Pre-CGI Movies - AT-DC
In 1985, Industrial Light and Magic took model kits from a 1965 Chevy Stepside Pickup truck and a 1942 Nazi “Dora” Railway Gun and made a thing that kind of looks like if a tank and a bear had a child. The stop motion has not held up but when you see modern CGI recreations it simply doesn’t look right, and that’s informed your notion of the existence of the soul. You could never afford the toy of this, but Adam, the rich boy in school, had one, and if you got invited to his house for his birthday— this happened twice, despite you being in the same class for twelve years— you would ignore the rest of the party and play with this in the corner. The toy had a real working winch and a removable panel to show battle damage. It was beautiful in a way Adam could never understand.
Post-CGI Movies - Shredderator
Realistically, an alien robot wouldn’t resemble anything from Earth, which is why this robot, voiced by Sean Bean in its first appearance and then Gary Chalk for a fraction of the cost in all subsequent films, looks like a series of unfortunate boolean operations occurred to an AH-64 Apache helicopter inside of Houdini. One time you read an article about how all life on Earth is slowly evolving into crabs and it made you think about how Shredderator’s face. You bought a toy of this for your nephew and he looked at it blankly before telling you about how he just discovered this new game called ‘Keepy Uppy’ from Bluey. It took a render farm the size of an office building 192 years of combined processing time to accurately produce his blurry death scene. Now all those video cards are mining bitcoin.
Literary Science Fiction - Modular Disaffected Katana in Freefall
Technically a HardCon SSI aetherbonded to a fleetilla of molectronic gunboats produced by the Squeh’lmaqq Conciliation (known to the galaxy simply as The Society), secretly derived from a crystalline phantomdrive cold processor submerged beneath Ontario Lacus on Titan by the Foremovers, Modular Disaffected Katana in Freefall (or as they self-identify, Kat) notably possesses a Kreth carapace in the climax of Space Is A Rushing Closeness which, one hundred pages later, the reader finally understands is a sort of robot, although the description of it in the text reads more like if you performed a series of unfortunate boolean operations on an AH-64 Apache helicopter that was slowly evolving into a crab. You weren’t really reading this series for the action scenes, though, so you kinda skipped over this section, and then payed much closer attention to the networkspace sex scene between Kat, the tri-gendered fatale Pelmara, and Ajax the wise-cracking dolphin. This was in your school library!
Pulp Science Fiction - ANDRO, THE METAL MAN
WHO CAN STOP ANDRO, THE METAL MAN??
80 FEET TALL, THE HEIGHT OF THE TALLEST BUILDING.
POWERED BY ATOMIC RADITATION
BUILT BY PROFESSOR TOTENKOPF
ANDRO! THE METAL MAN!
HIS ONLY WEAKNESS— LOVE! LOVE FOR THE BEAUTIFUL MELINDA!
DESTROYED BY THE POWER OF AMERICAN GUNS!
WHO IS THE REAL MONSTER? THE METAL MAN? OR THE HUMAN MAN??
THIS IS THE QUESTION OF ANDRO!!— THE METAL MAN!!!
Tabletop Games - Wülfskrieger X-9
The unstoppable cornerstone of the Icefang Dynasty’s assaultmech force. A horrible trash bin with legs. Any given boxy lump on the model’s body can be justified as a missile launcher, and has been slowly through every iteration of the fiction. Despite being described as a venerated, 1000-year-old heirloom, every paint job you’ve ever seen for this thing looks absolutely covered in grease and scum. Still, it has those iconic ‘fangs’ in the front, and after The Hyperwar Scandal, you keep one in your collection just to remember how rad it was when Grimkiller Vein burst into the Galactic Daimyo’s regeneration ship and impaled him with them. For a while they couldn’t put this one in the video games because they lost the rights to the design.
Kid Holding Toy in Hands - Batman’s Secret Robot
PPSHEEW!! PSHHEWW!!!
*Haha, Pikachu you can’t win! Even with your friends, Thomas the Tank Engine and a T-Rex!! Because I have a NERF GUN!
*
Pika-pi! Piii pika pii!
*What? You’re summoning— no, it can’t be!!
*
BEEP BOOP I AM BATMAN’S SECRET ROBOT
Noooooooooo!!!!
PSSHEWWW! PSHEEWWW!!
**BOOOOOSHHHH!!!!
**
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSHHHHHH!!!
60s Anime - Tetsukyojin-40
Built from indestructible iron by the clever Prof. Hanma and controlled by a portable wrist radio by intrepid boy reporter Akio. In America his name is BIG ROBO and your dad thinks he’s cool, even though he doesn’t like anime. There’s a vinyl toy of him at a dive bar in your town and they don’t know it, but it’s worth $100,000 at auction. For some reason he looks like Zeus.
70s Anime - DAIZINGER V
Looks like if Darth Vader went to Carneval. Inspired a violent revolution in Malaysia. The original cartoon was 72 episodes long, every episode used the same animation of Daizinger forming, and ended with the unbelievably bloody destruction of a two-headed dinosaur with Daizinger’s iconic spiked mace. Piloted by Koshiro (the half-mad school bully and race car driver), Juzo (the grotesque fat school bully known for his crass jokes), and Sayaka (the huge-breasted daughter of Daizinger’s creator, Professor Hell). There was a weird abortive licensing push for this in America, and as a result if you go looking for it, there’s a comic where Spider-Man teams up with Daizinger V (renamed to Ninjor, the Martial Automaton!) to fight Godzilla. They also had the rights to Godzilla then.
80s Anime - PX-84 Thunder Boost Blazion (mk II)
Mass produced on Mars by the Earth-Zone Planets Alliance, the solar armor PX-84 Blazion is best known as the signature ship of ace pilot Tarno Zon. In episode 34, the Blazion is significantly damaged in a duel with Duke Zja Gravor’s red-eyed Caucasus-3 and is upgraded to the black “Thunder Boost Blazion.” However, the newly installed Phantom Puppet system awakens Tarno’s latent psionic powers as an Evolved, setting the stage for the series ultimate and depressing finale. The series flopped on first viewing, but model kits based on the series (“Blamo”) have kept it alive for decades. The most recent season of Blazion focused on teen lesbians playing tennis.
90s Anime - Transforming Police God Train Dinosaur Z-Guts
I BET YOU THOUGHT THIS WAS GOING TO BE AN EVANGELION JOKE. DUMMY. FOOL. SIMPLETON. If you loved mecha in the 90s, you were A LITTLE BOY and you wanted TOYS and the fine gentlemen from BANDAI were going to SELL THEM TO YOU. Featuring iconic designs by Kunio Okayama, Transforming Police God Train Dinosaur Z-Guts is about Z-Guts, a justice-loving robot that can transform from a robot into a dinosaur, a train, and a real working NERF gun that fires “capture bullets” that send criminals to jail. His best friend is a Satoshi, a little boy with short pants and enormous hair. Every woman in this toy-selling cartoon for children clearly exposes the fetishes of the character designer. Therapy has nothing on singing the theme song for this show at full blast in the car. “ZA ZA ZA ZAZAZA… ZEE GATTTTSSSS”. Discotek just announced they were releasing this on Blu-ray and you thought it looked pretty hype.
00s Anime - Armored Organism Reithyeon
“We have existential masterpieces at home.” Reithyeon looks somewhere between a jackal and an armored skeleton, which, look, its sick, we aren’t going to argue that. The show has like two good ideas to start with but falls apart in the back half and by back half we mean from episode 4 onward. In 2003, when you were watching this crap dubbed on Toonami, the ending— where Shusui sacrifices herself for Shiden, and Shiden screams a lot until the Reithyeon’s eyes glow and then all of humanity Awakens— hit you hard, but now that you’re a miserable nerd, you realize it’s just knocking off the finale of Thunder Boost Blazion, but without the wild bodycount or homosexual tension of the older work. For some reason the Japanese porn artists you still follow on Twitter keep drawing Shusui and Tenrai, and a picture of them in medieval garb made you realize Fern and Freiren might actually be based on them.
10s Anime - SOLARBOYY
All you can remember about SOLARBOYY is that you have to have sex doggy-style to make it go or something. The more you think about it, the more you realize the whole show was actually just a weird reboot of Kimagure Orange Road. In 2016 while the world burned, every cosplayer in the world dressed up like Espa, and you still have a folder buried deep in your PC collecting them all. Now you occasionally see some really wild cuts of SOLARBOYY whipping its beam fencing saber around on Sakugabooru and wonder if you should go back and revisit the series, but— no. You really don’t.
20s Anime - Bang Brave Bang Bravern
A goofy homage to Transforming Police God Train Dinosaur Z-Guts. A love triangle between two beefy pilots— Isami and Lewis— and the big gay robot that only wants Isami to get inside him. There is no subtext in this show at all. Bravern even sings his own theme song. Somebody let Masami Obari off the chain and now he is gleefully committing crimes.
Real World, Industrial - Gigantskiykrot
The only giant robot ever actually built, this horrible oil-rig on treads is the size of a city block and was used by the Soviet Union to strip-mine mountains. Every concept artist has pictures of this in their reference folder. Jake Sulley attacks one of these with a pterosaur in Avatar: The Way of Water.
Real World, Hobbyist - Sendo Heavy Industries ZTX-01
Remember that submarine for super rich people that imploded? It’s just that but on shitty legs and above ground, down to the controls being a Wildkatz wireless controller. If you have $3,500,000 and want to slowly toddle around inside a go-kart that’s had a series of unfortunate boolean operations performed on it, this is the thing for you! Some dreams just weren’t meant to come true.
