alt title(s): Star Blazers; Space Cruiser Yamato; Space Battleship Yamato
We're off to outer space,
We're leaving Mother Earth,
to save the human race...
—Star Blazers theme
In 2199, the surface of the Earth has been bombarded into an uninhabitable radioactive wasteland by an alien race from the planet Gamilus. The Gamilon fleet is superior to humanity's few remaining warships, and the extinction of humanity is likely within a year. In the middle of a losing battle against the Gamilon fleet, a spaceship from the planet Iscandar arrives and crashes on Mars. Two space cadets investigate the wreck, and discover a beautiful woman, dead, with a message for Earth: if Earth can send a ship to Iscandar, Queen Starsha of Iscandar will give Earth technology that will neutralize the radioactive contamination on the planet, and save humanity.
In response, humanity refits the wreck of the World War II battleship
Yamato, lying at rest on the exposed surface where the ocean used to be, into a space battleship, using plans for a star drive included in Starsha's message. The
Yamato then sets forth on a desperate quest to reach Iscandar and save humanity....
Yamato was one of the earliest
anime series to reach North America. It was dubbed under the title
Star Blazers, and aired in the Saturday morning cartoon block during the late 1970s.
A national and international phenomenon since the 1970s, Yamato was a pre-modern, or classicist, work - its narrative progressed with the same straightforward martial discipline as its characters, and any subtext was unpremeditated. (All those bulging phallic symbols and climactic cannon discharges - how innocent we all were once!)
The series is fascinating as a reflection of Japanese attitude towards its past military adventurism. That the spaceship is a resurrected Yamato (the storied, supposedly unsinkable mammoth
WW 2 battleship symbolising the Spirit of Great Japan), and that its crew's mission is to reverse the effect of enemy atomic bombardment: these are barmy, cathartic wish-fulfilments. By positing a future where the Japanese noble-warrior tradition is an unambiguous good, and by portraying the Aryan-like alien aggressors as even more fascist and decadent than anything Earth can come up with, Yamato is as close to a pop-culture apologia to kamikaze credo as you can get.
In a 2004 interview director
Leiji Matsumoto confirmed that the ship's gung-ho crew were named and modelled after
samurai from
the Shinsengumi - the late-shogunate special police group that aimed to drive out foreign influences and to renew the empire. The notoriously anorexic and sylphlike Leiji woman, the cartoonist also revealed, was based on a daguerreotype of an ancestor of his that he found in the family home as a child. The ancestor was a young war widow, and Matsumoto felt powerfully drawn towards her, an emotional and genetic link across time. Thus the prototype of
his wan ice maidens, often the instigator and the final object of cosmic quests, was born.
Simply animated but full of atmosphere, and highly influential to this day in terms of visual design and plot devices (e.g. the quest story arc of the third season of
Star Trek Enterprise, the anachronistic aircraft carrier metaphor and the grown-up drama of the new
Battlestar Galactica, the mix of realistic combat tactics and dodgy cosmology in
Evangelion), Yamato stands as an indiscussed and enthralling pop milestone.
Provides examples of:
- Absolute Cleavage, sort of. Starsha's outfit would result in this trope, if they'd actually bothered to draw her boobs.
- Alien Invasion
- Anime Anatomy: presumably the explanation for the above.
- Anime Theme Song (Uchuu Senkan YAAAMAAAATOOOOOOO...!)
- And the dubbed US version was pretty catchy, too...
- Applied Phlebotinum
- Artificial Gravity
- Ass Pull (arguably): one can't help but wonder why the Gamilons use weapons that make the earth uninhabitably radioactive, if their goal is to colonize it. In the last episode of the first series, we learn that a radioactive environment is their natural habitat.. although the pilot captured earlier in the series didn't seem to need it. And it never comes up again in later seasons, where there appear to be No Biochemical Barriers.
- The Asteroid Thicket
- The Yamato can use its naval anchors to build one as a shield around the ship.
- Back From The Dead: Okita was dead at the end of the first tv series, but for some reason the writers decided to bring him back as Captain in Final Yamato
- Backup Twin
- The Battlestar
- The Bridge
- Canon Discontinuity: Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato which led to a remake of the whole Comet Empire arc in the second series.
- The Bolar Wars to some extent as the story in the movie Final Yamato took place in 2203 (events in Space Battleship Yamato III took place in 2205)
- The Captain (Okita / Avatar)
- Clothing Damage - when time speeds up as the Yamato is being sucked into a black hole, the major visible sign of this is everyone's clothing starting to wear out really fast.
- Comic Book Adaptation: There were four comic adaptations set in the Star Blazers universe. The latest is the webcomic Rebirth.
- Contrived Coincidence
- Cool Starship
- Earth Shattering Kaboom: The destruction of planets Gamilas and Iscandar ( by a Self Destruct Mechanism) in The New Voyage
- Elaborate Underground Base
- The End Of The World As We Know It
- Exact Time To Failure ("There are only X days left!")
- Find The Cure
- Forgotten Superweapon
- Frothy Mugs Of Water (The Trope Namer, after Star Blazers and Doctor Sane's "spring water". Some people see it as an improvement.)
- Gas Mask Mooks - Gamilon space suits, including Dessler when he wears one
- Half Human Hybrid: Sasha from the movies The New Voyage and Be Forever Yamato
- Heel Face Turn (Dessler / Desslok)
- Heroic Sacrifice
- Hollywood Cyborg (Sanada / Sandor)
- Human Aliens - The Gamilons were indistinguishable from humans in early episodes, but during the first season their skin color was switched to blue. Deslar actually goes from pink to blue before our very eyes.
- The Deingilian race from Final Yamato were descendents of humans who escaped from The Great Flood (caused by the water planet Aquarius) by a alien spaceship
- Keep Circulating The Tapes: There's still no western release for the three seasons of the original Yamato TV series
- Luke Nounverber: Only in Star Blazers (like Wildstar for example)
- Macekre: Star Blazers
- The dub of the movie Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato cut 30 minutes out from the film, and used names from the Star Blazers series
- Made For TV Movie: The New Voyage
- Magnificent Bastard: Deslar/Desslok is magnificently bastardlicious. And that's before he becomes an ally
- Mecha Show
- Meaningful Name: Comet Empire villian Sabera's name in Star Blazers is Invidia. A Latin word for envy.
- Military Mashup Machine
- The Movie : Currently five movies with an upcoming revival movie (after years of rights disputes) to be released in late 2009
- A Nazi By Any Other Name - Deslar and the Gamilons in general. which makes his subsequent Heel Face Turn kind of disturbing
- Notable Original Music
- Nuclear Weapons Taboo (Gamilon planet bombs)
- Old School Dog Fighting
- Older Than They Think: kids who first saw Star Blazers circa 1979 probably assumed it was derivative of Star Wars. Cosmo Tigers are X-Wings, IQ-9/Analyzer is R 2 D 2, the Wave Motion Gun is the Death Star's main weapon, etc. All of this is impossible because Yamato premiered in 1974.
- Cosmo what? They were Cosmo ZEROS in the dubbing we saw.
- The Cosmo Zero is the unique fighter flown by Wildstar/Kodai. The other fighters are collectively either the Black Tigers or Cosmo Tigers depending on the season.
- Newer Than They Think: as youtube comments will tell you, there are also a lot of latter-day fans who think the Death Star was based on the Comet Empire. Not likely, as the Comet Empire was introduced in 1978.
- See The Whites Of Their Eyes (even the damn Wave Motion Gun has to be fired at spitting distance.)
- This was a plot point in the Comet Empire series: the Empire's Wave Motion Gun-like ship outranged the Earth fleet, picking off ships without needing any other weaponry.
- Real Time (Sort of. The Yamato/Argo has one year exactly to complete its mission — i.e., one season — and at the end of every episode, a countdown of how many days are left before the destruction of Earth is displayed.)
- Ridiculously Human Robots
- Robo Speak
- Rubber Forehead Aliens: Every alien race in the series has a body similar to humans, but a different skin color
- Peek A Bangs - fighter pilot Yamamoto/Hardy goes into combat with one eye obscured.
- Religious And Mythological Theme Naming: The Yamato in Star Blazers was renamed the Argo which is named after the Greek mythological ship in which Jason and the Argonauts set sailed upon
- Screwed By The Network: The first season was supposed to have 39 episodes, but was reduced to 26.
- A Bigger example was that the number of episodes for the Bolar Was was originally 52 episodes, but was reduced to 25.
- The Smurfette Principle
- Apparently imposed by Word Of God in the middle of the first season. Several (unnamed) female crew members were seen in episode 10. Then producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki decided that Yuki was the only woman. The others were never seen again.
- As the only woman on this ship, Yuki's duties include serving tomato juice to other (male) crewmembers and doing their laundry. Her title in the EDF may as well have been "Mom".
- Stay In The Kitchen: At the start of the third season, it initially looks like the show is going to avert The Smurfette Principle by having a lot of females (mostly nurses). However, once it becomes apparent that the mission is not going to be just exploration but will also involve a lot of combat, all the women except one (guess which one!) are sent home on a transport ship that appears out of nowhere. (Please someone tell me if this only happened in Star Blazers.. I don't have access to the original version of this season)
- So Once Again The Day Is Saved ("There are only X days left!")
- Space Clothes
- Space Is An Ocean / Space Sailing (refurbished wet navy ships, complete with anchors and anti-fouling paint below the "waterline")
- Spoiler Title: Only in the original Japanese series
- Translation Convention, Translator Microbes, Aliens Speaking English or something: except for one case early in the series where Analyzer has to translate the Gamilus language for his human friends, all the aliens speak Japanese (and in the dub, English) both to the humans and to each other, even in the case of different races that you wouldn't expect them to have a common language.
- Furthermore, in what could only be described as a really odd instance of The Queens Latin, Star Blazers has many of the Galmans in the Bolar Wars series speak in a variety of accents from around the British Commonwealth, some of them pretty bad. (Of course, some of the American Accents are pretty goofy-sounding too)
- And how would Analyzer know how to speak Gamilon anyway?
- Wagon Train To The Stars
- Wave Motion Gun (the Trope Namer)
- We Could Have Avoided All This
- strangely, this was mostly excised in the dub, making it come across as more warlike than the original
- Wacky Wayside Tribe: the bee people
- Worthy Opponent: too many to name.
- Star Blazers even has one bizarre Woolseyism in which a funeral for dead crew-members is translated into a funeral for dead enemies, to show the respect that both sides have even as they try to slaughter one another. It would have worked if you wouldn't have been able to see the obviously human bodies inside the caskets.
- Younger Than They Look: Half Human Hybrid Sasha, due of Iscandarian Origins, is one year old in Be Forever Yamato despite that she looks like a teenager.
- You Have Failed Me: in addition to using a Trap Door to dispose of men who laugh at their own jokes, Deslar is known to shoot subordinates Vice President Hisu in the first season and Admiral Vandeburg in the second season with a gun that is only shown smoking after the act. An exact inversion of Where Did They Get Lasers: in a series where lasers actually would be expected, this guy seems to prefer old-fashioned firearms.
