What are you watching now?

[Toriban]

Gatchaman (aka Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, aka Battle of the Planets, aka G-Force) is... well, it's over thirty years old is what it is. This means of course that in order to watch it, you must be willing to accept certain things: cheesy dialogue, poor animation quality, static shots, animation re-use, essentially everything anime has been drifting away form for at least the last ten years. Thankfully, the phrase "Science Ninja Team", the biggest offender IMO, loses it's cheese factor after about the fortieth time you hear it.

Interestingly, I actually prefer the English dub over the original Japanese for one major reason: The VA's have the advantage in that they realize that this is a cheesy anime from 30 years ago. This allows them to add a little poke of fun here and there that would otherwise be lost within the "ninjas in bird suits with gadgets fighting evil peoples led by a disembodied face oh noes!!"

Example: in an early episode, there's a scene where a random enemy mook dies a horrible death. Joe's Japanese seiyuu says: abso-freakin-lutely nothing. His VA though, says, "Wow, that had to suck." Ken's seiyuu says at one point, "Science Ninja Team, let's move out!" and hi VA counterpart says, "Alright guys, are you ready to rock?!" It's little things like that that make me smile.