Kagaku ninja tai Gatchaman or simply Gatchaman, is an anime animated television series originally produced in Japan in 1972 (lit. Scientific Ninja Troop Gatchaman) by Tatsunoko Productions. It consists of 105 episodes.

The series is centered around five young superhero ninjas trained by Dr. Nambu of the International Science Organization to stop Galactor, a terrorist group, from trying to wipe out the world's resources. The leader of Galactor appears at first to be the androgynous masked villain Berg Katse ; as the series progresses, the Gatchaman team discovers not only Berg Katse's true origins (he/she is a hermaphrodite mutant, created by merging together fraternal twins, who can shift between a male and a female form) but also that Katse reports in turn reports to the true leader of Galactor, Sosai X (Overlord X).

This series was notable as being one of the most successful anime attempts to emulate the American superhero genre with many of its conventions like colorful costumes, powers and secret identities etc.. It also establishing the convention of the five member hero team that was emulated in various series like the live action sentai series that were edited into Mighty Morphing Power Rangers.

The series was followed by two sequel series, Gatchman II and Gatchaman F . Furthermore, the original series was remade as a condensed OAV series in 1994.

The original series was shown on American television in 1978, in severely edited form, as Battle of the Planets. The series was shown again on American television in 1986 in translated form as G-Force ; while this version cut out much less of the original, and had a much more faithful translation, the voice acting and the background music (not to mention the Americanized names chosen for the characters) were widely panned. The two sequel series, Gatchaman II and Gatchaman F were combined into one and translated as Eagle Riders in 1996, with yet more changes to audio and character names.

The main characters featured always wore either teen fashions with numbered T-shirts showing their rank in the team, or caped battle uniforms styled after various birds. They also used various signature weapons and mecha style vehicles which each had a more mundane looking disguised form. Each character was known by several names thanks to changes made in Translation to English in each of the various series'.

External links

• Gatchaman - Home of the White Shadow
• Gatchaman
• Gatchaman,BotP, G-Force
• Gatchaman Links List

• IMDB Entry