Still, once that OVA came & went, the name "Giant Robo" was automatically linked with what Imagawa created. Only to wind up making said cartoons because they were being paid more than they ever had. That honestly seems like how the Fleischer Brothers didn't want to make Superman cartoons in the 40s, so they asked for an absurd amount of money. In response, the OVA became a celebration of Mitsuteru Yokoyama in general, featuring characters from a bevy of the man's manga catalog. Created by cult-favorite director Yasuhiro Imagawa, this OVA was not really an adaptation of Giant Robo, as Imagawa was actually barred from using any of the supporting cast from either the manga or toku.
Of course, as time went on, this title has become associated with something else entirely: The 1992-1998 OVA series Giant Robo: The Day the Earth Stood Still. Alongside this, & similar to what Go Nagai & Shotaro Ishinomori would do with their creations later on, Yokoyama also drew his own manga take on Giant Robo, which ran for three volumes in Weekly Shonen Sunday while the show aired on TV. The toku series ran from 1967 to 1968 for 26 episodes, & would shortly later be brought over to North America under the Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot. What Yokoyama created was Giant Robo, which still featured a teenage boy controlling a giant robot by way of a voice-operated remote control on his wrist unlike Tetsujin, though, which could be controlled by anyone, Robo could only be controlled by a "hero".
After that manga was made into a wildly successful TV anime from 1963 to 1966, Toei Company contacted Yokoyama with an offer for him to create a pilot for a new tokusatsu show, likely to follow up on the success of shows like Ultraman & Ambassador Magma. While the likes of Go Nagai, Ken Ishikawa, Yoshiyuki Tomino, & even Tadao Nagahama are acknowledged for their contributions to the genre, they all worked off of the template that Yokoyama introduced back in 1956 with Tetsujin 28. I've said it before here, but it bears repeating that Mitsuteru Yokoyama might be one of the most underappreciated people in the history of anime & manga, and that even applies to mecha.
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