Phantoma Phantaman: Warrior of Justice (partially found English dub of "Ōgon Bat" anime series; 1967)
"Ōgon Bat" title card.
Status: Partially Found
Ōgon Bat (黄金バット literally "Golden Bat") is a Japanese superhero franchise created in 1930, featuring an ominous yet heroic cackling golden skeleton man and his fight against the evil Dr. Erich Nazo.
Originally a Kamishibai (traveling local shows consisting on telling stories while scrolling illustrated prints), the series was eventually adapted into a manga, an anime series and eventually transformed into a feature movie distributed by Toei Japan.
It's notable for being one of the very first Japanese superheroes and for pre-dating both American comic book characters Superman and Batman (created in 1938 and 1939, respectively).
In 1967, an anime adaptation of Ōgon Bat was produced by Yomiuri TV, based directly on the manga adaptation. During the same year, the series was dubbed by the now defunct Tokyo-based dubbing company Frontier Enterprises and picked up by Nine Network in order to be localized for western audiences under the name Phantoma Phantaman: Warrior of Justice.
Broadcast
The series was originally scheduled to be aired for both American and Australian audiences[citation needed] but for unknown reasons, the series was never released on American territories, Australia being the only country where the English localization was ever broadcast. The dub started air in April of 1968 in the mornings at 7:30, and continued airing until late 1972.[1][2]
Loss
After the show's run in Australia, the English dub never had any reruns and the dub has no known form of home media releases, even in Australia, and thus most unlikely exists. Although there were some references of the dub online such as it’s name,[3][4][5] for a long time, the English localization was believed to never have been produced, as no footage ever surfaced, until a clip (albeit poorly recorded from a cassette tape in the 60’s or 70’s) was uploaded in 2012 to YouTube, posted by user TVNostalgia, showing that in fact an English localization was made.
It is unknown why the show never aired in the U.S., but now that the existence of the clip was made public, there is hope that more footage will resurface eventually on the net. However, due to the age of the show itself, there are very small chances that any copies of the dub still exist as the 16mm reels are theorised to have been sent back to Japan or wiped. The chances of any episodes being recorded during it's run is very low too since VHS recording was 4 years away from when the show last aired. However, it’s believed that the other dubs of the show were actually based off the English version itself as they all use Americanized names for the characters used in the English one which may very well hint that additional copies of the English dub were sent to other regions that surprisingly increase the small chances of the localization being found one day.
It's worthy to note that the series was actually translated in Spanish as "Fantasmagorico". And fun fact, the Italian dub uses a similar title to the English version going under the name of "Fantaman".
Cast
- William Ross (founder and director of Frontier Enterprises) as Dr. Steel
- Burr Middleton as Phantaman, Dr. Zero, Gabby and the narrator
- Patricia Kobayashi as Maria
- Unknown as Terry
- Unknown as Gorgo
- Unknown as Dr. Death