Yeah, 7-Zark-7 was able to fly…by flapping his cape. Or, more like, vibrating his cape*. His flying wasn’t much faster than his walking/rolling or whatever you would call his standard method of locomotion, so I guess the main advantage was…saving animation frames.
Anyway, 8-Dork-8 inherited that feature from him, and 8-Megadork-8 inherited it in turn – and immediately scrambles to engage his enemy, Tetsujin, in aerial combat. Which seem quite optimistic, given Tetsujin’s demonstrated speed and agility while flying. But that’s our team for you! Or perhaps it’s another thing 8-Megadork-8 has inherited from 8-Dork-8, whose computations don’t inspire complete confidence on the best of days. >_>
I can’t claim to have seen too many episodes of Testujin/Gigantor, but from what I’ve seen, I couldn’t really nail down how the giant robot is supposed to be controlled…and I strongly suspect that this was left somewhat vague on purpose. The control unit featured only a simple joystick and a single button, which seems quite sparse for any sort of high-tech machinery, let alone the flying sort. On top of that, the giant robo reacted to voice commands, and it also, at times, demonstrated at least a limited amount of autonomous thinking/action. So, I really dunno. To be on the safe side, I have provided a pilot/controller. In addition to control, he can provide plot-useful commentary…and, fortunately, there is an established character who is a freelance mecha pilot, and was unemployed as of his last appearance. So welcome back, Shinji. XD
More on Thursday.
* Don’t ask me why he even wore a cape. Even a single item of clothing is, after all, already way above par for a robot/droid. In the case of a robot, we can rule out most of the classic functions of clothing from the get-go: protection and heat management should be designed into the robot’s outer shell, and modesty/body shame shouldn’t apply, either. So perhaps Latho’s suspicions regarding 8-Dork-8’s vanity weren’t actually that far off the mark…although, if 8-Dork-8 really thinks that that cape is fashionable, he must have got some issues with his CPU, as well.
Control panel: could be worse! Could be Battlestar Galactica (1978) setup… nothing but banks and banks of white flashing lights with no indicators or labels!
Well, but wasn’t that a realistic assumption for a scifi? The ongoing trend is that interfaces have to be dumbed down more and more to keep pace with dumber operators…so the logical endpoint would be a strictly one-button interface – but with multiple identical copies of that one button, just to make missing it harder. XD