Wondering for 25 Years

[1oldrobot]

i lived in japan for a long time, was forced to know the names of all the robot characters, etc.

despite that, i still dont know what the heck a "mazinger" is.

most names are written entirely in katakana, the simplest form of written japanese syllabus. and it is usually used when representing english and other foreign language words.

so ive been wondering for more than a quarter of a century, what is a
mazinger
getter
danguard
grendizer

[faulkners2]

I had two years of Japanese in college, and we were forced into fluency by our instructor, who was a native. Not only were we trained in the language but in the culture and the manners. I have often wondered the same thing about the names of the robots, so I got to looking around about it. I found that some of the English words that were converted to Japanese were used simply because they sounded cool. This is why there are a lot of "super happy fun time" things. However, I also found, as I am sure you did, that English was not the only language the Japanese borrow from and convert into Katakana. Maybe these words have meaning in another language. Grendizer particularly sounds German, but I'll bet you that the word "grand" figures in there.

I think the best origin for the word "Mazinger" I have found relates to the "Daimajin" films by Daiei studios in the '60's (being that the actual Japanese pronunciation of Mazinger is "Majinga"):

"「大魔神」Daimajin is a fictional word created for the 1966 Daiei Motion Picture Company production of the same title (directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda), about a fictional stone idol that comes to life as an avenging demon. The title translates literally as "The Great Devil." The film was released directly to television in the US by American International Television "Majin, Monster of Terror" in 1968. There are two sequels, all of which are now available on DVD in North America from ADV Films. The lyrics, "Mashin-da, Majin-da, Majinga Zet!" in the closing theme, "Bokura-no Majinga Zetto" (Our Mazinger Z), are a play on words: "It's a machine, it's a devil, Mazinger Z!"

So in Japanese, the word "Mazinger" and the word "Machinder" are very closely related, as is the word "Majin" (for devil). I think the name is just another example of the Japanese adapting existing tech (in this case language) in a clever way.

As far as "Getter", it is a corruption of the Japanese word "gattai," which means a fusion or merging of two separate entities. It is particularly appropriate for the giant robots.

I always thought the word "Danguard" was a cleaver melding of "Danger" and "Guard." "

[zman]

great reply and very interesting, faulkners2

[luclin999]

Which explains why in Mandarin "Mazinger" and "Great Mazinger" translates into "Great Devil" and "Great Devil King"

Something that I had wondered about myself.

[faulkners2]

Thanks, Zman. By the way, just as a great fun time, if anyone here hasn't seen the Daimajin movies, put 'em on your Netflix list right away. I am a huge aficionado of the Japanese Kaiju films, and Daimajin is a prime example of these and very different in tone from the stuff being done at Toho or Toei at the time.

[xiombarg]

ugh... I wish I could remember the exact thread, but a couple of years ago somebody posted something up that had the same name, "mazinger", but it was something that was made or came before Mazinger the character. I was wondering if whatever that was would help to give an idea of what it means? Anybody remember what that was?

[1oldrobot]

i thought that years ago, but the "majin" scheme doesnt really match with robots. i doubt getter is from gattai. close, but not close enough, and that eternal katakana is the tell all that this will remain a mystery. i think the closest answer would be because it sounds "english-ish." danguard i almost understand. dan as in danna, or dan meaning male or distinguished male in conjugated juku go form. i think theres a lot of conjugated katakana juku go in these names, half meaning something, the other half of the name going nowhere. i guess dan could also be "organization" or "group." they have to place the japanese affection for the word or meaning of mammori in there. i always assumed thats where the "guard" part comes in. and conjugated katakana with an underlying japanese meaning is kind of a mess.

you know, in 1990 when i moved to japan, choco flake cereal used to be called KKRAP! to express the onomatopoeia of the crispy flakes breaking. krap cereal doesnt seem so good when it is designed to melt in your mouth and leave a chocolate graveyard mess.

i worked at a trading company for years in osaka and i remember they repackaged electric razors for export and called one the "smooth dill." i thought it was "smooth deal" when i read the kana, then i saw the romaji beneath it. smooth dill." i put the stopper on that one real quick. they also tried to call a futon beater "flush beating." sometimes theres the zen zen hazure machigae when japanese try to express their slightly misconceived english and other languages.

one of the imperfections inherent to jumbo design is the names of characters because even though kanji and katakana can be conjugated, it doesnt happen on robots too often because the target market (used to be) for kids, and they dont start learning joyo kanji until 4th year in school. that leaves us, years later, without any real explanation as to what the heck anything is. just katakana. makes me want to build a robot called "katakaner" just so the belt would be very confusing to read with the "-" for "er."

if you add the kana for "er" on the end of almost any word, it makes it seem like whatever theyre talking about is built to do something specific. i guess the spazer spazzes? the getter gets? and the mazinger mazings in his free time. the jet pilder pilds. scrander scrands.

im almost sure that combattler combats.

daitetsujin and tetsujin, theres some kanji on these! only because the kanji is so simple and common that a little kid would know it.

gaiking is a foreign king?

not meant to bash the japanese. osaka will always be my adopted hometown. heres one for you-

a terrible mistake i made at an english teaching gig i didnt keep for long. i was 16 and my japanese was just coming along.

i had a class of old ladies that had "studied" english for decades. naturally, they couldnt speak any english.

so i reverted to my at the time novice japanese. trying to drum up conversation i wanted to ask about occupations.

nani o shimasuka? would be the most basic way to properly ask.

but i asked "o nani shimasuka?" attempting to put "oh" in front of my sentence to politely address the older ladies directly as "you." it was my terrible mistake.

i loudly asked "onani shimasuka?"

all of them flustered, one answered, "no, not anymore," in english.

didnt keep that gig for long.

[faulkners2]

Ah, HA! That is awesome! I can't believe you even got an answer for that one!

[faulkners2]

I will tell you that when I was learning Japanese, I used to worry about sentence structure all the time. The forms of sentences in Japan are so unusual as far as where the subjects, objects and verbs are -- you literally had to restructure the way you think to be able to follow it. And then you had the extra, added bonus of having completely different words or forms of words depending on the social station of the person you were speaking to or how you were related to that person. As our instructor said, there is really not a good way of teaching the language without teaching about the culture and the societal structure of the country. It really made me think about how much our thought processes are controlled by the structure of our language.

And, I think you may be right -- a lot of the names of the robots got that way because they are cool and "English-ish." The Japanese really have a fascination for "tech" words and words that sound like English. However, I still believe that the word "Mazinger" comes from the word "Machinder" and the word "Majin" combined, like "Gojira" comes from "Gorira" and "Kujira" combined. I think the devil image fits the Mazinga Z with the darkness of the robot and the red "horns" on the chest. I may be totally wrong, but this is always where I put the name.

[1oldrobot]

lol. yeah, i think everyones hair was standing up on end for the remaining silence of the duration of the class.

lots of blinking and breathing through open mouths in that time. the japanese brand of silent and uncomfortable nervousness was a thick cloud in that room.

i recall my last day of work. i skated to the office and was wearing a suehiro maruo print shirt of a woman that had been impaled and was laughing and coughing blood on her killers.

somehow, students really liked me per their feedback. but as you probably know, in japan, if something is so extremely terrible, the insurmountable power of the problem becomes respected. i dont know about insurmountable power as a teacher or in any other regard, but i was a terrible fit as a teacher.

born to skate. lol.

[1oldrobot]

ahhhhhhh, japanese art and devil stuff. thats a really hard one to peg.

goes back to hindu pre buddhism, where are gods are essentially multi faceted demons. i dont think the japanese are very aware of that origin, but it certainly carried over.

but as you probably know, japanese hate the bad guy, hate devil stuff, etc. its all part of that convenient treatment of aesthetics over literal meaning and function.

this subject can be really tricky in japanese art.

the trick here is that it was designed by go nagai, a big fan of devil stuff, hence devilman.

there is a bit of a trick in these toys to add to their appeal. and the appeal is strong.

another japanese art "trickster" would be gojin ishihara. check out his wonderful books on japanese monsters.

using a different name, he did a lot of homoerotic art that was also quite sinister. but thats also renegade stuff, so i dig it. he was an awesome artist. did some robot stuff, too.

i could go on about japanese artists that spin the "devil trick" but i collect their original art and dont want to spark a collecting spree and raise premiums of limited existing pieces.

i used to confuse myself putting too much thought into "mazinger." "ma" for evil, as in akuma, and "zinger" as in a meaningless usage of the pseudo word in english "zinger." i assumed "zinger" was used like the word "smurf" and could really hold any meaning stuffed into it when crammed in a sentence. unless youre eating hostess cupcakes.

[1oldrobot]

luclin999, hey thats great info! i think you answered it. i never even considered that theyd write the kanji and then revert to the original han pronunciation. best info.

sorry to keep posting and replying to myself. im doing this on my phone and by the time i post i see other peoples responses.

i am sure that luclin999 got us the right answer. thank you very much and now i know. thats valuable info for curious collectors.

[Gettershadow]

what does ""onani shimasuka" end up meaning??

[1oldrobot]

well, id only write it in japanese because there may be some youngsters here, and id like to avoid being vulgar (here at least). highlight it and search google. you should see it in the first page of results.

[Gettershadow]

hhahahha.. they knew it was an error, right??

btw, "Great Devil King" hits a nerve with me, when I was 8 Id sit there looking at GM thinking "Man!!!, he looks like a Knight, and he's got horns!!.. is he a bad guy or a good guy?"
"Great Devil King" is an accurate description of his appearance.

[1oldrobot]

the japanese have a funny cultural dogma about them, especially older folks, that bypasses conversational analytics. sometimes error is not considered. my pronunciation was dead on osaka dialect, even though i was still early on in learning japanese. that, coupled with the big mohawk, green braces on my teeth, and t-shirts with satanic overtones, id say they figured i asked intentionally just to be disagreeable. i asked it again at another job i didnt like pretending i had made a mistake, but no one believed me since i could speak by that time.

for the longest time i thought GM was a bad guy. i still pretend he is (i like the bad guys). the good guys in so many toys are like what tito santana was to wrestling - a boring nice guy with no agenda. at least the bad guys say "ha! im taking your sh*t! for no reason! ha ha ha! get in my way and ill break off your legs and throw them in the garbage!" i like characters and people that dont waste time getting their point across.

maybe id change that perspective temporarily if i were robbed at gunpoint. until then, all hail the evil robots!

[Dr. Fate]

Oh c'mon, youngsters know that way before we did in our days:)

Onani shimasuka = do you masturbate

[Gettershadow]

"not anymore"... LOL
all of Go Nagai's stuff kinda looks like badguys.. I guess thats why I liked em.. even Posiden has a bandits mask on.

[1oldrobot]

sure, kids know it, but i dont need to reinforce it and let them feel its casually appropriate to bring up anytime anywhere. itd be nice if kids today could enjoy their spiderman and transformer toys without making them mount each other. "bumping robots" shouldnt be a scheduled activity at playtime. i also dont want to be responsible for a thread joking about robot wieners and butts.

i felt bad when the lady said not anymore. it was a knee jerk blurted out answer. far more rude in japan to put an old person on the spot like that than here in the US. that doesnt mean it isnt funny.

go nagai stuff certainly does take a stroll on the dark side of fun. my favorite robot of all time, black ox, is the most sinister robot to me, and hes not a go nagai design. i had a terrible nightmare some time ago that my 18" black ox model came to life and was hiding behind furniture in my house and by the time id see him, hed use his magnetic field to paralyze me and punch me in the ankles, trying to break them. he looks super evil, but really, he is sculpted after a cat.

i like the occasional bad dreams, even f they do reflect what a robot collecting geek i am.

[magengar]

I love this, bro!

You nailed "Mazinger" and "Daimajin" right on point...

...in the Mazinger-Z series, episode #9
("The Devil Statue Abdora"), the mechabeast in this
episode is kikaiju Abdora-U8 disguised as a statue,
perched on a pedestal in a park overlooking the city...
...by Baron Ashler's remote control, the statue comes to
life and starts attacking the city by setting everything on fire.

Here's the entire episode (in Spanish)... ;D



zozo-mag

Sept 17, 2012 14:12:41 GMT -5 faulkners2 said:

I had two years of Japanese in college, and we were forced into fluency by our instructor, who was a native. Not only were we trained in the language but in the culture and the manners. I have often wondered the same thing about the names of the robots, so I got to looking around about it. I found that some of the English words that were converted to Japanese were used simply because they sounded cool. This is why there are a lot of "super happy fun time" things. However, I also found, as I am sure you did, that English was not the only language the Japanese borrow from and convert into Katakana. Maybe these words have meaning in another language. Grendizer particularly sounds German, but I'll bet you that the word "grand" figures in there.

I think the best origin for the word "Mazinger" I have found relates to the "Daimajin" films by Daiei studios in the '60's (being that the actual Japanese pronunciation of Mazinger is "Majinga"):

"「大魔神」Daimajin is a fictional word created for the 1966 Daiei Motion Picture Company production of the same title (directed by Kimiyoshi Yasuda), about a fictional stone idol that comes to life as an avenging demon. The title translates literally as "The Great Devil." The film was released directly to television in the US by American International Television "Majin, Monster of Terror" in 1968. There are two sequels, all of which are now available on DVD in North America from ADV Films. The lyrics, "Mashin-da, Majin-da, Majinga Zet!" in the closing theme, "Bokura-no Majinga Zetto" (Our Mazinger Z), are a play on words: "It's a machine, it's a devil, Mazinger Z!"

So in Japanese, the word "Mazinger" and the word "Machinder" are very closely related, as is the word "Majin" (for devil). I think the name is just another example of the Japanese adapting existing tech (in this case language) in a clever way.

As far as "Getter", it is a corruption of the Japanese word "gattai," which means a fusion or merging of two separate entities. It is particularly appropriate for the giant robots.

I always thought the word "Danguard" was a cleaver melding of "Danger" and "Guard." "