Casshan, also known in Japan as , is an anime series created by Tatsunoko Productions founder Tatsuo Yoshida in 1973. The Casshern franchise also includes a 1993 original video animation titled Casshan: Robot Hunter, and a 2004 live-action adaptation titled Casshern. In October 2008, a reboot of the franchise Casshern Sins premiered. In anticipation of the upcoming series, a DVD box set of the original series, Neo-Human Casshern Complete DVD-Box "All Episodes of Casshern", was released in Japan on September 24, 2008. Casshern also appears in Tatsunoko Fight and Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars as a playable character. At Anime Expo 2013, Sentai Filmworks announced that they had signed a deal with Tatsunoko to release some of their catalog, with Casshan being confirmed as one of the characters involved. Sentai Filmworks released the series on DVD and Blu-ray Disc in the United States on March 4, 2014. Plot , also known as "Casshern", is an android with a human consciousness, also known as a . Tetsuya turned himself into an android to hunt down and destroy the robots that have taken over the world. His biological father, Dr. Kotaro Azuma, was the inventor of the automatons that were originally intended to serve humankind. However, the first android, BK-1, was struck by lightning and went out of control. Despite great efforts to stop it, BK-1 used its great strength to escape from the castle. After some time, it renamed itself Buraiking Boss (often mistranslated in English as "Black King Boss"; the name is derived from 無頼 or burai, meaning rogue or brute, using the symbols for "trust" and "nothing," but phonetically "Bu Rai" can mean "Lightning Man" or "Lightning Warrior," so the name fits with his background). The Buraiking Boss then built a robot army against mankind. The robots mutinied en masse when they logically concluded that the good of the Earth's ecosystem required the destruction of the human race. Casshern and his robotic dog, Friender, join forces with a beautiful girl named Luna Kozuki to battle the robots led by the Buraiking Boss. Friender can transform itself into a tank or a jet aircraft and actively helps Casshern fight the robot army. Casshern has great strength and agility, but he is not armed, except for a pair of strange pistols, which are used more like rockets than weapons. While the robots are huge and robust machines, almost all of them