The Battle for the Planet.
The animated TV series Science Ninja Team Gatchaman (originally Kagaku Ninja-tai Gatchaman in its native Nippon) may be better known to those of us in the Anglosphere as either Battle of the Planets or G-Force - something that caused li'l me, ignorant of such things as variant dubs, some confusion when discussing the show in the playground as it turned out that some of my compatriots knew it by one name and some by the other; I think it depended whether you were watching the most recent iteration to be broadcast on TV or caught it on video - and began way back in the dim and distant past of 1972 as an environmentally-minded Running for a grand total of 105 original episodes from the first of October '72 to the twenty-ninth of September 1974, the series detailed the exciting adventures of the titular five man (well... three men, one woman and an adolescent boy) superhero team as they donned bird-themed costumes and boarded the super-ship the God Phoenix to battle the evil forces of Galactor - an evil organisation bent on conquering the Earth and plundering it's natural resources and mineral wealth (perhaps they'd heard that Greenland has rare earth minerals or something) headed by the disembodied alien intelligence Leader X and the sexually ambiguous genderfluid commander Berg Katse. The Gatchaman team would fight for humanity and nature against an immense assortment of Galactor's giant mechas - usually animal themed such as the Turtle King (or Space Terrapin in the BotP dub, more on which anon) - with an assortment of individual weapons and vehicles and hand to hand combat skills, all the while keeping their civilian identities secret.
The leader of the group (not transformed from the norm by the nuclear goop but instead provided with 'cerebonic' implants - at least, according to Battle of the Planets) was Ken Washio, ace pilot and all-round good guy with the Eagle for his avian avatar. Second in command was Joe Asakura, race car driver and the rebellious bad boy of the team who we all really wanted to be more than Ken (very much the Han Solo to Ken's Luke), designation Condor. Then there was Jun with her green hair and thigh boots and penchant for pantsu-flashing flips that troubled many a pubescent trouser, callsign Swan. The youth contingent was catered to - those immune to Jun's charms, anyway - by the young lad Jinpei, stinking up the place with his adolescent scent and codenamed Swallow (I'd much rather that was his foster sister Jun's codename...). Finally, there was the portly Ryu - because where there's a Ken there has to be a Ryu, by the law of Hadouken - who flies the ship and sports the Owl costume. Armed with signature weapons like Ken's sonic boomerang (think Batman's batarang, but more lethal), Jun's deadly yo-yo (cooler than it sounds) and Jinpei's explosive bola and driving personalised vehicles (Ken's glider, Joe's car, Jun's motorbike and Jinpei's dune buggy) they were routinely summoned via their trusty wrist communicators to come together to board the Phoenix to face this week's threat to the Earth and mankind.
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| "I will always be better than you, Ken." |
Confusion would reign due to the multifarious differing dubs would rechristen the team Mark, Jason, Princess, Keyop and Tiny (Battle of the Planets, which would also give Keyop a bizarre speech impediment and add robot sidekick 7-Zark-7 [very much the H.E.R.B.I.E. the robot to G-Force's Fantastic Four] as well as muck more of an intergalactic Star Wars scale rather than the original's more Earthbound remit); Ace, Dirk, Agatha June, Pee Wee and Hooty (G-Force: Guardians of Space) and eventually Hunter Harris, Joe Thax, Kelly Jennar (a lost Kardashian relative, mayhaps?), Mickey Dugan and Ollie Keeawani (there is also apparently Eagle Riders, a third permutation I've never seen but apparently sporting the voice talents of a young Bryan Cranston in the Joe the Condor role making me glad that he was always my favourite character [Jun aside, obvs.]). The original series was followed by a sequel, Gatchaman II, in 1978 consisting of a further 52 episodes which was in turn directly followed up in 1979 by Gatchaman Fighter which lasted 48 instalments and had a markedly darker turn than the previous series; it was this pair of sequel series that would later by combined a redubbed as Eagle Riders.
And so in 1994, fifteen years after the ending of the combined 205 episode saga, a reboot occurred in the form of an original video animation (this happens OVA and OVA again you see, which as a bad yolk but I'm basically a good egg). Playing out over three 50-ish minute episodes, this reinvents the entire Gatchaman story from the start and drags it int the 21st century - both in and out of universe as it gives us a definitive temporal setting of 2066 and gives the characters a modern update on the their classic future-'70s design - like post-Crisis on Infinite Earths DC meets the Star Trek Kelvin timeline in a crack lounge.
Released on the first of October 1994, the premier episode 'The Dragon King' begins as a parallel world retelling if the original first episode 'Gatchaman Versus Turtle King' (or 'Attack of the Space Terrapin' in old Battle of the Planets money) with an updated rendition of an attack on Earth's defences by the titular testudinous mecha, constructed by the long-gestating Galactor who have been present on the planet since their Ice Age arrival. Dr. Nanbu, who has been given something of a hipster makeover replete with swishy scarf, assembles the Science Ninja Team against the protests of rival scientist Dr. Kessler - an obvious Galactor shill - and so our supreme squadron (each themselves given an updated look: Joe now sports long hair, tattoos and a clothing style - ankh medallion over his bare chest under an open leather jacket - that screams "frontman or guitarist early '90s 'edgy' metal band" and Jun now rocks a short brown bob instead of her old flowing green locks but has been compensated with a more fully fleshed out figure which she flashes while changing out of her swimming costume and into her motorbike leathers. God I still love her) comes together.
The rogue Republic of Hontworl, led by maverick president Kerry Beoluke who has been described as "the devil" and "the reincarnation of Hitler", has decided to withdraw from the United Nations Security Council and no longer deal with any U.N. bodies. No real world analogues there I can think of. No siree. When was this made again? 1994? Oddly prescient. This rogue nation has allied itself with Galactor (who have adopted the very "Hail HYDRA!"-esque call and response catchphrase of "Glory to Galactor!"), Beoluke being one of the many guises of catlike hermaphrodite Berg Katse, to trigger an all-out nuclear conflict among the nations of the Earth on the Darwinist understanding that the survivors will be stronger. Pain is the price to survive; to evolve.
The chelonian menace is averted by the team boarding it and causing it's burning from the inside like a Bauhaus album, but the Galactor threat - led by the xenomorph Leader X replete with Masonic all-seeing eye just like the dollar bill - lives on to fight another day.
On the first of January 1995 'The Red Specter' [sic], also known as 'Secret Red Impulse', saw the struggle against the alien menace continue with the appearance of the Red Impulse - or Reddo Imparusu - squadron. This team of top aeronauts (rechristened as fighters from the planet Riga in Battle of the Planets, along with their leader changing to the cool moniker of Colonel Cronos) recurred with their own long-burning storyline in the '70s series that is necessarily drastically telescoped down for a three part OVA.
When a submarine encounters what the crew think to be an underwater mountain or volcano on the seabed only to find that it's Galactor's pyramidal base, it is destroyed. The pyramidal edifice is hosting a meeting very reminiscent of a Bond movie S.P.E.C.T.R.E. (or rather, Spectra) meeting presided over by Berg Katse, here presenting in their alluring female form with very nice colour co-ordinated nail polish. Galactor plans to alter Earth's atmosphere to better suit their species - something that will have the side effect of reducing the human populace by 95%. There are a lot of those sorts of plans around recently: see also my Scream of the Shalka maunderings.
Dr. Nanbu contacts team leader Mark whilst he is visiting his late mother's grave and we get a flashback to the funeral - the last day he saw his father, a distant man of secrecy whose top secret job kept him apart from his family. Gee, I wonder if that will come up later? Assembling the team and sent to scope out the enemy's trans-Atlantic intergalactic base, the Gatchaman squad's God Phoenix come under heavy fire from Galactor's blackbird squadron only to be rescued the secretive Red Impulse team led by a man with a mysteriously familiar moustache (obviously Kentarou Washio, Ken's absent father). The crimson-clad commandos aid our ninja team in defeating Galactor's elite Jupiter Death Squad - another great band name, their early E.Ps were great, probably - but it ends with an inconclusive 'To Be Continued...'.
The saga culminated after another three month lacuna in 'The Final Countdown' (poodle rockers Europe not included, though Joey Tempest is a name that was just made for an anime character) on April the first. This particular April Fool entails our heroic quintet continuing their heroic fight against the evil forces of the Decepticons Galactor as the enemies' fleet of Space Turtles / Terrapins / Dragons mass above the cities of the world like the Sith Exogol fleet meets the Visitors from V.
Condor Joe's trailer (because like the '80s and '90s edgy rockstar that he is, he lives alone in a trailer in the desert like some kind of Petrocelli-Martin Riggs where he presumably spends his free time drinking bourbon by the bottle while weeping a solitary tear watching home movies of a family that may not have even been his own and staring angrily at his reflection before punching the mirror like the loose cannon he is. Or is that just me?) is targeted by Galactor but the renegade gives them the slip to go rogue without the rest of the Gatchaman ninja squad. Revelations abound as Joe discovers that alien Galactor blood runs in his veins, but that's where their similarity ends as his allegiance is to humanity; he goes on a foolhardy solo mission to attack the Galactor base where he discovers Red Impulse also on a deep infiltration mission - a suicide run. Meanwhile, Mark and the others join the fray to prevent ecological catastrophe, save their friend and avenge his father's self-sacrifice.
Confession time: I found the (slight) redesign of Berg Katse / Solaris / Zoltar (voiced in the English dub that I watched by Edwin Neal, a.k.a. Nubbins Sawyer the hitchhiker from Tobe Hooper's horror classic The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and in feminine guise by Claire Hamilton) with feline fangs over lipsticked lips tres arousing. Must be all the erotic vampire fiction I've consumed over the years. I blame Jean Rollin. Needless to say, if fangs had been incorporated into Jun's reimagining I could not have been held responsible for my actions. Fangs + lipstick + thigh high boots = exploding crotch time.
This, of course, was not the final end for Gatchaman as a franchise either; 2013 would prove the magic number seeing as it did the start of a new anime iteration, this time in a whole new continuity with fresh characters rather than re-versions of the originals, in the form of Gatchaman Crowds (followed by a second run titled Gatchaman Crowds Insight in 2015) as well as a live action movie directed by Toya Sato with the classic team of Ken, Joe, Jun, Jinpei and Ryu taking on Galactor and Berg Katse on the silver screen.
Always ready to transmute into new forms, Gatchaman will doubtless survive to continue their duty of protecting the Earth from the evil forces that threaten it: watching, warning against surprise attacks from beyond space. Always five, acting together as one. Dedicated, inseparable, invincible!
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