Over the years, Dougram’s influence has been felt very keenly in things like anime and especially video games and many don’t realize that this is in fact the origin for the modern realistic depiction of mecha.Īs you’d expect, Dougram had many toys and kits made for it, with the original Takara Dual Model toys being still hotly coveted by fans in Japan. From things such as having a cockpit canopy in the head as well as detachable armor and hardpoints for weapons meant the Dougram was an ideal candidate to create a rule set for BattleTech to operate within. These early designs are now known as the Unseen and the Dougram, called the Shadow Hawk (shown above), was one of the earliest mecha used in BattleTech. The original Dougram (left) and the Shadow Hawk from BattleTech and MechWarrior (right). In that sense, I think Okawara wanted to take the next step and make the mecha itself more realistic according to the story. As long as it was a humanoid fighting mecha it didn't really need a human styled face. So I assume that after doing Gundam, Okawara didn't want to design something with a face. It still had a semblance of a face after all.
However, while the premise was more realistic the design of the Gundam itself wasn't really updated to match that approach. Gundam changed all that and showed how mecha should be manufactured and how they would be used in an actual war. So that was the basic story premise for shows like that back then and there were obviously a lot of shows in that vein other than Mazinger Z.
Before that it was all super robots like Mazinger Z, where this one genius professor makes this invincible mecha and out of nowhere bad guys turn up that want to conquer the world. So it was generally set around a realistic basis. In addition, the war was between two clear factions.
This was the first story in anime that showed how the mecha were manufactured and on what basis they were made, specifically that they were built for war and made in a factory. While I haven't discussed this with Okawara, I assume that he did that because before Dougram he was working on Mobile Suit Gundam. I think it's also probably the first mecha not to have a face. The Dougram didn't have a face, it only had a cockpit. Last year I was lucky enough to interview the writer and director Ryosuke Takahashi, as Fang of the Sun Dougram was one of his formative works as a director, and he talked at great length about how the realism helped shaped the show:
#Battletech toys series#
This in turn created a new wave of other realistic mecha anime, with series like Armored Trooper VOTOMS being a good example what followed. While Dougram was by no means the first real robot anime of its kind, as Mobile Suit Gundam is arguably a far better starting point for that, the series was much more realistic than others of that era.
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