#rgz

Moffat Tunnel

This image was made from the dome car while riding on the Rio Grande Zephyr. I've posted one of these images before, but added a previous shot approaching the famous tunnel. As stated before, this wonderful train ran between Denver and Salt Lake City. I was headed westward on my ride, and so this is the eastern portal.

This 6.2 mile bore, which pierces the continental divide, was built by the Denver & Salt Lake Railway between 1923 and 1927. The first train went through the tunnel in February of 1928. The Denver, Rio Grande & Western took over the line in 1931.

Prior to the building of the tunnel, the Denver, Northwestern and Pacific Railway (DN&P) crawled over the mountain using switchbacks, loops, and very steep grades (4%). David Moffat, on the board of the railway, conceived of the tunnel to eliminate all of that—but would not live to see it built.

This train would be discontinued in 1983 but a few months later Amtrak began running their train, the California Zephyr on this route and still does today.

A history of Robot Girls Z

2009-2013

Initially, Toei back in 2009 started a project called Robot Girls, aiming at turning their original 70s anime robots into cute little girls. They created a site, posted a few 4 koma about them on it, animated a short, but nothing major. After all, we’re speaking of Gaiking, Gackeen, Danguard and Baratack, mecha anime that don’t have the name Go Nagai attached to them (Except for Gaiking or originally, but that’s another story of rights that I don’t want to get into). Suffice to say, the project went nowhere given the properties involved. 

2014

Then of course in 2014, they relaunched it as Robot Girls Z, with brand new anime shorts but now the main focus is on Nagai’s Mazinger trio consisting of Mazinger Z, Great Mazinger and Grendizer, as well as other Go Nagai / Dynamic Pro properties like Getter Robo and Koutetsu Jeeg. An online niconico gacha video game called Robot Girls Z Online was also launched about a month later. The game consisted of Robot Girls Z from the Mazinger series that wasn’t initially included in the anime like Tauros D7. The manga also had new girls like Count Brocken etc. In addition, Toei seeked out Japanese mascots and memes like Imaichi Moe, Miyari, Pixiv-tan to be included in 3 Bluray exclusive shorts. 

2015-2016

The success of Robot Girls Z shorts and its online game caused Toei to create additional shorts under the title of Robot Girls Z Plus, but with Gaiking LOD and even more Go Nagai / Dynamic Pro characters like Getter Robo G, Getter Robo Go, Emperor of Darkness, Boss Borot etc. The list of robot girls kept growing as Toei decided to branch out and seek out robots that weren’t only created by them, but also robots that were co-produced with Sunrise, such as Combattler V, Voltes V, Daimos. There were also new Dynamic Pro characters like Dino Getter. Anyway, the game was still including plenty of girls regularly. At this point, I stopped playing it entirely due to its repetitiveness, being a gacha game and all.

2017 

This year, they announced they included robots in their game they had no part in like Ginguiser, Machine Blaster, Blocker Gundan, and Dai Apolon (Nippon Animation mecha). At least with Dino Getter, even if they didn’t create the manga, it was still a Dynamic Pro product and they have mended their ties with Go Nagai. And finally, we are now getting 3 new Go Nagai properties to come with a new bonus short exclusive to this new Bluray. What’s different? Well, for once, Govarian (Govari-san), Groizer X (Guro-chan) and X-Bomber (Big Dai as X-san) weren’t created by Toei. Basically, Nagai parted ways with Toei after the Gaiking rights fiasco, and went on to collaborate with Knack (Chargeman Ken’s infamous studio), with the exception of Bomber X, a puppet animation show which was by Cosmo Productions and Jin Productions and God Mazinger by TMS, which still doesn’t have a robot girl YET so I’m hoping Toei gets to them as well.

Okay, so why am I excited?

Well, I stopped playing Robot Girls Z Online for a long time, BUT I’m really confident that the Robot Girls Z project is way more than just for dirty otaku money. It’s a celebration of an era of robot anime from the 70s to the 80s. They could have stuck to properties they owned, but Toei went out of their way to revive the early days of giant robot anime.

And there’s a point I forgot to mention, also this year, Robot Girls Z actually made it to Super Robot Wars. So why couldn’t Govarian and Groizer be part of it as well? Maybe they were too obscure? Perhaps, but it seems that the issue of rights shouldn’t be much of a problem now.

So what does this all mean?

This means that we’re now open to new Dynamic Pro robots like Mazinkaiser and Shin Getter Robo being included in Toei’s growing list of robot girls.

What I ultimately want is a new Robot Girls Z anime, but this time as a TV series, rather than just a bunch of shorts. 

That’s all I can say about Robot Girls Z. Initially, I called this post “A brief history of Robot Girls Z”, but obviously, “brief” couldn’t be part of it. 

Yesterday, I was super bored with my life, so first, I stole the Devilman image from the Devilman Crybaby website (http://devilman-crybaby.com/), gave it a blood red colour (as opposed to bright red) and put it on my tumblr page to try and style it just like the website.