This is also my first Korean anime, though I had no idea at first because I was watching the English dub. Not by choosing though but as far as I know this he only version that exists on the internet (though I didn’t look too hard) and it is GLORIOUS.
Dubbed in Singapore; it has all the hallmarks of a bad Singaporean eng dub with Speed racer level “Ah’s!” and “Oh’s!” interspersed with terribly ADR’d silence. Hearing garbled Aussie and British accents while watching this was hilarious, especially the woman they got to play the male lead who is not only straining to do a man's voice, but also delivers her lines in the most ridiculous ways possible, with possibly my favorite line of hers being how she says “Oh My gosh it disappeared!” in such a weird way that I burst out laughing. This is Garzey’s wing level bad.
But on to the actual anime itself. Super Majingga is a clear attempt to cash in on the mecha craze Japan was going through at the time, and it shows, with both the main robots design and its name being suspiciously similar to a certain mecha classic called Mazinger Z, but hey, lets not hold near plagiarism against them.
This anime is bad, with power point animation that would have been considered poor in the early seventies (this was made in the eighties) which leads to some deliciously crappy cuts and moments that make you wonder if the animators were paid in leftovers McDonald's. They also mis-color a few characters' skin green. It’s later revealed that they’re a green skinned alien, who is wearing a human mask. I guess the colorists forgot that the mask wasn’t green as well in a few scenes, and thus spoiled the twist of their identity about ten minutes before it happens.
The bad animation also leads to boring action scenes. I praise this anime for how funny it was, but the action scenes were by far the most boring part because no one talked during them, and there were way too many long panning shots of robots just flying in space. These were by far the points I was the most tempted to just stop.
There’s no point in talking about the characters, they’re flat as paper. I know everyone says that about a character they don’t like, but seriously there wasn’t a single character arc in this thing.
The plot is VERY basic. Aliens come to take over the planet, a bunch of kids in their giant robot stop them. The end.
The one bit of true praise I have for the movie is that in the few moments where there IS music, the music is pretty good. It’s not GREAT, but with how bad everything else is in comparison, it shined the most by far.
Sadly, I don’t know If there was supposed to be any more to Super Majingga 3 than this movie. The title implies this is part of a series, and the movie assumes you know who everyone is, not giving any introductions whatsoever, but this being nearly lost media, I couldn’t find anything about it, beyond the fact it was eventually brought to Australia, got chopped up and re-edited and then used to fill out dead time. If there’s more to this series, I’d be interested to see if the rest has a dub this wonderfully bad.
Overall, If you find it in its original Korean, I wouldn’t recommend it, but If you go to the internet archive (or of the several uploads of it on YouTube ) and watch it dubbed, go ahead. If the dub wasn’t entertaining enough to interest you, well it's only an hour long so not much time was wasted. Otherwise, this is a great so bad it's good watch. 1/10 for quality, but 7.5/10 for entertainment.
