Okay, this may be a real stretch, but my memory was just jogged and I'm wondering if anyone out there has any info on this.

I remember a cartoon that was on when I was a kid (early-mid 80's). I'm assuming it was Japanese, but I could be wrong....I'm really not into anime or anything so pardon me for sounding dumb. It dealt with space ships and that sort of stuff. When called to action, the main "good guys" would slide down a long slide that would plop them down into the cockpit of this ship. The ship was like a flying saucer, only it had a big robot head on the front (I think). When it took off, it flew from its hidden perch through a waterfall and into space to do battle. Once in space, if the fight got tough, the ship would switch into full robot mode, with a full transformer type robot coming out of the front of the ship head first. One thing I remember clearly is that the pilot would say something like "Shoot in" and would be sent in his chair from the cockpit to the robot head. A full robot would emerge from the center of the ship and go to work. They would always yell out the name of the weapon about to be used, and I remember one of them was "Rainbow Beam."

That's about all I can remember. When I was a kid, I thought this show was really cool, but it was hardly ever on. If anyone out there thinks they know what I'm talking about, post a reply.

You mean this?
http://web.mit.edu/sseligma/www/gr_tech.html



--HN

Damn, nice find. How the hell did you come up with that?!

Just ran "Grandizer" through Yahoo and got a ton of matches.

Well, at first everything seemed to be pointing towards "Voltron" in your description until you said "Rainbow Beam." Figured not too many giant ass kicking robots would have that weapon so i ran that through Google and there it was.

--HN

Well, I've tracked down that the name of this show was "Force Five" (no, not Fox Force Five). The series ran 5 different cartoons during the week, and Grandizer was on Thursdays. Apparently, it aired mainly in Quebec and New England, so I guess that's why not too many people have heard of it. Supposedly, the French translation was much better, and that "rainbow beam" was part of the lousy English translation. I found a message board about the show and a lot of people said the same thing that I was thinking...."I knew his show wasn't a figment of my imagination!"

It actually made it to IMDB:

http://us.imdb.com/Title?0185070

It lists the show as being from 1975, but I saw it several years later.

MAN! '70's anime ROCKED!!!! I wish they would show more.

OMG, I just started looking for this same series. Does anyone know where to buy, I think, 26 episode series at, other than ebay.

OMG... I actually remember this. (barely) I even had the little metallic action figures when I was a kid. Can't remember what I did to them though.