Iron King

I saw an interesting looking series on DVD the other day and got it. Now I'm in the process of watching it. It's called "Iron King" and it's a Japanese series from 1972.

It's in the Godzilla family, then the Space Giants genre. Big robots tromping buildings and frantic Japanese running for their lives. It's got 26 episodes and four discs. My copy happens to have the DVD case nubs broken, so I don't know what caused that. Maybe the robots inside were agitating it too much.

I'm up to episode 4. So far the episodes are following a distinct pattern. There's a clan in Japan that's been scheming for 2000 years to get their revenge on the rest of society and to go into the ascendancy. They have ready many different kinds of robot monsters, mostly for the apparently impossible task of killing this one guy, one of the stars of the show, Gentaro. He's not Iron King, by the way. He seems to be simply a mortal, but one with all kinds of fighting ability.

Iron King is the giant/robot alter ego of Goro, a comic kind of guy who travels with Gentaro. Gentaro doesn't realize that Goro is Iron King. He appears when he's needed for the fight, by saying the words "Shock, Shock, Iron Shock" in English. His one downfall, very much a bummer, is that his body fluid -- water -- goes down like a dropped brick. So he can't fight very long till he's wiped out. Then when he becomes Goro again, a normal human being, he's parched and is going after water in an insane way. Gentaro hasn't figured this out yet but he knows all about Iron King's trouble with losing water.

The pattern is that they're traveling. The clan seeks to kill Gentaro. They send forth a robot. The robot fights, then recedes. They regather and attack again. I won't say what happens to the robot in each episode, but by the end of the episode the clan is preparing the next robot to try. Every stranger they meet is a member of this clan.

I like it so far.