It's 'Voltron', 'Ultraman' and 'The Power Rangers' Thrown In A Blender For 5432 Film's "Megabot"

Written By: Ken Hulsey
Sources: Geek To Me / Megabot Website

I really think that most people really under appreciate the amount of influence Japanese sci fi series like, "Ultraman", "Gundam", "Voltron", "The Power Rangers" (actually 'Super Sentai' in Japan), Gamera, and of course, the Godzilla films have had on American pop-culture. Film makers these days are making their own homages to these often underground, and often misunderstood, Japanese characters hand over fist as of late.

One has to look no further than 5432 Films latest production, "Megabot", to see just how much all this Japanese entertainment has permeated our very soul. Well, all you have to do is look at my office wall, with all the Bandai figures and Godzilla movie posters, to see just how much it has had an impact on me anyway.

"Megabot" is the brainchild of writer Micah Fitzerman-Blue, directers Nathan Kitada, Aaron Umetani and producer Jonako Donley. Of course, the series, which recently premiered as a webisode at Atom.com, is spoof, but as we all know, satire is the purest form of flatery.

Writer Fitzerman-Blue explains in a recent interview at the 'Geek to Me' blog on the Chicago Now website, "...the idea (for 'Megabot'), a lot of our sensibilities come from Saturday morning cartoons and video games just gone horribly wrong.

So we're big fans of Voltron and we watched over our little sister and brother's shoulders as they got into the 'Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers' and we thought 'here is a great opportunity just to kind of skewer it. And we just started talking and you know on one of our endless kind of 'neo-meetings.' (We asked) what would happen if these hand-picked, multi-ethnic ideal American teenagers, who were lucky enough to fight crime in a big robot, um, what if they just kind of kept doing it? And what if the stakes didn't really change? What if the problems of a quarter-life crisis, what if they sort of began to creep in? And that's were we started thinking 'Bots was going to be a hilarious little web-series.

So what we did is reach out to our friends at Cherry Sky Films. Cherry Sky is an independent film company and we decided to ask them if they would give us the financing to turn a whole season out. So we shot five episodes and they said 'yes' graciously. We cut it and did a lot of post-production. You'll notice on our 'gag reel' on YouTube that it was all shot on green screen, we did that later. And then we found a home for it on Atom.com."

"Megabot" stars television actors, Fran Kranz and Miles Fisher, journalist/comedian, Heather Anne Campbell, reality TV star, Randall Park, up-and-coming movie actor, Giovanni Adams and the voice talents of stand-up comedian Jonathan Oliver.

Here is the plot:

Seven years ago, five attractive, multi-ethnic students from Anytown High discovered mystical PowerSleeves. United, the PowerSleeves control MegaBot, a colossal crime-fighting robot, designed by Lord Galgon, who must defend Earth from BioBorg invasion, week after week...

"Megabot" is a great spoof of all the stuff, we Generation X types grew up with. Just one warning though, the series does contain a lot of 'colorful' language which may not be suitable for younger fans. Amazingly enough, I kinda envision that this is how the members of the "Voltron" team would have actually talked to each other in real life.

Here is the trailer, plus a special 'gag reel', for "Megabot":