The First Series: Gatchaman I
105 episodes
World peace is threatened by the Galactor organization, which launches enormous mecha (monster machines) against the Earth. These mecha are tools Galactor uses to steal, destroy, intimidate, and otherwise wreak havoc everywhere they go. Galactor is apparently headed by the ever- masked illusionist Berg Katse, and the Gatchaman team spend most of the first series believing that Katse is in fact the mastermind behind Galactor. But even Katse answers, we discover, to Sosai X (Overlord X), an alien being from the distant planet Selectro. There is but one thing that can keep Galactor from taking over the Earth --five kids handpicked by the International Science Organization's Dr. Nambu and trained in the ninja arts. The Science Ninja Team Gatchaman.
We spend the first nineteen episodes getting to know the characters: Ken is the strong leader, Joe is the moody (and hotheaded) loner, Jun is quiet but technically skilled, Jinpei is a fun loving but brave (and mouthy) kid, and Ryu is the laid-back country boy.
In episode 20, Joe is injured while saving a puppy.The shrapnel that is lodged in his skull is gone by the end of the episode but, though he seems to be fine, he will have recurring problems later. (Fans often mock the manner in which Nambu removes the shrapnel--he puts Joe in a centrifuge.)
We meet Red Impulse, towards whom Ken alternately feels resentment and gratitude. During the first half of the series, Red Impulse occasionally beats Ken into shape (both literally and figuratively), mocks his weaknesses, and saves the Gatchaman team from all kinds of disasters at the last minute. At the end of the first season, when Galactor reveals a plan to attack the Van Allen belt and thus remove the Earth's defense against the sun's radiation, it is Red Impulse who must die to save the world...only moments after Ken learns that he is his father, Kentaro Washio. For the first time we see Ken lose control, and he is consumed by the need for revenge for the next few episodes. Ironically, it is Joe who tells Ken to cool off and think.
The Gatchaman team is as curious as the audience to know what's behind Katse's mask, and they make many attempts to remove the costume, always failing. Finally, towards the end of Gatchaman I, Ken manages to tear Katse's mask off. Katse turns away so quickly that all the team sees is a swirling mane of blond hair. Sosai X appears to save Katse, and for the first time, and the team realizes that Katse may not in fact be the top of the Galactor food chain. They are left baffled, and Ryu, who slept through the whole thing in the Phoenix, laughs at them.
Jun loses one of her shoes, and Katse accidentally stumbles upon the secret of Nambu's Bird-Style technology. While trying to destroy the shoe (not knowing that it's Jun's), Katse's flunkies direct a frequency of 3,600 MHz at it, transforming it into Jun's bird-style boot. Breakthrough! If he can transform the team out of bird style, he can learn their identities! (Because evidently the huge numbers on their shirts don't clue anybody in.) With a machine that transmits this pattern, he manages to transform Ken back into civilian mode, but the two remaining members of the Red Impulse team save him from Katse's discovery. At the end of the episode, the team tricks Katse into overheating his invention, and it explodes. Little do they know that Katse will build another...
Joe starts having strange problems: an extreme aversion to light, dizzy spells, nightmares. Concerned, Ken questions him, and he finally confesses that he is plagued by nightmares of his parents' deaths: they were murdered by a masked assassin. An explosion brings the remaining repressed memories hurtling back at him, and Ken forces him to face them...and finally Joe realizes what he's repressed: When he was a child, his parents, who were working for Galactor, attempted to betray the organization and were subsequently murdered...in front of young Joe. The murder weapon was a rose bomb. We see this flashback multiple times, even into Gatch II. Joe's symptoms temporarily disappear after his mental block is dissolved, but they're not gone, as we soon see...
The team comes into possession of photographs that hint that the mysterious masked Katse may be more than he seems. In fact, he might be a woman...sometimes.
Katse attacks Crescent Coral, Gatchaman's base, and finally destroys it (almost taking Ken, Jun, and Dr. Nambu out when he does it).
Joe's illness returns with a vengeance -double vision, dizziness, numbness, nightmares- and leaves him suffering in silence, terrified but too macho to admit to a mysterious weakness. He goes to an underground doctor, who by coincidence turns out to be working for Katse and is not a doctor at all.
Katse has recreated the machine that can transform the team from bird style back into civilian form, and Joe is his prime victim. Standing at the end of a corridor, Katse taunts Joe to pursue him, and when Joe does, Katse shoots him.
Caught in the line of fire, Joe's true identity is revealed. Not to be outdone, Joe plugs the barrel of the gun. It explodes in Katse's face, and Katse whirls away to huddle against the wall, covering his face with both hands, blond hair streaming down his back. In a rage, Joe goes after him, prepared to drag his enemy around so everyone present, including Nambu, can see him.
Nambu stops Joe, explaining that he already knows what Katse is. Berg Katse is Sosai X's creation, a genetic merger of fraternal twins. Katse is a hermaphrodite, and can change at will from male to female form. Laughing simultaneously in both male and female voices, Katse rises and turns, and finally we see his face...her face. Katse tells them that he was created to conquer the planet, chosen by his god to rule. Taking his cue, Sosai X materializes to save Katse and introduce himself. He tells Nambu et al that the Earth's destiny is destruction and that until then he will need Katse. Again, Katse escapes, and now he knows Joe's identity...
He captures Joe while Joe is out racing and, robed so Joe can't recognize him, enjoys Joe's protests that he is not Gatchaman's G2. When Katse finally whips off the disguise, Joe mockingly tells him to take off his own mask. Katse tries to coerce (wheedle, beguile, entice!) Joe into revealing the identities of the rest of the Gatchaman team, and Joe spits in his face and then introduces Katse to his fist. After a fight, Joe escapes by leaping from the mecha, which is in flight. He transforms into bird style en route to the ground, but when he lands, he lands on the road, severely disoriented by his illness. A car almost hits him, and finally he lands in the capable hands of a real doctor...and he wakes just in time to hear said doctor explaining to Nambu that Joe has severe brain damage, and will only live another week.
Joe takes off to find Galactor headquarters on his own, which only leads to his detransformation and recapture. Katse proceeds to beat the living hell out of him, enjoying the torture so much that he orders Joe be drugged up so he'll live longer and endure a little more sadism. Confident that Joe is helpless, Katse explains the Black Hole Plan, which will destroy the Earth. At intervals, a machine is dropping bombs into the center of the Earth. Eventually, a nuclear reaction will affect the core and create a black hole, destroying the planet in the process. Horrified, Joe tosses a feather shuriken at Katse and misses (the only time I've ever seen Joe miss), and the weapon is sucked into the machinery behind Katse. For this insurrection, Joe is shot. (In the head. With automatic weapons. Multiple times. Would somebody please tell me how he survives this without a single drop of blood?). He goes down, but Gatchaman is coming...
Joe is left for dead, but he drags himself towards the surface, where Gatchaman fights Galactor flunkies by the dozens, searching for an entrance into the underground base. The team run past Joe, who can get no farther once he reaches the outside. But when Jun is backed against a rock by a malicious flunky, it's a feather shuriken that kills him. As he falls, Jun sees Joe. The team surround him, and he smiles and gives each of them a few final words...including telling Jun that she and Ken should get a life together and quit their dangerous work in the team. While this is going on, the team is surrounded by flunkies. In tears, Ken rises to his feet and screams at them. He demands to know what good any more killing will do, besides destroying families and friends for absolutely no sane reason. He presses his baadoran into Joe's hand and tells him to keep it...then, despite the rest of the team's protests, he makes the decision that they will leave Joe and go after Katse.
The team find Katse in a room with a globe, practicing the speech he will make when he is the world's ruler. Ken attacks him, demanding that Katse stop the Black Hole Operation. But Katse can't, only Sosai X can. And Sosai X announces that his only intention is to destroy the Earth, as his home planet, Selectro, has been destroyed. He tears himself out of the wall he's been in and rises. All we see is a huge, glowing golden pillar (which, frankly, looks like the Washington Monument). Katse, horrified and disillusioned, miserably demands to know what the point of his existance was if this was how it must end? Why couldn't he have been normal, a brother and a sister instead of a mutant if death was all he was to inherit? Screaming "Die, die, everyone die!" he throws himself into the lava pit left by Sosai X's flight.
Ken, desperate to stop the Black Hole plan, tries to climb into the machinery that is dropping bombs into the center of the earth, but Jun pulls him back, saying that he can't die alone, that if they must die, she wants them to die together. Together, the four remaining members of the team await the end. But when the timer reaches 0002, Joe's number, it stops. The shuriken Joe threw at Katse jammed the machinery and stopped everything.
The team returns to the surface, but Joe's body is gone.
My Humble Opinion
When I finally saw Gatchaman, I was floored by it. The story is very consistent, the characterization is incredible, and the animation in the last few episodes is gorgeous, especially considering that this was prior to computer animation.Both Ken and Joe are well-developed and all the characters, including Katse, are wrenchingly human. Ken and Joe take their frustrations out on one another quite often, and when Joe hasn't been around to take the flak, even Jun has found herself on the wrong side of Ken's fist more than once. (I recommend American viewers watch the Space Serpent episode on the Rhino DVDs twice. First in the BOTP version, and then in the subbed Gatch version. The difference between the way the two episodes end shows the striking difference between Ken and Mark.)
Those who have only ever seen the English translations of the show might be surprised at the graphic nature of the violence and the explicit language.
A distinctive feature of the first series is the Gatchaman whistle, Ken's announcement that he's about to attack. By the end of the series, Katse is cowering under tables when he hears any kind of whistle. In the second series, the whistle becomes exclusively Joe's.