G-Force: Guardians of Space

1986-2002: Turner Entertainment: Closer to the Original

When Sandy Frank Productions' domestic distribution rights were about to expire, the company sold them to Turner Broadcasting (now Turner Entertainment), which owns TBS and the Cartoon Network.

Turner showed Battle of the Planets for a short time before someone decided a whole new translation needed to be done. G-Force: Guardians of Space first aired in July of 1987 and ran for a grand total of five days on TBS before being yanked off the air; nobody seems to know why. The show reappeared on the Cartoon Network (in the US) in 1995 and ran for about two years; it has also been aired in Australia and on the European satellite version of the Sci-Fi channel. The rights to the show are currently owned by Hearst Entertainment, which is owned by King Features Syndication.

The last 20 episodes of Gatchaman weren't used for G-Force because the network decided not to, in their own words, "allocate the funds," but another says that Turner only bought 85 of the episodes in the first place (which would make sense since that's the same number of episodes produced for Battle of the Planets).

Ace, Dirk, Agatha Jun, PeeWee, and Hoot Owl

If you're a fan of the Cartoon Network's G-Force, you will know them as Ace Goodheart, Dirk Daring, Agatha Jun, PeeWee, and Hoot Owl. Katse is called Galactor, and X is called Computor.

The problem of Katse's being a hermaphrodite is never addressed, because the final episodes weren't translated.

Gatchaman and BotP vs. G-Force

Because Sandy Frank wouldn't release the rights to 7-Zark-7 or the Battle of the Planets tech jargon ("Transmute," "Whirlwind Pyramid," "Super Sniper missile," etc).and character names, Turner Broadcasting had to replace all of them. This was a mixed blessing: the new terms were closer to the Gatchaman originals, but the characters' names sound more like those of of porn stars and video-game characters than real people. [Yes, I know they're not real people.])

The G-Force translation is much closer to the original Gatchaman dialogue, most of the violence was kept, and Ace and Dirk have a far more balanced relationship than Mark and Jason did. Two of the most common complaints about the G-Force version have to do with the flat voice acting and the background "music." When theTurner Broadcasting team members received the original footage, they didn't receive the background music from either Gatchaman or BotP.They thought quickly and came up with the kind of solution only inadequate funds can provide: a bad one. The repetitive drum beat and...I think it's supposed to be a melody...behind it are excruciating to endure for more than a minute at a time.