Soukou Kihei Votoms Recaps

This a list of all Armored Trooper Votoms anime in release order, which is also the recommended watch order. MAL's relation system doesn't really give an overview of the franchise and its structure.
Recaps are marked and any special content is noted in case you want to skip them, and release order is clarified for the 80s OVAs.

Armored Trooper Votoms is a 1983 Mecha anime directed by Ryousuke Takahashi, noted for being one of the landmarks of the "real robot" subgenre, i.e. the treatment of mecha as simply military machinery instead of super heroes. The franchise is primarily built around this main TV show and fleshes it out with various prequels, side stories and sequels in a non-linear fashion, with a few spin-offs that make use of many of the elements of the world while not directly relating to the main story.

Sunrise's 80s OVA policy was to release a number of recap OVAs, then follow them up with new content, and then if that sold well they'd put out more recaps with more new content at the end. Votoms isn't the only show to see this policy, but it's the one where they did it the most. This is how The Last Red Shoulder, Big Battle and Red Shoulder Document came to be.

Armor Hunter Mellowlink, Case;Irvine and Votoms Finder are spin-offs that have varying degrees of connection to the main Votoms story and world, Mellowlink being the closest, and Finder being the furthest removed (in fact you may struggle to find a reason why it's called Votoms).

While the franchise has been dormant since 2011 as Ryousuke Takahashi has mostly retired from the directing anime (with a few exceptions in the last few years), there are a number of novels set in the Votoms universe that have been released in the last 20 years but have not been adapted to anime. These include Commando Vorct, Blue Knight Berserga, Philosopher on the Battlefield, and Child of God. Some of these may be adapted some day (in fact there is a doujin anime of Berserga on Youtube), but I wouldn't hold out hope.

The intent of this stack is to provide a complete history of Sunrise animation in a single course, meant to fit inside the framework of a 3 credit class with an expectation of 90 hours of out-of-class material over the period of a 15 week semester.

Adaptions of manga, or novels will be mostly excluded unless the creators themselves worked at Sunrise like in the case of Dunbine, or Arion. This means extremely notable, and historically important series, such as Cyborg 009, Ultraman, City Hunter, Inuyasha, Planetes, Sgt. Frog, and Gintama will all be excluded, despite the critical artistic contribution of this works on Sunrise's style. A truly dedicated academic would, at the minimum, watch some of the City Hunter, Inuyasha, Sgt Frog and Gintama side content since they were incredibly important on influencing Sunrise studio direction.

This course would ideally be taken alongside a thrice per week hour long lecture, breaking down the lineage of Sunrise's works, and how they influenced one another to build what we have today. As a result, there may be a series you feel is critical, or exceptionally great, but it will be excluded in favor of discussing the series role and relationship to the studio due to the limitations watching long form weekly series made for weekly broadcast. Sunrise is unique in that many of their major series have movies, or OVAs that summarize or recap the main franchise to give viewers a soft entry to understanding the work. However, there are of course serious works like Giant Gorg, Vifam, Pazer World Galient, Ronin Warriors, Jushin Liger, the entirety of the critically influencial Brave Series, most alternative Gundam series (which would be left to their own "Gundam" course), Garasaki, Infinite Ryvius, s-CRY-ed, Big O, Tiger & Bunny or even Love, Live! that would be discussed in class even if they aren't going to be watched.

This is a developing experiment, so please contact me if you have any suggestions, or questions.