NS: The Tragedy of Getter Robo

[leahandillyana]

If Gundam is the Star Trek of Japanese popculture, than Getter Robo is its Star Wars – a story of simple ethics, bombastic characters that often appear downright deranged even when fighting the good side, fun technical designs, disgusting alien monsters and freakin’ awesome fights. Getter Robo is the brainchild of Ken Ishikawa, with the concept of combining robots as well as mechanical designs of all three initial combinations and the four fighting jets being designed by Go Nagai, who is often incorrectly credited as the sole creator. The series has been running for decades with little change in the concept, but when Ishikawa-sensei tried to update the franchise, the results were… mixed, let’s say.

 

Getter Robo Go is the third manga arc of Getter Robo, running in 1991-3. In it, the author tried to update the story to fit what was popular at the time: more down to Earth protagonists, one of them being a girl, more realistic depiction of international effort in warfare against extraterrestials, as well as more realistic combination mechanics and scaled-down superpowers of the machines. That didn’t go as well as expected, especially since the anime adaptation of the arc is… not good, and let’s leave it at that. I cannot say what got the author to change direction in the last volume of the arc, but nonetheless at the very end the story returned to the supernatural origins, introducing a version of the robot that is sentient as well as the idea that the energy it runs on is the personification of evolution itself. The final of the arc was confusing, perhaps in a conscious not to similarly mind-boggling Ideon: Be Invoked.

 

Shin Getter Robo is the next arc and ran in 1996-9. It’s an interquel taking part directly before Getter Robo Go and having heavy inspiration from contemporary Neon Genesis Evangelion, with several locations having direct counterparts in Eva and a certain character becoming an expy of Gendou Ikari. It’s the most mature and intellectually heavy of Getter Robo arc, as well as the shortest one – only two volumes long, becoming one volume in deluxe release of the whole franchise called Getter Robo Saga.

 

The final and tragically unfinished arc of Getter Robo is called Arc. It ran in 2001-3 and was the closest of the sub-stories to a contemporary shounen anime, with the spotlight-stealing co-protagonist half-human Shou Kamui. The arc had great expectations with its moral ambiguity (after the reveal of Shin Getter Robo, it turns out that for the galactic society humans have been villains all along) and sympathetic portrayal of some members of the enemy society of the first arc. Unfortunately, the magazine the series ran in was canceled and a few years later the creator died of heart attack.

 

There are numerous adaptations of Getter Robo, most of them, as I said, bad, or enjoyable only in the very specific context of the time they were published in. The series in general is difficult to get used to due to extreme violence and a „quirk” of having violence against animals as a running gag – sometimes a deadly gag. Anyways, I enjoyed three short anime adaptations of Getter Robo:

• New Getter Robo (2004) is the adaptation most faithful when it comes to characterisation and backstories and least faithful when it comes to the story, mixing elements from the first three arcs of Getter Robo with the author’s fascination with Japanese history and mythology.

• Getter Robo Arc (2021) premiered last year and is a loose adaptation of the manga arc of the same name, keeping all the good parts and finally giving the franchise a proper ending.

• Getter Robo Armageddon (1999) is an What If story where at an undisclosed point of the main timeline things went wrong and in a chain of events most of humanity is extinct and Earth is no longer habitable. In my opinion this entry has the best characters, but that’s strictly my personal opinion.

With combined number of 39 25 minutes long episodes, these series make for an excellent weekend binging material. There are also numerous manga series published after Ishikawa’s deaths, but they have a tendency to try to up each other in darkness and edginess, to the point of one being basically a guro manga, so I won’t reccommend any of these.

Comments

[windleopard2]

Interesting info.

[icon_uk]

I'm vaguely familiar with Getter Robo, but I had no idea it had such a long history, or even much of an existence beyond the anime Thank you for this.

[servant_iskandar]

Just a couple remarks:

the Getter Machine units come normally in three, not four: there might be a support vehicle but the assembly is made up of three, each one with a pilot, and with a recognizable color scheme that matches who's in charge at the moment and the resulting form's prevailing specialization (traditionally air/underground/underwater).

I wrote "traditionally" because as Ishikawa went on developing the storylines, and Getter Energy as the "Power/Personification of Evolution", the mecha shifted from being built around "polymorphic alloy" to accomodate for the non-linear transformations and the amount of weaponry every form has (a very early case of nanomachines, son). It gradually became able of even more bizarre feats.

And some are really out there: Armageddon features a giant Dragon built out of several combined Getter machines, and one of the manga has the heroes' mecha growing progressively more powerful and colossal by absorbing, reshaping and evolving matter, including planetoids at a certain point.

[leahandillyana]

What I meant by four was the additional support unit Go Nagai designed for Michiru that is used in the original anime. Most versions of Getter Robo do indeed consist of three parts only.