Megas XLR

The giant robot that chicks dig (back), the chick who digs giant robots (left), and the nerds who are trying to pick up chicks with their giant robot that chicks dig (center and right).

“	Coop: "I ain't no hero, I'm just a guy from Jersey; I wanna cruise around in this thing, smash stuff, maybe pick up a few chicks." Jamie: "Chicks dig giant robots."	”
	— The moment where it all began

Megas XLR (Japanese: Megadasu gōgai ōkī Robotto) is an epic mid-2000s Cartoon Network tale, detailing the exploits of famous talking manatee Coop, his man-servant Jamie, and well-known Terran Ghost wannabe Kiva Onderu who pilot a majorly pimped-out Gundam/Evangelion hybrid, dubbed MEGAS XLR (Mechanized Earth Guard Attack System eXtra Large Robot). The series of documentaries centers around their battle against the Glorft, a group of Cthulhu-worshiping cyborg squids.

Premise

The story follows Coop, a fat, lazy video game freak who finds a giant robot called MEGAS in a junkyard. He stiffs the junkyard owner Goat out of two bucks for the robot and rebuilds it, gives it a car for a head, and adds "XLR" to its name. MEGAS was mistakenly sent back in time by Kiva, a mech pilot from the future who rides with Coop to give him much-needed advice. Together with Coop's goth-like friend Jamie, the three drive their giant robot around their hometown of Jersey City destroying bad guys, freakish monsters, POPTV satellites, and the entire city all within roughly 30 minutes of each day on a regular basis.

Throughout the course of the series, the trio encounter many a foe including Bruce Campbell's head, a robotic Mr. T, a cheap Megatron ripoff, a cheese monster that Coop created, and the inevitable evil twins from some Star Trek mirror dimension. Their main enemies are green space squids called the Glorft, who look it too, and they fight them more often than other quirky one-time villains.

Collateral damage

Even though he triumphs over evil in every episode, Coop still manages to destroy many things around him that aren't really his main target. For one, his hometown of Jersey City has been destroyed and rebuilt at least fifteen times; he has also destroyed at least two planets, destroyed a copy of Halo that was used for data storage on Covenant technology, created a nuclear winter for Earth for at least three months, and blown a large chunk out of the dark side of the moon which altered Earth's climate.

Despite all of this, people are too scared that Coop will smash them if they bill him for all the damage he's caused, and they would rather just ignore the big robots and monsters fighting in the streets while they go about their daily lives.

Characters

Heroes

• MEGAS – Born of a time paradox created by the actions of Cyborg Jesus, MEGAS was programmed to do many things. Among these were eliminate the Glorft, put the lime in the coconut, follow the Prime Directive, and save the Earth. MEGAS has a strange control scheme that seems to change frequently (in other words, the creators made up whatever crazy gag would suffice as they went along). MEGAS is a hateful machine, always changing its buttons so that the pilot cannot hope to be productive. On rare occasions, MEGAS has been known to produce a "useful button" that, when pushed, would solve all the problems currently faced by the pilot. Unfortunately, said "useful button" is almost never pushed, and by the time that the "useful button" would be the only option left, it is usually gone, never to be seen again.
• Coop – The result of a strange medical experiment with the attempt to replace the brain of a manatee with that of a man from New Jersey. The experiment was a success, but deemed an abomination against God, and thus Coop was released, and left to die. Little did they know that Coop would evolve at an alarming rate. He soon grew legs and primitive hands, which were used mostly to hold cheesesteaks, and play video games (very mentally stimulating to a super-manatee). Due to side-effects, Coop developed a hatred towards the DMV, where the manatee brain was purchased for the experiment; Coop can be found destroying the DMV when piloting his giant robot.
• Jamie – Coop's lanky best friend who enjoys cowering from fights, digging giant robots, flirting with chicks who dig giant robots, and reading magazines where he fantasizes about having Coop and Kiva under his thumb. He originally was unemployed and had to resort to video game-playing to indulge his habit; this did not end well (in particular, after an encounter with Jack Thompson). However, after stumbling upon MEGAS along with Coop, he began a new life defending the universe with a lot less gaming and a lot more explosions, albeit explosions that bring his gaming experience to the table.
• Kiva Onderu – Born in 3012, Kiva is unknowingly the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandniece of the one and only Asuka Langley Soryu; this has been proven through her tough, no-nonsense personality. Using the Delorean 3012 to return to the past, she planned to swiftly recover MEGAS and take it back to the future; however, things have not gone exactly as planned...
• Goat – Professional hobo, lazy mechanic, and PhD. Goat was thrown into a dumpster by his family at the age of 6, and left to fend for himself against the herds ravenous kittens of New Jersey. He spent his young adult years as a roadie for the Appalachian Dueling Banjos, Puffy AmiYumi, and the Roadside Revolutionaries, before becoming a junkyard attendant. Goat's claim to fame is that he is the one who sold MEGAS to Coop for two dollars, as he mistakenly believed MEGAS was worth nothing more than a broken Coke bottle.
• Ultra Cadets – Nameless girls who are parodies of the Sailor Senshi, except they're poor.

Villains

• Gorrath – The commander of the Glorft, and high priest of the Cthulhu cult, Gorrath spent much of his youth in a basement playing G&G, the Glorft form of D&D. This caused his pathetic little alien mind to be warped, and made him want to kill humans, puppies, and in fact all life in the galaxy. He claims to be pursuing MEGAS, and its current owners, for the war against humans... but he really just wants to be a dick. Gorrath enjoys long walks on raging battlefields, bathing in the blood of his enemies, and editing Uncyclopedia.
• The Glorft – According to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Glorft are a race of cyborgs whose faces have been melded with that of squids. The Glorft seem to have odd obsessions, which include shiny objects, calculator watches, soft rock, cell phone plans, and Transformers novels (which have been translated into Glorftanese).
• Magnanimous – A floating Bruce Campbell head who runs the Galactic Combat Championship Federation, the galaxy's largest robot cockfighting arena.

Reception

Megas XLR was critically acclaimed among its target audience of anime/mecha nerds; The AV Club described it as "one of the least realistic and funniest mecha shows of all-time." Allegedly, the historical series was cancelled due to the protests of New Jersey citizens, who were upset that their parts in the events were not recorded. It has also been speculated by IGN that "Megas's awesomeness was too much to contain in one show; we're informed that viewers supposedly had seizures from such raw awesomeness that the show became a health risk, especially to those with damaged funnybones."