A few mornings ago, I was having breakkfast at McDonalds, and sitting a seat away from Maurice, who up and said to me, “Hey Stanley, you like old things. There was this cartoon I liked…”

Maurice is someone I see, and talk to in McDonalds. He’s a polite young man, at least ten years younger than I am. He was born and raised in El Salvador, and came to Canada at the end of the 1980s. English is his second language, and he’s soft-spoken to boot, so I often strain to catch his entire meaning. But this time, there was no doubt he was describing a Japanese mecha anime.

I quized him about the look of the giant robot, the human characters, and the basic plot. At one point, he described a chubby robot, and I thought he was referring to the granddaddy of all super robots, Tetsujin 28-go (renamed Gigantor for the US) from 1956, but no, the chubby giant robot he was referring to wasn’t the star, but a secondary character.

Some image searches nailed his cartoon as Mazinger Z (1972-1974), not as old, but more influential. Mazy was the first to put the pilot in the mecha robot. It featured a sizeable cast of mecha, including Aphrodite A, the first-ever female-form mecha. While the titular mecha had it’s “Rocheto pun-chee,” the Aphrodite mecha had her own titulars — her “breasts” were explosive-tipped missiles. There were over 90 episodes of this anime, and Maurice had apparently watched, and loved them all. I could hear it in his voice as he remembered, with a big smile, how the fat, comedic mecha got jealous, because Aphrodite A was sweet on Mazinger Z.

I knew of the anime, and I’d watched some YouTube clips, but now I was interested in seeing some complete episodes, if not all of them. But there was another aspect to this which really interested me. Anyone who’s searched the Internet for dubbed anime, or so-called “fansubs” — Japanese anime with original Japanese audio, and fan-created subtitles — will probably have noticed how common Spanish subtitled, or dubbed, anime is. I did, but chalked it up to the large Spanish-speaking population in the United States.

Turns out, young Maurice, growing up in El Salvador in the early-mid 1980s, had a cartoon diet particularly rich in Japanese anime. Over breakfast, we worked out a partial list:

Possibly also:

Maurice explained that Latin Americans feel a sense of community with the Japanese. This Wikipedia entry pegs the population of people of Asian descent living across Latin America, at four million — nearly one per cent of Latin America’s population. The same entry says:

“Brazil is home to the largest Japanese community outside of Japan, numbering about 1.5 million.”

Wow. So that alone could explain the wide availability of real anime (ignoring the Transformers, and He-Man) throughout Latin America. This ElSalvador.com page (translated by Google) talks about the spread of Mazinger Z across Latin America:

“In 1978 the television program beyond the borders of Japan and came to Spain and Puerto Rico, for two years later appear on the screens of Panama, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, El Salvador, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, Argentina , Colombia, Honduras and Ecuador.”

There were voice-over dubs in three kinds of colloquial Spanish to accommodate the wide geographical diversity. Mazinger Z was also very popular in Portugal, and Spain, where a proposed amusement park was to feature a large, but not full-size statue of the giant mecha to greet visitors. They never built the amusement park but Mazinger Z stands guard in the Tarragona forest!

This blog on abandoned amusement parks features lots of images of that Mazinger Z statue — just keep scrolling down — but pay attention to the first set of photos on Okpo Land in South Korea, abandoned due to tragedy. The photos were taken by the sweetest little South Korean Girl — photo number seven to be precise.

I’m not forgetting that the 1980s was a turbulent time for Latin America. In 1985, El Salvador was halfway through a civil war, where the United States was militarily supporting the government. The U.S. was also doing whatever it could to destabilize the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, including, in 1985, putting an embargo on all trade between the U.S. and Nicaragua.

Awesome Gigantor animated GIF came from this Adult Swim message board ►