Before anime became a streaming category, Japanese giant robots ruled Philippine television. UFO Grendizer was one of them, until the Marcos government decided we had seen enough. Nearly fifty years later, I still have room for one more robot.
A personal retrospective of the original 1975–1977 Toei series, with full-series spoilers. The Infinitism kit photographs show Bandai publicity samples, not my own assembled model.
A piece of childhood, in 1/144 scale
Among the collectibles I own is a Bandai High Grade UFO Grendizer Infinitism 1/144-scale model kit. It is a very modern interpretation of a machine I first knew from the era when Japanese giant robots practically had their own television schedule in the Philippines. The model has far more surface detail than anything we watched in the late 1970s, with joint assemblies and armour panels that make the original design look almost modest by comparison. But the important bits remain: the horns, the red chest, the angular face and forearms that suggest diplomacy was never going to be the first option.
There’s something faintly ridiculous about revisiting childhood television through elaborate plastic models. As children, we were happy watching the machines on the family television, sometimes recreating the battles with whatever toys happened to be around. As adults, we can spend hours studying tiny representations of fictional engineering and call it collecting, which sounds more respectable. Yet Grendizer has always felt a little different from the other robots of that period.
Mazinger Z established so much of the genre’s vocabulary. Voltes V had the combination sequence, the family tragedy and a theme song that seemed to belong to every Filipino child. Daimos brought martial arts and interplanetary romance into the mix. Grendizer had a wandering prince who had already lost his world, a flying saucer and a hero who looked rather less happy about the whole arrangement. At the time I cared about the robot. Looking back, I find myself thinking more about the man inside it.
When Thursday belonged to Grendaizer
In the Philippines of the late 1970s, Japanese robot animation was not a niche interest. It was ordinary television, broadcast in English and watched by children who didn’t really care which country the programmes came from. We didn’t distinguish carefully between anime, mecha and cartoons. These were giant robots, and that was enough.
The familiar weekday line-up is often remembered as Mekanda Robot on Monday, Daimos on Tuesday, Mazinger Z on Wednesday, UFO Grendaizer on Thursday and Voltes V on Friday. It was an excellent arrangement if you were young and your world still had clear divisions between school, homework and television. Miss an episode and there was no streaming service to recover it. You waited, asked a friend what happened or simply lived with the gap.
Accounts of Philippine television history place the show on GMA-7 from January 1979, with 18 January frequently given as its local premiere, under the spelling UFO Grendaizer. The English dub has been associated with Questor International. Those details survive mostly in later broadcast and dubbing records; I have not found a contemporary schedule confirming the exact premiere day. What matters most to the memory is the broader setting: Thursday evening, one robot among several, and a generation learning that television could make the week feel properly organised.
The Marcos government versus giant robots
Then, in 1979, the Marcos administration removed Voltes V and other Japanese giant-robot programmes from Philippine television. The official explanation was that their violence could have a harmful influence on children. Reports and retrospective accounts disagree on the exact dates and the sequence of cancellations, so I am wary of presenting a single day as the moment every robot vanished. The larger fact, however, is difficult to misunderstand. A government was deciding that children shouldn’t be watching these cartoons.
People have long suggested another motive, especially in the case of Voltes V: its story about oppressive rulers and rebellion sat rather awkwardly beside a real dictatorship. That interpretation is compelling, but it is not the same thing as documentary proof that political themes directly caused the ban. Complaints about televised violence, commercial rivalry and authoritarian sensitivity have all been discussed in different accounts. Whatever combination lay behind the decision, the result for viewers was much simpler. The programmes disappeared.
Grendizer was not a domestic revolutionary story in quite the same way. Yet its enemy was an expansionist empire that destroyed peaceful worlds, demanded submission and treated its own soldiers as expendable. Its central character had fled because a ruler with overwhelming power decided his planet was available for conquest. Whether the people behind the ban appreciated the irony, I couldn’t say. I suspect the children were more interested in the Double Harken.
Removing those programmes helped make them permanent fixtures of Filipino Gen X memory. We had been given a weekday ritual and then told it was dangerous. Unlike Voltes V, which later enjoyed much bigger mainstream revivals, Grendizer’s original Philippine run remained more of a fragment: remembered in snippets, recordings, conversations and eventually the merchandise we could afford as adults.
How Toei gave the Mazinger family a refugee prince
UFO Robot Grendizer aired in Japan for 74 episodes from 5 October 1975 to 27 February 1977. Produced by Toei Animation with Go Nagai’s Dynamic Planning, it followed Mazinger Z and Great Mazinger in the larger super-robot family. Tomoharu Katsumata directed the television series, with Kazuo Komatsubara among its principal character designers and Shunsuke Kikuchi supplying the music. The concept also grew out of the 1975 animated film The Great Battle of the Flying Saucers, an earlier, distinct version of the alien-prince premise.
Grendizer’s premise changes something fundamental. Instead of beginning with an Earth-built machine and a boy who learns to operate it, the story introduces Duke Fleed, prince of the planet Fleed, whose home was devastated by the forces of King Vega. Duke escapes in the powerful Grendizer, reaches Earth and is taken in by scientist Dr Genzo Umon. Calling himself Daisuke Umon, he works at a rural ranch and tries to build an ordinary life. But the empire that destroyed his home follows him, and the possibility of remaining ordinary disappears.
As science fiction it is simple enough to grasp, which is partly why it works. Duke has seen what the Vegan Empire can do. Defending Earth means ensuring that the people who sheltered him do not experience his own catastrophe. There is a melancholy underneath the machine’s armour that becomes more noticeable once you’re no longer counting the number of monsters destroyed in an episode.
Duke Fleed was never much of a cheerful superhero
Duke, originally voiced by Kei Tomiyama, is brave, solemn and sometimes maddeningly secretive. His instinct is to keep other people out of danger, even when they are perfectly willing to help him. I can see why that appealed to the writers: a man carrying the responsibility for a lost civilisation isn’t going to hand control over to the first enthusiastic visitor who asks nicely. But it also makes Duke difficult to live with, and the tension between protection and trust becomes one of the programme’s better continuing themes.
Koji Kabuto, returning from Mazinger Z, is an excellent counterweight. Now flying the experimental TFO rather than his old robot, Koji starts out as the eager, occasionally rash Earthling who doesn’t quite understand Duke’s reluctance to share information. Their friendship develops through arguments, rescues and mutual respect, and Koji eventually becomes a more useful partner with the Double Spazer. For someone who once piloted Mazinger Z, he handles the demotion with surprising patience.
Hikaru Makiba, from the ranch family, provides part of Duke’s emotional connection to Earth. She discovers his secret and later becomes a pilot herself, operating the Marine Spazer. Maria Grace Fleed, Duke’s younger sister, arrives later after surviving the devastation of Fleed and growing up unaware of her true identity. Their reunion gives the hero something more than revenge to fight for. Maria’s Drill Spazer also joins the team, allowing the action to expand without pretending that everyone else should remain helpless spectators.
Dr Umon works as both scientist and adoptive father, while Danbei Makiba and the ranch household supply the comic business. The lighter characters occasionally seem to belong to another programme altogether, particularly when the show moves from planetary genocide to an elaborate countryside misunderstanding. But the ranch matters. It shows the kind of life Duke is trying to preserve, and the sort of family a refugee can find without losing his memories of the first one.
When the enemy had a history of its own
The Vegan Empire runs its invasion from the Skull Moon base. King Vega commands a succession of officers including Blacky, Gandal and Zuril, whose failures and rivalries supply a good deal of the weekly drama. On paper they are conventional cartoon antagonists, often sending yet another Disc Beast into battle and then being surprised when it comes back in pieces. But the series is more interesting when the enemy’s motives become complicated.
Naida is one of the strongest examples. She comes from Duke’s past and reappears with devastating claims about the fate of people from Fleed. The episode briefly forces Duke to see himself not simply as a survivor but as a possible participant in further suffering, because the war machinery around him conceals terrible things. The result is more disturbing than the latest explosion, and I remember being struck by how different that sort of episode feels from the familiar formula.
Princess Rubina, once connected to Duke through an intended marriage, brings a similar sadness. As King Vega’s daughter, she belongs to the enemy’s family, yet her love for Duke and her wish for reconciliation do not fit the clean moral categories of a weekly robot battle. Her story ends tragically, adding another loss to a young man who has already had more than his share. These characters make Grendizer less comfortable and far more memorable.
The robot and that magnificent flying saucer
Grendizer remains an extraordinary piece of mechanical design. Its horned head and mask-like face give it a vaguely ceremonial look, while the wide black torso, red chest, white limbs and blue forearms form a silhouette that hardly needs a name beside it. Compared with Mazinger Z it looks less like a machine from a workshop and more like an artefact from a culture with its own rituals of war.
The Spazer is the defining idea. Grendizer doesn’t simply fly off to fight: it travels inside a saucer-shaped craft, emerges from it and returns to it. The preparation, docking and launch sequences turn the beginning of each fight into a small mechanical ceremony. I’m not sure any of it would pass serious engineering scrutiny, but I have never really wanted it to. Some machinery is more useful as choreography.
The weapons are just as unapologetic. Screw Crusher Punch, Space Thunder, Anti-Gravity Storm and Double Harken sound as though they were conceived by someone with a deep love of capital letters and an equally deep distrust of understatement. The Double Harken, that improbable double-bladed weapon, is still one of my favourite examples of the genre’s ability to make a simple silhouette feel dangerous.
The Double Spazer, Marine Spazer and Drill Spazer were convenient additions for the toy market, obviously, but they also give the supporting cast things to do and allow the fights to move between air, sea and underground spaces. The best episodes use those machines to create fresh compositions rather than just to introduce another accessory.
What forty-year-old animation can still do
Watching a 1970s weekly cartoon today requires a certain adjustment. Some episodes are beautifully staged, with expressive character work, crisp dramatic framing and confident action. Others lean on repeated footage, held drawings, economised movement and launch sequences we’ve already seen many times. It’s not a revelation to discover that a 74-episode television production had to work within a budget.
The monster-of-the-week formula can become predictable. Some comic detours go on longer than they should, and the women occasionally exist more to worry about Duke than to pursue fully realised lives of their own. Hikaru and Maria get stronger roles as pilots, which helps, but the writing doesn’t always follow through. The tonal switches can also be jarring: a genuine trauma story in one scene, broad ranch humour in the next.
Yet I admire the fact that Grendizer kept trying to carry emotional material beneath the machinery. The recurring story isn’t really whether the hero’s robot is powerful enough. We know it is. The question is whether Duke can endure another war, form new attachments and finally believe that he doesn’t have to survive it alone.
The music was never embarrassed by the material
Shunsuke Kikuchi’s score knows precisely what sort of programme this is. It uses dramatic brass, insistent rhythms and sweeping orchestral passages without the slightest attempt to make the spectacle seem ironic. The original opening, Tobe! Grendizer, sung by Isao Sasaki, announces the robot’s importance within seconds. The ending theme, Uchū no Ōja Grendizer, carries the same confidence, while the quieter incidental cues give Duke’s memories some of their emotional force.
We didn’t need to know the Japanese lyrics to understand what the music was doing. Those themes were built to come through indifferent television speakers and to remain in a child’s head long after the episode was over. Hearing them again now is rather like opening a drawer containing something you hadn’t realised you’d kept.
I’ve grown more fond of that conviction with age. Modern productions sometimes seem anxious to establish that they know how ridiculous their premises can be. Grendizer simply lets a horned robot fight for the survival of two worlds, and lets the orchestra treat it as a matter of genuine importance.
The ending the Philippine broadcasts left hanging
By the final episodes, the Vegan Empire is mounting its decisive attack on Earth. Duke, Koji, Hikaru and Maria fight together, and King Vega’s rule finally comes to an end. But the conclusion isn’t only about the defeat of the invaders. Duke and Maria learn that their home planet can support life again, making a return possible after years of exile.
That decision gives Grendizer an unusually moving conclusion. Duke has built a family on Earth, with Dr Umon and the people at the ranch, yet his life began somewhere else. Returning to Fleed means leaving those who saved him, and staying would mean refusing a chance to rebuild the civilisation the empire destroyed. The farewell is hopeful without being altogether easy.
As a child I might have preferred the robot to remain on Earth indefinitely, available whenever another villain appeared. Now I appreciate that Duke is allowed to leave. After 74 episodes of fighting the war that followed him across the universe, his reward is not a more powerful weapon but the possibility of having a home again. For those of us whose Philippine broadcasts were interrupted, reaching that ending years later has a peculiar poignancy.
Goldorak, Goldrake and a robot that travelled further than we knew
Grendizer’s reputation reaches well beyond Japan and the Philippines. It became Goldorak in France and Goldrake in Italy, building an audience in places where Japanese animation was not yet an everyday category. The series also found a remarkable following across parts of the Middle East, where its themes of conquest and survival carried their own associations.
That international life has continued through comics, reissues, exhibitions, merchandise and new reinterpretations. It is easy to think the revival industry runs entirely on nostalgia, and a fair amount of it probably does. But Grendizer also had an exceptionally good visual idea. Even when the armour changes, the fundamental outline is recognisable.
Back to the Bandai kit on my shelf
My own HG 1/144 Grendizer Infinitism kit is part of that afterlife. Released by Bandai in 2019 with a more detailed mechanical redesign by Takayuki Yanase, it takes the simple, emphatic shapes of the television robot and gives them the joints, panel lines and articulated parts that contemporary kit enthusiasts expect. The Double Harken is still there, and so are the horns and the red chest. There’s more hardware than the old animators would ever have wanted to draw every week.
I don’t need it to be an exact reconstruction of the 1975 animation. In fact, I like that it shows how the design has continued to change. There is a point, admittedly, where surface detail becomes less an improvement than an exercise in finding room for another panel line. But the old silhouette survives the treatment.
Owning the kit doesn’t mean I want everything about the late 1970s back. The Philippines of that period offered plenty of reasons not to romanticise the past. What I miss is more specific: the Thursday television slot, the music, the anticipation of a launch sequence and the strange feeling of having a favourite programme taken away by a government that apparently had no shortage of things to police.
The model kit occupies considerably less space than the real machine would, which is fortunate. Nearly fifty years after I first knew Grendizer, it is enough to have a small version of the robot within reach and to know, finally, how Duke’s story ended.
Production and broadcast references
For production dates and the 74-episode count, see Toei Animation’s official UFO Robot Grendizer series archive: https://lineup.toei-anim.co.jp/en/tv/grendaizer/. The Bandai Spirits product archive documents the HG 1/144 Infinitism model’s April 2019 release. Philippine premiere and ban dates are discussed cautiously because the surviving sources do not agree on every detail.
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