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Ask about my Power Sword
Who needs an Abrams tank when you can have a 100-foot man-shaped robot with a glowing sword and a fist that fires off like a missile? There's no argument - fighting robots are just infinitely cooler than ordinary vehicles. Whatever their shape, though, they are all known as "mecha".
The "mecha", or "giant robot", concept is ubiquitous in Japanese pop culture, and is more than adequately represented in anime. Despite the name, the robots need not actually be "giant" - some are merely human-sized, and some even smaller. They range from the boomers and hardsuits of Bubblegum Crisis, to the Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann big enough to use galaxies as shuriken ( no, really!).
Surprisingly, they're not limited to high tech or rubber science settings, either. For example, Vision Of Escaflowne is high fantasy with magical mecha with Power Crystals, and Sakura Taisen is a 1920s Steam Punk setting with rare but powerful psi/magic talents.
Normally, the series just tries to ignore the elephant in the living room, namely, the fact that the humanoid forms are not particularly effective or efficient for combat, movement, or almost any other purpose to which they are assigned. When used in a series that involves magic or psi abilities, however, the mechas often seem to have a spiritual or supernatural link to their pilots, which suggests that they have a symbiotic relationship aided by their humanoid construction. Other series have come up with alternate solutions; Mobile Suit Gundam created an entire fictional branch of physics to explain it. The simplest one may be the one used in Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers - the idea that a mech is easier to pilot because it simply takes feedback from the pilot's own physical movements, thus allowing him to use millions of years of evolution's worth of fighting instincts to control his machine. (The line between mecha that actually follow their pilots' movements - " Powered Armor" - and mecha that are piloted using controls in a cockpit is thinner than one might at first think.) Naturally, this is an area where the Rule Of Cool applies frequently.
Please flee or be stepped on at your own expense.\\ -- Megatokyo
Teams of Humongous Mecha are traditionally piloted by a group of plucky kids or a mismatched band of misfit pilots who are all in love with the beautiful daughter or niece of the robots' designer. Either one of these may be a Five Man Band, and if they are, their robots will probably combine into one. Mech pilots have an alarmingly high likelihood of Falling Into The Cockpit.
A subcategory of mecha is the transforming mecha - robots, vehicles and equipment that unfold, rotate and shift parts of themselves to turn into other mechanical devices. Similarly, there are combining mecha - where several smaller robots or ships combine to produce a larger, far more powerful single mech. There are two distinct kinds of Humongous Mecha, the Real Robot and the Super Robot. Either kind, although the Super Robot is more likely, can be a Transforming Mecha or a Combining Mecha.
A series focused on Mecha as its main gimmick is called (appropriately) a Mecha Show. See A Mech By Any Other Name for the various names for mecha in fiction.
History of the trope:
Mythology as a whole is replete with artificial humans and similar automatons (eg. Talos, the great bronze automaton built by Hephaestus), but special mention goes to Hindu mythology. One of the three tasks the gods set to protect their elixir, the Amrita, was a robot with rotary saws for hands. No, I Am Not Making This Up.
Jumping forward over a millennium, the second earliest examples of the trope are the Martian tripods from War Of The Worlds. Wikipedia claims the Lensman novels of the 1930s contain the earliest example of the hardsuit/powered armour type. It is difficult to determine whether these depictions influenced later the later Japanese works at all.
The giant robot genre is considered to be the creation of Mitsuteru Yokoyama, creator of Tetsujin 28-go ( Gigantor) and Giant Robo ( Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot). Both of these featured the early trope of The Kid With The Remote Control. The genre was further defined and refined by Go Nagai. His Mazinger Z ( Tranzor Z in the United States) holds the distinction of being the very first piloted giant robot. In that series and others ( Getter Robo, UFO Robo Grendizer, etc.), Nagai singlehandedly invented nearly every classic trope of the Super Robot genre: the rocket-fist, the blazing sword, the amazing entrance from a secret launch bay, and the first transforming and combining robots.
Yoshiyuki Tomino ( Brave Raideen, Zambot 3, Combattler V) started out emulating Nagai. Wanting to write a serious war story but under contract to crank out robot anime, he finally said "let's watch both!" and created Mobile Suit Gundam, the first step toward the Real Robot subgenre. In its wake, such series as Dougram and VOTOMS refined the concept with robots that looked as though actual military people had designed and built them. Macross, in this context, was merely the first anime to come up with transforming robots that still looked like reasonable examples of military hardware.
For the interested, Here ◊ is an image with the relative sizes of most of the various Humongous Mecha throughout history - for obvious reasons, a certain recent one would not fit in there. Notice how the Super Robots are typically much larger than the Real Robots in the far lower left.
Examples:
Anime
- Tetsujin 28-Gou, or Gigantor as it's better known in North America, was probably the first "giant robot" anime imported to the United States. This black-and-white series was aired during the 1960s in many markets.
- Go Nagai's Mazinger Z defined the Super Robot as we know it, featuring, if not originating, many of the tropes that have come to be associated with the genre. The series, along with sequels Great Mazinger and UFO Robo Grendizer, have been aired worldwide.
- The Gundam metaseries more or less launched the Real Robot subgenre, and its dozen or so sequels, prequels, and Alternate Universes refined it perhaps more than any other series. The original series had Transforming and Combining Mecha, due to its Super Robot roots, but these were retconned out in the movies. Recently, Gundam SEED brought back Transforming Mecha, and its immediate sequel, Gundam SEED Destiny, features a new Combining Mecha, the modular-design Impulse Gundam.
- Super Dimension Fortress Macross features some of the earliest transforming mecha, with the Valkyrie jet/space fighters that could turn into humanoid robots and a hybrid semihumanoid/semijet ("gerwalk") form. The Macross itself was a huge spaceship that could rearrange itself into a pointlessly humanoid configuration.
- Gasaraki is a recent release which attempts (amidst an incomprehensible mass of mysticism) to show a "realistic" view of giant war robots in a contemporary setting. The "Tactical Armors" of Gasaraki are not much larger than a main battle tank, require extensive support squads, and can have their joints fouled by blowing sand.
- Full Metal Panic, like Gasaraki, attempts to show "realistic" robots in a "modern" setting, but is considerably more relaxed about what constitutes "realistic", not to mention much lighter-hearted. It also acknowledges that man-shaped robotic fighting machines are at the very least unlikely, but promptly handwaves the objection away with a mysterious source of ultra-advanced technology.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion superficially resembles a mecha show, but this is intentionally misleading; the show is in fact a post-modern Deconstruction of the giant robot genre, thoroughly shot through with dysfunctional characters caught on a depressing apocalyptic downslide ( not to mention the fact that said mecha, the Evas, are actually alive, and the robotic armor only allows the unwitting pilots and mostly unwitting scientists to restrain them).
- Parallel Trouble Adventure Dual gently parodies Evangelion and giant robots in general while still having an upbeat and entertaining plot. It features an Ordinary High School Student who gains The Unwanted Harem when he turns out to be the only male capable of operating a "Core Robot", an apparent Real Robot, but later updates to a Super Robot similar in appearance to the mecha of Escaflowne.
- Eureka Seven also uses mecha similiar to Evangelion, where the mecha are more than simple robots. The LFO and KLF units, as they are called, have a form of sky surfing applied to their operation. Additionally, the units are Transforming Mecha, as most can change into land vehicles.
- The immensely popular Martian Successor Nadesico not only features a battle mecha class called the "Aestivalis", but also incorporates a 1960s-style Super Robot anime called Gekiganger 3 as a Show Within A Show. "G3" is a clear homage to the early classic Getter Robo, and manages to hit all the classic melodramatic cliches of the genre.
- Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go! is about a kid and a bunch of robot monkeys who live in a Mecha.
- The popular Japanese franchise Sakura Taisen employs not-so-Humongous mecha (only about 10-12 feet tall), powered entirely by steam (and empowered by the pilots' psychospiritual ability, or "reiryoku"). The mecha fight demons and evil spirits who, in turn, pilot their own appropriately evil steam-powered robots. The franchise's mecha are entirely super, though, with a whole list of named super-moves and various highly improbable weapons, including a revolver, gun-barrel sword, and giant psychically animated teddy bears.
- Patlabor
- A recent example is Soukou No Strain, which, though it may not be what it seems, is certainly about mecha pilots.
- Utawarerumono has a nation composed of a religious minority who have giant mecha given to them by their god to defend themselves. Considering the rest of the world hasn't even invented gunpowder, this is probably overkill. Then again, their god is a psychotic nihilist.
- Tenchi Muyo! GXP: the main character Seina, already the captain of his own ship, finds a giant mecha in a late episode, and after using it to trash a few pirate landcruisers, decides, "Ships are great and all, but real men need giant robots!" His giant robot also looks suspiciously similar to one from another anime from the same creator.
- The leaders of the Nobuseri bandits in Samurai 7 are massive cyborgs, with swords the size of houses.
- In Gundam Wing, a bit of Lampshade Hanging goes on for the humongous mechas in the series where Lt. Noin explains that the advent of the mechas came about when the Alliance wanted a physically intimidating weapon.
- Sky Girls contains about every cliche in this trope, including Lolicon-like female pilots wearing extremely skin-tight and revealing g-suits.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann pushes the "humongous" part to ridiculous degrees. The last few episodes of the series feature increasingly giant power-ups to the titular robot, each one surpassing the last, culminating in Chouginga Gurren-Lagann, which is larger than the Moon, and finally Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann, which uses entire galaxies as stepping stones!
- Gunbuster and its sequel Diebuster have Mecha even more Humungous than most- Gunbuster is hundreds of meters tall, and Diebuster is approximately the same height as the Earth itself.
- The Xephon from Rah Xephon, although obviously and definitely not mechanical, follows many of the genre's tropes to a T.
- The Rune Gods in Magic Knight Rayearth take form of not just beastly creatures, but also Humongous Mecha based on those said creatures.
- This funnily creates a fan-wishing to include Magic Knight Rayearth in Super Robot Wars, despite the difference in theme of story. Well, who wouldn't want to see Rayearth teaming up with, say, Gao Gai Gar? This troper is actually one of them.
- Let's not forget all the Humongous Mecha that Team Rocket wields in the Pokemon anime. One has to wonder where they get the money for all those giant robots, considering that they're both deep in debt and far out of favor with their boss...
- In one episode (In the recent Diamond/Pearl series), it was noted that Team Rocket stole various parts from a factory, which they used to build that episode's mecha. That seems to help keep their expenses down.
- Played with in an episode of Wolf's Rain in which the wolves accidentally reawaken an ancient defensive mecha while making their way through a ruined city.
- The main villains in Scrapped Princess are capable of transforming into Humongous Mecha. They are forced to use power limiters to maintain a normal human guise until they are authorized to carry out their mission.
- Mecha are part of the central conflict in Code Geass. A one-sided war was won with them, and now they're being used to reclaim the country from The Empire.
- In Gad Guard, the mecha aren't piloted, per se. Rather, the person they "belong to" rides around on their shoulder, or some such. While some of them occasionally give their mechs orders (especially the villain), they tend to act on their own. In battle at least...
- The Armor Troopers from VOTOMS (Verticle One Man Tank for Offense and Maneuvers)are perhaps among the most perceivable humongous mecha in real life. They are no taller than 4 meters, do not transform, don't fly, and generally don't have any unique powers. They are more like bipedal tanks than anything else.
- Geneshaft has a very weird mecha, which looks more like a set of cranes welded together to vaguely resemble a human outline. It is also totally unclear why it should look remotely human anyway, given its function in the story.
- Funnily enough, Saber Marionette J parodies this when the Imperial Palace eventually transforms into a Giant Robot, who is then used to attack and stop a Giant Bomb.
- The Brave franchise is a series of mecha shows each starring a different Super Robot and their respective crews. They will often feature a pair of main characters, rather than a single one (usually a young boy and a grown man, who often serves as a big brother feature). By far the most famous of these is The King of Braves Gao Gai Gar, a series which managed to recapture the feel of fun and Hot bloodedness of mecha from the 70's amidst a wave of Darker And Edgier mecha series in the wake of Evangelion. Also had a sequel OVA a few years later which managed to be of better quality (especially the fight scenes!) than most series of its kind. And even that proved so popular it got a special edition just five years later, linking it to Betterman, a much different kind of mecha show from the same company.
- The Big O puts Victorian-looking giant robots in a creepy retro-future film noir setting reminiscient of recent Batman cartoons.
- Ramrod from Saber Rider And The Star Sheriffs
WesternAnimation
- Transformers and the various series showcase a Western version of the archetypical transforming mecha. It's especially notable because unlike the usual mecha show, there are no pilots or crew to be the stars - the mecha themselves are the stars, being sentient robots.
- It has been speculated that the on-and-off popularity of Transformers in Japan is because it lacks pilots or other very important human characters... usually. When annoying kids are put in, the American fanbase, which is much larger and more consistent, shudders.
- The Japanese versions of Transformers appear to support the theory that giant transforming robots without pilots are alien concepts in Japan. While the Western series give reasons for their alternate modes (disguise, protection from radiation, etc.), the Japanese series, such as Transformers Armada, generally disregard them-although, as the series exist to advertise toys, they transform anyway. This reached ridiculous heights in Transformers Energon, where the Transformers, capable of flying around in space in robot mode, transform and drive in space. I Am Not Making This Up.
- Voltron was, for a time, the best-known example in America. It was a Macekre of two fairly obscure shows, Go Lion (Lion Voltron) and Dairugger XV (Vehicle Voltron), along with some Lion Voltron episodes produced by Toei especially for the American market.
- Cartoon Network's Megas XLR is possibly the best Western parody, with an alien robot from the future crash-landing in a New Jersey junkyard, where the main character, Coop, buys it for two bucks...which he never actually pays.
- As another American example, Codename Kids Next Door had too many mecha count, probably because its creator is an anime fan. These are normally possessed by their enemies, especially the Delightful Children from Down the Lane, who have a seemingly inexhaustible supply. However, Numbuh Three (who is, incidentally, of Japanese descent) has her own mecha, Hippy Hop. Then again, Hippy Hop never seems to get the chance to do anything each time it's deployed.
- In one episode of South Park Chef's giant plasma TV transforms into a humongous mecha at the end and goes on the rampage.
- In another episode of South Park, Barbra Streisand transforms into a humongous mecha and goes on the rampage. However, it's not a not humanoid but a godzilla-like machine. The word 'mecha' is used in the episode to describe Ike, who's merely giant and not mechanical in any way.
- And who could forget when Brian Boitano traveled through time to the year 3010, fought the evil robot king and saved the human race again?
- Go Bots
- Futurama got in the act after Nixon got re-elected.
- The Batman builds a mecha suit in order to fight a Venom'd up Bane, and keeps it around just in case.
- Batman Beyond also had Bruce Wayne designing powerful cybernetic suits to offset his advancing age; the strain of working the largest of these damaged his heart and contributed to his retirement.
- And in the Crapsack World of the Kingdom Come series, an aged Batman fielding an entire army of computerized mecha is the reason why Gotham City, along with the Flash's Keystone City (constantly patrolled by the Flash at ultraspeed), are the only two really safe places for a normal human to live.
Web Comics
- Xuan, R2, and Sanna discover that their guardian is a mecha in this page of Between Two Worlds. Xuan then becomes the mecha's pilot.
- Webcomic subversion: In Mechagical Girl Lisa A.N.T, the A.N.T is a Humongous Mecha... for ants. To a human, it looks more like a Powered Armor.
- In Mega Tokyo, the police cataclysm division (which facilitates cataclysms like 'zilla, zombie, and alien attacks, as long as they are done in an orderly fashion) employs mecha. They turn out to be less effective than robot-girl Ping.
- In this Loserz strip. Just for fun, in this case.
- Sluggy Freelance parodies this a few times, most notably in the GOFOTRON arc
- Girl Genius has plenty of them, given that Sparks love to build stuff like that. In fact, the first time that Agatha is without her Restraining Bolt, she builds one out of spare engines and parts. It leads Baron Wulfenbach straight to her door.
Live Action TV
- In live-action, giant transforming and combining mecha have been a staple of the Super Sentai franchise since its third installment, Battle Fever J, having borrowed the concept from a live-action Japanese adaptation of Spider-Man. Yes, that Spider-Man.
- Later installments of the franchise (from Dinosaur Task Force Zyuranger onwards) would be adapted into Power Rangers.
Music
Manga
- Giant Robo is a descendant of a 1960s live-action series brought to the U.S. as Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot.
- Getter Robo
- Subverted in 20th Century Boys. The Big Bad, Friend, holds a robotics engineer hostage so that he can construct a fifty-foot giant mecha to use on the Bloody New Year's Eve. However, throughout the brainstorming process, the aformentioned engineer is on the verge of snapping because he can't get them to understand that a robot construted in such a way probably couldn't even stand, much less cause massive havoc and destruction.
Video Games
- A Humongous Mecha in the form of a giant monkey is used in an epic battle at the end of the fourth Monkey Island game. No, really.
- Xenogears and Xenosaga? Humongous Mecha for days. In some cases, there are battles against giant foes where the characters have to enter said mecha, or get stepped on.
- In Xenosaga, the Erde Keiser sidequest is a send-up of the more light-hearted Mecha shows (in a game that's more dark and serious).
- The Steel Kossack from early PSX videogame Krazy Ivan. As the trope description says, it approaches the line between Power Armor and this trope; the titular Ivan controls it by doing the actual movements himself. This one falls straight into this trope, however, as the Mecha is far larger than a human.
- Live A Live gives us Buriki Daioh, a giant ancient Babylonian giant robot. It appears in the Near Future chapter expressly for the purpose of stomping tanks, shooting lasers at airplanes, shooting missiles at larger airplane aircraft carriers, and punching an animated bird statue that is threatening to devour the world in a wave of liquefied human hate. I Am Not Making This Up (video game edition!)
- How could we forget the Super Robot Wars/Taisen games? For the most part, the series consists of crossovers from an astoundingly large number of Humongous Mecha anime, though not all in the same game, or even timeline. All games after the first have also included original creations, both Real and Super, such as the Elemental Lord Cybuster. The original creations then got their own crossover with each other in the Original Generation subseries.
- Metal Gear in all its stomping, nuke-launching incarnations. There's always a rationale (a missile platform which isn't limited to normal terrain) but the series makes light of the implausability anyway. Implicitly, as REX from MGS was designed by a brilliant but eccentric otaku, and the rest of the world has been caught in a REX-pirating arms race ever since. Explicitly in the prequel MGS 3 when the idea of a walking tank is openly derided.
- The fourth game even features a fight between Metal Gears, with Snake piloting REX from MGS1 against Liquid Ocelot in RAY from MGS2 This is the only time the Metal Gear series has actually allowed you to pilot a Metal Gear.
- Also of note is Hideo Kojima's Zone Of The Enders series, which plays it straighter.
- Sengoku Basara portrays mighty Sengoku general Honda Tadakatsu into a Humongous Mecha, so much he got nicknamed Hondam. No, really. I swear.
- The Giant of Babel (or Bab-Il, depending on the version) of Final Fantasy IV. The entire plot of the game, wherein the Big Bad's forces steal the elemental Crystals, was all performed so they could use the Crystals' power to send the Giant from the Moon, through the Tower of Babel, and to the surface of the Earth, whereupon it would raze the entire planet. Although scale is difficult to convey with super-deformed characters, it is implied that the Giant is several thousand feet tall.
- The various incarnations of Alexander in the Final Fantasy series seem to be built out of enormous castles which were then modified into mobile robots. The first iteration, in Final Fantasy VI, even has towers and smaller castles built on top.
- Not to be outdone, Dark Cloud 2 (also known as Dark Chronicle) also has a gigantic flying fortress, Paznos. Although it was only supposed to be a mobile battle station, Max and Monica's tampering with the timestream further allowed its creators to transform it into a humanoid mecha strong enough to catch, stop, and toss an equally-huge flying castle which was about to fall on top of a city.
- Two Words: Goemon Impact. People tend to remember him by his Image Song, which begins with a shout of "DA-DA-DASH!" (He's actually an alien that just happens to look like a robot. All righty, then...)
- Don't forget, of course, that Impact is also an international movie star that wears roller sandals and shoots bullets out his nose. No, really. And why, you ask?
- The One Must Fall video game series was designed as a fighting game where hundred-meter tall robots remote-controlled by people smacked the crap out of each other for profit.
- Star Craft has several Humongous Mecha:
- The Terrans have the odd but effective Goliath battle frame, about twice the height of a man and armed with autocannons (for ground attack) and missile launchers (for attacking air).
- Star Craft II replaces the Goliath with the Viking, which is a Transforming Mecha that can switch between a fighter craft for attacking air and a humanoid mecha for attacking ground. The Terrans also gain use of the hulking Thor, so big it can't be built in a factory but has to be assembled piece by piece by several SC Vs.
- The Protoss, meanwhile, had the extremely useful Reavers, giant worm-like mecha that spat powerful homing bombs called scarabs, and Dragoons, a cyborg created from the body of a critically-wounded Protoss warrior and a robotic shell.
- In Star Craft II, the Dragoons have been replaced by Immortals, very similar to Dragoons but with shields that can shrug off the most powerful attacks (but let much weaker attacks through), and further supplemented with the Stalker, the Dark Templar version of the Dragoon, which has a teleportation ability. Finally, the Protoss also gain the Colossus, a towering war machine so tall it can just step up and over terrain like cliffs. This is, in fact, a realistic downside: they can be attacked by units that can normally only attack air.
- The War Craft series gained Humongous Mecha with the third installment, which introduced large golems. The Frozen Throne, the expansion pack for War Craft III, introduced very large golems.
- The Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft also introduced the Fel Reaver, which is essentially a giant steampunk robot powered by demonic energy. And they are terrifying.
- Not to spoil anything but the Big Bad in Fallout: Tactics uses robots, including ones that qualify as Humongous Mecha.
- The mechs in the Crusader series of video games aren't humongous, per se, but they can get bigger than any human and pack some serious firepower. Also, the end boss of No Regret wears a battle suit that appears to be about ten feet tall.
- The Expanded Universe of Star Wars got its first original Humongous Mecha with the Dark Troopers in the first Dark Forces game. Jedi Outcast also introduced a new walking mech, not much bigger than a Wookiee, and one boss wears a lightsaber-resistant battle frame (as opposed to the high-level Reborn warriors wearing plain old lightsaber-resistant armor).
- Golems in the Infinity Engine games--Baldurs Gate II and so on--are pretty darn big, given the engine limitations.
- Mentioned below in the Tabletop section, but Mechwarrior and Heavy Gear fit this to a T. Especially when you're sitting pretty in an Atlas
- In Command And Conquer, GDI had plenty of mecha in Tiberian Sun, from the chaingun-toting Wolverine scout walkers, to the Titan walking tanks, to the Juggernaut walking artillery platforms, to the Mammoth Mk II, which sports railguns. C&C Tiberium Wars, on the other hand, was mostly a subversion: the Juggernaut was carried over, Nod got an Avatar walker, and the alien Scrin got a tripod straight out of The War Of The Worlds, but in-game fluff material mentioned how the factions were discontinuing walker production, because commandos kept running up and disabling the things with a well-placed explosive on a leg joint. Indeed, the factions' commando units can do just that in-game, taking down an enemy walker instantly. Meanwhile, Red Alert 3 introduces the "King Oni" mecha on the Japanese side and the official website data does some Lampshade Hanging on the concept, noting that it "flies in the face of decades of conventional mechanized warfare".
- How could you forget the mech warrior games
Comics
- X-Men has the Sentinels, mutant-hunting Humongous Mecha. They started out small (when compared to Evangelion, Super Sentai, etc.) but worked their way up to standard mecha size. Much worse (in terms of design impracticality) is that they were created in a "Master Mold," which is actually a much larger Sentinel. Since AI Is A Crapshoot, Sentinels are known for getting out of their creators' hands in short order (Especially Master Molds, Sentinel-shaped factories which wouldn't need any decision-making ability.) It seems the government types finally learned their lesson, because lately, Sentinels tend to be standard Humongous Mecha - Sentinel-shaped vehicles piloted by humans.
- Does anyone remember First Comics' Dynamo Joe? (Sometimes scripted by Phil Foglio.)
- The BGY-11 of Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot is secretly a humongous mecha; the world at large and Rusty in particular assume that it is a sentient robot, and maintaining this secret complicates several episodes.
- Back when Marvel had licenced Godzilla as a character, they also created the Red Ronin giant robot to fight him. Godzilla has faded away from the Marvel Universe, but the Red Ronin still shows up. Occasionally.
- In Earth X, Tony Stark has secretly redesigned the Red Ronin into a Transforming Mecha that spends most of its time as his "Iron Avenger" factory. We don't know this till the end of the story (making Tony appear to be a useless recluse), when he pilots it into battle against the even larger Celestials, who are energy being versions of the same--their energy bodies need Humongous Mecha to give them shape.
- Marvel also, for a short time, ran a Shogun Warriors comic, featuring the Super Robots Combattler V, Brave Raideen, and Dangard Ace
Film
- Spaceballs has Spaceball One/Mega Maid, which is apparently so big it can take the entire atmosphere of a planet. It is also a Transforming Mecha.
- The Star Wars AT-ST's (chickenwalkers) and the AT-AT's are among the most visually distinctive mecha in popular culture.
- The ease with which the Imperial Walkers are defeated demonstrates the impracticality of the whole concept. Darth Vader should remote-strangle the whole R&D team. There's a reason why real-life tanks are built with as low a profile and as low a center of gravity as possible.
- Two Words: Mecha-Godzilla.
Table Top Games
- The classic western Humongous Mecha RPG is Mech Warrior, the role-playing side of the Battle Tech tactical miniature games. They feature everything from 3-meter tall battle frames to hulking 25-meter tall Humongous Mecha, and even had Transforming Mecha before their uncanny similarity of those models to Robotech's more famous mecha was noticed.
- Possibly the weirdest Humongous Mecha RPG is the Steampunk/Magitek crossover Dragon Mech.
- Exalted's Warstriders.
- Every race in Warhammer 40000 has at least one type of giant mech, though the Tyranids' uses Organic Technology; the sizes grow from Space Marine Dreadnoughts and Tau Battlesuits about thrice as tall as a man to at least 150 foot tall (the accounts contradict each other; some claim the heights go all the way up to 2km) Emperor-class Titans mounting cathedrals, housing a full company of troops in their legs and able to pull ground-to-orbit duty against enemy spaceships.
- Even Dungeons And Dragons gets in on the act with the Eberron campaign setting. The warforged are a playable race. Their "ancestors"--or more accurately, prototypes--called warforged juggernauts, are not.
- Some golems can get pretty humongous, as well, in particular the iron, mithral, and adamantine golems. However, the biggest autonomous constructs are undoubtedly the colossi, 100-foot tall humanoids of stitched flesh, hewn stone, or cast iron, only ever created by the mightiest wizards.
- Heavy Gear, which features smaller robots than Battle Tech's average, but which are definitely more than just body armor.
- Rifts features several different varieties, though ironically enough the most powerful of these, the Glitter Boy, is essentially overpowered power armour.
- GURPS Mecha gives players the wherewithal to design and build just about any of the above concepts. Of course, this troper (having tried just that) finds that doing this results in a quite startling mix of Tech Levels for any but the simplest battlesuit (quick note: GURPS Mecha defines a "battlesuit" as powered armour where the pilot's arms and legs extend into the suit's arms and legs. A "mecha" is piloted from a cockpit. So the Iron Man armour is a battlesuit, while an AT-AT is a mecha).
Commercials
- Several advertisements for the Citroën C4 feature the car transforming into a Humongous Mecha.
Literature
- Empire, by Orson Scott Card.
- The Star Wars Expanded Universe, again, features lots of big walking war machines aside from the AT-AT and AT-ST models.
- Subverted in the webfiction Whateley Universe. Since real-world physics actually prevails there (as much as possible), the kids known at Super Hero School Whateley Academy as the Robo-Jox have been trying to build one, but they can't get it to walk yet because of the real problems a 90-foot high robot man would have.
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◊ is an image with the relative sizes of most of the various Humongous Mecha throughout history - for obvious reasons, a certain recent one would not fit in there. Notice how the Super Robots are typically much larger than the Real Robots in the far lower left.
