is a 1980

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

ese

super robot Mecha anime and manga, known in Japan as and , are anime and manga that feature robots (mecha) in battle. The genre is broken down into two subcategories; "super robot", featuring super-sized, implausible robots, and "real robot", where robots are ...

mecha anime Mecha anime and manga, known in Japan as and , are anime and manga that feature robots (mecha) in battle. The genre is broken down into two subcategories; "super robot", featuring super-sized, implausible robots, and "real robot", where robots are ...

series. A film with the same title was released on December 19, 1981.

Production

The anime television series was produced by

Ashi Productions is a Japanese anime studio, located in Suginami, Tokyo, Japan, known for its four magical-girl anime, especially ''Magical Princess Minky Momo''. It was established by Toshihiko Sato and other artists on December 20, 1975, as ''Ashi Productions ...

and

Kokusai Eiga-sha , also known as Movie International Company Ltd. (MIC), was a former Japanese animation production company known for the '' J9 Series''. It was originally established in 1974 by Tsubota as Shigezu Ukuda founded as a video distribution company. It ...

with a feature film (with a strong environmental theme) distributed by Toei in 1981. While 39 episodes were intended, only 34 were ultimately finished, with 31 airing on TV. Some, but not all of the events that would have been in the final 5 episodes were compressed into the film. The name of the Baldios mecha was unchanged, although it played a small part in the film. In Italy, the series and film were shown as ''Baldios, Il Guerriero dello Spazio''. In Cuba, another feature-film version of ''Baldios'' was released in theaters (including violence removed from the American version) as ''Yaltus''.

Story

The TV series begins on S-1, a futuristic world whose wartime pollution has forced its occupants to live underground. Its emperor is assassinated by military fanatic Zeo Gattler and his followers, who frame the team of scientists who recently found a solution to their planet's environmental decay. Gattler's followers invade the head scientist's laboratory, killing the environmentalists and destroying their work. He loads the civilian population aboard a fortress, the ''Algol'', and flies off to conquer a new planet. Angered by Gattler's devious actions, the lead scientist's son (protagonist Marin Raygun) tries to escape. Before he can, he is caught in the ''Algol''

warp drive A warp drive or a drive enabling space warp is a fictional superluminal spacecraft propulsion system in many science fiction works, most notably ''Star Trek'', and a subject of ongoing physics research. The general concept of "warp drive" was i ...

and finds himself near Earth in the year 2100. When he sees a Martian colony destroyed by Gattler's Aldebaren Army, Marin joins the military organization Blue Fixer. His ship becomes part of Blue Fixer's mecha, the space warrior Baldios. Marin and the Blue Fixer team (Jamie Hoshino, combat pilots Jack Oliver and Raita Hokuto, researcher Ella Quinstein and commander Takeshi Tsukikage) defend Earth against Gattler and the S-1 force. The conflict ends when Gattler triggers a massive tsunami by melting Earth's polar ice caps with artificial suns, flooding the planet and killing millions. Blue Fixer is helpless to stop it, and Marin watches the waves in horror. They remove the radioactive core of the World Union submarine base, which threatened to contaminate Earth, transporting it to the Aldebaren fleet where it kills Gattler, his troops and Commander Tsukikage. The Baldios film contains a final confrontation between Marin and Gattler. In the series and the film, S-1 and Earth are the same planet. Gattler and his troops' time travel caused the same pollution which forced them to leave S-1, closing the

time loop The time loop or temporal loop is a plot device in fiction whereby characters re-experience a span of time which is repeated, sometimes more than once, with some hope of breaking out of the cycle of repetition. The term "time loop" is sometimes us ...

External links

* * {{Ashi Productions 1980 anime television series debuts 1981 anime films 1981 Japanese television series endings Adventure anime and manga Animated films based on animated series Animated space adventure television series Apocalyptic films Discotek Media Drama anime and manga Japanese animated films Japanese-language films Ashi Productions Super robot anime and manga TV Tokyo original programming