Its time to bring another big giant robot series, this time it’s The Brave Fighter of Sun Fighbird, an early 90s super robot show from Japan where it was known as Taiyō no Yūsha Fighbird and is the second of the Brave series – a collection of super robot shows made by Sunrise to sell toys for Takara. As such they feature cool looking robots that transform and combine.
Transforming robot and flaming sword = Awesome
That I’m posting about Fighbird now while it’s fresh in my mind and while I’m still desperate to buy all the merch which is is the sign of an anime doing its job. The plot shameless excuse for robots fighting is that the positive energy beings who make up the Space Police have come to Earth to protect it from the Negative energy being Draias. The lead good being posesses an android created by Professor Amano and becomes known as Katori Yutaro. Katori has no concept of a lot human ideas which usually ends up entertaining and being an android, gives him super human butt kicking ability – excellent. When Draias’ henchman lead by the human traitor Dr Jango bring out the heavy guns/ giant robot beasts, Katori merges with Amano’s fighter jet to become Fighbird and then usually gets his clocked cleaned until he merges with another smaller jet to become Armament Fusion Fighbird and uses the FLAME SWORD!
Fighbird has backup in the forms of Ace Baron who is a 5 mech combiner and the Guard Team who conveniently make themselves at home in the vehicles of emergency services. It’s always fun to watch Police Inspector Satsuda puzzle over his missing patrol car missing as Guard Star goes off into battle with Guard Fire (Fire engine) and Guard Rescue (Dr. Yoshiko Kunieda’s ambulance). When the going gets tough, the guard team combine into Guardion and even better, he later becomes Super Guardion! Their cries of Battle Up (insert character name) are good transformation scenes too.
To me it was a cartoon with fighter jets that combined into a robot or more often, just docked into the legs and chest of an even larger super robot MacStar (GoShogun) that fired beams from its eyes, had a Photon Battle Axe, and Sword and a gigantic Bazooka that fired a huge energy beam, not to mention it’s trademark lazer bombardment (GoFlasher).
If there is one anime I want to be released on blu-ray that won’t be in the UK or US for a long time if ever, it is 2008′s Macross Frontier, my next choice would be the 2009 remake of Mazinger Z.