Captain Future is a fictional character, the creation of science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton.
The original character was published by Ned Pines' Thrilling/Standard/Better publications company. A different Captain Future was published in Pine's Nedor Comics line.
In 1978, one year after Hamilton's death, Toei Animation of Japan produced a Captain Future TV anime series of 52 episodes, based on 13 original Hamilton stories. Despite the strong cultural differences and the large gap between a literary work and animation, the series was close to the original in many ways, from the didactic scientific explanations to the emphasis on the usefulness of brains as opposed to brawn.
The series was translated in several languages and distributed globally. The four episodes comprising the series' second story arc were dubbed into English and released on video by Ziv in the early 1980s. In the late 80s, Harmony Gold dubbed the series' initial four-part story as an edited together TV movie simply entitled Captain Future.
While only eight episodes were dubbed into English, the series met huge success particularly in France, where the title and lead character's name were changed to "Capitaine Flam" (based on Flame), and in Germany, where it appears under its original title. The success of "Capitaine Flam" and japanimation in France was especially due to anthemic theme tunes (in French language) which became true hits in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the French charts.
For the German version, which was cut by about a quarter of the original length - the producers erronously assumed it to be aimed at younger audiences and thus cut out more violent scenes - a completely new soundtrack was created by Christian Bruhn. To this day the soundtrack is considered cult and the theme song can be heard as background music in many magazines and other shows. A soundtrack CD was released in 1995, and a remix called "The Final" by Phil Fuldner entered the top ten of the German and Swiss single charts in 1998. Also, the German Bastei Verlag publishing house released a Captain Future comic series with original adventures, but the artistic rendering was far below the animation series' quality.
On a more literary plane, in 1996 the Hugo award for best Novella was given to a psychologically and socially complex pastiche of Hamilton's space opera: The Death of Captain Future by Allen Steele.
