During final exams at university, a student sitting next to me said something to a classmate who admitted he wasn't confident about the test.
"Whatever you're lacking, just make up for it with courage!"
At the time I thought, wow, what a powerful line—but it wasn't until several years later that I learned it was a quote from The King of Braves GaoGaiGar.
The Brave Series began with Brave Exkaiser, which aired in 1990, and was produced annually through 1998—a group of original robot anime with no specific source material. The production involved Nagoya TV, Sunrise, main sponsor and toy maker Takara, and the ad agency Tokyu Agency.
The concept was to sell domestically made transforming-and-combining toys like Transformers. In that sense, maybe because it was the last entry so they went all out, GaoGaiGar was abnormally popular with hardcore fans but didn't catch on with kids that much, and the toys didn't sell at all. That said, this was apparently because Sunrise had come under Bandai's umbrella, making it harder to keep producing works together with Takara.
Even so, GaoGaiGar is superbly made. Episode 18 has a story like this. The trouble starts when Minoru Inuboe—a former GGG staffer turned Zonder who plots to blow up the GGG Bay Tower base, along with all of G Island City, via a meltdown of the reactor—renders every vehicle robot except Volfogg inoperable. The combination program for the "Gao Machines" had also been initialized to escape the hacking, so the program couldn't be launched either, and the GGG main staff had to carry it out by hand. Leo boarded Liner Gao, Hyuma boarded Stealth Gao, and Ushiyama boarded Drill Gao. And then they attempt to combine GaoGaiGar manually.
With support from operator chief Entouji, the success rate came to about 60%, and in response to a plea from the members taking part in the combination and from Big Volfogg, they each chipped in 10% of their own courage to make up the rest and got approval.
At that point the success rate was 30%. Far better than the un-simulated, earliest stage's "as close to zero as you can get."
I have a feeling that line—"Whatever you're lacking, just make up for it with courage!"—came up here too...
Now, the composer is Kohei Tanaka. He's often handled the music for fiery works like Mobile Fighter G Gundam and Sakura Wars, and this score is fiery too.
First up is "Final Fusion." This is the music that plays when Guy Shishioh transforms into the mechanoid Gaigar and then combines with the three support Mega Gao Machines to become GaoGaiGar—and the GGG commander's approval is absolutely essential for the combination.
Next is "Hell and Heaven." This is GaoGaiGar's strongest finishing move, fusing the energies of offense and defense into one! And the music here is fiery yet again!
Finally, let's part ways while watching the first episode of The King of Braves GaoGaiGar.
Image from the official site: https://www.gaogaigar.net/
