Battle of the Planets, an American version of the anime series “Ninja Science Team Gatchaman”, takes place sometime in the future.
Earth has discovered a new mineral that makes it a prosperous planet in many, many galaxies, Vitalumis.
And the Earth is constantly fighting off invasions from the planet, Spectra, who wishes to claim the Vitalumis for themselves.
Unfortunately, the military is no match for the Spectra forces led by Zoltar, so they have taken orphans, given them implants, and made them into the fighting team, G-Force.
Like “Starblazers”, this is the product of the late 70’s.
Cashing in on the Star Wars craze, Sandy Frank Syndication imported Gatchaman from Japan, and decided that it wasn’t quite right, so they took the human villains from the series, Galactor, made them aliens from another planet, chopped out all the suggestive bits (except for a couple of panty shots), chopped out most of the excessively violent bits, removed all the death, and even the suggestions of death, and added new animation in the form the robotic controller of G-Force, 7-Zark-7.
Yep, this is a case of Americanization gone horribly, horribly wrong.
For instance, Keyop, who is now an artificial life form who speaks nothing but gibberish.
And then there are the voice actors.
Casey Kasem (Shaggy from Scooby Doo, and the host of American Top 40) provides the voice of the lead character Mark.
Now admittedly, I only have the first DVD from Rhino which has the first 2 episodes on it, and also contains the first 2 episodes of Gatchaman, and the first episode of G-Force, but I really don’t see myself watching it all that much.
It could be worse, it could be G-Force, but still . . .
. . .  there are parts I just couldn’t help but cringe at (and not in the horror movie sort of way).
Personally, I feel I can only give Battle of the Planets 2 Zarks out of 5.