On the Shoulders of Giants

Really good stuff! Maz Z is a weird one since, by being one of the first, it's a giant robot/super robot story from before [marketing/the audience/other authors] had really decided what that meant, so it's kind of this hodge podge of then standard shonen cliches but with this 20-30 meter tall elephant in the room.

One thing that might have helped y'all make sense of things is that Mazinger Z was kind of an anime-first property. I think the first volume (?) of the manga might have technically preceded the cartoon, but (as I understand it) that mostly happened as a way to make sure that Go Nagai had unimpeachable creator credit and also because basically every anime was nominally an adaptation of a manga at the time.

What that means is that most things which were unexplained in the manga were much better developed in the cartoon. We get a whole episode dedicated to Boss getting his robot and one for Diana A being built, for example. A handful of manga story lines also showed up in the cartoon first, including the Lorelei/Rhine X story (episode 61).

Great listen! I'll definitely have to catch up on the show's backlog. I definitely got a long enough commute for it, lol.

It was definitely a fun listen, I enjoyed the pod dipping their toes more into the super robot side of the genre. There's a lot of fun Mazinger trivia out there — like how Makinkaiser was originally made for Super Robot Wars F Final before getting adopted back into the mainline — and you can really see how it develops in real-time along with the genre. Great Mazinger, Grendizer, and then Mazinkaiser, Shin Mazinger, etc. all have very different feels.

If you want to do a more direct compare/contrast later on, I'd recommend swinging back for one of the more modern Go Nagai and Ken Ishikawa adaptations—Shin Getter Robo vs. Neo Getter Robo is a brisk watch, has fun designs, and has one of my favorite opening scenes in mecha.