Dino Mech Gaiking

Dino Mech Gaiking (大空魔竜ガイキング, Daikū Maryū Gaikingu, lit. Sky Devilsaur Side King) is a Japanese Super Robot mecha anime series produced by Toei Animation. For distribution purposes, Toei refers to this television series as Dino-Mecha Gaiking or simply Gaiking.

It ran from April 1976 through January 1977 and consisted of 44 episodes of 25 minutes each. Gaiking was notable for being one of the few super robot series to take place in real places outside Japan, and for being the first Super Robot series to have a mobile carrier for the chief robots. In the US, Gaiking was part of Mattel's popular Shogun Warriors import toy line of the late 1970s and Jim Terry's Force Five anthology series. In 2005, a re-imaging titled Gaiking: Legend of Daiku-Maryu was produced.

Production and release notes
Gaiking was Toei Animation's first super robot series not based on an existing manga (the company's previous super robot anime Mazinger Z, Getter Robo, etc. were based on manga series by manga artists and writers Go Nagai and Ken Ishikawa respectively).

The program was shown in English internationally as part of Jim Terry's Force Five lineup, and was also broadcast in Latin America as El Gladiador as part of a 4 anime mecha show called El Festival de los Robots (with the other 3 being Starzinger, Magne Robo Gakeen and Kotetsu Jeeg, known as El Galactico, Supermagnetron and El Vengador, respectively). The Jim Terry dub was released on video in the UK by Krypton Force under the name The Protectors, though the first volume of their Formators series actually contained Gaiking episodes instead of episodes from Jim Terry's Starvengers. Another dub was produced in the late-70s by M&M Productions in Hawaii, who also dubbed Mazinger Z for Toei as a potential test for a US release. Isao Sasaki did the English versions of opening and ending songs for this dub. Of this dub, only the eleventh episode survives.

The first 26 episodes of Gaiking were also aired in Italy during the Japanese super robot craze of the late 70s/early 80s, under the name Gaiking. In the late 1990s the whole series was released in Italy in dubbed DVD boxes. Two episodes from Jim Terry's Force Five Gaiking series would be redubbed as an episode of Robo Formers.

On 26 July 2015, Discotek Media at the Otakon anime convention announced that they had acquired the entire 44-episode 1976 television series and would be issuing it in a complete box set, in Japanese with English subtitles, in June 2016. Reception for the release was mostly positive, but was noted for minor translation issues with the word Ankoku, most notably renaming the Dark Horror Army and Dark Monsters to Black Horror Army and Black Monsters, respectively.

In 2009, William Winckler Productions produced three all-new English dubbed movie versions edited from the original series. William Winckler, known for Tekkaman the Space Knight, wrote, produced and directed the English films, which are seen on broadband in Japan and released on DVD in North America by Shout! Factory in 2013.