This picture came about after a conversation with my boss Frank Arrigo on Friday afternoon, Frank and I share a common interest in a lot of things and when we were discussing robots he dropped Gigantor on me. Something sunk in, it was a name that I have heard 1000s of times yet I was unfamiliar with it.
The first time I heard Gigantor was through Chris Wheeler, it was his email address (minus the i of course, yes I have a freaky memory Wheels), I think that was 1997 and I think it was an AOL email account? that's not important though. what is important is how did this wonderful cartoon elude me for so long?
So today I went looking and guess what, even Gigantor himself looked familar, why? simple, there seems to be 2 robots that spawned all of the Anime robots after them, call them the Adam and Eve of Anime if you want but know that they are simply Astro Boy and Gigantor, all of the realistic child like robots have tried to emulate Astro Boy and the rest have borrowed their styling from Gigantor, the Miyazaki robots in Laputa are a perfect example as well as the Iron Giant.
I'm now going to get my hands on the Gigantor series to watch it, it's very very cool, even the remakes are cool.
There are a number of reasons why I love Japan and the Japanese people and this is one of them, check this out (yes it's real, scroll to the bottom) it's in Kobe http://kaijuart.com/2009/09/25/a-gigantor-gigantor-the-kobe-project/
Interesting fact is that the Japanese name for Gigantor is Tetsujin 28-go
No comments:
Post a Comment