1 I loved Gravion!  It's one of my favorite mech shows. 

2

Avatar doesn't agree with me, but when I was watching Gravion Zwei it finally came to me that the whole thing was a huge sendup of the genre. Then I started to enjoy it.

When I watched the first series, I tried to take it seriously, and found it terrible.

Avatar and I had a big discussion about it, because he thinks the director was being completely serious. I think he had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek.

3 The -producers- didn't, that's for sure. All the promo material for the show played it straight. Very different feel from, say, Dai-Guard's promo material.

I still maintain that the essential feature of parody is the element that informs the audience that yes, the writer is in on the joke, the little twinkle of the eye of self-awareness. Gravion plays it straight all the way through the end... there's no "oh yeah, had you going there for a second, didn't I?" moment.

It wouldn't have even been hard! One character is all you need, and goodness knows it had a big cast already. Just one person to say "you sure that wasn't Krypton you came from?" somewhere.

4 Mech send ups only work if you take it completely seriously.  The concept of riding around in giant robots and punching each other is already ridiculous enough.  We all know it's stupid already, so if you've got somebody in the cast pointing that out it ruins the whole thing.  Imagine having Bugs Bunny ask Donald Duck why he can survive a half-dozen shotgun blasts to the face.