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story identification - 80's anime with the villains coming back after each defeat with a new animal-based robot


What I remember is that in the same movie every time the villains were defeated they came back in a new machine, I think they were all animal based but robots. They always had the same symbol somewhere on the robot.


The good guys had robots too.


I'm sure it was anime but it was in English.



Answer



Your description reminds me of the Time Bokan Series, a group of anime series by Tatsunoko Production. In all these anime series, there are similar characters:



  • the main good guys are typically a boy, a girl and a talking animal/robot.

  • the bad guys are typically a leading woman and two minions (a slim "tech" guy and a fat strong guy)



(there may be other supporting characters, e.g. a mentor for the good guys or an extra sidekick for the baddies, but they are not "mandatory").


Usually, both sides fight with mechas, often (but not always) animal-shaped and sentient:



  • the good guys have typically a single robot or a limited choice of robots (e.g. they choose according to the terrain: a fish mecha for an underwater adventure, a bird if they need to fly...)

  • the bad guys build a different robot every time, which is comically destroyed at the end of each episode (better if with huge explosion and nuclear mushroom)


Often the good guys recite a motto when they appear, sometimes mocked by the baddies. These characters and their funny quirks inspired many later anime characters, such as the bad guys of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (with inverted features for the minions: the slim one is strong, the fat one is the engineer) and Pokemon (Team Rocket are boy + girl + talking animal and they recite a motto).


The "Time Bokan Series" name comes from the first series, Time Bokan (i.e. The Time Machine), but the most famous and iconic of these series (at least in Italy where I live) is Yatterman. In this anime, the bad guys' symbol is a skull, so all their mechas have a skull painted somewhere (instead, the good guys' symbol is the letter "Y", which appears on the "good" mechas).


But, IIRC, the bad guys have a prominent symbol in others Time Bokan series as well.


A bowling-inspired mecha built by the Dorombo trio, it has the skull symbol



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