The concept of making the heroes more like alien avian humanoids is an odd choice, obviously trying to capitalize on the Ninja Turtles

Oh man, I just saw your post on this! Wiki doesn't show the updates on the edit feed anymore. I was wondering if you'd learned of it too...

There are some Gatchaman fans skeptical of the connection, but by this point it seems like Frank Ward and co. were taking whatever properties Bandai had merchandise deals for and "filing off the serial numbers" to make their own loosely-inspired pitches. I'd wondered where the whole Bandai connection with Gatchaman was since merchandise hadn't been a thing for it so recently, but somebody else pointed out Popy was founded by Bandai and merged back into them in the '80s so it's possible Ward took a look at their other early popular IPs they did merch for besides Gundam.

It does seem like it was in the vein of other "Power Rangers" knockoffs in the late '90s including that Next Mutation show. It's a shame the toy prototype designs weren't included in the copy sent to the LOC.

Going by how Renaissance-Atlantic filed trademarks for the "Saint Seiya" character names when they were doing that "Starstorm" pilot that Ray Mona also thankfully uncovered, yet how the actual pilot had entirely different names, I wonder if that was the earliest attempt at a "loosely inspired" live-action show that still had a little more visual resemblance than the later R-A pitches would have (like those Gundam ones and "Revolution" trailer, "Team Angel" being a 2.0 of an Americanized Sailor Moon, etc.)