Anime Like The Greatest American Hero
If you loved The Greatest American Hero's Action & Adventure and Comedy storytelling, these anime deliver a similar experience — selected for art style, narrative depth, and emotional impact. Each includes where to stream it now.
★ Top Picks
The Sweeney
Jack Regan, an unethical officer of the Flying Squad, uses unorthodox methods to pursue criminals with the help of his partner, George Carter.
Taken
The origin story of younger, hungrier, former Green Beret Bryan Mills as he deals with a personal tragedy that shakes his world. As he fights to overcome the incident and exact revenge, Mills is pulled into a career as a deadly CIA operative, a job that awakens his very particular, and very dangerous, set of skills.
Krypton
Set two generations before the destruction of the legendary Man of Steel’s home planet, Krypton follows Superman’s grandfather — whose House of El was ostracized and shamed — as he fights to redeem his family’s honor and save his beloved world from chaos.
Falling Skies
Falling Skies opens in the chaotic aftermath of an alien attack that has left most of the world completely incapacitated. In the six months since the initial invasion, the few survivors have banded together outside major cities to begin the difficult task of fighting back. Each day is a test of survival as citizen soldiers work to protect the people in their care while also engaging in an insurgency campaign against the occupying alien force.
First Wave
Framed for murder and on the run, a former thief struggles to expose the vanguard of an alien invasion with the help of a conspiracy theorist and newly discovered prophecies of Nostradamus.
La Brea
An epic adventure begins when a massive sinkhole opens in the middle of Los Angeles, pulling hundreds of people and buildings into its depths. Those who fell in find themselves in a mysterious and dangerous primeval land, where they have no choice but to band together to survive. Meanwhile, the rest of the world desperately seeks to understand what happened. In the search for answers, one family torn apart by this disaster will have to unlock the secrets of this inexplicable event to find a way back to each other.
Starsky & Hutch
Streetwise Detective David Starsky partners up with a more intellectual partner, Kenneth 'Hutch' Hutchinson, to protect citizens and patrol the streets of Bay City.
MacGruber
After rotting in prison for over a decade, America's ultimate hero and uber patriot MacGruber is finally released. His mission: to take down a mysterious villain from his past—Brigadier Commander Enos Queeth. With the entire world in the crosshairs, MacGruber must reassemble his old team in order to defeat the forces of evil.
More Anime Like The Greatest American Hero
Kung Fu
A quarter-life crisis causes a young Chinese-American woman to drop out of college and go on a life-changing journey to an isolated monastery in China. But when she returns to find her hometown overrun with crime and corruption, she uses her martial arts skills and Shaolin values to protect her community and bring criminals to justice…all while searching for the assassin who killed her Shaolin mentor and is now targeting her.
Almost Paradise
A former DEA agent forced into early retirement runs a gift shop in in the Philippines. Despite his best efforts to begin a tranquil new life, he’s pulled back into a world of dangerous people and deadly situations, either through his friends in the local police department or running into people from his old life. And the problem is: he likes it.
Panic
In the forgotten town of Carp, Texas, Panic is the only way out. Every summer the graduating seniors risk their lives competing in a series of challenges for the chance to win life-changing money. After the death of two players the stakes—and danger—have never been higher.
Doctor Who
The Doctor and his companion travel across time and space encountering incredible friends and foes.
Die Hart
Tired of being the comedic sidekick, Kevin Hart gets his wish when a famous director offers him his dream – to be a leading man action star – but there’s a catch: Kevin must first train at the world’s greatest action star school, run by a lunatic.
Black Lightning
Jefferson Pierce is a man wrestling with a secret. As the father of two daughters and principal of a charter high school that also serves as a safe haven for young people in a New Orleans neighborhood overrun by gang violence, he is a hero to his community.
Walker
Cordell Walker, a widower and father of two with his own moral code, returns home to Austin after being undercover for two years, only to discover there's harder work to be done at home.
Supacell
When five ordinary South Londoners discover they have extraordinary powers, it's down to just one man to bring them together to save the woman he loves.
Transporter: The Series
The adventures of professional transporter Frank Martin, who can always be counted on to get the job done—discreetly. Operating in a seedy underworld of dangerous criminals and desperate players, his three rules are: Never change the deal, no names, and never open the package. Occasionally, complications arise and rules get broken.
War of the Worlds
Humanity must resume its war against the Martians when they revive after decades of hibernation following their defeat in the 1950s. The fate of Earth may very well rest in the hands of a small yet courageous band: astrophysicist Harrison Blackwood, paraplegic computer wizard Norton Drake, microbiologist Suzanne McCullough and military man Paul Ironhorse.
The Hitchhiker
A young hitchhiker introduces characters who are about to experience a frightening and sometimes supernatural incident of some kind in this moody anthology series.
Why These Anime Are Similar
These recommendations share core qualities with The Greatest American Hero (1981): Action & Adventure and Comedy themes, comparable animation style, and similar narrative pacing. NoBadPicks uses TMDB collaborative filtering, genre matching, and AI analysis to surface anime most likely to resonate with fans of The Greatest American Hero.
See full details for The Greatest American Hero (1981)