Mighty Orbots
By Edwin McRae - Monday, May 19th, 2008
Here’s a TV series I loved as a kid in the early eighties. Mighty Orbots was similar to Starfleet in that it involved a bunch of different machines that joined up to make one big, kick arse robot. But in this case, the machines are the characters themselves – Tor, Bort, Crunch, Bo and Boo. Crunch was my favourite (the blue fat one of the left). He’d eat anything, including rocks. There’s something about chomping through granite like it’s chocolate that’s really cool.
I used to almost run the kilometre of gravel road home from school to catch Mighty Orbots, and dreamed of us having the latest of luxury inventions, the mystical ‘video recorder’ so that I could record them and watch them again. Alas we got our Black Diamond some time after Mighty Orbots finished screening.
While Starfleet was a Japanese production over-dubbed for the English market, Mighty Orbots was a joint American/Japanese production. I only realise this now, looking back, but I must have had quite a thing for the Japanese aesthetic.