So, I’ve recently become interested again in giant robot stuff, mostly because I found the BattleTech cartoons that I loved as a kid. So, what movies/games/shows should I look for to get a nice sampling of the Giant Robot genre? So far I’ve got the Battletech cartoons and Robot Jox. I’m interested in getting into the Mechwarrior games, but I don’t know which ones I should go for. For computer games, the main things are that they need to work in Windows XP, and unless the gameplay alone can carry the game, they also need a good story. Pretty graphics a bonus but not a must.
The movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow had some nice giant robots.
Megas XLR is a funny sendup of the whole giant robot genre, and also has a lot of in-jokes from popular anime series.
Big O is one of the better anime that doesn’t have nudity and sex, and it has a giant robot, too.
I think I was the only one out of my friends who watched the Battletech series. I think they must have had Thundercats on on another channel, since everyone apart from me seems to have seen that. They’re all up on YouTube, anyway. Check out that CGI, people!
I liked Force Five.
Does it have to be action? If you always wanted a giant robot pal when you were a kid, you should see The Iron Giant.
Big O, and the second series, Big O II are excellent.
Classics in the genre include Robotech (OK, Superdimensional Fortress Macross), and Voltron.
Patlabor is rumored to be good. Haven’t seen it.
Seconding The Iron Giant and Sky Captain. And most '80s kids have a nostalgic love of Transformers. At the very least, give Transformers: The Movie a shot (the 1986 animated film, which will probably be better than the big-budget CGI schlockfest due out this summer).
you too, huh? I look at Thundercats now, and I think “Wow… people liked this stuff?” and then I see Turbokats, and I’m like “YEAHH!! WOOOO!” 
And I guess I should have mentioned that I own Big O on DVD. Great show. Batman with 80 meter tall robots.
I’ll go really obscure and recommend the Iron Soldier video games for the late, lamented Atari Jaguar. The graphics are nothing to write home about (especially in this day and age), but the games really convey the sense of piloting a titanic, lumbering, 500-foot-tall robot as it stomps on tanks, pummels buildings, guns down helicopters, and chainsaws(!) enemy robots.
I was enjoying the anime series “Neon Genesis Evangeleon” about psychic teenagers who man giant robots to fight an alien invasion. Until the end, which is no end. Apparently they ran out of money or time or ideas or all three and the last episode is a disjointed, non-sensical mismash of storyboards and unfinished sequences that was very disappointing.
A movie called ‘Robot Jox’ is also about people who man giant fighting robots, this time for sport.
Don’t know if Gort qualifies as a giant robot, but when all is said and done “The Day The Earth Stood Still” is about as good as it gets.
Well, if you want to see a more sensical ending of NGE, check out “End of Evangelion”.
As for Robot Jox, see the OP. Oh, also I’ve seen Robot Wars, another good campy movie.
Mechwarrior 4 was the most recent mech-sim type game on the PC. If you look around you should be able to find the “MechCollection”, which had MW4 and all the expansions. I really liked MW4 itself, it had a decent storyline that fits into the MW universe (though the acting in the full motion video bits is pretty terrible). The expansion storylines are a bit weaker, but they’re still fun.
If you want to go real hardcore, there’s always Steel Battalion for the Xbox. The SB controller will cost a lot more than the Xbox at this point.
I dunno, look at Go Nagai’s Mazinger stories?
I personally have fond childhood memories of Mighty Orbots
I don’t think it was for sport. If I recall, they had replaced expensive wars with 1 vs. 1 robot fights to settle territory disputes and the like. Not that it matters; it’s a silly movie! Crash and burn!
As far as mecha animes go, your choices are… endless. Some good ones have been mentioned like Neon Genesis Evangelion and the Patlabor series. Some other good ones are RahXephon (very similar to Eva), Full Metal Panic, and of course Gundam (some of which are better than others). I’m also a fan of Gunbuster, which is an older mecha anime that is short and somewhat cheesy, but it also has some neat plot points dealing with faster-than-light space travel.
(Be forwarned, though…“sensical” doesn’t != “uplifting.”)
Seriously, though, Evangelion is considered a classic in the genre. Even if you don’t like it, you ought to see it.
After that, anime wise…
•Escaflowne. Personally, I thought the latter episodes drifted a bit too far into the interpersonal crap, but the clockpunk mecha action is pretty solid throughout. The movie version is more of a “reimagining” of the series, but it’s pretty snazzy in it’s own way.
•Big O. Currently re-running on Cartoon Network late at night, now. A very novel feel for anime—artistically, more like “Batman” than anything else. Also delves into the weird existential stuff, but I think it (mostly) pulls it off nicely, for a change.
•Patlabor. I’ve only seen the movies, not the series itself, but it’s well described as “Hill Street Blues with robots.” Great stuff.
The Supermancartoons from the 1940s. Ok, not all of them had giant robots but there were giant robots.
Castle in the Sky
P.S. my niece (6 years old) loves giant robots. We watched Sky Captain and I asked what she thought and she said they were too big.
There’s a giant robot in this video. 
Well… This is going to be long, but aside from “super robot” material, this should be pretty definitive.
As for Battletech, there’s a killer series of novels based on the tabletop war strategy game upon which the cartoon was based. MechWarrior (and MechCommander, and MechAssault) are all based on this same franchise. Hit up Barnes & Noble and you can find most of the books. there’s also a (pay site, IIRC) that hosts lots of long and short works, many by the writers of the book series (it’s Battlecorps, or something). I would especially recommend anything by Michael A. Stackpole, Loren L Coleman, Robert Thurston, or Robert N. Charette (I’d advise starting with the Warrior, Kerensky, or Jade Phoenix trilogies, but Illusions of Victory and Wolves on the Border are phenomenal one-shots).
The old tabletop game has been retired by the man who created it, Jordan Wiseman, but many of the talent behind the license’s development in the later years now work with a company called FanPro to continue it, while Wiseman’s Wizkids Games has a new tabletop game called MechWarrior: Dark Age (a miniature’s based war strategy game that’s affordable, requires no painting or assembly, and almost completely eliminates the need for pencil and paper! It’s really nice, except you can’t create your own units like you could in Battletech).
If you’re interested in the classic Battletech line, also check out Heavy Metal Labs, the private company of Rick Raisley, who developed various game aids (such as a Mech designer) that are so good the official game developers now use them (he’s credited in the Tech Readouts, whole books listing different mechs, their stats, and their history).
As for people’s other suggestions… You need to realize that there’s really two genres here: Realistic Robot, and Super Robot (to use he Japanese distinction). Realistic Robot, like Battletech, involves machines that behave as plausible, real-world machines with limitations, potential failures, need for maintenance, etc. These are usually war stories, also. Super Robot is shows like Voltron, Power Rangers, generally anything more toy-like, or where the machine more or less completely disregards the idea of being a machine, instead of an Item of Power. I’m not really into Super Robot, but if I had to suggest anything, I’d say that Voltron’s about as good as it gets (old Voltron, though, not the lame-ass computer-animated show from recent years).
Big O, which is fantastic, kind of straddles the line here; the machines fight like something out of a Godzilla movie, yet there is a weight, a gravitas, to them. They break-down and such. The show’s appeal to me had more to do with the amazingly well-done characterization and relationships, and the twilight zone-esque overall plot. It also has an interesting distinction for anime: the series was ended incomplete in Japan due to mediocre ratings, and it was Cartoon Network who paid Sunrise Studio to make a second season wrapping it all up. Hence, Big O is the first anime ever made primarily for a foreign audience (specifically the US). My only complaint with the show is that it has kind of a mind-bending, surreal final episode.
Gundam, of course, created the Realistic Robot genre. Literally. Back in 1979, it was absolutely groundbreaking in Japan. The license makes Star Trek look like a chump (~10 TV series so far!). Big thing here: the best shows are the old “UC” timeline (in the '90’s they began making new series, each of which exists in it’s own universe, US fans and Japanese fans have different terms for this). Hit up Mecha Anime HQ (googling MAHQ usually gets it as the first hit) and check out the anime reviews section to get an idea. As a fellow Battletech fan, I’d recommend either Zeta Gundam, or any of the miniseries set immediately around the original (08th MS Team, 0080, 0083). Please, please stay away from G Gundam (a parody series of Gundam and “tournament” anime) and SEED (a recent set of series that basically sell-out all the things fans loved about Gundam in favor of making it more generic anime).
Macross is fantastic. Inspired by Gundam, and itself the inspiration for Battletech (Wiseman originally used a number of Macross designs; see the Marauder, Rifleman, etc., for the visual design of Battlemechs), Macross is a top-notch “realistic robot” show. Robotech is the bastardized US dub version; it’s alright, but they had to make some dumb changes so they could rewrite two (completely unrelated) anime series as though they were follow-ups. “They” being Harmony Gold, who has stonewalled every effort to make an official English dub of Macross (I recommend getting the subtitled original, but if you can’t stand subtitles, Robotech will do).
Evangelion, and Escaflowne, are both good shows that are usually considered realistic robot, but blur the line a little. Eva’s fans hold a grudge, because the original series ending is terrible, and there are about 3 or 4 different movies with alternate endings. It’s an apocalyptic series set in the not-too-distant future, featuring a tremendous amount of philosophical messages and religious symbolism. It’s special-made to hook teenage boys, with lots of violence, a great deal of gunplay, and a milquetoast male lead who finds himself in one nearly sexual encounter after another with two very different girls his own age, and an older woman who is kind of like a big-sister/step-mother to him.
Escaflowne is a phenomenally well-made high-fantasy series where knights in shining armor fight in steampunk (anachronistic, impossible, but thematically appropriate technology) giant robots. It’s noted for it’s equal success with male and female audiences because of the way it balances a tragic war story and gallant swashbuckling adventure with a tender, well-crafted romance story. Since it came out the same year as Eva in Japan, and didn’t have the cocktease angle to sell it to US fans (in the early days of anime where that was the primary interest, and to heck with whether or not it would permanently give the genre a black eye) and therefore came out here much later, it’s been sorely overlooked. There’s an Escaflowne movie as well, but it’s basically a radically altered re-telling of the series. Escaflowne also has a phenomenal soundtrack, written by master composer and singer Yoko Kanno (in terms of both skill, and diverse styles, this woman has any big-name Hollywood composer beat; Cowboy Bebop, Escaflowne, Ghost in the Shell, Wolf’s Rain, etc.).
And of course, Transformers is an extended franchise of fun super robot-like shows. Personally, while the original series is more interesting overall, I prefer Beast Wars because the original series hasn’t aged very well. Beast Wars is very well-written after the first few episodes. It’s a sequel-series to the original show that’s connected in a very interesting way.
As for games, I would recommend the Zone of the Enders series (Playstation 2) for fast-paced, anime style super robot action; the Armored Core series (also Playstation 2) for in-depth realistic robot game play; MechWarrior 4 (it’s the only MW that works on PC right now); or Chromehounds for an Armored Core-like experience online (assuming you have Xbox360). Oh, and Front Mission 4 (Playstation 2) for a challenging, in-depth turn-based realistic robot game (tactical combat game, but I advise getting the strategy guide or using gamefaqs to give yourself a heads-up of what to expect before each battle).
PS. MAHQ is a prett good place to look up any anime giant-robot stuff. Also try wikipedia’s article on “Mecha,” a generic Japanese anime term that US fans usually use to refer specifically to giant robots.