Mighty Jack is a 1968 movie created by American producer Sandy Frank by editing together and dubbing episodes of the Japanese television series Maitei-Jyakku. The title is the name of both a top-secret international peacekeeping organization, and the technologically advanced flying submarine they use to fight the plots of the terrorist organization "Q". The movie gained its widest exposure in the United States when it was shown as a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode on Comedy Central. (The movie was actually featured on the show twice: once during the first season, which only played on a single UHF TV station, and then again midway through the third season of the show's run on cable.)
The original Japanese TV series was the creation of special effects master Eiji Tsuburaya, much better known as the creator of Ultraman; reportedly Tsuburaya considered it his masterwork because the focus was on the people rather than on the vehicles, monsters and special effects. However, even for the original series of 13 hour-long episodes, ratings were low; Sandy Frank edited together the first and last episodes of this series to make the movie, which is perhaps what produced the sense of incoherence that made the movie a target for MST3K. A follow-up series of 26 half-hour episodes, Tatakae! Maitei-Jyakku (Fight! Mighty Jack) fared better in the ratings, perhaps because of its inclusion of monsters and aliens rather than purely human evil-doers like Q.
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