In the US, Gaiking was part of Mattel's popular Shogun Warriors import toy line of the late 1970s and Jim Terry's Force Five anthology series.

The story chronicled the battle between the crew of the semi-transformable carrier Daikū Maryū[b] and the Super Robot Gaiking invented by Dr. Daimonji[c] against an invading race of aliens called the Dark Horror Army.

Notable aspects of the series include the dinosaur-based designs of the Daikū Maryū and its support machines and the use of part of the carrier to form the main robot.

The robot Gaiking was piloted by former baseball star named Sanshiro Tsuwabuki[d] who was drafted for the job because his latent psychic powers made him the only one capable of doing so, all other similarly empowered candidates having been assassinated by alien agents with he himself having been injured in an attack that ended his sports career.

These generals used bomber-like spaceships called Grotectors to create artificial black hole vortexes to travel to Earth and back.

Throughout the series the Death Cross Generals and Darius note that natives of Zela originally came to Earth for research purposes before slowly colonizing the planet and using it to hide various dark monsters with the rise of humanity, as far back as one million years before the start of the series until the twelfth century AD.

Both Gaiking and the Daiku Maryu are composed of the super alloy Zolmanium Steel which was later reinforced with iron deposits from the Moon.

Discotek Media acquired the rights for the entire television series and released it in a complete box set, in Japanese with English subtitles, in June 2016.

In 2009, William Winckler Productions produced three all-new English dubbed film 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!