How long have you been gone?
It's more that I've been off and on like, the entire thread. I think I was near 1k posts last time. I haven't even broken 100 this time.
Getter Robo G 26
There really shouldn't be anything impressive about yet another episode of "the Dinosaur/Demon Empire turns someone close/uses someone close to the Getter Team to hurt them emotionally" episodes, but somehow when these come along they never fail to disappoint. Where once I considered the possibility that the theme was that the world and its wars corrupted and destroyed women (considering for basically the whole of Getter Robo the victims of these arcs WERE just women) I think now that it's more just humans in general, since you cannot deny the blatancy of it in this episode.
I mean, Demonic Hitler of the Armed Forces of Hell finds a young man who is already afflicted with the love of money due to his intense poverty and seduces him into becoming a demon, turning him against his good friend Hayato in the process. That's not really very subtle, now, is it?
But I don't think that subtlety is really the success nor the point of these episodes. The point is that war is a terrible thing, whether hot or cold, and that it finds every way possible to hurt and kill the ones you love. I've probably said this before, but Getter Robo is a much, much better anti-war mecha anime than Mobile Suit Gundam because it really does portray the horrors of it. Which is ironic, since the setup of Mobile Suit Gundam really should give it the advantage over Getter Robo in that regard.
The success of these kinds of episodes is in demonstrating the emotional toll it takes on our heroes. For starters, Musashi is just plain gone. That's what war does. It takes people who are good and kind and brave and it kills them in moments of fear and desperation. Ryouma was so messed up during one of these episodes that he couldn't actually fight. The death of Gora was enough to break the spirits of Emperor Gore himself, and now Hayato is at bat for the second time. As you may or may not recall, the Demon Empire took his sister's fiance away, and his death was enough of a shock that she fled Japan for good. Now Hayato has lost his childhood friend to this war, and for once cool, stoic, quiet Hayato runs crying into the night, shouting at the top of his lungs in rage and sorrow. Indeed, the depths of Hayato's sadness over the entire affair are mirrored only by the fury he feels at how deeply his friend has betrayed him.
As a side note, this episode sort of accidentally does an excellent job of portraying the time in which it took place because of the outlandish appearances of civilians (bell bottoms everywhere, fros and disco jackets and sunglasses, too) and the episode's score, which included this weird kinda Iron Butterfly sort of feeling song in it, too. I want to say it was all very 70s, but knowing my luck I'm off by when the show took place by a decade like always.
