Space Warrior Baldios

うちゅうせんしばるでぃおす

Aired: 1980 - 1981

A television anime co-produced by Ashi Productions and Kokusai Eigasha and broadcast on Tokyo 12 Channel (now TV Tokyo), this giant-robot series follows the young space pilot Marin Reigan, who flees the dictatorial collapse of his home planet S-1 and arrives on twenty-second-century Earth. Recruited into the Earth-defence task force Blue Fixer, he comes to pilot the colossal combining mecha Baldios in an existential war against the S-1 tyrant Aphrodia, a struggle made all the more agonising by Aphrodia's intimate connection to his own past. The early episodes hew closely to the conventions of the invader-mecha SF tradition, but as the series progresses it confronts heavier themes of environmental ruin, dictatorship, exile and the absurdity of war, culminating in a famously bleak finale. After the broadcast was cut short of the planned ending, Ashi and Kokusai Eigasha produced the 1981 theatrical feature 'Space Warrior Baldios' to provide the story's full closure.