At any rate it's a terrific titan of 70s anime, featuring super monsters, colorful heroes, lots of kids-action-anime drama, and muscular, fairly realistic character designs. Not to mention a great musical score. As bad as the BOTP dub is, the greatness of the original show still shines through.
Once 1978's Battle of The Planets had run its syndication course, the entire series was re-dubbed by Fred "Astro Boy" Ladd for Turner, under the new title G-Force. This new, uncut version of the series (1986) featured goofy character names and new background music that never went away. The series was shown a few times on the various channels of the Turner cable network before vanishing mysteriously.
In the 1990s Saban (you know, the Power Rangers people) took the second and third Gatchaman series (Gatchaman II and Gatchaman Fighter) and dubbed them under the title "Eagle Riders". This fairly nonsensical dub worked its way into syndication and vanished opposite a late-decade wave of anime imports like Sailor Moon.
Once DVDs made their appearance, Rhino Video produced six volumes of Battle Of The Planets - each release featuring two BOTP episodes, two subtitled Gatchaman episodes, and one G-Force episode.
A little later ADV released the entire 105-episode Gatchaman series, with new, accurate dubs AND subtitles, in DVD box sets with extras. I feel we've reached some kind of turning point in anime fandom; panellists can spend an hour discussing a show at an anime con panel, and then go to the dealers room and purchase an offically licensed, uncut, super-high-quality edition of the actual show under discussion.
Gatchaman was one of the first American anime releases to have a substantial fandom built around it; when I got into anime fandom in the 1980s, Gatchaman fans were there already, publishing APAs and writing fan fiction and drawing fan artwork and swapping 13th generation copies of the last 5 episodes of Gatchaman F. It's an enthusiasm that's mirrored in the culture at large; Battle of The Planets inspired two completely separate American comic book releases and continues to be a minor cultural touchstone among former 70s cartoon kids. And in the rest of the world it's even more popular.
Tatsunoko continues to milk its most famous cash cow; apart from an abortive, crazy-looking 1990s OVA series, a new computer-animated film AND a new live-action film, thank you Wendy, is in the works. The Science Ninjas are not going anywhere.
