Tuesday, March 27, 2007

"Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs" - or why a robot is not a mecha

The topic of this post is not something I will bitch about ... it's a TV-series I used to watch years ago: "Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs".


Even though I didn't know it then, I was actually watching a series belonging to one of the most-wanted topics in Japan - and of course I was watching an anime. The series contains a mecha - in Japanese animation a mecha is something not too unlike a huge robot. Unlike a robot, a mecha does not have artificial intelligence or a programmed mind, instead it is controlled by one or more persons - usually it's a team of at least three, quite often four of five.

The whole series was set in some kind of futuristic western world (somewhere in outer space) where four star sheriffs (three men and a woman) were defending right and justice with the help of a large spaceship (which had been build by the woman, April, and her father and could turn into the mecha), two cars and a robotic horse. That might sound a bit ridiculous here, but in the series it worked out quite well.


Why have I started thinking about this? Well, because the series will be out on DVD in a big, beautiful box soon enough ... and I currently toy with the thought of buying it. I'd like to have all of the episodes at my disposal - and I can live without the Japanese voices. On the other hand my DVD-collection has grown considerably during the last couple of months (something which I'm pretty glad about as the TV-program seems to get worse and worse) and I'm slowly starting to wonder where to put them all. I think my sensible side is fighting a loosing battle here ... in the end I'll probably buy it. Then I might write another post about the subject - with pictures of the mecha and the main characters, of course.

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