The answer is that there are still some iconic titles that have yet to be licensed, as well as some lesser known but still notable works... and we begin the second half of this list with easily the most confounding gap of them all.
Seriously, how is it even possible for this anime to be in a list like this, especially considering how many other vintage mech anime of the era have since seen official English release? Anyway, in 1972 Go Nagai revolutionized how giant robots were seen with Mazinger Z, as it was the first one to feature a proper pilot that operated the mech directly via a cockpit that was a part of the robot itself. Created as a media mix project the TV anime version by Toei Animation aired on Fuji TV, and by early 1974 was still running... but Fuji TV wanted more. Therefore, Toei's Ken Ariga proposed a mech anime where the giant robot was formed by the combination of three units, each with its own pilot, and the order they combined in resulted in multiple forms. While initially confused by the concept Go Nagai agreed to move ahead, but since he was so busy with other titles he decided to hand this new mech series over to his friend & assistant Ken Ishikawa... and the rest is history. On April 4, 1974 the first episode of Getter Robo debuted on Fuji TV, which saw three pilots (Ryoma Nagare, Hayato Jin, & Musashi Tomoe) work together to protect humanity from the Dinosaur Empire using their respective Getter Machines, which can combine together to form Getter Robo, which had three different forms depending on how they combined.
The Getter Robo anime was a massive success, solidifying the concept of the combiner mecha, & after 51 episodes would be followed up by a sequel series, Getter Robo G, that ran for an additional 39 episodes from 1975 to 1976. Ironically, Getter Robo G actually saw release in English as part of Force Five in the 80s, as Starvengers, so it's actually ineligible for this list. Meanwhile, Ken Ishikawa took the concept he helped create with Getter Robo & made a manga version of the story, one that eventually would become a massive franchise of works that created an epic magnum opus for the man and showcased the maddening, frightening, & essentially Lovecraftian power that were the Getter Rays that powered Getter Robo & its successive mecha. It would be Ishikawa's manga take on Getter Robo that would heavily influence the direction most Getter Robo anime would take from then on out... and most of those later Getter Robo anime would see official English release, with the only exception being Toei's Getter Robo Go anime from 1991/1992, which itself was a loose adaptation of Ishikawa's Shonen Captain manga (that did see English release via Viz as Venger Robo, though it was unfinished here). Today, Getter Robo is seen as one of the most important & iconic works to come from Go Nagai & his team at Dynamic Pro, right up there with Mazinger, Cutie Honey, & Devilman, and the continual release (& re-release) of the later Getter Robo anime productions (Armageddon, Shin vs. Neo, New Getter, & most recently Getter Arc) in English proves that there's just enough of a fanbase for the franchise... which makes the fact that the very first Getter Robo anime has still never seen an official English release (yet the sequel did, go figure) absolutely mind-boggling, especially since we have received fully subbed releases for both Mazinger Z & Great Mazinger.
Maybe there's some sort of weird hold up, or something, but hopefully one day the very first combiner mech anime will finally get its proper due over here.
Yeah, we have another mech anime up next (& there's still one more later on), but this time around let's focus on something a bit more forgotten... yet still memorable, in its own weird way. We also kind of jump ahead a few years after Getter Robo, over to 1977 specifically, as the double-success of Mazinger Z & Getter Robo led to a notable influx of what would now be considered "super robot" anime, including the likes of Brave Reideen, Koutetsu Jeeg, UFO Robo Grendizer, Gaiking, Gowapper 5 Godam, Block Corps IV Machine Blaster, UFO Warrior Diapolon, & many others from a wide variety of anime studios... & toy companies that wanted make money on figures that kids would buy & play with. One of those anime studios was Wako Pro, which initially was known simply as a subcontractor & assistance studio but in 1975 started doing its own productions, most notably 1976's "TV anime" adaptation of Kazuo Umezz's Cat-Eyed Boy, which actually wasn't a traditional anime but rather was "Gekimation", a form of paper cutout animation. I honestly originally planned on including Cat-Eyed Boy in this list, but turns out it's actually licensed right now by Golden Media Group, which recently worked with RetroCrush to get the 1989-1992 Guyver OVA streaming, so I imagine Cat-Eyed Boy will also become available in time. Anyway, easily the most well known original anime from Wako Pro would be Gasshin Sentai/Combination Squadron Mechander Robo, which ran throughout 1977 for 35 episodes & was sponsored by toy company Bullmark.
Mechander Robo took place on an Earth that had become 95% conquered by the alien Congistar Army, and focused on a rebellion group led by Dr. Shikishima that had the giant robot Mechander Robo that was piloted by the trio of Jimmy Orion (who in reality was the prince of the alien planet that the Congistar had previously taken over), Kojiro Yashima, & Dr. Shikishima's son Ryusuke. For the most part a rather standard concept for a mech anime of the era, though having Earth already be mostly conquered was a unique touch for the time, but Mechander Robo featured two neat twists to it. First, any time Mechander is actually sent out an "Omega Missile" is fired by the Congistar Army that homes in on any nuclear-powered device, like Mechander, giving Jimmy & his team limited time to save the day; yes, it's an excuse to only feature limited animation with the giant robot itself, but it's a neat concept. The other neat twist is with Mechander Robo itself, designed by the legendary Kunio Okawara, because... I mean, just look at it! Spiked bucklers on both arms that can be inverted to cut, crush, maim, & throw, a giant sword, a chest-mounted flamethrower, shark torpedoes, a five-barreled rocket launcher, and it even has blades on the back of its feet! If the forces of the Congistar Army that Mechander Robo fought were anything other than mechanical this anime would be an outright bloodbath every episode. Unfortunately, though, Mechander Robo is also notorious for its production problems, stemming mainly from the fact that Bullmark went bankrupt in October 1977, while the anime was still airing & being made. Unable to find a new sponsor, Wako Pro had to make six of its final seven episodes be partial recap episodes, with only a few new bits of animation here & there to allow the story to continue on as intended, but the studio managed to cross the finish line in December & told a complete story. Wako Pro would eventually leave the anime production business after 1992 & since then has simply managed the copyrights to its works, like Mechander Robo, for licensing purposes. A full English dub was produced for the anime by Telesuccess in the Philippines back then, as well, though I imagine that dub would be region locked, licensing-wise, as is the case for most English dubs made specifically for Southeast Asia (see also: The vast majority of Animax dubs).
Since first airing in 1977 Mechander Robo has managed to maintain a small cult fandom among mecha fans, due to the robot's memorable design & also its infamous production problems, but in a surprising turn of events from late 2024 to mid-2025 the entire show was officially uploaded to YouTube in cooperation with distribution company Chuo Eiga Boeki. These episodes are still available worldwide for anyone to watch, but unfortunately the only way to watch them with a translation is by using YouTube's auto-translation option via the captions, as the Japanese scripts were included there, so I'll still count Mechander Robo as being eligible for this list. While the official worldwide streaming option on YouTube is really cool to see, it should still have a proper English translation, instead of simply relying on literal machine translation.
As I mentioned last time, I decided to put down the series Attack No. 1, which was the first female-focused sports anime & based on the manga by Chikako Urano, as an Honorable Mention due to its length. That's because Attack No. 1 is 104 episodes long, so while it's influence & impact on sports anime is undoubted it's also something that's just too long to be considered somewhat feasible to license; there were four compilation movies, but these lists are all about TV anime. However, I still wanted to include some sort of female-focused sports anime from the 70s, and it just so happens that what I picked wound up also being what makes up the other half of this part of the 60s/70s list: Nippon Animation productions. Yeah, half of Part 2 of this list is mecha & the other half is Nippon Animation, which totally wasn't by intention but I think it's fair to say that both really did help define the second half of the 70s. Anyway, after the success of the "Oriental Witches", Japan's women's volleyball team that won gold at the 1964 Summer Olympics, the Japanese populace got really into volleyball & in 1968 two volleyball manga were able to take advantage of that momentum to find great success. One was the aforementioned Attack No. 1 by Chikako Urano & the other was Sign wa V! by Shiro Jinbo (story) & Akira Mochizuki (art), & while Urano's manga got a popular TV anime adaptation, Jinbo & Mochizuki's would receive two different live-action TV adaptations (in 1969 & 1973). After both Attack No. 1 & Sign wa V! came to an end, both in manga & TV form, Nippon Animation decided to essentially combine forces from both series together, bringing in Sign wa V! co-creator Shiro Jinbo for the original concept, have Fumio Kurokawa & Eiji Okabe (who together did episode direction for all of Attack No. 1's anime) direct & handle series composition, respectively, & Mon Shichijo (a scriptwriter for Attack No. 1) be a part of Okabe's writing staff. The end result was Ashita he Attack!/Attack on Tomorrow!, which ran for 23 episodes throughout 1977.
Ashita he Attack! starred Mimi Hijiri, a third year student at Tachibana High School who decides to spend her last year rebuilding the volleyball team after it was suspended following the death of one of its members, due to a harsh training regiment. The anime focused on more than just Mimi & the team simply being the best team in the country, though, as it also included other dramatic elements. Mimi had to deal with finding a proper coach for the team (eventually going with science teacher Daisuke Hara) or find a way for the team to properly gel together, since the new first-year members initially don't see any interest in practicing & a new third-year member demands to be made captain in exchange for joining, despite her arrogance making her a bad captain. Truly, unlike the two titles that it was made as a surrogate follow-up to, which were more about making way into world-class competition, Ashita he Attack! was instead more of a coming-of-age story set around high school volleyball, though there were still matches against other schools. While I guess it can be argued that this entry can come off a bit like a knock-off pick, I do think there would be more of a chance of a 23-episode shojo-styled volleyball TV anime getting licensed than a 104-episode shojo-styled volleyball TV anime. Plus, Ashita he Attack! saw an HD remastered Blu-Ray release in Japan in 2022, so that also puts things more in favor towards that show, too.
OK, one last mech anime for this half of the list, and if we began with arguably the biggest name of the 70s yet to be licensed for official English release, then we end with one of the most infamous of the decade... and the first truly iconic work for an absolute legend of the genre. Getting his start in anime all the way back in 1964 at Mushi Pro, Yoshiyuki Tomino would go from simple production assistant to storyboarder, writer, & even episode director on Astro Boy, and in 1972 would make his series directorial debut with Triton of the Sea. Tomino then would make his giant robot debut in 1975 by directing Brave Reideen, but he left the position halfway through due to constantly conflicting demands between both the network & the production partners themselves, with Tadao Nagahama taking over as director. It was via Nagahama that Reideen would become the legendary mech anime it is today, and Tomino (who still contributed here & there in the second half) would take note of what Nagahama did. After working on a few other shows in smaller roles, including directing an episode of Mechander Robo, Yoshiyuki Tomino would return to being series director on October 8, 1977 with the debut of a new mech anime from Sunrise, Muteki Chojin/Invincible Superman Zambot 3.
The anime told the battle between the Jin Family & the Gaizok, an alien force that had previously wiped out the planet Beal, which the Jin Family had managed to escape from & fled to Earth, preparing for the time when the Gaizok would eventually come to invade Earth. To combat their foes the Jin Family made three vehicles that could combine together to form Zambot 3... but the twist to Zambot 3 is that despite being the heroes that protect to Earth from Gaizok attack the citizens of Earth would come to despise the Jin Family, due to all of the destruction that the battles would bring, feeling that they're the very reason why Earth was even invaded by the Gaizok in the first place. The first original work produced by Sunrise, this Tomino-created story had a notably different tone, where the Jin Family continued to protect Earth despite being hated by the very people they were protecting, that would make Zambot 3 extremely unique from most other mech anime of its time. Also, its focus on telling a more realistic war story, one where the fear of going into battle played a big factor & the Gaizok would rely on literal "human bombs", would act as a sort of first draft for what Tomino would later do with Mobile Suit Gundam... and then there's the ending, which shocked both viewers & the production partners in its bleakness & violence, resulting in the legendary nickname of "Minagoroshi no Tomino/Tomino the Mass Murderer", often localized into English as "Kill-Em-All Tomino"; and to think that Zambot 3 is only 23 episodes long!
As of this piece, literally every TV anime that Yoshiyuki Tomino has ever directed since the original Mobile Suit Gundam has seen official English release on home video, with Heavy Metal L-Gaim being the last gap that was filled in by Sentai Filmworks just this past June. However, that still leaves Tomino's pre-Gundam directorial work to bring over, and I really hope that it's just a matter of time until Zambot 3, alongside Daitarn 3, Triton of the Sea, La Seine no Hoshi, & even Brave Reideen, is given its chance officially in English; Reideen did have a subbed broadcast in some Hawaiian & West Coast stations in the 70s & 80s, but still.
When making this list I felt like I needed to include an anime adaptation of a manga by the late Shinji Mizushima, arguably the most iconic baseball mangaka of all time... but the obvious pick, Dokaben, ran for 163 episodes; it, too, was an Honorable Mention in Part 1. Luckily, Nippon Animation actually was responsible for all but one of the anime adaptations of Shinji Mizushima's manga (all of which happened in the 70s, go figure), so I have another one to go with that I think is unique enough on its own. After Dokaben debuted around April of 1972 in Weekly Shonen Champion, Mizushima would debut another baseball manga over in the pages of Weekly Shonen Magazine later that year, but it originally didn't debut as a proper series. Instead, Yakyu-kyo no Uta/Song of Baseball Enthusiasts initially first appeared as a series of short-stories, no more than two or three chapters long, each telling its own story about someone who could be described as a "Baseball Enthsiast/Fanatic", like a 50-year old pitcher for the fictional Tokyo Mets. This happened once in late 1972 & then three times throughout 1974, before in Combined Issue #3-4 of 1976 a proper serialization for Yakyu-kyo no Uta debuted in Shonen Magazine, which would run until Issue #24 of 1977; overall the manga would total 13 volumes. This serialized run told the story of Yuki Mizuhara, a high school girl who plays for her school's women's baseball team but intends to become a vet, only to be scouted relentlessly by Tetsugoro Iwata of the Tokyo Mets, who manages to convince Yuki to play professionally for one year, turning her into the first female professional baseball player (well, in Japan at least). Yuki winds up becoming a talented pro pitcher, due in part to her "makyu" the Dream Ball, and like many of Mizushima's other various baseball manga leads would go on to make appearances in other works of his, since Mizushima was big on having his various baseball manga take place in the same overall world.
On December 23, 1977 the first episode of Nippon Animation's anime adaptation of Yakyu-kyo no Uta ran on Fuji TV as a one-off special, detailing the initial turmoil surrounding Yuki joining the Tokyo Mets. The episode did extremely well with viewers, though, resulting in an additional five episodes being produced & aired as monthly specials from May to September of 1978, and starting that November the anime became a weekly series for Episodes 7 to 25, which ran through March of 1979. Yuki's story arc would end in Episode 11, though, with the remaining 14 episodes actually adapting the initial short stories that predated the manga's weekly serialization. However, due to the fact that the Yakyu-kyo no Uta anime initially started as a series of one-hour specials (i.e. just over 45 minutes long each, without commercials), the remaining 19 episodes that were aired weekly were also just as long, which means that the Yakyu-kyo no Uta anime is really closer to the equivalent of a 48-50 episode series. There was also an anime film in 1979 that looks to have compiled Episodes 13 & 14, which told the Kita no Okami Minami no Tora/Wolf of the North, Tiger of the South story. Now, to be fair, if I wanted to be a bit more "reasonable" when it comes to a Shinji Mizushima anime I guess I could have instead gone with Nippon Animation's adaptation of Ikkyu-san (a.k.a. Highschool Baseball Ninja) from 1978, as that was only 26 standard length episodes... but, nah, Yakyu-kyo no Uta sounds way more interesting.
I mean, come on, a baseball story starring the first female player in (Japanese) pro baseball history? I'm not really all that into baseball, but I'd certainly watch that anime with English subs.
Finally, we end with one last Nippon Animation production, and it's back to the world of shojo with a series where some people may actually be familiar with it due to a pair of anime movies that came out in the late 2010s, but not so much with the OG anime adaptation. Making her published debut in 1966 at just the age of 18, Waki Yamato would quickly find notoriety in shojo manga in 1971 with the manga Mon Chéri CoCo, which despite only running for three volumes across less than a year would get turned into a TV anime in 1972... which wound up being cancelled after only 13 episodes due to a dispute between the production chief & the chief director. Anyway, after a few other short series in the first half of the 70s Yamato would debut what would become one of her most iconic works, 1975's Haikara-san ga Toru/Miss High Collar Passing Through, which told the story of Benio Hanamura, a rebellious tomboy living during the Taisho Era who becomes the arranged fiancée of Lt. Shinobu Ijuin, and while she initially hates this & tries her best to break off the marriage Benio slowly comes to truly fall in love with Shinobu. While only running until 1977 across eight volumes, Haikara-san would be a popular & long-lasting work for Waki Yamato, and in 2017 & 2018 an anime movie duology was done by Nippon Animation that saw official English release as Haikara-San: Here Comes Miss Modern; both movies would be streamed, but only the first saw physical release via Right Stuf.
However, as you can guess from it being the final entry in this list, there was a prior anime adaptation of Haikara-san ga Toru, and it was a 42-episode TV series that ran from 1978 to 1979 & was animated by Nippon Animation, coincidentally enough. You'd think that Nippon was hired to animate the later anime movies because of this prior TV anime, but aside from Katsuji Mori (who played Shinobu) doing narration & Reiko Suzuki actually reprising her role as Baaya the housekeeper, plus Banjo Ginga being in both anime (but for different minor roles), there was essentially no carryover between productions, so I think Nippon animating both adaptations was probably more coincidental than anything. Anyway, with only eight volumes of manga to work with, but 42 episodes of anime, I think it's fair to assume that the 70s anime adaptation of Haikara-san expanded on Waki Yamato's story & characters a bit with plenty of anime-original plots & the like. However, part of the appeal of Haikara-san is the usage of Taisho Era Japan, which admittedly is rarely utilized in anime & manga, a time where Japan went through rapid advancements in both technology & culture after the Meiji Era became the embodiment of Japan leaving behind the isolationist ideals of the Tokugawa shogunate that had ruled Japan for 265 years. Benio, in turn, was a true representation of that change, being a young woman who preferred to think for herself, be capable of protecting herself (as she loved kendo), & disliked dressing in more "traditional" kimono in favor of more Western-style garb. In a weird way, by taking place in such a short-lived time period (the Taisho Era only lasted 14 years) Haikara-san ga Toru has likely aged surprisingly well, & I wouldn't be shocked if Nippon Animation's TV series from the late 70s holds up similarly well today.
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And with that we've come to the end of this list of unlicensed TV anime from the 70s (plus some 60s in Part 1), going over a neat variety of titles that were either historically important, very much of their era, both, or maybe even timeless in their own rights. Again, if you were to go back to the anime bubble of the 00s the idea of any of these anime being seeing as potentially viable for official English licensing, even in the ever-so-slightest, would have been seen as an absurd idea... but now, with a generation of anime fans that have continued to remain fans of the medium after literal decades, the idea isn't quite as impossible to consider. Sure, most of the titles I listed across these two parts aren't necessarily likely to ever get licensed for official English release, and I would argue that the majority of the titles that probably seemed to be the most likely have already been licensed & released, though there are still some notable exceptions, like Getter Robo.
Still, the fact that we're in an era now where the response has changed from "Never gonna happen, so stop asking" to "Well... you never know" is pretty damn cool, if I say so myself.
Getter Robo © Dynamic Planning・Toei Animation
Gasshin Sentai Mechander Robo © Wako Pro
Ashita he Attack! © Nippon Animation
Muteki Chojin Zambot 3 © Sunrise
Yakyu-kyo no Uta © Shinji Mizushima/Nippon Animation
Haikara-san ga Toru © Waki Yamato'Kodansha・Nippon Animation
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