Although it's been 35 years since the show aired, I've never seen a better looking transforming robot before or since. Everything about this excellent anime series is over the top. The cool robot, star crossed love triangle, and crazy violent commander of the defense force.
The story is set in 1999. Space fairing race called the Baamians (Baam Seijin in Japanese), were looking for a permanent home. Their talks with the earth delegation goes horribly wrong when Baamian leader Leon (Rion in Japanese) gets assassinated by his second in command. But the assassination is blamed on the earth delegates. Leon's son Richter (Rihitel in Japanese), starts to attack earth with his robot army. Standing in their way was giant transforming robot Daimos that's piloted by Kazuya Ryuzaki. Kazuya is a karate expert, and uses his skills to control Daimos with his karate moves. He finds a girl with amnesia in the battlefield. Soon they fall in love, but what Kazuya didn't know was that she (Erica) was Richter's sister.
Daimos is a dual purpose robot/ trailer that was designed by Daimobic for the purpose of extra-terrestrial planetary development. It's usually hangared within Ryujin rock near Dymobic. It turned out to be the ideal defense weapon against the invasion of Baameans. When Kazuya calls "Justeen !", Daimos opens the bay to take in Kazuya's vehicle (Triver75S), and when he calls "Daimos, battle turn !" the trailer Tranzer transforms into Daimos.
I won't go into the well known Nagahama Romantic Robot Trilogy aspect of this show. Output of Robot themed Japanese anime went into decline in the '90s because licensed products weren't making as much money in the view of toy manufacturer (like Bandai who now owns Sunrise, the company that made this series along with Tohoku Shinsha). So this series truly is from the golden age of Japanese robot anime that started with Mazinger Z, and Raideen.
The robot Daimos' design was done by Katsushi Murakami. It's sleek line, beautiful transformation sequence, and karate movement that was traced from the actual martial arts director's movement all translates to one bombastic package.
The other outrageously cool thing about this anime is it's opening music composed by Shunsuke Kikuchi (Lyrics by Saburo Yatsude, sung by Isao Saki, and chorus by Columbia Yurikagokai). There is no better robot anime theme song than this one. Strangely enough, although it's sung in Japanese, many international audience seem to agree with this comment, so there must be something that goes deep into person's heart about this song.
This series was cut short, and only 44 episodes were made. Nagahama's original idea was that earthlings, and Baamians eventually come to understanding, and Baamians leaves earth to terraform Mars. Kazuya, and Erica also goes to Mars to terraform Mars into a habitable planet. But due to numbers of episodes being cut, the ending became very different from Nagahama's original idea.
A series that deserves the adjective "The Greatest" in every way is this series from Japan. DVD set containing all the episodes is only available in Japan, and is difficult to obtain, but this is one series that's worth watching despite the difficulty of getting a copy.
