GORG! GIANT GORG!
When I got home last night and saw that A-Classic had released a fansub of episode 1 of Giant Gorg I made with the “yay!”s. This was a series I’d wanted to see for about a decade. Ever since reading a review of the soundtrack in an issue of V-Max. And the only reason I had to want to see it was the name. GIANT GORG. That read like the best name for a robot show ever.
And so, ten years later, I finally get to see the first episode.
Following the instructions left by his dead father, Yu Tagami makes his way to New York to see his father’s student, Dr. H. Wave. On the way to Wave’s home he is almost accidentally run over by the delinquent Rod Balboa, heir to the GAIL conglomerate. At Wave’s home he meets Wave, Wave’s sister Doris and their dog, Argus. It turns out that GAIL are trying to kill Wave and Wave’s home is destroyed by a GAIL henchman. Our four heroes get away and Wave plans to enlist his friend Sensho to get to the mysterious Austral Island that Wave and Tagami’s father were researching. At GAIL HQ Rod is told that Austral Island holds secrets that could effect all mankind, and further arrangements are made to to kill the Waves. The Tagami and the Waves attempt to get across town to meet Sensho by dressing in fancy dress and taking part in a Halloween parade. But GAIL’s thugs find them and by the end of the episode they are trapped at the river’s edge and shot at by the chief henchman…
There’s a lot of portrayals of background black characters that look horribly caricatured in their drawings, however unlike the more recent Baccano! most of the white characters are likewise grotesque caricatures. Doris and Rod are probably the only white characters who look stereotypically “anime”, and even then they are designs you don’t see often nowadays. And Dr Wave is Woody Allen.
There also appears to have been an animator who was sneaking (?) drawings of dicks throughout this episode. Argus is a Great Dane, I guess as a Scooby Doo homage, but he’s occasionally drawn far more anatomically correct than Scoob ever was. But only occasionally, not all the time, which makes me think someone was diverting from the model sheet. I guess future episodes will bear this out. Also there was this costume in the Halloween parade…
All I’m saying is if that was meant to be a nose, why paint it that colour?
Also in the Halloween parade was this…
Are those names an in-joke or some kind of topical reference from Japan in 1984?
The animation in this first episode isn’t going to set the world on fire, but beyond the aforementioned penile goofery, there’s nothing really embarrassing here. The other two eighties shows I’m following at the moment, Urashiman and Lupin III Part 3 are a better choice for groovy animation though. However the background paintings in this episode are really neat, particularly early on when Yu is wandering through the ghetto. And as Yoshikazu Yasuhiko is directing, stuff gets blow’d up real good. Real good.
The eighties were arguably the golden age for robot shows (and anime as a whole), and so you were able to have an opening episode to an ostensibly giant robot show that doesn’t feature the robot at all. There’s plenty of action, and the episode whips through at a fair pace, but it’s all human level. Barring the design of GAIL’s HQ, which looks straight off an 80s sci-fi novel cover, there isn’t anything sci-fi or fantastic in this episode at all. It’s looking to be a slow build from where we start to the Daimajin tinged giant robot antics of the starting credits.
It’s great to see old shows like this get subtitled, this is exactly the sort of project that fansubbing should exist for.