Surely HG Wells 1898 classic 'War of the Worlds' takes the prize for 
granddaddy of the genre with his tripedal alien mecha?
See e.g. http://www.stellabooks.com/images/hgwells/war_of_worlds.jpg
DLM

"Jim Henderson" <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote in message 
news:pan### [at] nospamcom...
> On Thu, 02 Jun 2005 17:09:45 -0400, Jim Charter wrote:
>
>> I had always though they originated in the Star Wars movies. No?
>
> Nope, the term at least originated with Japanese anime/manga; according to
> the wikipedia article, the mecha genre started in 1956 or 1958 (two
> articles have different dates) with a manga called Tetsujin 28-go that was
> made into an anime in 1963 that outside of Japan was called "Gigantor".
>
> In recalling my childhood memories of mecha, they were always bipedal, and
> had a single pilot, which the Star Wars AT-AT and AT-ST didn't have.
> Robotech and Macross pre-date the AT-ATs seen in Empire Strikes Back by a
> couple of years as well, as does the fairly popular Gundam series.  I
> can't think of anything in the original Star Wars film that came close to
> being a Mech; TIE and X-Wing fighers are more closely aligned with
> aeronautics than robotics, and R2D2 and C-3PO are both autonomous robots;
> while in the strictest sense of the Japanese word "meka", autonomous
> robots (and even electrical appliances) would fit the definition, but the
> definition of the genre is a bit more constrained than the general word
> usage.
>
> Jim

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