and taking it as their new home planet. Duke and company go out to intercept them in Grendizer and the newly designed space combat Spazers. After a fierce battle, they finally manage to destroy the Vegan mother ship along with King Vega himself. Soon afterwards, Duke and Maria bid a tearful farewell to Earth and their friends and return to help reconstruct planet Fleed. Production UFO Robo Grendizer's origins dates back to Uchu Enban Daisenso (宇宙円盤大戦争, Uchū Enban Daisensō), translated and also known as Battlefield of The Space Saucers and The Great Battle of the Flying Saucers, a 1975 animated short film created by Go Nagai and produced by Toei Doga. It is also known as Space Disk War and was also released in Italy under the name UFO Robot Gattaiger-La grande battaglia dei dischi spaziali. It was originally shown along with the short film Great Mazinger tai Getter Robot G: Kuchu Daigekitotsu, also from Toei and Nagai. Nagai and Dynamic Productions created Grendizer using some of the elements and characters from Daiseno including Duke, the Makiba family, and even Blaki. Some changes were made to make it more original. The most obvious are the changes in design and the addition of characters such as Koji Kabuto and Maria Fleed. UFO Robot Grendizer was developed to be a sequel to Great Mazinger after the initial concepts of a sequel were rejected by Toei. With the appearance of Uchu Enban Daisenso at the March 1975 Toei Manga Festival a remake was pitched using elements from Mazinger. To breathe new light into the series, the villains of the series were decided to be aliens, a trend that followed in other Toei mecha series while also making Duke a more Blue Blood character with his suit being based on a knight including more romantic elements with its characters and sense of adventure. Go Nagai, however, at one point stated in an interview that the anime series was considered a fun side project and does not consider Grendizer to be part of the series timeline. This is mainly because he had many disagreements with Toei and Shingo Araki over the direction the show should take as well has Toei not paying him royalties for the show's overseas airings, which culminated in a 1986 court settlement that lead to Toei paying Nagai his royalty earnings. In the end, UFO Robo Grendizer is more of a