What is Gaiking, you ask? Well, allow me to fill you in.

“Demon Dragon of the Heavens Gaiking (大空魔竜ガイキング, Daikū Maryū Gaikingu?) was a Super Robot mecha anime series produced by Toei Animation, credited as an original idea by Akio Sugino…

…It ran from April 1976 through January 1977 and consisted of 44 26-minute episodes. Gaiking was notable for being one of the few super robot series to take place in real places outside of Japan, and for being the first Super Robot series to have a mobile carrier for the chief robots.”

In short, for those of you who haven’t seen it, it’s a mecha/adventure from the 70’s, but if you’ve watched the trailer, you’ll see that it is quite obviously not in keeping with the style.

So who’s spearheading this project? According to this Ain’t It Cool article, LightStage (notable for their work with Avatar and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and director Matthew Gratzner will be. There is an interesting piece of information that I thought was pretty cool…

“We are building the robots life size. Matt is one of the last great practical effects guys in the business who can pull this off. We will bring you to the set and give you first shot at seeing them. If you want, we can have you put out those first images of what the finished versions look like. The teaser we have now is CG for the robot. It is to give the fans a taste of the design we are going with, but it is not a true reveal given what we are going to be doing when we build the thing. The real deal is going to be mind blowing of course.”

Take a look at the rest of the article and the second source from Anime Vice for the complete story.

And also, check out the forum discussion thread!

Source: Ain’t It Cool, Anime Vice