A twelve-year-old inherits his dead father's giant war robots and has to keep them from the yakuza. That premise is the entire show, and it never blinks. Watch the Japanese version, where the plot actually breathes and the voice acting carries weight that the English dub completely butchered, because this is the prototype that invented the super robot anime the whole genre still copies.
During the Second World War, Dr. Haneda built experimental giant robots, but an Allied bombing wiped out his facility and killed him. Ten years on, criminals put two surviving prototypes, numbers 26 and 27, to work in a string of crimes. Shotaro Haneda, the scientist's twelve-year-old son, looks into the gang and learns they are searching for the twenty-eighth robot, said to be the strongest of the series. Shotaro gets to it before the villains, joined by Dr. Shikashima, his father's colleague, who was also thought to have died in the bombing. The two keep Tetsujin-28 out of criminal hands and choose to devote it to peace instead of war. Shotaro goes on to fight crime with the robot, with Dr. Shikashima handling repairs and police officer Otsuka at his side. The result is a sci-fi mecha adventure.
