^?) and robot manga (ロボット漫画, robotto manga^?), are anime and manga that feature robots (mecha) in battle. The genre is broken down into two subcategories, "super robot" is one category in which the anime or manga includes a super sized totally non plausible robot. The second category is "real robot", wherein the robots used are explainable by real world physics. Mecha series cover a wide variety of genres from comedy to drama, and has expanded into other media, such as video game adaptations. Mecha has also contributed to the popularity of scale model robots.

The genre started with Mitsuteru Yokoyama's 1956 manga Tetsujin 28-go (which was later animated in 1963 and also released abroad as Gigantor). Its inclusion is debatable however, as the robot was controlled by remote instead of a cockpit in the machine. Not long after that the genre was largely defined by author Go Nagai, into something considerably more fantastical. Mazinger Z, his most famous creation, was not only the first successful Super Robot anime series, but also the pioneer of the genre staples like weapons that were activated by the hero calling out their names ("Rocket Punch!") though an earlier mecha series, specifically Toei's Giant Robo (tokusatsu) also had this feature of the mecha's attacks being shouted out. It was also a pioneer in metal die-cast toy such as the Chogokin series in Japan and the Shogun Warriors in the U.S., that were (and still are) very popular with children and collectors. Getter Robo, for its part, was the first combining robot, something that became a frequent design theme and was aggressively imitated in similar mecha shows. In 1976 Brave Raideen aired, in which the titular robot was given mystical properties as opposed to its sci-fi predecessors and it had one of the first true transforming toys as opposed to the impossible morphing done by Getter Robo and Osamu Tezuka's Ambassador Magma, which was the first transforming robot.

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