Before Mecha
Mecha on the Battlefield
Western Invasion
Assimilation
The Present
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Machine Evolution
The Advent of Mazinger
On the Eastern side of the world, super robots, created by eccentric inventors as crime-fighting
automata, were fast becoming popular characters in Japanese manga.Seeking to differentiate itself from the horde of giant robot stories, Go Nagai's Mazinger Z (1969) introduced the concept of the piloted robot. Putting a real human pilot (as if it were a tank) inside the mecha, rather than outside the mecha barking orders and cheering the robot in, served to heighten the tension of the story.
The successful formula was widely imitated by a number of "super mecha" stories. Variations soon appeared, in the form of robots that transformed and robots that broke into separate component parts (likely influenced by toy manufacturers). But because the influences of that first series persisted, features of the story became standard in the genre (e.g. the pilot is usually the teenage offspring of a robot inventor), and Mazinger Z continues to be considered the definitive super mecha story.