He goes by many names. In Italy they call
him Fantaman, in Brazil he goes by phantomas,
and in japan, they simply call him The Golden Bat.
Today's anime is about a skeleton wearing a cape, and he's probably one of
the most important characters that you've never
heard of. So in this video I'm going to cover
every, single, aspect of Golden Bat, and even stuff that
wikipedia doesn't know about, so with that said, let's start with the anime. Released in 1967, Golden Bat is a TV series about a group of kids, traveling the earth under the great Professor Yamatone.
When he's not inventing rocket fuel or solving world hunger, he's traveling the
planet in his flying Super-Car. Every episode him and his group of kids
travel the world, but in the first episode it's all about this giant
monster that's appeared, somewhere, off the coast of antarctica. A
ship has set sail for the lost city of Atlantis, but as soon as they get close,
they get attacked by a sea monster, leaving a young girl as the sole
survivor. Picking up the distress signal, a UFO flies in and rescues her; but no
sooner do they escape, they end up crash landing on the lost city of Atlantis.
It's there that they discover a gold sarcophagus; and using the research that her father left her, the young girl revives the
greatest hero, who has ever lived; and thus, golden bat
awakens from his ten thousand year sleep, to fight for justice and save the world from evil. And from then on the show has
these kids bumping into monsters, solving mysteries, and slowly building towards fights, with the superhero Golden Bat.
Thankfully they don't call on him unless they absolutely have to,
and this is kind of important, because Golden Bat is one of THE,
most, invincible characters, that i have ever seen. You can't freeze him. He
doesn't mind if you light him on fire, and I'm pretty sure he summoned a
tornado one time. Also he can teleport. Did i mention he's basically magic? As a
skeleton magician from beyond time and space, Golden Bat's power level is only limited by your imagination, and how fast they could draw it. Half the fun is just seeing what kind of crazy
thing that he'll fight next. This was right in the middle of the late
1960s kaiju boom, so he fought as many creatures as
skeletonly possible. it's not the fact that he has every
power imaginable that i love about him, it's how he actually fights. Most heroes
have a catchphrase, but he...does things a little bit different...instead he'll just laugh in your face and throw an entire building at you. All these monsters are being thrown at
him by the great Dr. Nazo, one of the most evil super villains
of all time. i absolutely love this guy. He's half
scientist, half UFO, and 100% evil. He puts the MAD in "mad scientist". When i think of og super villains,
i think of Dr. Nazo. He once stole all the water in a river, just so he could steal
all the gold at the bottom of it. Another time, he forced a village to
build him a giant robot, only to turn them to dust when they
finished. He's the kind of guy that doesn't wash his hands when he goes to
the bathroom, not because one of his hands is a giant
claw, but because he's just that evil. Most villains would have some sort of
volcano lair or something, not nazzo. He went one step further and
made his entire base portable, just so he could be evil
wherever he wants. It also doubles as a rocket ship because
why wouldn't it? The stories range from battles with greek gods, to episodes
about science gone MAD. One story Nazo steals
some kind of rocket fuel, another episode the kids are exploring
distant magical lands. It's got a good balance of adventure and
monster fights. Now even though it never aired in
America, people all around the world still remember this show
VERY well, and someone at cartoon network was probably a huge fan. Lapis Lazuli
from Steven Universe looks a lot like a character from
episode 20. That story follows an underwater kingdom,
and the magic pearl at the center. When Dr Nazo finds out about its unimaginable
power, he hires fish people to steal it with
giant monsters and Science-Magic. Golden Bat then
proceeds to beat them SO hard into the ground, that they turn
back into regular fish. and this isn't even the first time
Steven Universe referenced this series either. Dr Nazo has a second in command, who's pretty much the only person
that doesn't get turned into a pile of dust by some sort of science laser beam,
and he looks a lot like this other character from Steven Universe too.
i don't think they've ever said it officially, but this is the same cartoon
that parodied 1970s anime "Captain Harlock", so i think somebody out there must really love this show. How they actually manage to watch it is anyone's guess. This series never came
out in America, and the english dub is almost completely lost media. The only bit that survived is a few seconds, that somebody managed to
record onto a cassette tape in the 1970s. Now even though Golden bat is Pretty
popular, he hasn't had an anime series since the 1960s; but that doesn't mean
that they haven't tried to bring him back a couple of times.
In the early 2000s, a video started circulating the internet for an anime
called "Golden Bat millennium version" but nobody really
knows where it comes from. Was it a pilot for an unproduced series?
Was it some sort of anniversary video? The whole thing is a complete mystery! At
the bottom of the video you can see some vhs data, so this was probably a preview
at the end of some tape. The earliest reference that i can find
is from 2003, on a release list for upcoming anime for
that year. That same site claims that it was directed by Shinichi Watanabe, which
would be pretty cool if it's true. He was the director of Excel Saga, and in
fact, he worked on an episode of the anime "Zettai Karen Children" and in that show, there's a very brief reference
to Golden Bat! It's a shame nothing came of it, but hey you know what can you do.
Thankfully there is one piece of Golden Bat media that we actually CAN watch.
In 1966, one year before the series, a live action movie simply titled "Golden
Bat" was released by toei. It actually stars future mid 1970s
martial arts megastar "Sonny" Chiba, and it's just as great, as it
is goofy. In this movie the planet Icarus is
careening towards earth, and it's up to Professor Yamatone
and the Pearl research lab to figure out how to blow it up.
Meanwhile, the planet's impact is accelerated by Dr. Nazo, who's actually an
alien from outer space this time. In the anime they could just have Golden Bat do
whatever they wanted, but in the movie, he's trained in the
MYSTICAL art of beating people up with a stick! They had the
actor wear a rubber mask, and it makes them sound even SPOOKIER.
Every time i see his face i can't help but smile.
The whole movie has this sincere goofiness that you just don't see
anymore. After that, Golden Bat gives them the
materials for the lens that they need to blow up the meteor that's heading
towards earth, and then the film turns into a spy movie.
Hey, ya know, it was the 1960s. It was like half the movies out were spy
movies. and then you throw in some kidnapping, a
hijacked spaceship, and Golden Bats classic laughing in the
face of evil. You've got a pretty good fun B-movie. Toei probably made this thing just to cash in on Ultraman, which aired just
a couple of months earlier, and when the movie came out in Italy
they renamed it "Diavolik" which makes this his fifth name if we're counting
Latin America. Over there they call him phantasmagorico.
That's probably why you never heard of this character, nobody knows his name! Now the movie is pretty famous in its own right, but would
you believe that the character goes back even
further than the 1960s? Golden Bat has so much lost media, that
it borders on archaeology. Not only
is he japan's first superhero, he might be the first tokusatsu hero too.
Predating the movie "Supergiant" by seven years, and Godzilla by FOUR, the first Golden Bat film came out in 1950
made by shin Eiga Sha, and distributed by toei, japan's first superhero movie was called "Golden Bat: Phantom of the Skyscraper" now unfortunately no copies of this movie
still exist, but through newspaper clippings, and some insane research, i've pieced together everything that i
know about it. Apparently the plot involved Dr. Nazo and his "QX-Gang" trying to steal a new atomic energy source....
and....that's all we really know about it. It ends with Golden Bat saving the day,
and that's all we know. It's a shame it's lost media, because japan's entire masked
hero genre, starts with this one film. He's got the
cape, he's got the mask, he fought villains with superpowers. I
would say it counts. and yeah, i know wikipedia says
"Supergiant", was japan's first superhero movie, but that's probably wrong.
i mean TECHNICALLY there's proto-toku stuff from before 1950, but it's all
pretty much ninja movies, and nobody's ever taken a photograph of a ninja, so
we'll just never know. But Kenny you say, that doesn't make
Golden Bat Japan's first superhero! i've seen every japanese movie there is,
and there's tons of characters that come before him! Well this is to go back even further beyond. Pre-dating Superman, Batman, and anime as we know it; Golden Bats
first known appearance can be tracked back all the way to 1931. That makes him not only japan's very first superhero,
but one of the oldest heroes worldwide. Back then manga barely even
existed, so instead they told stories with the japanese art of Kamishibai.
Translated as "paper theater", these slide shows laid the groundwork for the manga
that we know and love today. You'd run out of stand, narrate a story,
and gather a crowd of people by making some kind of sound.
"NOICE" that's the sound. It was kind of like an ice cream truck, but instead of
ice cream, it was the fantastic stories of gold and bat!
Performers would do all sorts of voices, and at the end everyone got candy, which
automatically makes it better than anime. So yes, Japan used to lure in children
with stories of talking skeletons and candy bars, but that doesn't make it any
less historically accurate. In fact, it's actually still being
practiced today. Check out this modern version that i
found, where they projected the anime on top of it. Hey if you're not into Japanese shadow puppet theater then
i don't know what to tell you. You just need to get on my level. I'd like to
think someone who saw the anime, as it was airing in the 1960s went, "ah
you know the kamishibai was better" "yeah anime is technically remarkable,
what with bringing moving pictures to life and all"
"but where's the heart? You don't even get candy for watching?"
"anime blows!" early on people mocked tv in japan, by calling it electric Kamishibai, because really, why would you pay for a
TV when you could watch Golden Bat for free? Now i don't really consider it to be manga, but they still do shows at the
Kyoto manga museum, and who am i to argue with all of japan right? They were even kind enough to subtitle it too, which makes Golden Bat not only
Japan's first superhero, but the first subtitled manga too.
What? You guys don't watch your manga subtitled? This is probably the only time
you could ever say that and be 100% right. Now would you believe, and this is where
it starts getting really REALLY obscure; would you believe that there's actually
ANOTHER Golden Bat movie, based on all of this madness? In 1972
toho released a comedy about the origins of Golden Bat
called "The Golden Bat is Here" and despite being made by a major company
like toho, this movie, is lost media too. The only
footage i could even find is a two-minute clip, that somebody probably recorded onto a vhs tape when it was airing on tv in
japan, and the fact that there's not one, but
TWO lost Golden Bat films, kind of amazes me. And now, we get into
the really, REALLY obscure stuff. This wasn't even
the last time that they tried to reinvent Golden Bat, let alone the
final time that they tried to reinvent the character. Released in 2005, GARO, is a live-action gothic horror series,
with costumes, fighting, and so many sequels i can't possibly cover them all.
So why am i even bringing it up then right? Well it looks like the project
started with the name "Skull Z" very very early on. Originally,
Keita Amemiya, Creator of the series, began the project with a simple idea.
"what if golden bat was remade with modern technology,
and a brand new design?"
so he drafted up some characters, but as the design
evolved, he resembled Golden Bat less and less. Time passed, and eventually
they settled on a wolf theme instead, and well, you know, the rest is history. He
never got that modern show, but everything from the skulls, to the gold
hero carried over into the final product, so in a way his spirit lives on, even if
most people don't realize it. My favorite design doesn't even come
from a show. Japanese publication "OUT!" magazine did a joke issue with fake
Gundam designs, and one of them had Golden Bat
redesigned as a Metal Hero Mecha. i love this picture so much. Now Golden
Bat is well loved around the world, but there is one place that takes their love
of this series to an entirely different level. I didn't
mention it before, but the series was one of the first anime to outsource some of
its production to South Korea. This excluded it from their ban on
Japanese media at the time, and made him really popular over there.
They liked him so much they even made their own movies!
Now I'm not going to pretend i know what's going on, but it's got Golden Bat
fighting a guy in a Gremlin mask, which just might be the best thing that
I've ever seen. Korea likes him so much that it's kinda
hard to tell where one series ends and another begins.
You've heard of the anime, you've heard of the movie, but have you heard,
of golden, bat, MAN. It's a South Korean cartoon from 1979,
where they combined Golden Bat, and Batman, into a single character. This thing was apparently popular enough,
that it led to a live-action rip-off in 1990, called "Super Beta-Man" that's right, Korea loves this series so much,
that even their bootlegs have bootlegs. The amount of ripple effect that this
character had on all hero media, is kind of insane. Even
one of Osamu Tezuka's very first manga stared Golden Bat. Everything from TV to movies has his fingerprints on it, and i can't
even imagine what anime would be like if he didn't exist.
You ever hear the anime "Space Adventure Cobra" the main villain "crystal bowie" was probably influenced by this series.
He's got a golden skeleton, and he also has Dr. Nazo's claw. I'd say it counts. Ever hear of this obscure show called "Power Rangers?"
Well the second episode has a team of heroes fighting a monster
that looks a lot like Golden Bat. It's kind of hard to tell in the episode, but
it's actually based on his 1930s musketeer design.
Okay, now here's a real obscure one. Have you ever played,
the SEGA Genesis game, "Trouble Shooter"? It's a side-scrolling "SHMUP" with
two anime girls, and one of the bosses looks just like Dr. Nazo. He even has the
claws and the four eyeballs. Oh and in case you were
wondering where you've seen him before, he also shows up for a second in
gainax's daikon 4 short. Golden Bat has been on Japanese
stamps, modern cartoons are still referencing him,
and even had a series of bubble gum, which i'm sure would break
all your teeth if you tried to eat it today. I don't think you could find a
more important character if you tried. Sadly, most people just don't know
about him, and i would pay for somebody to
re-release this model kit, where he rises from his sarcophagus.
Even his toys have history! This thing was so cool, that it actually showed up in the Gainax anime "otaku no video"
next to a model kit for Minky Momo, and if that doesn't cement him as one of the
greatest anime characters of all time, then i don't know
what does. Next year marks his 90th anniversary, but
it's anyone's guess if we'll ever see him again. Flying through space and time alone, will Golden Bat ever laugh in evil's face
ever again? I'll tell you one thing; that's a secret,
that only the bats know... and that is absolutely everything that i
know about this series and pretty much everything that i could possibly say
about it. Did anybody here actually grow up with Golden Bat? and if you did,
what did you call him where you come from? Let me know in the comments below, and if
you really like what i do and want this video to reach as many people as
possible, then please, leave a comment & leave a thumbs up,
that'll really help with the search results, and that'll get this video to as many people as possible. Again, thank you very much for seeing this video all the way to the end. I will
see you guys next time. take care
