As a child of the 80’s I grew up watching Getter Robot. Of course I don’t remember a darn thing anymore about it, only a snippet of an episode. But the image of Go Nagai’s creation of planes merging to form 3 different Getter robots have never left my mind.
I remember having a very tall, cheap, hollow, bootleg, plastic toy of Getter 1 that I carried around with me all the time, even when I had to take a bath I remembered bringing it with me. Maybe it was tall because of my perspective as a child, so I’d assume that in reality it could have been somewhere around 8 ~ 12 inches in height.
The Getter Robo franchise created by Go Nagai tells the story of a hidden Dinosaur Empire beneath the earth that sought to rule the world. Dr. Saotome initially created the Getter Robot for space exploration but due to the turn of events used the 3 crafts to fight the Dinosaur Empire. Quite cheesy but back then anything this genre was brand new and people would eat up anything as long as you had a giant robot attached to it. After that series we leapfrog over the next series of the franchise, Getter Robo G, to this series, where this toy came out.
Change! Getter Robo or sometimes called Shin Getter Robo: Armageddon is a 1998 released OVA that tells of an even darker story where Dr. Saotome turns bad, fakes his death and has Getter 1 pilot Ryoma Nagare blamed for his death. Ryoma is of course imprisoned for a long time and when Dr. Saotome shows up again with his plot to blow up the world, Ryoma is fielded in a Getter Robo 1 to try and stop him.
