Recently, this wonderful 80s anime received a Blu-Ray HD release in Japan, but there are no English subtitles available for it. So I took it upon myself to rip the English DVD subtitles for Giant Gorg, run them through OCR transcription, fix line by line machine transcription mistakes, and re-time the whole thing to sync to the Blu-Ray rips online! To do that for 26 episodes was a big, often boring task, but if it makes anyone else watch and enjoy this series as much as I did, it's worth it, to me. Here's the link!
Giant Gorg was directed by the legendary Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, known as the character designer of the original Mobile Suit Gundam and Dirty Pair, and the director of the recent Gundam movie, Cucuruz Doan's Island, plus the creator of several manga, anime and film works like Gundam: The Origin, Arion, Jesus, Venus Wars, and many others.
Giant Gorg is kind of a precious baby of his that unfortunately never took off in popularity the way it deserved to. It's a wonderful series in the style of old adventure serials like Johnny Quest, about a boy named Yuu Tagami who, through a series of events, ends up joining/founding an exploration group to research the mysterious tropical island of New Austral, that is also on the aim of an evil corporation called GAIL, who'll do whatever it takes to claim the island and its secrets its exclusive property.
Yuu ends up finding and seemingly befriending a mysterious, ancient, and extremely powerful golem residing in the island, the titular GIANT GORG, deepening the mysteries of the land. The expedition group juggles surviving the island's natural and less-than-natural perils, managing internal conflicts, scraping by GAIL's assaults and dealing with other parties interested in the island for themselves. Plus, they now have to figure out just what the Giant Gorg is, if it can be relied on, and what is its intent. Whether this incredible being really is a Messenger of the Gods, some cataclysmic ancient weapon, or something else entirely.
If I had to reduce it to something, it's old adventure serials mixed in with Mobile Suit Gundam and the Iron Giant. That's kind of what Giant Gorg is. The expedition group has a similar feeling to a much more scaled down White Base in Gundam, a group of people mostly barely related to one another forced into becoming a found family, relying on each other and surviving the strikes of a much bigger military force that's after them, with their own bureaucratic conflicts and machineries. Giant Gorg even has its own Char, in the form of Rod Balboa, a hotshot heir of GAIL that has been given control of its New Austral initiative. He's voiced by the same actor and everything!
What's truly great about GIANT GORG is how the stakes change as the intrigue develops, it creates a real, powerful sense of danger as things escalate. Characters feel like truly strong individuals that develop and peel out layers of complexity as the series goes on, and it tests your faith heavily in who they are and whether they'll do the right thing for themselves and the people they care for. There's such a great mix of sentimentalism, danger, discomfort, comedy, that makes this series feel like a truly fullfilled Adventure.
So yeah, and the Blu-Ray looks fantastic, especially as someone who had to watch it originally in dim, blurry 420p resolution. So please give it a try!
