The big guy with the pincers is Pluto (Bruton in the dub), who was sent out by his creator to kill the seven most powerful robots on earth. Including Astro. Which would make him the most powerful robot on Earth.
[spoiler]Astro was the only survivor, mostly because Pluto had developed a soft spot for his sister, Uran, IIRC.
The laser-proof robot (Zeron in the dub) had a particularly laughable end, honestly.[/spoiler]
Recently, a manga called Pluto was released, which retells the story as a murder mystery. (In an alternate universe, which gives Pluto a slightly different motive, makes several of the robots more human - basically everyone but Pluto, Montblanc, and the buttlerbot - and makes a couple other changes.) It’s currently being released by Viz, and it very good.
You’ve actually conflated at least two of the robots with this one - there were two large robots, other than Pluto: Montblanc, the mountaineer, and Brando (possibly spelt Brawndo) the robo-wrestler. Neither of whom was noted as solar powered. The solar powered robot was the human-size, and quite delicate looking, Aussie nannybot - I’ve never been able to figure out just what his name was in the dub - either Voltar or Photar would be my guess.
Sorry to double post, but I’m sure it is Astroboy you’re thinking of, and I’ve dug up some more info on it. It was a double episode The Greatest Robot in the World (Part 1 & 2)
The evil robot, who was called Bruton, was a massive blue fellow with big horns on his head (not pincers), although he could move the horns about a bit to almost act like a set of pincers I guess.
The gold plated guy was called Zeron, he was German, and the gold plated made him immune to lasers.
There was solar powered robot called Photar, who lived within sight of Ayers Rock at a child care centre :dubious:. He wasn’t a giant robot though? There were at least a couple of other giant robots in the show though that Bruton kills.
The summary was Bruton was made and programmed (by an oil shiek or similiar IIRC) to track down and kill the 10 most powerful robots on earth so as to become The Greatest Robot in the World.
It’s widely regarded as one of the best episodes in the 1980’s Astroboy cartoon series.
Thank you, both of you. The additional details Tengu provided match up with a few other things I remember (Astro Boy’s sister, Zeron’s end), so it looks like that’s certainly it.
BTW, I’m just going to pimp Pluto again, by pointing out some interesting trivia - it’s done by Naoki Urusawa, the creator of, among other things, Monster. Which, like Astro Boy, features a character named Dr Tenma.
The main character of Pluto (at least the first several volumes…I’ve seen references which suggest that it switches at some point later than I’ve gotten to) is Gesicht, the detective robot. Atom (Astro) has a fairly minor roll.