Lightspeed Electroid Albegas aired from March 30 1983 until February 8 1984 on TV Tokyo Wednesdays at the oddly specific time of 5:55pm. This Toei robot anime show filled the time slot formerly occupied by Toei’s Dairugger XV, aka “the Voltron with the cars”. Both Dairugger and Golion, aka the “Voltron with the lions”, were sort of experiments for Toei, trying to move past the now-standard super robot, science center, alien invaders, youths burning with the fires of justice cliches. And Albegas… features super robots piloted from a science center by justice-seeking teens battling alien invaders. Maybe Toei’s experiment didn’t work out? TV Tokyo would replace Albegas with Wako’s fox anime “Cry Of The Wild” and next season the slot would, for some reason, feature reruns of Knack’s Manga Sarutobi Sasuke, aka Ninja The Wonder Boy. Much of the staff from Albegas would carry over into Toei’s next robot anime Laserion, a TBS show.
But let’s get dimension, already. Lightspeed Electroid Albegas stars hero boy Daisaku Enjoji, moody loner Tetsuya Jin and teen miss Hotaru Mizuki, three top robotics students at the elite Aoba Academy private high school, where the students learn robotics along with literature and math. All three win the school robot olympics with their Alpha, Beta, and Gamma robots, just in time for Earth to be attacked by the Dellinger Corps. Led by the Great Deran, the Dellinger are an advanced race from beyond the stars, against whose mechanical monsters Earth’s military is powerless. Even the Aoba Academy champs can’t stop the invasion. That’s why the three break into the Robot Center research facility run by Hotaru’s father Professor Mizuki and try to upgrade their robots with the Center’s advanced technology.
As it turns out Dr. Mizuki was conveniently working on a plan for three super robots that would be able to utilize extradimensional power and combine into six different configurations, and when our three heroes shout “Get Dimension!” they find themselves piloting Albegas.
Combining Daisaku’s black Alpha robot, Tetsuya’s blue Beta robot, and Hotaru’s red Gamma robot - Al(pha), Be(ta), Ga(mma), get it? - Albegas can become the Denjin Dimension, Magma Dimension, Marine Dimension, Space Dimension, Sky Dimension, Rescue or Guard Dimension depending on which robot is where when the transformation sequence starts. Since the Alpha, Beta, and Gamma already look pretty similar, it takes a sharp eyed viewer to really distinguish between the six different possible combinations. I guess this saved the toy designers some headaches, but it doesn’t make for visually engaging mecha.
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| various Dellingers |
The evil Dellinger Empire - referencing 70s rock icon Rick Derringer, maybe - is led by the Great Deran, perhaps named after folk rock icon Bob Dylan. After all, both are immensely powerful mysterious beings whose true motives are unknown. Sadly the rest of Dellinger’s hordes of space mutants are armored lumps with non-musical names like General Duston, Catastra Commander, the wise staff chief Dime, the female-coded Mirror Zero, and midshow replacements like New Generalissimo Bios and the crab-armor General Dali. Most Dellinger are characterized by hoods or masks or some other face covering that saves animators the trouble of animating mouth movements, and this includes their “Reploid” masked goons, who carry out vital tokusatsu-sentai show masked goon villainy every episode. Of course their inevitable defeat requires Dellinger to unleash that week’s giant Mecha Fighter, in the hopes that this Mecha Fighter, unlike all the previous Mecha Fighters, will finally defeat Albegas. Dream on, losers.
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| Mecha Fighter Jazz Hands |
Albegas leader Daisaku Enjoji could be any one of dozens of robot anime heroes, a regular teen who loves justice and is great with robots and computers but hates studying and schoolwork, which is why he gets a harsh after-school tutor who turns out to be a Dellinger spy. Daisaku is athletic and popular with the girls, but he’s also required to deliver goofs, blunders, and juvenile lechery, when he isn’t being hassled by his kid brother Jiro and little sister Natsuko, or being disciplined by his blue-collar dad. Of course since Daisaku is the hero, he delivers every episode’s finishing blow with his Denjin Sanbei Sword.
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| Daisaku and Miss Danko |
Tetsuya Jin holds down the “moody loner” position on the team, moody for many reasons, but mostly because because he gets accused of ransacking the school (a Dellinger plot), because he’s an orphan whose only relative is a doctor on a far away island where a local girl gets promised to Tetsuya in marriage (also a Dellinger plot), and also because the girl he actually has feelings for turns out to be the daughter of a Dellinger general as part of yet another Dellinger plot.
Voiced by Hiromi Tsuru (Jodie Foster’s voice in the Japanese version of “Bugsy Malone”), tomboy Hotaru Mizuki is the daughter of the professor responsible for our super robots. She’s the idol of the Aoba School, athletic, brainy, and attractive, but not smart enough to spot Dellinger plots, like for instance when they impersonate her long-dead mother. Aside from defending the Earth, Hotaru’s biggest problem is dealing with the unwanted attentions of classmate Goro, when she isn’t encouraging her dad’s relationship with his assistant Saeko.
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| Professor Mizuki and Saeko |
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| Goro and his Gori-Robo |
Goro Kumai is this show’s Big Moose, a giant goof so jealous of Albegas that he builds his own super robot out of scrap, and so smitten with Hotaru that sometimes viewers will find themselves wondering if they should file a restraining order. Reminded of “Boss” from Mazinger Z? You sure are. Goro’s gorilla-esque Gori-Robo lumbers out to get its robotic ass smacked down by Mecha-Fighter after Mecha-Fighter, episode after episode, but Goro never gives up. Extra comedy relief comes courtesy their homeroom teacher Miss Danko, whose size and demeanor gives Albegas scripters a chance to use up all the fatphobic, misogynist cringe they had left over from the 1970s.
If the “Tetsuya falls in love with an alien girl” plotline feels Acrobunch-adjacent, well, don’t be surprised, Albegas character designer Shigenori Kageyama worked on both shows. Albegas also had mechanical design by Koichi (MD Geist) Ohata, and screenwriter Shozo Uehara worked on hundreds of tokusatsu and sentai series episodes, which might explain the “monster of the week” pattern Albegas adopts early on. Every week some Dellinger infiltrates in disguise, every week their heinous plot is uncovered, every week the Dellinger unleash a giant, havoc-wreaking mechanical beast, which every week is defeated by Lightspeed Electroid Albegas, after another replay of any one or two or six of six different transformation sequences.
Albegas walks a line between super robot drama and high school comedy, and it’s when the show gives in and lets itself be funny that Albegas really entertains. There’s a New Year’s party episode where the heroes and villains relax and enjoy themselves while also conniving to sabotage each other, and the results are surprisingly fun. There’s a story arc involving General Dali and how his daughter Julia sneaks off to Earth to enjoy regular teen life that ends in tragedy and remains an important story point for the rest of the show, including a convoluted yet touching episode where Daisaku’s confused little sister decides she’s really an adopted Dellinger and that General Dali is her real father. At times the series is extremely culturally Japanese, with episodes involving Japanese holidays, traditional Japanese theater, and one built around the folk horror legend of the murdering innkeepers, who are, of course, Dellinger aliens in disguise.
Albegas was originally planned to be syndicated on American television as part of World Events Productions’ Voltron series, which, as we all know, was built out of King Of Beasts Golion and Armored Fleet Dairugger XV. The story is that WEP saw the positive audience reaction to their Lion Voltron segments and instead of dubbing Albegas, they simply subcontracted for more episodes starring the Voltron Force. However, after watching Albegas, I’m unsure as to how well the series would have fit into the Voltron aesthetic. After two shows full of cosmic adventure, the largely Earth-bound high school hijinks of Albegas would be a definite tonal shift, and handling the cultural Japanese elements would be challenging. I don’t know how WEP would have localized the show for ‘80s TV, but I’m sure the results would have been amusing.
On the whole it’s not hard to see why WEP took a pass on Albegas. The show is dank, the color palette is muted, there are a lot of greys and dull greens and browns, and the animation is utilitarian at best. A lot of anime from this period will have an episode or a sequence that really stands out, where somebody like Yoshinori Kanada would be unleashed for three or four minutes to really show off and blow our minds, but that’s not happening in Albegas. This show’s animation is all subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, the sort of clumsy, outsourced, by the numbers, get it done already look shared with dozens of contemporaneous productions. By no means is this an artistic achievement to be lauded, but… if you were an American anime fan in this period and you’d been seeking out anime on cable and UHF and in the kiddie section of the local video rental, you’d recognize this sort of budget-type dollar-store generic animation instantly, having seen it everywhere from episodes of GI Joe and Transformers to whatever super robots were hiding on discount public-domain VHS. This animation is as 80s as any Pac-Man video game or Duran Duran LP or Members Only jacket. Maybe we shouldn’t be nostalgic for a bad rack zoom or an inept walk cycle, but we are. Deal with it.
Just to change things up, Albegas’s final episode features some fun, nicely animated first-person sequences as our heroes zoom through extradimensional space to confront the Great Deran. Yes, the evil aliens and their plot to take over the Earth is defeated, in case you were wondering. These climactic sequences bring to mind 80s first-person shooter video games. Well, by a strange coincidence, Albegas was in fact the basis for a Sega laserdisc video game, titled “Albegas” in Japan and “Cybernaut” in the United States, if it ever made it to the United States, that is. Details are sketchy.
Albegas did appear in the US as “Voltron II The Deluxe Gladiator Set” from Matchbox, which seems to be a repack of Popy’s GC-04 DX Albegas, a toy I wish I’d bought when it was on clearance at K-Mart. With my employee discount it probably would have set me back a whole eight dollars. The DX combination process gives us an Albegas with three sets of arms, an altogether more interesting look than what we got on the TV.
Early in the Albegas series our heroes each have personal commuter-type jet planes that are used to dock with their Alpha, Beta, and Gamma robots. Episode 14 delivers an extremely toyetic upgrade in the form of the New Jet Alpha, Beta and Gamma, each transformable into vaguely robotic forms, and that can combine into the Super Abega and become a Godaikin toy for sale at better toy stores everywhere in the 1980s.
For my part, I first saw Albegas on the shelves as a “Voltron II” in that K-Mart toy department. It would be a few years before I’d first see animated Albegas as one of dozens of anime openings on a tape of anime opening credits, courtesy some fan somewhere with two VCRs, a slew of TV episodes from different shows, and a desire to build a mixtape of OP and ED sequences. That’s where Albegas first hit my eyeballs, Mojo and Korogi ‘73 belting out the catchy theme song that starts off chanting “Gan-gan-gan” before asking us to “get dimension” and “scramble go,” one more colorful high-energy anime OP in among forty or fifty other colorful high-energy robot anime OPs. It’s easy to see where Albegas would be overlooked in a Japanese TV schedule that included Urusei Yatsura, Dr Slump, Tokemeki Tonight, Sasuraiger, Votoms, Dunbine, Orguss, Prowres Sanshiro, Cat’s Eye, and Kinnikuman. American anime fandom in the mid 1980s was too busy drawing Dirty Pair fan artwork and writing extensive Zeta Gundam episode guides to worry about combination robots from two or three seasons ago. But speaking for myself, decades later I’d be throwing down cold hard cash for a Blu-Ray of Albegas, purely on the strength of that opening credit sequence.
Yes, Discotek Media continues their crusade to release the unexpected and brought Albegas to North American home video in a standard-def Blu-Ray disc containing all 45 episodes with English subtitles. You might wonder about video quality with so many episodes stuffed onto one disc, but the show looks fine. In fact higher resolution might not do this show any favors; the show isn’t visually striking or particularly well animated, and seeing it in UHD 4K would only highlight those imperfections. Personally, I’m kind of jazzed that we’re finally getting the full 80s anime experience; not just expensive films and beloved TV series, but also the kind of forgettable programmers that filled time slots and toy store shelves, that caught and held the attention of viewers just long enough to be replaced with next year’s new show. Maybe there’s some version of the world where American kids watched a renamed Daisaku, Tetsuya and Hotaru battle whatever WEP would call the Dellinger in however many episodes survived the standards and practices cuts and were retitled “Gladiator Force Voltron.” But the get dimension we got, where we can enjoy the original and think about what might have been, well, that’s OK too. Now tell Goro to get lost, there’s scramble go lightspeed electroids to combine!
-Dave Merrill
Thanks for reading Let's Anime! If you enjoyed it and want to show your appreciation for what we do here as part of the Mister Kitty Dot Net world, please consider joining our Patreon!
If the “Tetsuya falls in love with an alien girl” plotline feels Acrobunch-adjacent, well, don’t be surprised, Albegas character designer Shigenori Kageyama worked on both shows. Albegas also had mechanical design by Koichi (MD Geist) Ohata, and screenwriter Shozo Uehara worked on hundreds of tokusatsu and sentai series episodes, which might explain the “monster of the week” pattern Albegas adopts early on. Every week some Dellinger infiltrates in disguise, every week their heinous plot is uncovered, every week the Dellinger unleash a giant, havoc-wreaking mechanical beast, which every week is defeated by Lightspeed Electroid Albegas, after another replay of any one or two or six of six different transformation sequences.
Albegas walks a line between super robot drama and high school comedy, and it’s when the show gives in and lets itself be funny that Albegas really entertains. There’s a New Year’s party episode where the heroes and villains relax and enjoy themselves while also conniving to sabotage each other, and the results are surprisingly fun. There’s a story arc involving General Dali and how his daughter Julia sneaks off to Earth to enjoy regular teen life that ends in tragedy and remains an important story point for the rest of the show, including a convoluted yet touching episode where Daisaku’s confused little sister decides she’s really an adopted Dellinger and that General Dali is her real father. At times the series is extremely culturally Japanese, with episodes involving Japanese holidays, traditional Japanese theater, and one built around the folk horror legend of the murdering innkeepers, who are, of course, Dellinger aliens in disguise.
 |
| our hero |
Albegas was originally planned to be syndicated on American television as part of World Events Productions’ Voltron series, which, as we all know, was built out of King Of Beasts Golion and Armored Fleet Dairugger XV. The story is that WEP saw the positive audience reaction to their Lion Voltron segments and instead of dubbing Albegas, they simply subcontracted for more episodes starring the Voltron Force. However, after watching Albegas, I’m unsure as to how well the series would have fit into the Voltron aesthetic. After two shows full of cosmic adventure, the largely Earth-bound high school hijinks of Albegas would be a definite tonal shift, and handling the cultural Japanese elements would be challenging. I don’t know how WEP would have localized the show for ‘80s TV, but I’m sure the results would have been amusing.
On the whole it’s not hard to see why WEP took a pass on Albegas. The show is dank, the color palette is muted, there are a lot of greys and dull greens and browns, and the animation is utilitarian at best. A lot of anime from this period will have an episode or a sequence that really stands out, where somebody like Yoshinori Kanada would be unleashed for three or four minutes to really show off and blow our minds, but that’s not happening in Albegas. This show’s animation is all subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, the sort of clumsy, outsourced, by the numbers, get it done already look shared with dozens of contemporaneous productions. By no means is this an artistic achievement to be lauded, but… if you were an American anime fan in this period and you’d been seeking out anime on cable and UHF and in the kiddie section of the local video rental, you’d recognize this sort of budget-type dollar-store generic animation instantly, having seen it everywhere from episodes of GI Joe and Transformers to whatever super robots were hiding on discount public-domain VHS. This animation is as 80s as any Pac-Man video game or Duran Duran LP or Members Only jacket. Maybe we shouldn’t be nostalgic for a bad rack zoom or an inept walk cycle, but we are. Deal with it.
 |
| things get more animated in the last episode |
Just to change things up, Albegas’s final episode features some fun, nicely animated first-person sequences as our heroes zoom through extradimensional space to confront the Great Deran. Yes, the evil aliens and their plot to take over the Earth is defeated, in case you were wondering. These climactic sequences bring to mind 80s first-person shooter video games. Well, by a strange coincidence, Albegas was in fact the basis for a Sega laserdisc video game, titled “Albegas” in Japan and “Cybernaut” in the United States, if it ever made it to the United States, that is. Details are sketchy.
Albegas did appear in the US as “Voltron II The Deluxe Gladiator Set” from Matchbox, which seems to be a repack of Popy’s GC-04 DX Albegas, a toy I wish I’d bought when it was on clearance at K-Mart. With my employee discount it probably would have set me back a whole eight dollars. The DX combination process gives us an Albegas with three sets of arms, an altogether more interesting look than what we got on the TV.
Early in the Albegas series our heroes each have personal commuter-type jet planes that are used to dock with their Alpha, Beta, and Gamma robots. Episode 14 delivers an extremely toyetic upgrade in the form of the New Jet Alpha, Beta and Gamma, each transformable into vaguely robotic forms, and that can combine into the Super Abega and become a Godaikin toy for sale at better toy stores everywhere in the 1980s.
For my part, I first saw Albegas on the shelves as a “Voltron II” in that K-Mart toy department. It would be a few years before I’d first see animated Albegas as one of dozens of anime openings on a tape of anime opening credits, courtesy some fan somewhere with two VCRs, a slew of TV episodes from different shows, and a desire to build a mixtape of OP and ED sequences. That’s where Albegas first hit my eyeballs, Mojo and Korogi ‘73 belting out the catchy theme song that starts off chanting “Gan-gan-gan” before asking us to “get dimension” and “scramble go,” one more colorful high-energy anime OP in among forty or fifty other colorful high-energy robot anime OPs. It’s easy to see where Albegas would be overlooked in a Japanese TV schedule that included Urusei Yatsura, Dr Slump, Tokemeki Tonight, Sasuraiger, Votoms, Dunbine, Orguss, Prowres Sanshiro, Cat’s Eye, and Kinnikuman. American anime fandom in the mid 1980s was too busy drawing Dirty Pair fan artwork and writing extensive Zeta Gundam episode guides to worry about combination robots from two or three seasons ago. But speaking for myself, decades later I’d be throwing down cold hard cash for a Blu-Ray of Albegas, purely on the strength of that opening credit sequence.
-Dave Merrill
Thanks for reading Let's Anime! If you enjoyed it and want to show your appreciation for what we do here as part of the Mister Kitty Dot Net world, please consider joining our Patreon!
