Space Battleship Yamato

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Space Battleship Yamato (宇宙戦艦ヤマト Uchū Senkan Yamato) is a Japanese science fiction anime series created by Leiji Matsumoto, and the name of its eponymous space craft. It is also known to English-speaking audiences as Space Cruiser Yamato and Star Blazers; an English-dubbed and partly edited version of the series was broadcast on American television under the latter title. In Spanish it is known as Nave Spacial, and in Arabic as Nousour El Fada (Space Eagles).

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Contents

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Development

Conceived in 1973 by producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki, the project underwent heavy revisions. Originally intended to be an outer-space variation on Lord of the Flies, the project at first was titled "Asteroid Ship" and had a multinational teenage crew journeying through space in a hollowed-out asteroid in search of the planet Iscandar. There was to be much discord among the crew; many of them acting purely out of self-interest and for personal gain. The enemy aliens were originally called Rajendora.

When Leiji Matsumoto was brought onto the project, many of these concepts were discarded. It is his art direction, ship designs and unique style that accredit him in fans' eyes as the true creator of Space Battleship Yamato, even though Nishizaki retains legal rights to the work.

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First season

See also Space Battleship Yamato characters and Space Battleship Yamato planets

The first season, titled "Quest for Iscandar," began airing in Japan in 1974. Set the year 2199, an alien race known as the "Gamilas" ("Gamilons" in the English dub) are raining radioactive bombs on Earth, rendering the planet's surface dead and uninhabitable. Humanity lives in refuges built deep underground. When all seems lost, a mysterious message is received by Earth's military forces, revealing plans for a faster-than-light engine and containing a message that Queen Stasha ("Starsha" in the English dub) of the planet Iscandar in the Large Magellanic Cloud has a device which can repair Earth's radiation damage.

The inhabitants of Earth secretly convert the ruin of the Japanese battleship Yamato into a massive spaceship, the Space Battleship Yamato of the title, complete with a new, incredibly powerful weapon called the "wave motion gun". In the English dub, the ship is still the historical Yamato and referred to as such, but is renamed the Argo (after the ship of Jason and the Argonauts) once rebuilt. An intrepid crew leaves in the Yamato to go to the Large Magellanic Cloud and retrieve the mysterious device, if it exists. Along the way they discover the plans of their blue-skinned adversaries: the planet Gamilas, sister planet to Iscandar, is dying; and its leader Lord Desler ("Deslok" in the English dub) is trying to irradiate Earth enough for his people to move there.

Like much anime of its time, the World War II themes and explicit violence were regarded as too explicit for Western children, and so the English dub in 1977 was toned down in these respects. Nevertheless, the epic story and high quality of the voice dub (though as the dubbing was done by non-union actors, their identities were obscured for years afterwards) earned it many fans who remember it fondly to this day.

The first season contained twenty-six episodes, following the Yamato 's year-long voyage across the galaxy and back. A ninety-minute theatrical movie version of the first season was made by selecting a few key episodes, editing them heavily, and sticking them together; as a result the first-season movie leaves large gaps and doesn't flow very well. This compilation movie was actually edited down further and dubbed into English in 1978, prior to the dubbing of the episodes as Star Blazers. This movie version, entitled simply Space Cruiser, was only given a limited theatrical release in Europe.

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Following seasons and movies

A theatrical movie titled Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato or Arrivederci Yamato followed, to bring an end to the story of the Yamato. In this film, the Yamato and her crew take on the Comet Empire and die valiantly as they save Earth once again. But as the popularity of this franchise became clear, a second season ("The Comet Empire") of the television series was produced, ignoring the movie and presenting a different plot against the movie's enemy without killing off the Yamato or its primary characters. The second season has generally tended to be the favorite of most of the series' American fans.

The theatrical movies Yamato: The New Voyage and Be Forever Yamato came next as prequels to a third television series, "The Bolar Wars." All three television series were dubbed in English and broadcast on American television. The Bolar Wars, however, only played to a small test market at the time and was not as widely seen until its release on VHS and DVD. "The Bolar Wars" has been criticized by most fans of the series since the now-familiar voice cast of the first two seasons was completely replaced in the third. This appears not to have been entirely the fault of the American production company, however, since the original cast members were non-union, and the production company had no way of contacting them following the long interval between the second and third seasons since most of them were students and had moved elsewhere in the meantime.

The saga ended in 1983 with the fifth theatrical movie, Final Yamato, in which the great ship is detonated like a bomb to protect Earth from an intergalactic tidal wave guided by yet another evil enemy. Melodrama abounds in this film, which takes inordinate amounts of time to show the remains of the ship repeatedly 'sinking' beneath the waves somewhere out beyond Earth.

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Yamato 2520

In the mid 1990's, Nishizaki attempted to create a sequel to Yamato set hundreds of years after the original. Yamato 2520 was to chronicle the adventures of the eighteenth starship to bear the name, and its battle against the Seiren Federation. Much of the continuity established in the original series (including the destruction of Earth's moon) is ignored in this sequel.

In place of Leiji Matsumoto, American artist Syd Mead (Blade Runner and Turn A Gundam) provided the conceptual art.

Due to the bankruptcy of Nishizaki's company Office Academy, and legal disputes with Matsumoto over the ownership of the Yamato copyrights, the series was never finished and only three episodes were produced. Most Yamato fans were generally underwhelmed by the series' first episodes and were not disappointed by its cancellation.

In March 2002, a Tokyo court ruled that Nishizaki legally owned the Yamato copyrights. The two parties eventually settled, and Nishizaki began work on a new movie titled Yamato Rebirth (set after the original series), while Matsumoto planned a new Yamato series. However, additional legal conflicts since then have stalled them both.

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Trivia

  • When the series was redubbed as Star Blazers for US audiences, far less edits were made than with another 1970s anime, Battle of the Planets (a heavily-censored version of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman). Principal changes included Westernisation of character names, reduction of personal violence, toning down of bad language and removal of sexual fan service and references to World War II. Many fans still regard it as more "adult" than other cartoons shown in the US at the time. The most significant change was purely narrative: whereas in the original series the Yamato and its crew were regarded as a single entity, in Star Blazers the crew were named the Star Force and faced peril each week, with the Argo merely being the vessel in which they travelled.
  • Bandai has released three Space Battleship Yamato games for the PlayStation and another three games for the PlayStation 2. However, these games are only available in Japan. In addition to these, the Yamato theme was also extended to another Japan-only PlayStation 2 release, this being a pachinko game titled Fever 7.
  • The Space Battleship Yamato series generally involves themes of brave sacrifice, noble enemies, and respect for heroes lost in the line of duty. This can be seen as early as the second episode of the first series, which recounts the defeat of the original battleship Yamato while sailors and pilots from both sides salute her as she sinks (this scene was cut from the English dub, but later included on the Star Blazers DVD release). The movies spend much time showing the crew visiting monuments to previous missions and recalling the bravery of their fallen comrades. Desler, the enemy defeated in the first season and left without a home or a people, recognizes that his foes are fighting for the same things he fought for and eventually becomes Earth's most important ally.
  • During the mid 1990s, the Walt Disney Company had purchased the theatrical rights to a live-action Yamato movie. The most highly publicized script reportedly put a ragtag crew of misfits (none of whom are named after any of the original show's crew from either the Japanese or English version) aboard the rebuilt United States battleship Arizona (which was sunk by the Japanese during the attack on Pearl Harbor) on a mission to save Earth. The project is believed to have been shelved.
  • In the Space Battleship Yamato time line, later spaceships built by Earth look more like normal spaceships, but tend to show traces of the "converted sea-battleship" shape of the Yamato.
  • The theme song from Space Battleship Yamato is frequently performed by military bands of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, an example of life imitating fiction.
  • In Japan, a measure of the cultural impact that Space Battleship Yamato had become among Japanese, was the way that the Aum Shinrikyo cult -- long before their sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subways -- promoted their faith with inspirational videos that emulated the animation style, cosmic images, and theme music from the series.
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References in other works

  • The Space Battleship Yamato occasionally makes cameo appearances in Leiji Matsumoto's Captain Harlock universe; most notably the recent Galaxy Express 999 manga. However, probably partially due to licensing restrictions, the crew is never seen or mentioned during any of these instances and we are left to speculate whether the crew is the familiar crew or a different one altogether. Also, given the timelines of the various Harlock and 999 stories, it would appear to make the Yamato a time travelling ship as well.
  • The concept represented by the wave motion gun (an extremely powerful main weapon that requires time to charge beforehand and leaves the ship powerless and vulnerable after firing) has been used in other science fiction, including the Babylon 5 spinoff Crusade.
  • A Space Battleship Yamato poster is seen on the walls of Noriko Takaya's private quarters in the anime Gunbuster.
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Star Trek Parallels

Yamato is often called Japan's answer to Star Trek and many similarities in the way the sagas played out raise speculation as to whether the two borrowed from each other.

  • The plot for the beginning of the second season "The Comet Empire," which follows the Yamato landing on Earth and being taken, against orders, on a rescue mission back into space by a crew of volunteers led by Lt. Captain Kodai (Wildstar), is echoed heavily in the theatrical release of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Almost echoed verbatim is the theme of a more advanced successor to the Yamato (the Andromeda), the total automation of said ship, and the arrogance of its captain. Star Trek III also echoes the breakout of the Yamato from her undersea docking port, and the subsequent chase by the Andromeda.
  • The original Yamato chief engineer Tokugawa (Orion in Star Blazers) bears a strong physical resemblance to Scotty as seen in the movies. The English dub even gave Orion an Irish accent, an almost direct homage to Scotty's Scots accent.
  • Be Forever Yamato and Star Trek II both feature the introduction of a niece or nephew of one of the bridge crew; Kodai's (Wildstar's) niece Sasha and Scotty's nephew Peter Preston. Sasha was initially introduced as chief mechanic Sanada's (Sandor's) niece, Mio. Both Peter and Mio/Sasha die bravely defending their respective ships.
  • Star Trek II featured the death of Spock and Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato featured the death of everyone save one or two supporting characters, making continuation of either franchise unlikely. Due to fan acclaim, Star Trek III was written specifically to resurrect Spock and the TV series Space Battleship Yamato 2 (essentially an extended retelling of the movie) was produced specifically to change the ending of the Comet Empire conflict so that at least the main crewmembers survive, ensuring the continuation of the sagas.
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English title

For many years, English-language releases of the anime bore the title Space Cruiser Yamato. Nishizaki, a sailing enthusiast who owned a cruiser yacht, ordered that this translation be used out of love for his boat. However, it is inaccurate, as 戦艦 senkan means "battleship" and not "cruiser" (which in Japanese would be 巡洋艦 junyōkan). Today, Yamato releases, including the Voyager Entertainment DVD, are marketed either as Star Blazers or Space Battleship Yamato.

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External links

fr:Yamato (anime) it:Starblazers ja:宇宙戦艦ヤマト pt:Patrulha Estelar zh:宇宙戰艦大和號

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