I could swear someone did a thread on this, but it's gone now. Anyway, I picked this up on a whim at Best Buy last night and damned if it isn't a great buy at $60. It's got all 27 eps. of the first season of this 1980 TV series, plus two bonus Sonny Chiba Shogun films (SHOGUN'S NINJA and SHOGUN'S SHADOW). And each ep. of the series is 45 minutes. That's something like 22 hours of solid Japanese ninja filmed entertainment. I watched the first episode and it's very good. Beautifully shot and put together. Very well acted, with Chiba at his subtle best. (STREET FIGHTER notwithstanding, he's always better when he tones it down.) My only complaint is about the lousy synthesizer/keyboard score, with lots of jazzy anachronistic strains. Give me some koto melodies!

I was confused at the absence of Kenji Ohba, Chiba's partner in the famous sushi bar scene in KILL BILL, VOL. 1. I thought that casting was based on this series, but a check of IMDB reveals that Ohba is only in the third season of "Shadow Warriors," which is called "Shadow Army 3" on IMDB.

The series was a spin-off of a hit Toei film (which didn't star Chiba as Hanzo), Hiroyuki Sanada and Etsuko Shihomi only pop up as guest stars in the first series, which may have been a trial run to see if they could keep the momentum going. Sanada and Shihomi become regular members of the cast in later series, as well as other members of the Japan Action Club, such as Kenji Ohba. When I lived in Tokyo during the mid-to-late 1980s, I used to watch KAGE-NO GUNDAN IV (and KAGE-NO GUNDAN: BAKUMATSU-HEN) every week.

I think this is one of my major complaints/problems with Japanese Cinema and television in the 1980s—the music scores are sometimes tinny synth scores which grate against anything on screen. This is too bad, since the shows and movies of the 1960s and 1970s had tremendous scores (I can't remember if the scores are better in the succeeding KAGE-NO GUNDAN series or not). Oh well...