Fifteen minutes is enough to show you everything that made Lupin III a franchise worth stealing from. The cat-and-mouse call between Lupin and Zenigata establishes the whole dynamic: a thief who moves like jazz, a cop who moves like duty, neither one serious about actually winning. You watch this and understand instantly why people came back for fifty years of heists.

Lupin III places a call from a public phone to challenge Zenigata, and that call opens this short action pilot. It was produced two years after the manga first appeared, as a way to gauge interest in adapting Lupin III into an anime. The pilot is a brief piece, with its length reported at roughly 13 to 15 minutes. In 1978 a remastered version was made: it was reshot in cinemascope and given a new dub so it could play in theaters ahead of the first feature film, The Secret of Mamo.