Marine Boy - Japanese Anime from the late 60s

Question:- Which was the first Japanese anime cartoon series to be shown on British TV? Answer – I don’t know for certain, but I’d be really surprised if it wasn’t Marine Boy. This anime series began being broadcast in the UK on the BBC in 1969 – when I was 5 years old, as it happens. The shoe was set in the ‘near future’. The title character, Marine Boy, is the son of one Professor Mariner. Mariner heads up the Ocean Patrol. At this time in the future the ocean beds are being settled and cultivated by mankind, and it’s the job of the Ocean Patrol to keep them safe from various threats. I recall That he ate chewing gum called Oxy Gum to enable him to breathe underwater, and that he had an armful of what seemed to be electric boomerangs to help him.

The series featured the adventures of a small submarine craft the Ocean Patrol’s P-1. The pilots were Bolton and Piper, whom I remember as being vaguely reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy, and Marine Boy himself. Marine Boy’s friends included a white dolphin called Splasher, and a young mermaid called Neptina (look, it was for kids, right?). His wetsuit seemed to be bulletproof, and the heels of his boots had propulsion units in them, and retractable flippers.

Marine Boy was actually cancelled before it was originally shown on British television, but each episode was repeated several times during the 1970s. I remember really liking “Marine Boy”, probably because it had all the action you could ever hope to get from a children’s cartoon series in the early 1970s, and because it was just so different from what studios such as Hanna-Barbera, and a little bit later, Filmation, were coming out with at the same time. There was nothing quite like it seen on British TV until “Battle of the Planets” came along towards the end of the decade.