Go Nagai and Ken Ishikawa respectively). The program was shown in English internationally as part of Jim Terry's Force Five lineup, and was also broadcast in Latin America as El Gladiador as part of a 4 anime mecha show called El Festival de los Robots (with the other 3 being Starzinger, Magne Robo Gakeen and Kotetsu Jeeg, known as El Galactico, Supermagnetron and El Vengador, respectively). The Jim Terry dub was released on video in the UK by Krypton Force under the name The Protectors, though the first volume of their Formators series actually contained Gaiking episodes instead of episodes from Jim Terry's Starvengers. Another dub was produced in the late-70s by M&M Productions in Hawaii, who also dubbed Mazinger Z for Toei as a potential test for a US release. Isao Sasaki did the English versions of opening and ending songs for this dub. Of this dub, only the eleventh episode survives. The first 26 episodes of Gaiking were also aired in Italy during the Japanese super robot craze of the late 70s/early 80s, under the name Gaiking. In the late 1990s the whole series was released in Italy in dubbed DVD boxes. Two episodes from Jim Terry's Force Five Gaiking series would be redubbed as an episode of Robo Formers. On 26 July 2015, Discotek Media at the Otakon anime convention announced that they had acquired the entire 44-episode 1976 television series and would be issuing it in a complete box set, in Japanese with English subtitles, in June 2016. Reception for the release was mostly positive, but was noted for minor translation issues with the word Ankoku, most notably renaming the Dark Horror Army and Dark Monsters to Black Horror Army and Black Monsters, respectively. In 2009, William Winckler Productions produced three all-new English dubbed movie versions edited from the original series. William Winckler, known for Tekkaman the Space Knight, wrote, produced and directed the English films, which are seen on broadband in Japan and released on DVD in North America by Shout! Factory in 2013. Legal controversy Toei Animation credited the show as being based on an original idea by Kunio Nakatani, Akio Sugino and Dan Kobayashi. However, in reality the original idea was of Go Nagai. Toei deliberately took Nagai out of the credits in order to avoid the payment of royalties. Because of that, Nagai sued Toei and stopped further collaborations with Toei for