|
Star Blazers - The Quest for Iscandar is the English
title for the Japanese animated series, 宇宙戦艦ヤマト (literally
Space Battleship Yamato). Created as a movie by Leiji Matsumoto
in 1977 for adult audiences, the program was later
dubbed into
English and viewed as a children's
cartoon in the late 70s and early
1980s.
In themes seen in many
anime, an alien race, the Gamilon, are raining radioactive
bombs on Earth, rendering the Earth's surface uninhabitable due to the
fallout and threatening to kill humanity, now living 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 that a race located in the
Large Magellanic Cloud has a device which can repair the radiation
damage.
Secretly, the ruin of the Japanese
battleship
Yamato (though referred to as the Argo in the English dub) is
converted into a massive spaceship, complete with a new, incredibly
powerful weapon called the "wave motion gun". An intrepid crew leaves in
the Yamato to go to the Magellenic Cloud and retrieve the mysterious
device, if it exists. Along the way, the crew are involved in many
adventures.
Like much anime of its time, the
World War Two themes and explicit violence was regarded as too
explicit for Western children, and so the English dub was toned down in
these respects. Nevertheless, the epic story (with echoes of many of the
themes of both
Star Wars and
Star Trek) and high quality of the voice dub (though as the dubbing
was done by non-union actors, their identities were obscured for years
later) earned it many fans who remember it fondly to this day. It is a
particular touchstone amongst twenty-something IT professionals.
Two more series were created after the first proved to be so
successful. Originally intended to be a movie to cap off the series,
Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato was later expanded into a series
of its own, The Comet Empire. A third series, The Bolar Wars,
was also shown on US TV. In Japan, the third series was preceded by the TV
movie Yamato: The New Voyage and the ambitious theatrical Be Forever
Yamato. The end of the saga was shown in 1983 with the theatrical Final
Yamato.
The revolutionary SF project concieved in 1973 by producer Yoshinobu
Nishizaki would undergo heavy revisions before it's final evolution in
1974 as Space Battle Ship Yamato. Originally conceived as sort of a "Lord
of the Flies" in outer space, the project was originally called "Asteroid
Ship" and had our crew journey through space in a hollowed out asteroid in
search of the planet Iscandar. The enemy aliens were originally called
Rajendora and there was to be much discord amongst the multinational
teenage crew as many of them acted purely out of self interest and
personal gain. When Leiji Matsumoto was brought onto the project, many of
these concepts were discarded and it is his art direction and ship designs
that accredit him as creator of Yamato even though Nishizaki retains legal
rights to the work. In the mid 90s, Nishizaki attempted to create a sequel
to Yamato set hundreds of years after the original. Yamato 2520 was to
chronicle the adventures of the 18 starship to bear the name and it's
battle against the Blone Empire. In place of Leiji Matsumoto, American
artist Syd Mead (Blade Runner) provided the conceptual art. Due to the
bankruptcy of Nishizaki's company, Office Academy, the series was never
finished and only two episodes were produced. Most agree in general, that
Yamato fans were underwhelmed by what little of 2520 they did see and were
not disappointed by it's cancellation.
|
