"Holy Klono's tungsten teeth and curving carballoy claws!"
E. E. "Doc" Smith's classic series, one of the very first Space Operas. As such, many classic Space Opera tropes were first seen in Smith's books, making it a must-read for anyone interested in the genesis of Science Fiction.The series, assembled from initially-unconnected short stories in Astounding Stories magazine from 1937 onwards, details an epic battle between Good and Evil as personified by Civilization (and their sponsors, Arisia) and Boskone (and their sponsors, Eddore). Each faction is, in fact, the pawn of a different race of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who each have a grand plan for the sentient beings of the universe.The Kinnison bloodline plays an important role for Civilization, since it was carefully bred over millennia by the Arisians to produce a race of super-beings that would ultimately supplant the Arisians themselves.The title object, the Lens of Civilization, is an Empathic Weapon that initially grants its users Psychic Powers which vary in strength and effectiveness from user to user, as well as providing an identification for Law Enforcement that cannot be forged or duplicated and instantly kills anyone attempting impersonation. For certain, special individuals, the Lens is no more than a Magic Feather.As originally written in the 1930s and early 1940s, the Lensman series consisted of four novels:
Galactic Patrol
Gray Lensman
Second-Stage Lensman
Children of the Lens
In the early 1950s, however, Smith wrote a lengthy prologue to an earlier (and previously unrelated) book of his named Triplanetary, which brought it into the Lensman universe. He also wrote an interquel novel, First Lensman, to bride the gap between the events in Triplanetary and the events in Galactic Patrol.The Lensman series was later used as the starting point for a (non-licensed) Japanese Anime movie ("SF New Century Lensman") and series ("Lensman: Galactic Patrol") , which took the basic outline and the names of most of the major characters and turned it all into a Star Wars ripoff. Doc Smith's estate attempted to sue the anime's creators over the series but the lawsuit was thrown out on a technicality (they waited too long before doing anything about it and thus failed to protect their copyright). The movie and a Compilation Movie of part of the series were dubbed in English by Harmony Gold USA; later, Streamline Pictures redubbed the movie with the original soundtrack and no cuts for content.In 1963 the New England Science Fiction Association named their annual SF convention "Boskone" (a play on "Boston Convention) in Smith's honor. The convention newsletter is named "Helmuth", of course.*
Helmuth is an intermediate Dragon who always begins his messages to his underlings by saying "Helmuth, speaking for Boskone!"
A God Am I - Kimball Kinnison's children, and even more so the Arisians and Eddorians.
The first is specifically stated in the books to be more powerful than the "even more so" second and third. Also, in all cases, but especially in the first, it's much more the "perfectly accurate assessment" side of the trope. (The third group are perhaps more on the delusional side, because they've been deliberately misled by the second group.)
The planet Trenco, where anything has to be willing to eat anything in order to survive, and usually does - to the point where a creature will take pains to finish its lunch even while being lunched upon.
Always Chaotic Evil - Nearly all of Boskone is so evil that virtually no prisoners are ever taken. On both sides of the war. Several entire Boskonian planets (all of them effectively planet-sized fortresses) are destroyed with no survivors over the course of the series.
On at least one occasion, Kinnison notes that the previous life on that planet had been exterminated to make way for the base; this is hinted at as being standard Boskonian technique.
Oh, it doesn't stop there: Christopher "Kit" Kinnison, Kathryn "Kat" Kinnison, Camilla "Cam" Kinnison, Karyn "Kay" Kinnison, Constance "Con" Kinnison...
Amulet of Concentrated Awesome - Played straight by having the Lensmen's lenses amplify their Psychic Powers. For the Second-Stage Lensmen they turned out just to be magic feathers, as Second-Stage Lensmen are advanced enough to use mind powers on their own.
Even a Second (and on occasion a Third) Stage Lensman is advised to wear it when a maximum effort is required. Despite having done everything up to that point without it, Kim Kinnison makes sure he puts his on before duelling Thralian Prime Minister Fossten, and Kim's teenage daughters materialise Lenses for themselves out of thin air when directing their share of the space combat at the Battle of Arisia.
An Axe to Grind - the Valerian space axe. The universe's personal battle armour (and its associated energy shield) deflects most hand-held projectile and energy weapons, and the Valerians are fast enough, thanks to their origin on a high-grav world, to close the distance before the few exceptions can do much good.
Animal Eye Spy - Kinnison does this mostly, using everything from dogs to worms to infiltrate enemy bases or perform critical tasks. Nadreck takes a hint later.
Awesomeness by Analysis - The Arisians' "Visualization of the Cosmic All", which effectively gives them precognition from sufficiently analyzing a person or object.
Costigan also has a talent for figuring out the details of how to operate, repair, and modify both alien technologies and alien social interactions with a brief observation.
Costigan is one very highly trained, incredibly badass Irishman.
Badass Army - the Lensmen may have been SF's first, being equipped with small arms that vaporize a person, personal shields that can survive said small arms, a machine gun equivalent that can boil steel in seconds, 'caterpillars' giant tanks fitted with starship-grade weaponry...
Bastard Understudy - Among Boskone (and their controllers, e.g. the Eddorians) it is regarded as quite acceptable, even praiseworthy, for an underling to scheme to supplant their superior – the idea being that if he's successful the superior is no longer fit (e.g. not cunning and ruthless enough) to hold their position anyway.
Batman Gambit: Used whenever Xanatos isn't available for personal appearances
Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Several tyrants throughout Earth history, including Nero, Genghis Khan, and Adolf Hitler, were actually guises used by Gharlane of Eddore. Also, an in-universe example with the scientist Bergenholm. In the second book, he comes up with the breakthrough to make the Inertialess Drive safe and efficient. Later, they find out that he was an Arisian.
Beware the Nice Ones: Lensmen were referred to as "sublimated boy scouts" by one character, but Klono help you if they catch you engaging in piracy. No to mention that they use planets as strategic weapons.
BFG: The Standish, the equivalent of a machine gun, and it replacement, the semi-portable.
Bizarre Alien Biology - the Palainians' metabolism has to extend into the fourth dimension in order to function in their native environment (Pluto is as far inside Earth's solar system as they feel comfortable living).
Brother-Sister Incest - Never happens in the books themselves, but the five Kinnison kids are the new ultimate beings – a race seperate from the rest of humanity and the founding population of a new species of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. One brother, four sisters, do the math. Vaguely foreshadowed (as strongly as the era would allow, anyway) in the last book.
The Chosen Many - The Lensmen as a whole. In point of fact, according to some sources, the Lensmen inspired another famous Chosen Many, the Green Lantern Corps. (The Corps' creators deny this, although later they made amends by adding GLs named after elements of Lensman.)
Clothes Make the Superman - The space armor in Triplanetary incorporates forcefields that can resist steel-cutting lasers rays. It only goes up from there.
Code Name - "Boskone" originated as the Galactic Patrol's secret codename for operations against the space pirates, unaware that the code name was devised by a Patrol scientist who was a physical manifestation of Arisian telekinetic power. They deliberately fed the Patrol the right name.
"Zwilnik" was the Patrol's codename for their operations against a drug smuggling ring at around the same time as Operation Boskone; by Kimball's time, the word "zwilnik" has become standard slang referring to drug traffickers.
Deceptively Human Robots - Most of Gray Roger's crew look outwardly identical to people, but given the setting's lack of processing power, they're effectively remote-controlled puppets.
Where's it say that latter bit? The setting has independently working robots elsewhere – Whole space fleets crewed by them towards the end of the series!
Deflector Shields - Usually referred to as "ether-walls" or "screens."
Disintegrator Ray - Without the later trappings of safety and convenience. The beams used really do vaporize their targets, with all the attendant thermodynamics, so best wear a shielded suit when firing unless you want your front half to be blackened cajun-style.
Depends on the weapon. Kim Kinnison fires his DeLameters while unarmoured on several occasions, and it's hinted that its ancestor, the Lewiston, can also be fired by an unprotected user. The Semi-portable projectors, on the other hand...
Dolled-Up Installment: The "first" novel in the series, Triplanetary, was originally unconnected to the saga, but later rewritten and expanded as a "Prequel".
Earth-Shattering Kaboom - In the third volume the bad guys' main base has a scuttling charge that pulverizes the crust of the planet it's on. This being the origin of the Lensman Arms Race, they have to find a way to beat that. So starting in the forth book, the superweapons of choice are planet-sized antimatter bombs and planets travelling in opposite directions and smashing the target between them. Yeah, beat that. (And they do, with colliding planets from another universe travelling at fifteen times the speed of light.)
The Patrol focuses it's efforts on thionite, which is really nasty stuff (and more importantly, whose dealers are part of the Boskonian food chain). Bentlam weed, on the other hand, seems to be the equivalent of marijuana - the Patrol doesn't even bother mentioning it.
Everybody Smokes: Even the women. Tobacco is never once maligned in the series. Fine brand cigarettes are imported to Tellus all the way from Alsakan, all the way across the galaxy.
Evolutionary Levels - Lensmen are graded on stages from First to Third; only specially bred individuals get past First-Stage Lensman.
Fake Memories - supplied by the Boskonians whenever their agents bite the amnesia pill and on one occasion by Kim Kinnison in order to rehabilitate one of those agents, who had been their puppet since she was fourteen.
Kinnison once had Worsel give him false memories in order to sow disinformation among the Eich leadership.
Fate Worse than Death: After the trio has been captured by Gray Rodger, Clio has the following conversation with her guide:
"But I wouldn't want to keep on living!" Clio declared, with a flash of spirit. "And I can always die, you know."
"You will find that you cannot die," the passionless creature returned monotonously. "If you do not yield, you will long and pray for death, but you will not die unless Rodger wills it. I was like you once. I also struggled, and I became what I am now - whatever it is."
Later Conway remarks that the woman "isn't alive - she's full of the prettiest machinery and communicators that you ever saw!" Which leads to a majorFridge Horror moment when one stops to wonder just how many other of Rodger's robots atarted out as human.
The Federation - a multi-species multi-planet civilization is common these days in science fiction, written and visual (see Star Wars, Star Trek, Brin's Uplift Universe, et cetera) but it had a definite start, and it was here. Ironically enough, unlike most modern portrayals where the bad guys tend to be a single species, both the heroes and the villains were multi-species and multi-planet.
Florence Nightingale Effect - The Chief Surgeon and the Port Admiral try to set this up between Clarissa and Kinnison, only for the two of them to annoy the hell out of each other at first. Later, of course, they do fall in love. As the Arisians had intended them to do all along. They were the penultimates in their breeding program.
This is lampshaded early on: in the first book Triplanetary it's mentioned ... and demonstrated ... that the two breeding lines would instinctively be incompatible with each other until the time was right.
Future Slang - Lots of it, including "zwilnik" as mentioned above, but the most prevalent is "QX" as a replacement for "OK."
Gadgeteer Genius: Practically every inventor or engineer in the series can whip up new devices or radically modify and rebuild existing ones in a matter of minutes, often in the middle of a raging battle. Hell, Kinnison is one of these himself. Just look at Galactic Patrol when he's stranded on Velantia.
Gender Restricted Ability - Smith's stories had only one woman who was deemed worthy of the Lens. First Lensman had the Arisians Hand Wave it by explaining that the Lenses were intrinsically "masculine". Some of the authorized sequels just threw other Lenswomen in anyway. And a canon Lenswoman did eventually appear, throwing the original claim somewhat into question, but that's Arisians for you... they say whateverelicits the desired reactions.
Human Aliens - Kinnison not only manages to pass as a native on Thrale (a planet Civilization's run of humanity could not possibly have colonized – knowingly, anyway), but even manages to impersonate one of Boskone's officers there.
He did telepathically absorb practically all of the memories and skills of the Thralian officer he was replacing, and unknowingly had the Arisians filling in the blanks where he couldn't.
Also, in the Lensman universe, convergent evolution is a scientific fact: all the separate branches of humanity are virtually identical, even if they arose in entirely different galaxies. This is attributed to all non-Eddorian life in the known universe sharing an ultimate ancestor (the Arisians), meaning that species differentiation would be produced only by evolving in different environments.
This is brought up by characters in the series, where they will mention how close to baseline Tellurians a particular alien is, often saying something like "Tellurian to within ten decimal places." However, it is unclear as to whether the decimal places part is meant to represent an actual mathematical formula, or is simply tongue-in-cheek.
Humanity Is Superior - guess who runs Civilization? There were four species the Arisians selectively bred and eugenically improved for millions of years. The four races were the humans, the Velantians, the Rigellians and the Palainians. Humanity was considered the most desirable candidate of the four races because each of the others, despite being superior to humanity in many qualities, had a significant flaw: the Palainians were intrinsically cowardly and very bad at multitasking, the Rigellians too nonaggressive and unambitious, and the Velantians deficient in resistance to mind control and in attention span. Humanity, on the other hand, while having the fewest special strengths, had absolutely no weaknesses.
Humanity as a whole has the problem that humans have a pronounced tendency towards corruptability. Finding an incorruptable human is just about as difficult as finding a courageous Palainian.
Subverted in that Roger is actually an asexual alien who reproduces by binary fission and is mainly just trying to figure out what this "sex" thing is and why other races think it's such a big deal anyway. When he says he wants to use her for experiments pertaining to sex, what he means and what she... and The Hero... think he means are two entirely different things.
Loyal Phlebotinum - The Lenses, which kill anyone other than their owners who tries to wield them.
Mad Mathematician — Sir Austin Cardynge. (Not actually insane, just... focused. Or perhaps Heinlein would call him U Nsane.)
The Man Behind the Man - the Arisians, the Eddorians (and the Ploorans, and so on down the Boskone hierarchy), Prime Minister Fossten.
Mecha-Mooks - Grey Roger's minions in Triplanetary. Played with in that the escaping heroes unhesitatingly gun down both robots and humans on sight without a moral quiver.
Never Found the Body - The nature of high-energy space warfare means you usually don't have a body to find, which Grey Roger uses –twice– to his benefit.
Nice to the Waiter - Even when he's infiltrating the bad guys' organization to work his way up the hierarchy, Virgil Samms refuses to take credit for work those under him did.
No Conservation of Energy: Averted hard; whether it's ray guns actuallyvaporizing people or Deflector Shields reradiating energy to their surroundings and setting them on fire, Smith is one rare sci-fi author who understands that not only does energy have to be generated, it also has to go somewhere.
Metal objects don't simply disappear - they glow, melt, and even evaporate is the beam is powerful enough.
In the climactic battle of the last book, anti-matter projectiles are used, and Smith very explicitly states that when an electron and positron collide, they annihilate, giving to two photons of *very* hard radiation. The really big antimaterial projectiles can fill volumes with diametres best expressed in light-minutes with lethal levels of ionizing radiation.
Nuclear Option: More like Casual Nuclear War, for lack of a better term. Several variants of atomic weapons are used: Super-atomic bombs which convert their entire rest-mass into energy, and duodecaplylatomate (or "duodec," for short), somewhat less energetic but apparently in wider use (perhaps cheaper?). And of course, the famous negabombs, "antimatter" projectiles that come in every size up to planetary mass. All are used increasingly liberally as the war escalates; expect no trace of any Nuclear Weapons Taboo.
Other passages suggswt that "duodec" is chemical high explosive with a yield otherwise only matched by nukes.
Old-School Dogfighting: Averted - the closest thing they have would be speedsters, used for scouting and transportation.
Omniscient Morality License - The Arisians like to jerk the lesser races' chains a lot, but it's for their own good.
Outside Context Villain: The Nevians in Triplanetary - when they first show up wreck both the patrol and the pirate fleets. Once the Boise gets the proper upgrades, however...
Pardon My Klingon - The Lenses assign random words to alien concepts with no direct English equivalent, and all the lenses use the same word afterwards.
Power of Love: This is what enables Chris to find and bring back Kinnison after he went through the Hell Hole and was trapped in a far off dimension that not even Mentor and the children could find. The chapter's even called "The Power of Love".
Given the early publication date, would that make this the Trope Namer?
Prequel - First Lensman, the last Lensman novel written by Smith, which finishes linking Triplanetary to the rest of the series.
Proud Warrior Race Guy - Worsel of Velantia, and also the confusingly named (Human) Valerians and their scion, Van Buskirk.
Not all that confusing... Valerians are called Valerians because they're from Valeria, a planet settled by Tellurians (Earth humans). They're distinct from Tellurians, because Valeria has several times Earth's gravity, making them much stronger (and faster, in a puny 1 G gravitational field) than Tellurians.
A lot of the confusion is the similarity between the names Velantian and Valerian. It comes dangerously close to the One Steve Limit.
Purple Prose - Each space battle seems to be a test to see if Smith can one-up himself.
"And from the mouth of that gargantuan cone [of battle] there spewed forth a miles-thick column of energy so raw, so stark, so incomprehensibly violent that it had to be seen to be even dimply appreciated. It simply cannot be described." (... And he was only up to the second book in the series by this point!)
Rule Of Cool - averted, surprisingly; the basic fictional scientific principles such as the Bergenholm drive, hyperstatial tubes, force fields, rays etc are all handled with consistency and care. Smith finds new ways to apply these principles, rather than applying Applied Phlebotinum. Even his predilection for the Boarding Party, and, of course the Valerian Space Axe Recycled In Space, are solidly justified.
Roaring Rampage of Revenge - Worsel, to avenge the millennia his people suffered at the hands of the Overlords of Delgon (not to mention his own suffering) vows to obliterate the entire species from the universe. Pretty much does. Considers the fact that he has to torture some of them for information to be a bonus.
This is a species that tortures its victims slowly to death in order to enjoy their agonies and then consume their life-force as they die. Little wonder that the Velantians' allies saw fit to help them destroy it.
Scary Dogmatic Aliens - Boskone is The Empire pitted against the democratic and free Civilization. Consider the stories were written in the run-up to, and during, WWII and I think you can see who they stand for.
It's probably not coincidence that the title of the Eddorian leader is also one of the titles of the German Kaiser ("All-Highest").
Also Cf. Helmuth von Moltke, German commander at the start of the First World War.
Schematized Prop - any and all weapons, but particularly the DeLameter blaster. Almost all spaceships.
Science Marches On - spaceships developed on slide rule, with fantastic beam weapons that use vacuum tubes!
The GURPS RPG supplement threw in the explanation that the Arisians deliberately prevented anyone in Civilization from inventing the transistor or modern computing theory, because the entire point of the Arisian breeding program was to improve the powers of the mind. Allowing the existence of surrogate minds (i.e., computers) would have interfered with that development, by removing most of the need for heightened intellectual capacity beyond the current human average. Some canonical support for this theory exists – when the Arisian breeding program finally reached its end (i.e., when the Children of the Lens were finally born), Civilization did immediately start to develop advanced computing technology, as seen in both Children of the Lens and Masters of the Vortex.
Well before that, they already had Mecha-Mooks to crew at least some of their war fleets. Lensman information technology is ... weird by modern standards.
The 'robot ships' in question are operating off of preprogrammed tapes and possess no capacity to react to circumstances; the level of computational power needed to do that is similar to an early 1950s automated lathe. Most of them don't even shoot anything; they're there solely to soak up enemy fire as decoys.
The early version of the Nebular Hypothesis that dominated the books' ideas of stellar and planetary formation, and the pre-DNA eugenics and Evolutionary Levels concepts used in the Lensman breeding programs.
The inertialess drive was theoretically possible when the books were written, but advancements in relativity and quantum mechanics have both made hash of it.
Negamatter. It's essentially antimatter, but as originally imagined by Paul Dirac in the 1930s. As such, it has negative mass and some other weird properties most scientists today don't believe it should have.
The vacuum tubes might not qualify, give that transistors can only handle very small power loads and tube circuits are very much more resistant to EM Ps and hard radiation.
Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Averted; Smith appears very much aware that he's portraying a galaxy-wide civilization. Here's the Gray Lensman on leading the assault on a major Boskonian stronghold:
Kinnison: "With around a million fleets to handle we can't spend spend much time on any one."
Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After Ploor is destroyed, the remnants of the Boskonian fleet flee back to their respective planets. The Patrol, thoroughly sick of killing mooks, lets them go.
Show, Don't Tell: Smith's character descriptions tend to be "This is what you should think about this character."
Shown Their Work: For such a dated series, Lensman can be surprisingly hard science-fiction at times.
2-D Space: Averted hard. Englobement is a standard tactic, as is the Cone of Battle.
Space Battle: While most of the action centered on the larger-than-life heroes as individuals, occasionally the emphasis shifted to the larger-than-life fleets of space battleships they commanded.
Space Is Cold: During Virgil Samms's visit to a sub-zero planet, Smith takes pains to explain that vacuum is a very poor conductor. Heat loss to the metallic ground is a much bigger danger, on the other hand.
Space Friction - When you're totally inertialess, running into a hydrogen atom in the almost-perfect vacuum of space actually does qualify as friction.
Stalker with a Test Tube - The Arisians have been interfering with most of human history, conducting a breeding program to produce humans with mental powers rivaling exceeding their own. The Kinnisons become the end result.
Starfish Aliens - The Nevians, Palainians and Rigellians, among many others
Stun Guns - The Nevian Paralyzer gun. Most of the other hand weapons don't have this setting as default, although it's implied that they can be tuned or modified in the field to produce it.
Reverse Mole - one of Kinnison's usual tactics, successful to the point that he eventually ends up running the Evil Empire in time for their (at that stage in the story) climactic battle with Civilization.
Taking You with Me: When fighting a loosing battle Boskonian gun crews purposely overload their weapons. This burns out the gun and kills the gun crews, but the resulting high powered beam is enough to break through the shields of the Patrols defensive cruisers. It backfires when Patrol scientists figure out a way to safely use method, creating the devastating primary beam.
Mentor: "Inflated — overweeningly by your warped and perverted ideas, by your momentary success in dominating your handful of minions, tied to you by bonds of greed, of passion, and of crime, you come here to wrest from us the secret of the Lens, from us, a race as much abler than yours as we are older — a ratio of millions to one.
"You consider yourself cold, hard, ruthless. Compared to me, you are weak, soft, tender, as helpless as a newborn child. That you may learn and appreciate that fact is one reason why you are living at this present moment. Your lesson will now begin."
Later, Mentor does the same to a couple of trespassing Eich.
The So-Called Coward - Nadrek refers to himself as a Dirty Coward. He's also probably the second most effective Lensman in Civilization, prior to the Children of the Lens; the fact that he doesn't stick his neck out leads him to take no risks and defeat the enemies of Civilization with consummate skill, efficiency and guile.
His race regards cowardice as a virtue. At one point, he's acutely embarrassed by the fact that he personally faced and defeated three enemies in single combat, instead of manipulating them into killing each other.
Touched by Vorlons - several characters are touched by the Arisians to varying degrees, particularly the second-stage Lensmen in the later books.
In fact, the Arisians were largely the inspiration for the Vorlons in Babylon 5, as the Eddorians were for that series' Big Bad, the Shadows.
Types Of Naval Ships: Played with. Speeders are smallest (room for one or two people) and fastest. Covettes, frigates, and destroyers aren't used at all. Cruisers are generally designed for specialized tasks, such as prevent hostile ships from going "free", scouting, or launching negabombs. Battlecruisers are used for commerce raiding (by the Boskonians), or for fighting commerce raiders (by the Patrol). Battleships and super-dreadnoughts are front-lime combat units although we see far more of the later then former. Finally, the slow maulers and super-maulers were designed for planetary bombardment, although thanks to the strength of theater shields they proved more successful in ship to ship combat.
Uncanny Valley - Both Grey Roger's robot slaves, and Roger himself, receive comments to this effect by various characters.
The Unfettered - Gray Lensmen are free to pursue whatever avenues they desire in pursuit of their moral duty to protect Civilisation, and answer to no one.
Unobtainium - Dureum, a "super-dense" metal which allows it to be used inside of Hypertubes.
We Have Reserves: When Patrol marines storm a Boskonian battlecruiser, the defending officers have no reservations about tossing armored-piercing grenades into the melee, which kill almost as many of their own forces as they do of the Patrol attackers.
Worthless Yellow Rocks - Iron, the basis of the Nevians' technology and economy: five pounds is a king's ransom, but to humans it's so common we build our ships' hulls out of it!
The "super-atomic motor" in the stories works by converting the total mass of the fuel into energy. "Allotropic Iron" is an artificially produced allotrope that packs a lot of mass into a very dense liquid, and as such, makes a very efficient and easy to handle fuel for their ship's atomic motors.
Xanatos Gambit - not just the Arisian billion year plan (with redundancies!), but many of Kimball Kinnison's infiltration gambits require him to completely assume a new identity, at one point going so far as to systematically (and psychically) write himself into each and every portion of an enemy soldier's past!
To say nothing of the identity that required him to become an alcoholic drug addict, deflecting attention from himself by getting so smashed and high simultaneously that he could barely move a muscle. His mind, on the other hand...
You Gotta Have Blue Hair: Helmuth is described as having blue hair, blue eyes, and blue-tinted skin. The anime adaptation, for whatever reason, chose to turn him into a forty-foot monstrosity.
Conspicuous CG: For several spacecraft, a holographic Helmuth communicating to his minions, an illusionary chase sequence, and the Lens. The anime was one of the first uses of CG for the mass market.
Doomed Hometown: Boskone destroys Anime!Kimball's peaceful farm world practically as soon as the Lens is on his hand.
Evil Is Visceral: Boskone ships are purple organic-looking blobs, in contrast with the silver geometric shapes of Galactic Patrol ships.
Recycled Soundtrack: The Harmony Gold dub used part of the score for the unreleased Robotech II: The Sentinels.
Take Up My Sword: Kim is given his lens by a dying Lensman he finds when he saves the Britannia from crashing. (Of course, Lenses just don't work that way in the original series.)
The anomaly is immediately lampshaded in the film.
Tron Lines: Spreading from the Lens on the back of Kim's hand.
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