7/9/2005

I already know, of course, but I was trying to think of a mecha series I’d seen recently enough to review…and there aren’t any. A lot of my friends love mecha – sometimes I wonder what exactly is it that makes certain types of anime appeal to different people? I’ll watch anything you put in front of me, but once the space battles start, I’m totally lost…

In some works of science fiction, mecha (singular or plural) or mechs (singular: mech) are piloted or remote-controlled limbed vehicles. The key difference between mecha and robots (in the English usage of these terms) is that a mecha has a pilot or controller. The term is derived from the Japanese abbreviation for the English term “mechanical,” although English speakers have repurposed the term to mean only the vehicles described above. The original Japanese term of mecha has the broader denotation of all mechanical objects, including cars, guns, computers, and other objects without pilots or limbs.

In anime, ‘mecha’ is a genre that features the vehicles and their pilots as the central characters. Here, the average mecha are usually twenty feet tall at the smallest, outfitted with a wide variety of weapons, and quite frequently have tie-ins with toy manufacturers. The Gundam franchise is an excellent example: Gundam toys and model kits (produced by the Japanese toymaker Bandai) are ubiquitous in Japan. In this genre teenage pilots are more common than would be feasible in real life.

-Wikipedia

I guess I’ll eventually take on Gundam Seed, Dai Guard, Transformers or something…I need to locate a decent mech show and watch it! Anybody have a recommendation?