I first saw the Spectreman series in my youth on Superstation TBS, shortly after we got cable television installed.  It’s an odd Japanese live-action “tokusatsu” series that first aired in Japan in 1971 under the title of “Space Ape Gori”.

“Spectreman” ( is a super-cyborg sent from a benevolent alien race to help save the world from pollution.  Oh, and from a super-intelligent evil ape named Dr. Gori who wants to conquer the world so he can “protect” it from humanity.  Gori attempted to conquer his home world of benevolent apes and was banished.  When he finds Earth, he decides it’s too good for humans.

Spectreman has his human alter-ego of Joji (Tetsuo Narikawa) or “George” in the English version.  He works with the “Pollution G-Men” who battle pollution and (eventually) giant monsters.

The series focuses a lot on pollution.  This was a common theme in the seventies, especially in Japan, which had a massive pollution problem.  Environmentalism is a staple of this show, and occasionally does get tiresome.  Fortunately, in between the environmentalism is a lot of senseless violence involving giant monsters.

Spectreman borrows multiple tropes from Ultraman.  For example, Spectreman will often have a plot-sensitive “battery” that will run down to increase tension.  In Ultraman his chest light flashed, with Spectreman he had a light in his forehead.  To be fair, Spectreman didn’t run that trope into the ground and you saw less of it as the series went on.  Other tropes are endemic to kaiju style series in Japan, such as ubiquitous monsters of the week and transformation sequences.  Not to mention changing size to fight human-sized enemies as well as kaiju.

While not exactly Emmy-worthy, the writing on the series is better than most.  The fights were a bit nastier and the violence a bit more intense.  As a youth I compared it to Ultraman and Space Giants and it was always my favorite.

Part of the charm of the series are how seriously some of the goofier elements are treated.  The primary villain of Gori is an ape with blonde hair.  Yes, you read that right.  Planet of the Apes was very popular in Japan at the time and this was an attempt to make him look like Dr. Zaius.  Instead it just looks like he bleaches a lot.

Incidentally, the actor who wore the Gori suit (Takanobu Toya) was involved in live theater.  He used intricate and flamboyant hand gestures to give more expression to the character, since the ape mask covered his face.  He does a surprisingly good job.

I re-watched a few episodes recently just to see how they held up. While clunky, there are still a few moments of decent storytelling beneath the cheese. The series hasn’t been released on DVD, so it’s difficult to find episodes online.