Captain Future

Brilliant young scientist Curtis Newton (aka Captain Future) brings peace and justice to the galaxy with his sidekicks Android Otho, alien robot Grag, and "living brain" Simon Wright. Known collectively as the "Future Men," they keep their flagship, The Comet, hidden in a lunar crater and launch it to help Earth's government, which communicates with them through the beautiful agent Joan Randall.

The sci-fi novels of Edmond Hamilton were optioned for anime production in record time when George Lucas mentioned that they were a major inspiration for Star Wars (1977). Beginning with an adaptation of Captain Future and the Space Emperor (1940), the anime series is remarkably faithful to the original, especially compared to the license taken with E. E. Smith's Lensman. Hamilton's work was surprisingly well-served in Japan; his later Starwolf series was also spun off into a live-action TV show, itself reedited for the 1978 movie Fugitive Alien.

Four episodes were released on video in the U.S. as Captain Future 1 and 2, which chart the events of The Lost World of Time, where Newton must travel back to save the inhabitants of planet Prometheus (Kaitan) that is just about to disintegrate and form the asteroid belt. A third video, confusingly titled simply Captain Future, was a truncated digest of Captain Future's Challenge, in which Newton must stop "King Wrecker" from destroying all the gravium mines in the solar system. The other 14 hours or so of the Japanese version remain untranslated.

Captain Future also had a 60-minute TV special in 1978, in which an experimental spaceship goes missing on Mercury shortly before the start of the Interplanetary Yacht Race. In order to infiltrate a criminal network, Future must pose as a test pilot at the notorious Venusian "Suicide Base," before a showdown in the "Sargasso" Graveyard of Space. In an intershow homage, a character called "Curtis Newton" has a cameo in the later Sol Bianca series.