Golden Bat (1967) – Episodes 01-04

Some of my favorite anime series come from the 1960s. Domestically made cartoons on Japanese television were still a new phenomenon, and the way they were still working out how to put together weekly animation on a limited budget made for some very unique shows.

The character of Ogon Bat is generally considered to be the first Japanese superhero, created by Takeo Nagamatsu in 1931 for the “kamishibai” paper theater. If you’ve never heard of kamishibai, there’s a very helpful review of this book on the Let’s Anime site, you can read that review here.

Get the episodes from Nyaa or Mega.

Thanks to Hailey for providing the source material, doing a lot of the encoding work and sponsoring the translations for episodes 2 and 3. Thanks to Garrett for help in setting up the encoding workflow, and encoding some of the early episodes. Thanks to Kingmenu for allowing me to use their script for episode 1, translated by my long-time collaborator Tetris no Miko. And thanks to Nightrocket for sponsoring the translation of episode 4.

And don’t forget about the groovy Golden Bat live action movie, subtitled as a joint production between TSHS and Love & Care. Filmed in widescreen Toeiscope, this low-budget gem manages to cram approximately 2.4 metric tons of fun into a 73 minute bag. It even stars Sonny Chiba, years before he became known as a cinematic badass with movies like the Street Fighter series.

Get the movie from Nyaa or Mega.