Kagaku Ninja-Tai Gatchaman (Science Ninja Team Gatchaman) was a well-received Japanese animated series which ran in its own country from October 1972 to September 1974. Where Gatchaman differed from all the other "Earth is invaded" adventures was that it featured a team of five costumed heroes instead of a hero piloting a giant robot, and that the heroes battled the space invaders all around the world instead of just defending their home town each week.

The fantastic popularity of the first Star Wars film in 1977 put the sci-fi genre in great demand, and soon several American animation companies were drawing up plans to get their characters suited up, helmeted, and rocketed into the stratosphere. The first producer on the syndicated scene was gameshow distributor Sandy Frank, who acquired the ready-made Gatchaman, hired Hanna-Barbera veterans Jameson Brewer and Alan Dinehart III to adapt the scripts into English, editied out the more graphically violent passages, commissioned new animation of an R2D2-like robot character named "7-Zark-7" (and his "dog," 1-Rover-1) to narrate and bridge the continuity gaps left by the trimming, and retitled the whole package Battle of the Planets. Total cost to Sandy Frank: $4.5 million. It was, as TV Guide reported in 1985, more than was necessary, but Frank was a man willing to overspend if he foresaw a gigantic return.

Set in the 21st Century, the Sandy Frank version of Gatchaman centered around the exploits of G-Force: five young heroes who sported bird costumes and traveled the cosmos in their supership. The fact that all the Gatchaman action took place on Earth didn't deter Frank-- one of his additions was a stock shot of the team's fighter aircraft, the Phoenix, now called a spaceship, which was often shown flying through space. The narrator would intone, "G-Force has now arrived on the planet (whatever)," for that week's adventure. If that week's planet happened to look like Paris or Moscow or London or New York, then so be it. G-Force was a protective squad commanded by Mark (the characters did not have last names) the Eagle, and consisting of four war orphans: Jason the Condor, Tiny the Horned Owl, Princess the Swan and Keyop the Swallow. Headquartered beneath the seas of Earth at Center Neptune, the G-Force spent the better part of its time rallying together with the cry "Transmute!" (translation: get on your uniforms!), the better to stem the megalomaniacal inclinations of Zoltar, insidious leader of the Spectra monsters trying to conquer the galaxy, and the mysterious Luminous One, leader of the planet Spectra.

Eighty-five half-hour episodes of Battle of the Planets (whittled down from the 105 original Gatchaman episodes) were ready for Monday-through-Friday telecasts by spring of 1978. However, the kiddie TV market's swing back to violence and suspense by the end of the '70s rather mitigated the bowdlerized Battle's impact, the end result being that Sandy Frank nearly lost his original heavy investment. Commenting on his mistimed nonviolent approach, Mr. Frank, the distributor of The Dating Game and The $1.98 Beauty Show, ascribed the error to "my damn high ideals." Still, thanks to a razzle-dazzle promotional push ("I sold it like the Second Coming"), the producer was able to clear $15 million in sales.

Although ratings weren't bad, Battle of the Planets had only a so-so first run, regularly beaten out by older cartoons and network reruns. The mild reaction to Battle effectively halted American distribution of the sequel to Gatchaman, which premiered on Japanese television in 1978 under the title Gatchaman II. To date, non of the sequels to the origianl Gatchaman has made it to American, although it's rumored that the recent three-volume high-quality Gatchaman OAV remake (featuring a soundtrack produced by Earth, Wind & Fire's Maurice White and Bill Meyers) has been optioned for future U.S. home video release.

In 1986, Turner Program Services acquired the series and set to work making a completely new Americanized version. Turner selected a different set of 85 episodes than earlier producer Frank had chosen, this time leaving in all but the most violent shows -- and some episodes are indeed violent, with characters dying on screen. In this new incarnation, dubbed G-Force, the bogus 7-Zark-7 character was dispensed with, and Turner grafted on new soundtracks and renamed the leading characters once again: Mark was now "Ace Goodheart," Jason was "Dirk Daring," and the Princess "Agatha June," indicating the generally derisive tone of the new adaptations. Although the substantially unedited new version was much truer to its original Japanese incarnation, as G-Force, Gatchaman failed to make any impact whatsoever in America, lasting only five episodes of TBS. The property languished until January of 1995, when it finally aired in its entirety on Turner's new Cartoon Network.

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