A nice vintage anime that in the southern europe of the last century, for many years was relegated to less important television networks with limited broadcasting capacity, and still rarely re-broadcast on just a couple of nostalgic themed channels. The typical product that for content, genre or public trends, did not convince its buyers to bet on it, one of those products, in short, taken because they are part of packages with more interesting stuff inside, rather than for a selective choice.
Cybot Robotchi bears clear similarities to the more well-known and older Dr. Slump, for example: a robotic protagonist with peculiar abilities, a demented comedy, a tousled-haired scientist pining for love, an evil scientist who meddles in, and a gang of brats etc...
Obviously there are differences to avoid complaints of plagiarism. For example: the main robot this time is male and with a decent intelligence as well as in love with someone. Haiguro, the rival mad scientist, is more handsome and present than Dr. Mashirito by Dr. Slump. The thugs of the village this time are not friends but opponents to be defeated, there are more robots and fewer recurring humans, two Robo-mounts (one flying and one aquatic), there is the almost absence of anthropomorphic creatures, the comedy is slightly less nosense and a pinch more mischievous and the main super power that solves the day is not based on mega strength / invulnerability like Toriyama's creature, but rather on a kind of oven that creates tangible holograms, like a kind of Aladdin's lamp.
To be more precise, in the first third of the TV series, the main enemy is a trio of gangster that wants to steal Dr. Deko's engineering projects. In this phase (and in the central one), despite the light-hearted tone, the scheme of the episodes is less wild and predictable and the use of illusions is reduced to very few occasions. It will then be with the arrival of the mad scientist and his two robotic henchmen (ep.21) that Cybot Robotchi will become more repetitive and incoherent, but perhaps even slightly more fun.
Although the same television fate has happened to much greater cult creations (Hokuto no ken, Saint Seya, Time Bokan series, etc.), Cybot Robotchi, despite being little remembered today, was one of those cartoons that ensured good ratings and for this reason, repeated quite often, at least until the first half of the 90s. Compared to Dr Slump and Arale, reviewing the episodes of Cybot Robotchi, one cannot fail to notice a lower care in the drawings, very fluctuating, the less justified narrative events, some forced (or reworked) dialogue, an excessive saturation of colors (not even optimally matched), as well as a lack of fluidity in the movement of the frames dedicated to the landscape and grouped characters, perhaps a sign of cheapness, but quite common in those times. There are also occasional defects, which underline the age of the material and its non-existent restoration in the recent transition to the 16:9 format.
Despite this, however, ignoring the absurd humanization of robots, which also eat human food, ignoring the non-repetition of the new secondary characters, such as the little robot Kaori and the robo-cameraman, and ignoring the extreme inconstancy of power and duration of holograms, Cybot Robotchi still remains a pleasant vision, with that lighthearted comedy that Japan itself has struggled to reproduce and re-propose in the new millennium.