Science Ninja Team GATCHAMAN Video World

It is agreed among both anime and tokusatsu fandoms that Gatchaman was the originator of the Sentai concept and set the bar for all transforming hero teams; from Super Sentai to Magic Girls and beyond. In 2000, NTT East produced two animated and two live-action television commercials for their ISDN service featuring a more updated version of Gatchaman, featuring members of the J-Pop boy group SMAP. In 2003 this anime series was aired in Taiwan which the opening song was performed by famous hip pop boyband ENERGY. Gatchaman is one of many anime series in which its five main heroes have different features wherein two of its members, one of them the leader are both thin and of the same height, another one being the most overweight, one being the shortest and youngest and another one being the only female member. Other anime featuring the same line-up are Golion, Voltes V, Combattler v, Digimon Frontier, Voltron and Flame of Recca. Gatchaman became the inspiration of Choujin Sentai Jetman in the order, except the swallow is a girl in the later years. Before that, it seemed to have inspired the idea of Goranger. Gatchaman receives an homage from the animé-inspired Teen Titans series. In one episode, Robin dons a "flight suit" resembling the Science Ninja team's bird-like uniforms after ejecting from his R-cycle. In another episode Robin is seen throwing a red and gold "Razor boomerang" at the leader of the "Hive Academy" while trying to save Cyborg from an undercover mission. The opening credits of Gatchaman began with the five heroes' silhouettes flying across the screen at high speed. At the beginning of each episode of The Powerpuff Girls the three titular heroines dart across the screen in a similar manner before that episode's title card. The D.O.C. titled the ninth track of his 1989 release, No One Can Do It Better, "Whirlwind Pyramid" in an homage to Gatchaman. He even shouts "Transform" (a-la the G-Force dub) during a break-down section midway through the track. The original Character Designer for the Gatchaman characters is Yoshitaka Amano, who later went on to create designs for Vampire Hunter D, and Final Fantasy, among other projects. In the webcomic Sluggy Freelance, the main characters, Torg and Riff, accidentally teleport to a dimension filled with anime characters filled with parodies of the main characters from "Battle of the Planets" as well as "Voltron" and other anime of the same genre.