Television producer and distributor Sandy Frank has died at 97, Anime News Network reports. For anime fans, his legacy runs through one title above all: Battle of the Planets, the American adaptation of Tatsunoko's Science Ninja Team Gatchaman that he distributed, introducing a generation of Western viewers to Japanese animation in the late 1970s.

Battle of the Planets was many American kids' first exposure to anime, arriving years before the medium had any mainstream foothold in the West. However heavily localized the adaptation was, it opened a door — and the pipeline of imported, re-edited Japanese animation it represented laid groundwork for the anime boom that followed decades later.

Frank's career extended well beyond animation. He distributed game shows including Name That Tune and The Dating Game, making him a fixture of American syndicated television across multiple eras. He leaves a catalog that bridged two very different corners of TV history: the game-show golden age and anime's first beachhead in the United States.