This video is part of an ongoing project to build a retrospective TV archive made for the LL community on my Retro TV channel at
http://www.liveleak.com/c/Retro_TV_

Embed CodePlays: 150 (Embed: 0)


A double upload today, this episode includes somewhat obscure TV. You may have only seen this anthology show if you grew up in the New England area. Although it's obscure it's still somewhat important in broadcast history. This is basically what introduced the giant fighting robot idea to the US, which led to such series like Transformers and others.

It may be that Transformers might have come to the US anyway even if these shows were never brought to the US by Jim Terry and his company American Way. Who knows really, the genre may have stayed a "Japanese thing" too, if kids in the US didn't get this taste of giant fighting robots in the late 70's early 80's. You can see in the animation here the first iteration of the Transformer idea as each of these shows have some of the first concepts in the Transformer legacy.

Force Five is a syndicated cartoon anthology that was broadcast in the late 1970's and 1980's in New England and Virgina, there were about 156 episodes adapted from the animation and dubbed into English. It also appeared for a short time in some other areas like Dallas Texas, San Jose California and Toronto, Canada.

Jim Terry was the producer. Terry took five Japanese animated shows about giant robots and made them into one anthology show in response to the popular line of toys called Shogun Warriors. The line of toys came first to the US. You can see one of the commercials for the toy line at the beginning of this episode. Mattel was one of the sponsors of Force Five.

Over a broadcast week one show would appear on each day, usually in this order
Dangard Ace on Mondays---------------- (AKA Planetery Robot Dangard Ace)
The Starvengers on Tuesdays- ----------(AKA Getter Robo G)
The Spaceketeers on Wednesdays--- (AKA Starzinger)
Grandizer on Thursdays------------------- (AKA UFO Robot Grendizer)
Gaiking on Fridays-------------------------- (AKA Daiku Mairyu Gaikingu)

The intros to each show in the video above are in the same order.

Great Mazinger or Mazinger Z was supposed to be in this anthology but the deal fell through, instead they used SpaceKeteers, you can tell there is a slightly different concept to Spaceketerrs, a little more reminiscent of shows like Power Rangers. Mazinger IS the obvious choice to fit in with the other four and some limited amount of episodes of Mazinger were adapted to US TV. I do have the adapted English Mazinger Z intro too, will up it eventually. I was trying to figure a way to include it in a pack of intros like this one.