As I’ve mentioned before, the late ’90s were a rather sparse era for properly Burning robot shows. This wasn’t just a wasteland for musical cheese, though. It was a result of the marketing juggernaut known as Neon Genesis Evangelion and the quest for the quick buck.

Eva had an effect on the anime industry that was very much the same as the effect Watchmen had on the comics industry and The Lord of the Rings had on Hollywood. It was so popular, so critically well-received, and most importantly, so hand-over-fist profitable that other companies fell over themselves to imitate it and make “the next Evangelion.”

The time period that followed was quite accurately described to me back in 2000, when I spoke to a member of the GONZO staff (this was right after they made Blue Submarine no. 6) at Anime Expo. He said to me, “Everyone wants to be the next Eva. So nothing makes sense.” In the wake of Evangelion, you saw shows like Gasaraki and Brain Powerd, which concentrated on what they thought were the main selling points of this new style of robot anime: extreme plot obfuscation. It was hard to tell what was going on anymore, and just like M. Night Shyamalan movies, everyone kept trying stranger and stranger concepts with even stupider twists.

Existential angst, which had previously mostly been limited to things like “Oh my God, I killed Lalah by accident,” “I don’t like you and won’t combine robots with you until you admit you’re a prick,” and “My parents named me goddamn fucking Camille,” became an all-encompassing emotion that colored every frame of animation. Life sucked. The world sucked. Robots were stupid (or were Mom, but that’s a different discussion entirely).

This wasn’t entirely the case, of course. At the same time you had kabuki robots and mysteriously translucent space jubblies, you had such gems as GaoGaiGar, which taught people the meaning of courage, and Nadesico, which questioned the black and white moral simplicity of its predecessors while also paying homage to them.

But honestly, if a robot show came out between around 1995 and 2001, there’s about a 90% chance that it wanted very hard to be Evangelion and as a result sucked donkey balls. I’m completely serious about this. Don’t try to look for them.

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One of the most glorious traditions of Burning robot anime is the opening song. The main goal of a robot show’s theme song is to fill your veins with adrenaline and testosterone (the robot anime opening is one of the few genres where it is acceptable to shout nonsense in between verses just for the sake of shouting). It’s perhaps my favorite kind of music to sing, and should the tastefully-named Richard Kim and I ever find ourselves locked in a private karaoke room, I’m sure that our first order of business will be belting out the old hits, like Tekkaman and Kidou Senshi Gundam.

In the ’70s, the voices of the robot genre were unquestionably Sasaki Isao and Mizuki Ichiro. Those two singers set the standard for blood-pumping awesomeness with Getter Robo and Mazinger Z (if you haven’t heard the songs before, click now; I can wait). Songwriters back then operated under different rules; nothing was considered too silly to get the kids excited, and so those old songs were made of horns, drums, explosions, impassioned shouts, and on more than one occasion, children’s choirs.

As the audiences for these robot shows grew up, so did the music, and the old style of anime opening died out for a while. Macross made it okay to mix old-school Mizuki Ichiro machismo with girl pop. Gundam became so popular that major labels attached their acts to it for sales boosts - in some cases, with disastrous results.

It was a dire time indeed for fans of the old style. Then, in 2000, Mizuki Ichiro started a project to revive the old style of anime song. He gathered up some of the more famous anime crooners in what he dubbed the JAM (Japanese Anisong Makers) Project, and with that, the Burning style of song was reborn. Thanks to JAM Project, it’s cool to shout in anime songs again - but JAM project is a subject for another time.

I’m just curious here - are there any old-school Burning themes that you hold dear that I haven’t listed as a favorite? Or do you find songs from mecha anime to be dull, overdone, or passe?

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I love giant robots. But sometimes, you have to step back and think about you’re watching when you watch giant robots beat the ever-living crap out of each other. And at that moment, you realize just how silly and stupid the giant robot genre is. Not that I’m complaining, of course - the sillier and stupider a show gets, the more enjoyable it can be (I liked Sousei no Aquarion, that’s about as stupid as you go).

One of my favorite mecha anime traditions, one that truly screams “Yes, this is at once cool and totally ludicrous,” is a wonderful fictional weapon known as the pile bunker.

It exists almost exclusively in giant robot fiction, and is nothing more than a large, sometimes exposively or electrically powered spike. It’s usually stuck onto the arm of a robot (though in a few awesome cases, it comes out of the robo-crotch) and is used to deliver giant robot gut punches. Its first appearance was in Armored Trooper VOTOMS in the ’80s, and it caught the imagination of enough mecha designers that it’s lived on in the 25 years since VOTOMS first introduced the concept. You can find pile bunkers in everything from Armored Core to Final Fantasy VII and Guilty Gear.

But why is it so popular? Its not a particularly stylish weapon. It’s the technological equivalent of a plank with a nail stuck in it. If a society has mastered bipedal mechanics, laser weaponry, and other highly advanced technologies, you’d think they could give their robots laser beam eyes, particle cannons, heat rays, or at least some Macross-style beer can rockets. And yet, people’s imaginations get fired up at the thought of a big ol’ nail on a stick.

I figure that the pile bunker owes its popularity to its primitive nature. Sure, people can appreciate outer space dogfights with beam rifles and drunk missiles, but when you get down to it, people like the hands-on approach on a visceral level. And when firefights start to look the same, the most satisfying thing you can possibly watch is a good ol’ punch to the breadbasket.

Take the Baldr series as an example (I won’t blame you if you haven’t played it, it’s never been translated and never will be, what with the porn and all). In Baldr Force, combat takes place entirely in cyberspace, so Shumicram weapon loadouts are a matter of whatever you want to assign a button to. Wave motion cannons? Satellite lasers? Anti-air missiles? They all just materialize on your robot when you need them, ready to wreak havoc. But the pile bunker gets special treatment in that game: the action starts to move in slow motion, the camera zooms in, and the screen freezes at the moment your giant metal spike comes into contact with the enemy with an oh-so-satisfying “CLANG” noise.

The Super Robot Wars series makes the pile bunker seem even more ridiculously outdated and savagely satisfying. The Alt Eisen comes equipped with a pile bunker attached to a giant revolver, and even its pilot admits that the whole setup looks pretty stupid. You can see the results on this convenient Youtube video, starting at 0:36.

Does it look silly? Of course it does. But is it fun to imagine driving a giant stake into someone else’s robot, hearing the crash of heavy metal and a few gratuitous explosions?

Hell yes.

Tell me what your favorite “this has no business being here but it feels SO GOOD” weapon is in fantasy or science fiction - next week, I talk about another ludicrous fiction, the osananajimi.

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On Tuesday, the tastefully named Richard Kim explained the basic concept of moe. You should read it; it’s a pretty good primer on one of those vaguely defined concepts that changes definition depending on who’s doing the defining. For example, Akamatsu Ken of Love Hina, Negima and other miscellaneous moe manga links it to the protective, paternal instinct, while other people have a much more sexual meaning placed on it.

How do I explain it? Well, when anyone asks me, I respond in the immortal words of the wise sage, Sir Mix-a-Lot: “When a girl walks in with an itty bitty waist and a round thing in your face you get SPRUNG.” This makes much more sense if you know that the actual verb (萌える) means “to sprout” and the opposite of moe is nae (萎え), which means “to wither.”

Anyway, I’m not here to talk about that kind of moe - at least, not right now. I’m here to talk about that other kind of moe, which is “to burn” (燃え). This is a much older form of the word moe, and it’s much easier to define. The burning form of moe is the explosion that accompanies every special effects-enhanced attack in a Power Rangers-style sentai show. It’s the bright red and gold background as the pilot of a giant robot screams out the name of its signature attack (Getter Spark! Tomahawk Boomerang!). It’s the private battle that goes on between two athletes who are about to have a climactic showdown.

In other words, it’s about passion, it’s about energy, and most of all, it’s about nekketsu (熱血), or hot-bloodedness. Burning-Moe shows tend to be called “old-school,” especially when there’s a lot of shouting and combat involved.

But it’s important to note that the two different types of moe are not mutually exclusive at all. Rather, consider the two forms of moe to be independent but related, like the X and Y axes on a graph. You can have varying degrees of both, and the point on which a certain work falls tells you a lot about what you can expect from it. Some people like their Sprouting without the “silliness” of Burning, while other people might like really cute girls, but if they sit around doing nothing, there’s no point - so hey, let’s throw them into supernatural or sci-fi combat and see what happens!

For an example of a show that mixes both kinds of moe, just look at the super-powered high-schooler combat/romance show Mai-HiME, which even makes the moe-moe joke in its first episode (”Hey, I thought we were supposed to be moemoe [cutecute]!” “Indeed, we’re very moemoe [burningburning]”).

The intersection of the two is fascinating, as companies try to squeeze out some extra money by pulling in fans of both camps with cuteness and cheese. Another example is Gravion, which has a bunch of young girls in skintight suits piloting giant, combining robots. It’s fun to read about Gravion because it failed in one respect - fans mostly treated the girls as a sideshow and concentrated on the burning passion of the robots. They also had a mancrush on the commander, but that’s neither here nor there.

That’s the purpose of this column - to show you the various flavors of Burning and Sprouting, explore how they work and why people love them, and to show you how hilarious it is when the two are mixed in massively incongruous ways.

See you next week for Feel the Sprouting #1.

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