Ranked #4970

Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01

If you find a mysterious box on a truck in your technical college, the best and most obvious course of action to take is to open it. If it happens to contain a suit of powered armor and a manual,only read the passage that tells you how to turn it on and get inside. After that happens, there's no better way to celebrate the activation of your newly-found robot suit by visiting your ex-girlfriend in a crowded tower.

Uh-huh.

Metal Skin Panic Madox-01 (don't you love those old-school robot titles? 'Armored Trooper Votoms', 'Blue Comet Super Powered-Tracer Layzner'...) is another one of those old 80s shows with a plot seems more like an excuse for the directors and animators to cram as many cool fight scenes as they can into an hour of programming. It's a tried-and-true formula that produces morsels of crunchy animated entertainment and doesn't attempt to reinvent or blend any genres or push the envelope, and that's just fine. It's not intellectually stimulating or engaging, but it won't bore you to tears with hours of pointless filler or aimless dialog between sparkly-eyed effeminate men wearing goofy outfits in the pouring rain staring at opposite sides of the screen. Who also happen to be ninjas.

Everything is resolved at the end, nothing sticks out and needs to be hammered down. The fight scenes are fun, the animation's good, the English dub is awkward, and the artists seem to take too much pleasure in drawing little X-wing style flip-up targeting computers...

Seriously. There are like, several of them (I counted 5) and they all work with the same weapon. You'd think the company would have added a digital copy of the manual onboard, but... Whatever. read more

Here's another 80s mecha anime for you to check out. Metal Skin Panic Madox-01 is a one episode 42 minute OVA that follows Sugimoto Kouji, an engineering student who happens to have an odd combination of good and bad luck. The plot of this OVA is fairly simple in that Kouji happens to come across the Madox-01 military exo-skeleton after it is lost in a transportation accident. As Kouji is reading the manual on how to operate the Madox, he inadvertently gets locked into the suit.From there, pretty much all hell breaks loose until the end of the film.

There were a lot of really strong elements in this OVA that made it great to watch. First and foremost, it's old school anime, and second to that it has mecha suits and tanks. Those two alone made this a winning combination in my books. Another strong point was that the story didn't have too much going on. It was easy enough to follow, while still stimulating enough to continue watching without going into boredom shock. The animation style was very much what you would expect from the time period as was the music (very much in line with Patlabor or Dominion Tank Police).

I have to say that I also enjoyed the creativity that the writers had in developing the concept of exo-skeleton suits. While this is a technology that by today's standards seems less than science-fiction, consider that this OVA was produced in 1987. Back then (and yes I was only two years old at that time), the concepts being touched on by the writers seemed almost out of reach. One of the enticing factors for me in selecting to watch this was the fact that it really focused on the Madox exo-skeleton. I have always been fascinated by the ability to combine human functionality with robotics in a manner similar to what is expressed in Metal Skin Panic Madox-01 (I'm not referring to the war component by the way, just the ability to enhance human abilities with robotics). This specific element really allowed me as a viewer to make more of a personal connection with the show.

Overall, I think it goes without saying that I advocate checking out Metal Skin Panic Madox-01. If you are a fan of such films as Ghost in the Shell, then this one will resonate with you as well. read more