Where, where, where does he come from, the Golden Bat? Only the bats know.
In between the underwater sci-fi/horror flick The Terror from Beneath the Sea and the totally inexplicable Goke: Bodysnatcher from Hell, Japanese director Hajime Sato took a low-budget stab at the costumed superhero genre with 1966's The Golden Bat, in which Nazo, the self-proclaimed ruler of the universe (who looks like a four-eyed, felt teddy bear with a flipper and a huge, metal claw), sets the Planet Icarus on a collision course with Earth. In the hopes of destroying the rogue planet, a U.N. scientific team, which is headed by Sonny Chiba and operates under the aegis of old white guy Andrew Hughes (who later appeared in Destroy All Monsters and was a regular in Japanese monster movies of the period), is working on the Super Destruction Beam Cannon, and it is while searching for a vital component on a newly exposed island of the lost continent of Atlantis that they stumble upon the sarcophagus of the Golden Bat, an Atlantean superbeing awakened from a 10,000-year sleep by the team's requisite child mascot Emily, who revives him by pouring water on his chest.
If that doesn't sound loony enough, in addition to his horde of anonymous black-clad minions, Nazo also has three bosses (to use video game terminology) that the Golden Bat has to defeat in order to get to him: the horribly scarred Keloid (who is also a horrible over-actor), the womanly Piranha (because you just can't trust a woman), and the hirsute Jackal (who has a face like a werewolf and a fur suit that must have been a real bear to wear under the hot studio lights). Not only do they have the ability to beam from place to place, they can also turn invisible at will, defy the laws of gravity, take the form of just about anybody, and shoot sleep beams out of their eyes. Were it not for the intervention of the giggle-happy Golden Bat and his Baton of Justice, humanity would surely be sunk.