Video Warrior Laserion (ビデオ戦士レザリオン), or simply Laserion, is a 1984-1985 anime series from Toei that tells the story of a young boy’s video game robot come to life and only he can save the Earth from the evil Jack Empire! It’s a pretty standard wish-fulfilment story that borrows heavily from other mecha anime of the time.
The visuals are bold, there’s some very interesting animated sequences, plus plenty of others that get reused a lot along with some other real cheap shortcuts. There’s a literal visual novel slide across screen and I had to pause the video while I got all the laughs out because it came out of nowhere. The animation is as good as you can expect for this period of time and, naturally, it shares the Gundam/hot-blooded mecha pilot stylings of the time.
That said, I’m going to tell you all not to watch this show on the Toei Tokusatsu World YouTube channel because there are no English subtitles. I had to watch the first episode with auto-generated English subs and, while hilarious, it’s nigh-unwatchable and certainly not conducive to a review of a service that is supposed to allow English speakers to watch these shows.
So yeah, Toei dropped the ball on this one and the end result is utter nonsense but there’s plenty of other mecha anime on the service, some of which I’ve reviewed here so why not check those out!
You can now find Laserion, as well as many other tokusatsu shows, on the TOEI Tokusatsu World Official YouTube channel to watch for free with English subtitles.
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