Doozy Bots

Doozy Bots is an aborted animated television series made by Sunrise

Explanation
Doozy Bots was pitched at several American television industry shows in the early 1990s, with the aim of marketing the Gundam franchise in the United States. It was slated for a Fall 1991 release, but was never picked up. The show has been mentioned in passing throughout the online Gundam fan community for the last few years but awareness of the concept's existence was raised when one of the trailers for the show was posted on YouTube. The trailer is currently available on RetroJunk, however.

The show seemingly had no connection to Gundam beyond the use of SD Gundam designs for the robots. The story focused on a group of five heavily stereotyped sports playing high school students (a football player, a cheerleader, an overweight hockey goalie, a wheelchair bound black student and a skateboard using surfer). All five characters were in the science club ran by their school science teacher, the genius inventor Professor Doozy. Despite being a genius Doozy appears to have been rather absent minded and had to rely on the common sense of his daughter who served as his assistant. Doozy had been working on creating a series of rather short robots, who had rebelled and planned to take over the world and "rob the world of fun". They used a robot turkey who, when charged up with enough energy, could create new robot soldiers by laying gashapon eggs. In an effort to combat these villains, Doozy invented a machine which could transfer human intelligence into a robot body and back again, and he convinced his five students to take part. Other characters included Tag Along, a Gary Coleman-like younger brother and his Woody Allen-like friend Brandon, who served as comic relief characters. Eyewitness reports from the time also say the lead villain robot would have been the Sazabi from Char's Counterattack

Most agree that the show was likely not picked up due to an apparent failing of the Japanese creators to grasp American culture. Sticking the only lead black character in a wheelchair is seen as offensive, but becomes worse when it is revealed that his robot body is based on the Guntank (the only robot with wheels for movement instead of feet) and the heavy stereotyping of the main characters in general was not very appealing. The actual trailer itself presents the show as rather corny as well and makes several bold claims (most notably, the production is described as being 'beautifully animated'). Although the concept failed, minor elements of it resurfaced in the later Japan/America co-production Superior Defender Gundam Force

Robots Featured

Several robots from across the Gundam timeline were featured in the show, including the RX-78-2, Guncannon, a skateboarding and hangliding RGZ-91 Re-GZ, as well as a yellow MSM-07 Z'Gok, a MSN-03 Jagd Doga, and MS-09 Doms.

Links
* http://www.retrojunk.com/details_commercial/3219/

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See Also

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