Steel Jeeg more commonly known as Kotetsu Jeeg or Koutetsu Jeeg, is a super robot anime and manga series created by manga artists Go Nagai and Tatsuya Yasuda. The TV anime was produced by Toei Doga. It was first broadcast on Japanese TV in 1975. The series lasted for 46 episodes. Steel Jeeg also ran as a manga in several children's publications. The story tells about Hiroshi Shiba, a car racer who is mortally wounded on a laboratory accident, but restored to life by his father, Professor Shiba, a talented scientist/archeologist, who is incidentally investigating the relics of the ancient Yamatai Kingdom. The professor discovers a tiny bronze bell with sorcerous powers, and shortly afterwards he is murdered by the henchmen of Queen Himika, the ruler of the Yamatai, who wants to seize the ancient bell and its power. Hiroshi learns about his father's death, and his legacy: after the accident, Hiroshi was turned by his father into a cyborg, the bronze bell hidden in his own chest, able to transform into the head of a giant robot, the Steel Jeeg, created by Prof. Shiba with the purpose of stopping the Yamatai invasion of modern Japan. Jeeg is also assisted by a robot horse known as Panzeroid. The minions of Queen Himika have huge haniwa robots, called phantom gods buried thousands of years under Japan's soil, and only Jeeg can destroy them and save the world. Therefore, Hiroshi must roughly try to live his double life as his career as a racer who takes care of his mother and sister and a hero who fight to save the world. After episode 29, the Yamatai invaders were replaced by the Ryoma Empire and used robot monsters, which all but replaced the phantom gods as the series' monsters of the week.