This is one of my favorite videos! There's really just something about how passionately Tekkaman delivers these absolutely ridiculous lines with such sincerity that really sticks with me. I rememberered this old interview with one of the people that worked on the dub, William Winckler, which unfortunately seems to be down but was captured by the wayback machine that partially goes over how TEKKAMAN's dub came to be. Here's some highlights about just how into it TEKKAMAN's voice actor, Bill Hedderly jr got in the studio.
"what stands out in my mind is actor Bill Hedderly's method acting! He played Tekkaman, and at the end of every episode, Tekkaman would have a battle scene, smashing apart Waldarians while yelling "Space Lance!" "Take That!" "Space Lariat!" etc, and Bill in the dubbing booth, would be jumping up and down like a madman, screaming battle cries, fulfilling the part!"
"I recall Ted Turner almost purchased TEKKAMAN, but ultimately didn't, because he thought it was a little too violent. You see, we tried to remain faithful to the original show, and we didn't cut much out. There were lots of battle heavy scenes with robots. We tried to lessen the violence by saying TEKKAMAN was "deactivating" robots, as he sliced and diced them with his Space Lance, but I guess that wasn't enough for Mr. Turner. This was revolutionary at the time, because shows like BATTLE OF THE PLANETS/GATCHAMAN were butchered like crazy! I tried to lessen the blow of the violence through dialogue rather than butchering the film. I recall characters saying "luckily nobody was seriously hurt!" That was a good "throw away" line to add, sometimes off camera, to make a violent scene less violent!
I used to joke with Bill Hedderly that if he didn't stop over-acting, I was going to "deactivate" him! It was a funny, run-on joke among the cast, the word "deactivate!" In fact, I think Fred Patten came up with it!"
Just the image of this guy happily jumping up and down and screaming his lines with this goofy, heroic passion is just wonderful to me. Incidentally, I've heard that in the later re-envisioning of the series, TEKKAMAN BLADE, the titular Tekkaman of that series's original Japanese voice actor broke the microphone in the studio by screaming "VOLTEKKA!!" too loud. Twice! I think there's something about Tekkaman that just really inspires such hot-blooded heroic energy in people.