This is the one that makes you earn the robot. Danguard Ace spent a whole TV run keeping Takuma Ichimonji out of the cockpit, letting the masked Captain Dan's brutal training do the talking while a kid tried to scrub his missing father Dantetsu's name clean. Cut down to a single sitting, the washouts and the humiliations land back to back instead of dribbling out weekly, and the Promethe project starts to feel like the workplace it always was. Leiji Matsumoto's fingerprints are everywhere: the long solemn faces, the melodrama played completely straight, mecha treated as heavy industry rather than a toy shelf. So when Danguard A finally assembles and turns on Doppler's forces, it hits because you sat through every no. Then there's the mask, and what saying yes to it costs.

Doppler lays a trap for the Space Carrier Jasdum, and the planet robot Dangard A has to come to its rescue. The 1978 film has no new footage: it cuts together episodes 44 and 45 of the Wakusei Robo Danguard Ace television series into a single mecha feature. The show behind it centers on Ichimonji Takuma, who hopes to pilot Dangard A in a Japanese project to explore the newly found planet Promethe and to clear the name of his father, a well-known space pilot.