Exactly like the title...I'm about to give a long context of everything about mecha genre in South Korean animation. Where do I start now since there's so many I have to explain here since I got into said series because an old friend of mine used to love it (And funny enough....when he hit teen years, he no longer liking the series while I still love the series until now) Let's see....Ah! Ever since Transformer went popular, South Korea tried to get the same success but to avoid copyright they decided to change some of the aspect from the Transformer IP. First one...Tobot! (Hangul: 변신차동차 또봇 or spelled Byunshin Jadongcha Tobot). First time broadcasted in SBS, CN branch of SK, and so on around 2010 (Then they released the episodes starting in 2012), the entire series...like most Korean way of broadcasting a season: 1 season consist of 16 episodes with rundown of around 4 minutes each. In the series, we mainly follow through the perspective of twin brothers of the Cha family. Dowoon Cha (Father), Hana Cha (Older Twin), Duri Cha (Younger Twin)
Hana Cha the older twin (Tobot OG 2010 on the left and the reboot Tobot: Heroes of Daedo City 2023 on the right). He was renamed to Ryan Char in the localized version
Duri Cha the younger twin (Renamed to Kory Char in localized
Semo Kwon and Hansoo with Tobot Z (Originally, Tobot Z's pilot is just Semo but starting from Daedo's Heroes...Hansoo became part of Z's pilot so now Z must be handled by 2 people if Z want to transform from car mode to robot mode and Z can't transform when it's just one person who shout the command in the reboot. Sad that I don't have Semo's OG character screenshot, you can look it up in my stead)
First season until 2nd seasons revolves around the twins saving their kidnapped father, 3rd season introducing Semo Kwon (Renamed to Dylan Kwon in localized version), 4th until 9th season, Sora enter as the villain with Diluk as her henchman, at the same time somewhere between 5th and 6th...Limo Kwon carry the villain role while Sora is considered as second villain), later seasons slowly revolved around Towers planning to create the most powerful robot and his conquest for power. The original broadcasted from 2010 until 2015 and then 3 years later, dubbed to English handled by OCEAN Canada studio for the episode editing (If you have watched Zoids: New Century then yep...like New Century suffering from excessive scene cuts because of censorship, Tobot English dubbed version had so many tame scenes erased even as trivial as the scene when Semo Kwon being injected with medicine at the hospital because he was injured after being kidnapped by the villain, Diluk. Another censorship OCEAN did was blurring out all the Korean hangul on boards and the likes you see in some episodes, not only that but the entire characters...outside of the twins, they had been renamed with the most casual name that made you think they legitimately disrespect the IP from the renaming already).
Even the reboot suffer from censorship and removal of Korean name despite now they no longer cut any scene in the episodes (They tried to keep the episodes as intact as possible). Food names in Korean like Bindaetteok (Mung Bean Pancake), Tteobokki (Some kind of rice cake), Jjajangmyeon (Black Bean Noodle) renamed into "Vegetable pancake" (Jesus!), Jjajangmyeon renamed to just black noodle (Really?).
......I hate Korean animation series being censored like this but I'm giving note here, Youngtoys...the company behind Tobot is somewhat protective of copyright. Last time I tried to make English subtitle of the movie Tobot the movie: Attack of the Robot...it was partially blocked instantly (But never mind, I will hardcode the subtitle later on once it's done. I only managed to make the subtitle up to the 6th minute while the movie is around 80 minutes).
That's one done. Now it's another one but aimed for kids, titled Hello Carbot.
Cover of the first season
Created by Sonokong, it has up to 16 seasons so far but considering they're rather protective of the rights for movie production, I haven't found any raw of full footage regarding the movies they created (Even they deleted the movies from Netflix shortly after they released the movies in said platform).
How do I explain this one...it's rather complicated because it also has something to do with the English subtitle project I did on this series after they made the franchise exclusive to Korea only. Let's see....first time broadcasted in SBS and other South Korea TV channels in 2014, they decided to follow Brave series of Japan (Think Brave Mightgaine, GaoGaiGar, J-Decker, Brave Sun Fighbird and so on....) starting on season 16. One thing....the toys are considered almost as expensive as Tobot but when it comes to international marketing? Well...very much too late. They start going for international world audience starting from 2025 but they just started it after they found out that I started subtitling the first season of Hello Carbot with English sub. Is it a coincidence? It can't be coincidence because a year later after I started the project....they released an English dub of the first season starting on May, 2025 before finally created official channel for the EN dub and reposted the several episodes they deleted from last month into this channel. How do I know they tried to get themselves into international? Their video description on each episodes of their English dubbed, copy-pasted from mine back in May before the official channel just stop writing video description that explain what the episode is about.
I tried to contact them to see if they can let me be part of the localization team but eh....they just ignored me (Forget that, Youtube still screwed me with the copyright. The platform copyright claimed the episodes instantly when I posted the hardcoded sub version in my main channel along with the soft sub version in my alt channel). I was expecting them to at the very least do revenue sharing because the episodes are their but the English subtitle was created by me so the subbing is mine but oh well....what am I expecting? They're too big to even care about that. A bit of reminder about the English dubbing: They used AI dubbing but they didn't do quality checking so it's way worse than Metal Cardbot English dubbing (When Jeong DaHae, Chatan's mother screamed so loud that it hurt your ear in the original Korean...her screamed in dubbed version ended up half-effort and fall flat). Not only that....they renamed almost all the prominent characters into casual names like Jerry, Charlie, Suzy, and so on (Except Mona since she's named that in original Korean so no changes)
Chatan the 9 year old boy who carry cube (Later watch starting from 2nd season. He was renamed to Charlie in the 2025 English dub)
At the very least...the Hello Carbot series had no scene cut.
Korean series like Watch Car and Miniforce got decent dubbing with almost no scenes cut
Hana Cha the older twin (Tobot OG 2010 on the left and the reboot Tobot: Heroes of Daedo City 2023 on the right). He was renamed to Ryan Char in the localized version
Duri Cha the younger twin (Renamed to Kory Char in localized
Semo Kwon and Hansoo with Tobot Z (Originally, Tobot Z's pilot is just Semo but starting from Daedo's Heroes...Hansoo became part of Z's pilot so now Z must be handled by 2 people if Z want to transform from car mode to robot mode and Z can't transform when it's just one person who shout the command in the reboot. Sad that I don't have Semo's OG character screenshot, you can look it up in my stead)
First season until 2nd seasons revolves around the twins saving their kidnapped father, 3rd season introducing Semo Kwon (Renamed to Dylan Kwon in localized version), 4th until 9th season, Sora enter as the villain with Diluk as her henchman, at the same time somewhere between 5th and 6th...Limo Kwon carry the villain role while Sora is considered as second villain), later seasons slowly revolved around Towers planning to create the most powerful robot and his conquest for power. The original broadcasted from 2010 until 2015 and then 3 years later, dubbed to English handled by OCEAN Canada studio for the episode editing (If you have watched Zoids: New Century then yep...like New Century suffering from excessive scene cuts because of censorship, Tobot English dubbed version had so many tame scenes erased even as trivial as the scene when Semo Kwon being injected with medicine at the hospital because he was injured after being kidnapped by the villain, Diluk. Another censorship OCEAN did was blurring out all the Korean hangul on boards and the likes you see in some episodes, not only that but the entire characters...outside of the twins, they had been renamed with the most casual name that made you think they legitimately disrespect the IP from the renaming already).
Even the reboot suffer from censorship and removal of Korean name despite now they no longer cut any scene in the episodes (They tried to keep the episodes as intact as possible). Food names in Korean like Bindaetteok (Mung Bean Pancake), Tteobokki (Some kind of rice cake), Jjajangmyeon (Black Bean Noodle) renamed into "Vegetable pancake" (Jesus!), Jjajangmyeon renamed to just black noodle (Really?).
......I hate Korean animation series being censored like this but I'm giving note here, Youngtoys...the company behind Tobot is somewhat protective of copyright. Last time I tried to make English subtitle of the movie Tobot the movie: Attack of the Robot...it was partially blocked instantly (But never mind, I will hardcode the subtitle later on once it's done. I only managed to make the subtitle up to the 6th minute while the movie is around 80 minutes).
That's one done. Now it's another one but aimed for kids, titled Hello Carbot.
Cover of the first season
Created by Sonokong, it has up to 16 seasons so far but considering they're rather protective of the rights for movie production, I haven't found any raw of full footage regarding the movies they created (Even they deleted the movies from Netflix shortly after they released the movies in said platform).
How do I explain this one...it's rather complicated because it also has something to do with the English subtitle project I did on this series after they made the franchise exclusive to Korea only. Let's see....first time broadcasted in SBS and other South Korea TV channels in 2014, they decided to follow Brave series of Japan (Think Brave Mightgaine, GaoGaiGar, J-Decker, Brave Sun Fighbird and so on....) starting on season 16. One thing....the toys are considered almost as expensive as Tobot but when it comes to international marketing? Well...very much too late. They start going for international world audience starting from 2025 but they just started it after they found out that I started subtitling the first season of Hello Carbot with English sub. Is it a coincidence? It can't be coincidence because a year later after I started the project....they released an English dub of the first season starting on May, 2025 before finally created official channel for the EN dub and reposted the several episodes they deleted from last month into this channel. How do I know they tried to get themselves into international? Their video description on each episodes of their English dubbed, copy-pasted from mine back in May before the official channel just stop writing video description that explain what the episode is about.
I tried to contact them to see if they can let me be part of the localization team but eh....they just ignored me (Forget that, Youtube still screwed me with the copyright. The platform copyright claimed the episodes instantly when I posted the hardcoded sub version in my main channel along with the soft sub version in my alt channel). I was expecting them to at the very least do revenue sharing because the episodes are their but the English subtitle was created by me so the subbing is mine but oh well....what am I expecting? They're too big to even care about that. A bit of reminder about the English dubbing: They used AI dubbing but they didn't do quality checking so it's way worse than Metal Cardbot English dubbing (When Jeong DaHae, Chatan's mother screamed so loud that it hurt your ear in the original Korean...her screamed in dubbed version ended up half-effort and fall flat). Not only that....they renamed almost all the prominent characters into casual names like Jerry, Charlie, Suzy, and so on (Except Mona since she's named that in original Korean so no changes)
Chatan the 9 year old boy who carry cube (Later watch starting from 2nd season. He was renamed to Charlie in the 2025 English dub)
At the very least...the Hello Carbot series had no scene cut.
Korean series like Watch Car and Miniforce got decent dubbing with almost no scenes cut