BHOC: BATTLE OF THE PLANETS

The next big thing to come along for me wasn’t a comic book at all, though it was a super hero adventure. This was the debut of BATTLE OF THE PLANETS on the afternoon of Monday, September 11, 1978. Like everyone my age, I watched a certain number of cartoons every day as available, but most of them were pretty junky. cut-rate animation, basic plots, thing characters–often, character types who were virtually interchangeable from show to show. There were some good programs buried in there, but most of what was available on the television landscape at the time could charitably be called trash. And then this show came along and blew the doors off.

Unbeknownst to me, BATTLE OF THE PLANETS was a translated and modified adaptation of a wildly popular Japanese series, SCIENCE NINJA TEAM GATCHAMAN, which had run for 105 episodes between 1972 and 1974. In the wake of the culture-shifting success of STAR WARS, everybody was rushing to bring whatever similar science fiction concepts they had to market in order to take advantage of the sudden heat. SCIENCE NINJA TEAM GATCHAMAN only barely applied, but that didn’t bother American producer Sandy Frank. While GATCHAMAN was set entirely on Earth, Frank spliced in new footage of the characters journeying to other Earth-like planets, thus justifying the title he wanted to put on it. And the enemy organization–Spectra in BATTLE, Galactor in GATCHAMAN–had otherworldly leadership, so that at least tracked.

BATTLE OF THE PLANETS was about a team of five young super heroes–Mark, Jason, Princess, Keyop and Tiny, no super hero names were ever used– who operated out of an undersea base called Center Neptune. They were on guard against alien threats, in particular those posed by Spectra, an intergalactic syndicate dedicated to pillaging the resources of earth and other friendly planets. Spectra’s main general was Zoltar, who was gender-fluid when that term hadn’t quite been invented yet. Zoltar too his orders from The Luminous One, an entity on the Spectra home planet. When called to action, the members of G-Force would transmute themselves and their vehicles into bird-styled costumes and weapons and assemble upon their spaceship, the Phoenix, to seek out and engage whatever massive robotic monster Spectra had unleashed in that episode. In times of crisis, the Phoenix itself could be transmuted for a limited time into the Fiery Phoenix, which would annihilate pretty much anything it came into contact with.

BATTLE OF THE PLANETS was a great-looking show, especially for the time in which it first aired. The animation was beautiful, the designs were great (and very Americanized in the manner of traditional super heroes, a fact that made it more appealing to me) and the music was excellent. sandy Frank had wisely left most of the original GATCHAMAN score intact, bolstered by a powerful new orchestral opening song that was similarly rich and evocative. The one big downside to the music is that the material often had to be edited for American broadcast standards–SCIENCE NINJA TEAM GATCHAMAN was a lot more overtly violent than broadcast standards was comfortable with in 1978, requiring cuts to be made. Whenever a scene or sequence was cut, the music would skip–which was something I didn’t really notice in 1978 but which bugs the crap out of me today if I sit down to watch an episode. As well as the violence, localized Japanese material also needed to be excised, as did anything provocative or sexual. In particular, Zoltar’s original GATCHAMAN incarnation Berg Katse is a Trans character, an Earth female imbued with the spirit of a male Galactor sub-general. But that was way too dicey for American animation in 1978, so any time Zoltar appeared outside of his usual foxlike purple costume, he was said to be not himself but rather “Zoltar’s sister.”

In order to cover for these frequent cuts and also in order to make the show more appealing to fans of STAR WARS, Sandy Frank had new animated sequences dropped in throughout the episodes featuring a cute robot character, 7-Zark-7. He was said to be the operator at Center Neptune’s mission control, guiding and assisting G-Force on their missions remotely. He’d also get up to antics with his pet dog 1-Rover-1 and his robotic girlfriend Susan who was stationed on Pluto. The animation in these sequences was obviously a huge step down from the rest of the program–they stick out like a sore thumb to be honest. But having no idea what this show was or where it came from, I accepted them completely.

It helped that BATTLE OF THE PLANETS boasted a really good voice cast, one that largely took the material seriously and performed it with a decent amount of investment. It included such performers as Casey Kasum as G-Force leader Mark, Janet Waldo as Princess (and pretty much all other female roles) and Keye Luke as Zoltar. For some weird reason, possibly to make the show seem more alien or because they thought his character design was too absurd, BATTLE decided to make Jinpei, the youngest of the Gatchamen, into Keyop, a test-tube creation with a strange speech impediment. Seriously, it was really annoying, one of the real missteps of this production.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was my first step into the world of Anime–though I was already primed for it, having been an avid viewer of both Speed Racer and Gigantor when I was a young child. I’m not sure just when I discovered the international roots of this program that I loved so much–it would be a few years, I think. And even longer before I’d be able to sample actual episodes of the original uncut SCIENCE NINJA TEAM GATCHAMAN. But below is the original Japanese opening to SCIENCE NINJA TEAM GATCHAMAN followed by the American opening for BATTLE OF THE PLANETS. They’re both pretty great.