Eagle Riders

Eagle Riders is an combined adaptation of Gatchaman II (1978-1979) and Gatchaman Fighter (1979-1980), the two sequel series to the original Science Ninja Team Gatchaman.

Dubbing History
Due to Sandy Frank owning the rights to Battle of the Planets, Saban pitched Eagle Riders as a completely unrelated series rather than a sequel. In order to adhere to Saban Entertainment's strict censorship guidelines, which forbid any explicit references to death, the show was heavily edited and re-written, arguably more so than the editing done to Battle of the Planets. The dub featured new music composed by Shuki Levy and Haim Saban.

Although the dub starts off as a relatively straight dub of the first sequel, Saban quickly began skipping episodes and cherry-picking whichever ones felt "safest" for them to translate, as well as airing others out of order. Much like Sandy Frank and Battle of the Planets dubbing order, this was due to Tatsunoko sending the film reels out of order. Character deaths were generally covered up or cut out, entire episodes were dropped while others were spliced together, and Saban's dubbing effort proved very inconsistent as the writers stumbled to get themselves out of plot holes they'd created.

One notable example of the inconsistent changes made to the series is the removal of Mallanox (Gel Sadora)'s origin and transformation, which originally happened in the premiere episode of Gatchaman II. Instead, it is said in the first episode that Mallanox was created by Cybercon (Leader X), then it's changed in a subsequent episode where he's referred to as the son of Lukan (Berg Kattse from the first series). Even later in the series it reverts back to the original backstory that Mallanox is in fact an artificially-aged Nancy Aikens (Sammie Pandora), the missing daughter of Francine Aikens (Sylvie Pandora). As a result, Mallanox is initially referred to as male, then as female, still speaking in a masculine voice when in costume. It's important to note that even in the original Japanese version, Gel Sadora was voiced a male actor, thus the character's gender is often a source of confusion.

In an attempt to cover up the villains death at the end of Gatchaman II and to try to merge the two series closer together, the footage is edited so that Mallanox is transformed by Cybercon into the villain of Gatchaman Fighter, Happy Boy (Count Egobossler) - so titled due to Mallanox's habit of laughing constantly. The cutting and pasting only increased once the dub reached Fighter, with episodes spliced together and some scenes from later episodes being put into earlier ones with rewritten context.

The final 8 episodes of Gatchaman Fighter were never translated, due to the objectionable content involved. Instead, the 15th episode of Gatchaman Fighter served as the series finale, offering no closure for the storyline. All in all, 65 of a combined total of 100 episodes (52 for Gatchaman II, 48 for Gatchaman Fighter) were adapted. The series only aired for 13 episodes in the United States, while it aired in its entirety in Australia.

Additional Voices

 * Bob Bergen
 * Dena Burton
 * Richard Epcar
 * Julie Maddalena
 * Dave Mallow
 * Joshua Seth