Tranzor Z

Tranzor Z was my introduction to anime. I remember someone much later telling me that anime was quality animation and that there was a lot more attention to detail, and that American animators weren't as dedicated as their Japanese counterparts. Well, I can honestly say that Tranzor Z might just disprove that theory.

I'm not bashing Tranzor Z at all. I remember watching this cartoon on Sunday morning. There's a huge nostalgia factor for this to me. To be honest, it was on when I was probably 6 or 7 and for the longest time I couldn't remember what the show was called. Then, a bunch of guys were talking about old 80's cartoons, and they started on the memorable ones like G.I Joe, Thundercats, Transformers, He-Man and Voltron. Then they started bringing up ones I hadn't heard about in years, like Silverhawks, Turbo Teen, Visionaires and Gobots. So I asked them if they remembered a cartoon where there was a giant robot controlled by a kid in a hovercraft, and sure enough they knew it.

That was a couple of years ago, and I've looked up some of the stuff since then, and Tranzor Z has some of the same feel as some of the giant monster movies that came out of Japan about the same time. I don't know much about the diakaiju genre, but I do remember liking the Godzilla movies that were shown as the Saturday afternoon movie.

I added the second picture to show that way back in the 70's, when this actually was released in Japan as Manzinger Z, the Japanese were still putting a lot of fan service in their cartoons. It was also funny how the female robots were armed (if you're interested, look it up). Regardless, even though my memories of this cartoon doesn't totally match up with reality, it really was still a cool cartoon, and if it came on today, I'd have to watch it.