Space Warrior Baldios is an anime TV series that originally aired from 1980 to 1981. At this time, the super robot genre from the 1970s was still raging on, and at first glance, Baldios looks to be yet another one of those shows. Three separate fighter crafts combine to form the titular mecha, which was quite the standard at the time. The well-known Mobile Suit Gundam, which premiered a year before hadn’t yet had have enough of a ripple effect on the industry to firmly establish the “real robot” genre. Despite this, Baldios does a fairly good job at distinguishing itself for the time. Baldios beginson the planet S-1. Hopelessly polluted, the leaders of S-1 have two choices, either go along with military leader Gattler, who seeks to invade and take over another, less polluted planet, or the scientific community, led by Dr. Reigan, who are working on a device that they hope can help repair the environment. Gattler stages a military coup where S-1’s emperor is killed and he imposes himself as leader (or “fuhrer” as stated in the official US subtitles). Dr. Reigan is soon killed as well and his son, Marin is forced to flee in the craft Pulseburn. Gattler leads S-1’s populace and military forces, known as Aldebaran to space and Marin’s craft warps along with them to Earth.

Gattler puts top underling, Aphrodia, in charge of Aldebaran’s forces as it seeks to take over Earth. Aphrodia has a personal grudge with Marin, who killed her brother while seeking escape. Marin makes his way down to Earth and becomes a key part of the Blue Fixer organization, the main force fighting off Aldebaran. Although initially doubted as an alien invader, Marin becomes a key part of Blue Fixer, who soon create the Baldios robot as their main fighting force.

With the main narrative established, Baldios settles into its groove. Each episode tends to feature Aphrodia and the Aldebaran forces launching a new attempt to defeat Blue Fixer and take over Earth. And while the show is made up of mostly stand-alone episodes (with the occasional two—parter), it does a fairly good job at providing us with entertaining and non-repetitive storylines. In fact the mecha action of the show seems to take a back seat and is not a major part of each episode (although they do find a way to fit in the Baldios combining sequence in pretty much every episode). The character development of the show is fairly strong. Along with Marin, there’s approximately a half dozen central characters in the Blue Fixer organization and each gets some room for development and growth with their own focused episodes. Things rarely feel stale or repetitive. We also have several episodes that eschew the formula and focus largely on the Aldebaran side of things. While Gattler is pure evil, Aldebaran has several good people with in it as well and we meet several sympathetic characters in its ranks. Aphrodia gets a fair amount of development and it is interesting to see her views on Marin soften as the series goes on.

Technically, the series is never going to really impress. The character animation is rather shoddy, the music is repetitive and the mecha design is nothing special. Technically, other shows of the same era like Gundam and Ideon outshine it here. Yet the story and characters more than make up for it.

Things move to a head as we near the end of the show. The attacks by Aldebaran get more and more fierce, to a level where Gattler doesn’t care how much he environmentally damages the planet he is hoping to move his followers to. The show ends very abruptly (in the middle of a 2-parter in fact), and quite grimly. From what I have read, the show was cancelled, originally planning on 39 episodes, but only 31 got to air. This clearly shows. The recent US bluray release features 3 more episodes that were produced, one which acts as the penultimate episode and the latter 2 which take place after the aired finale and continue things. Although they don’t fully conclude the storyline they do feature a major plot twist which while shocking is also quite fitting. In order to see the complete ending, one will have to resort to the movie, which as of this writing I have yet to see.

Anyway, for ones who like mecha/sci-fi shows, and anime from the late 70’s and early 80’s, this show is worth the experience and comes highly recommended.