Cartoon show aired in 1978/1979. A Sandy Frank Productions translation of the Japanese anime program Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, it featured 5 young heros (G-Force) battling alien invaders. They fought in their ship, the Phoenix, and in several detachable independent vehicles.They could also form the "Whirlwind pyramid" when together.
The team:
- Mark, team commander (voiced by Casey Kasem);
- Jason, second in command, weapons officer;
- Princess, motorcyclist, only female team member;
- Tiny, ship's pilot;
- Keyop, annoying kid.
The "bird" aspects of each character obvious in the uniforms, and present in
Gatchaman, were ignored.
In sanitizing it for North American kids, the violent parts were removed and replaced with the prattling of 7-Zark-7 and worse yet, his robot dog 1-Rover-1. As a kid I always wondered why G-Force never came to visit 7-Zark-7. I never suspected he was an add-in.
Nekojin tells me:
The Phoenix Transformation only happened once in Gatchaman; it wrecked the ship.
Both that sequence and the 7-Zark-7 bits were filler, to take the place of violence,
nudity, and the explicit mention (and use) of the fact that the main villain was a
hermaphrodite. 7-Zark-7 DID appear in one episode of the original, but wasn't even a
significant character.