Dai-Guard: Giant Robot Stomping and Office Politics Galore

Whether you watch this one in English ("Office Workers Saving the World!") or Japanese ("Even a salaryman can protect the peace!"), you're in for an entertaining take on the giant-robot-with-pilots anime.  Dai-Guard is kind of like what would happen if Dilbert married Megas XLR and a child was born: a giant robot action office dramedy. 

I still seem to get a kick out of it after all these years.  Here is one review, and here is another.

Basically, this security company was building a giant robot to fight off these strange, deadly creatures, but then the strange, deadly creatures sort of stopped invading, so the company was left with a pointless giant robot.  They decided to use it for marketing.  Then the creatures came back, and the public relations team in charge of the robot was the front line of defense against creature invasion. 

The military tries to be in charge, but that really doesn't work out well.  Their straight-laced representative ends up sort of blitzed by the burning and somewhat ridiculously enthusiastic commitment to saving lives that comes from kids who watched too much anime growing up and trainging in PR and getting to pilot a giant robot. 

Also, I feel compelled to mention that there is seriously a robot name Kokuboga. 

The pilots are all just somewhat average office workers with complicated, slightly-more-dramatic-than-usual regular joe lives (one of them doesn't get along at all with her step-dad, one seems like a total ladies' man but is hiding a rather tender secret).  Their co-workers are often a hoot; their boss is pretty great, and the company president could take the Pointy-Haired Boss in a duel in about 2 seconds.  They hate trying to save the world on a tight budget, but them's the breaks. 

Office politics cause problems, as do military politics and even politics politics.  It's all just another day at the job, except they're robot-jockeys instead of desk-jockeys.  I wonder if my job would be different if that were the case for me.

One of the things that makes this an enjoyable background show for me is the rewrite for the English dub.  It plays fast and loose with literalness (okay, it really just sometimes dispenses with it altogether), and the acting isn't great (I think it was one of Monster Island's first), but it's fairly amusingly quotable with its referenences to cow squashing, monster wrassling, and getting dunked in heterodyne coffee.  If that doesn't appeal to you, there's always the Japanese dub, which is fun, too.

Some people complain that Dai-Guard gets too heavily dramatic sometimes.  I know exactly what they mean, but I don't really care.  :)  Yeah, I may want to smack a pilot now and then (this would have been a very different show with Bright Noah in charge), but the hystrionics just make it work better for me.  When we get to that last battle, I am fully invested in these people; I know what struggles they've gone through to get here, how they've struggled to relate to each other, and I care how things turn out.

So if you want some giant robot action that doesn't get deadly serious (it ain't Full Metal Panic) but isn't all fluff, and you're hankering after a comedy that stars adults every bit as annoying as your real co-workers (only funnier), Dai-Guard is your new best friend.

Have you seen this one?  Any thoughts?