My Life In Fandom: The Classics Come West!

Synchronicity is a weird beast. A handful of us get serious about making mecha great again, and all of a sudden new licensing deals on the classics get inked so a new generation can enjoy the pillars of the genre. It's as if someone decided that the time was now to bring it back.

Here's a list of what got announced on Twitter via Discotek Media's account yesterday.

• Giant Robo: The Animation
• Space Warrior Baidos
• Area 88
• God Mars
• Cyborg 009 (an update)
• Voltes V
• Galaxy Express 999 TV
• Psycho Armor Govarian

In addition there are two live-action releases coming that are relevant to our interests: Message From Space: Galactic Wars and Space Wolf Juspion. I'll embed the posts with trailers below, as they show a time when Japan's pop culture heroes were men and not boys- these are pre-Gundam.

Never heard of Message From Space: Galactic Wars? Here's a sneak preview! pic.twitter.com/hvj5R1YE9o

— 💿 Discotek Media 💿 (@discotekmedia) August 12, 2018

Space Wolf Juspion is heading to SDBD! For those that have never heard of it, prepare yourself for the intro. pic.twitter.com/VW5qtNvZrz

— 💿 Discotek Media 💿 (@discotekmedia) August 12, 2018

There are announcements for Lupin the 3rd, Kimagure Orange Road, Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, and a series called Hells to read also but this is what I find pertinent for we the #AGundam4Us scene specifically and more generally the #PulpRev and #Superversive scenes generally.

Why?

Because the SF/F split in the West came later to Japan and still hasn't fully taken root there, and these older shows exhibit that it's far more of a sliding scale at the best of times. Due to the popular franchises being far more rooted in film and TV, it's a lot easier to see how the cultural degeneration we complain about in Western popular fiction went about over there and use that as a way to demonstrate what we're talking about to skeptical observers. (We have to go through action movies and TV series to get the same effect, which has its own issues due to deliberate memory-holing going on since the '90s.)

Works like those above are what #AGundam4Us builds upon and seeks to make great again by making new material, and I in particular draw upon the Super Robot as well as the Real Robot sides of mecha fiction for my own #StarKnightSaga- and if you haven't gotten on board that hype train yet then you can do so here. Meanwhile, Brian Niemeier has something far closer to the Real Robot end of things with Combat Frame XSeed. This is an exciting time for independent Science Fiction, and now is the time to join the scene.