Be Forever Yamato REBEL 3199

[Christopher]

Back in the Yamato 2202 thread, I commented that the biggest waste of storyline was not having Knox (sorry I can't think of his Japanese name) be the traitor who shuts down the Wave Motion engine when the Yamato is confronting Gatlantis at Saturn.

The writers had already established that Knox was a clone of the real Knox and that, thanks to a telepathic link to Gatlantis and Zodar, that could have been used to "activate" Knox and have him disable the engine and frame Conroy in the process, thus giving both men reason for actions later in the series.

They did establish that Saito (Knox) was a brainwashed Gatlantis agent without his knowledge, that he provided some vital intelligence or something. As for Kato (Conroy), I think it was more powerful that he wasn't framed, but was manipulated into doing it to save his son.

Although I didn't get the logic of Zwordar's whole "People of Earth, I give you the gift of a cure for your children, before I destroy the entire human race in a few hours."


As for the Time Fault, I don't entirely remember the original season 2, but my impression was that the Time Fault was something the remake invented to rationalize the implausibly rapid fleet rebuilding in the original. And once they had the idea, they used it as a source of complications and moral questions.

 

[Ithekro]

The Time Fault was a product of Yamato 2202. Partly to explain how they rebuilt so quickly, but then also to make commentary on militarism, which I believe was a national political issue in Japan around the mid-2010s. In the original version, the Earth just build up a fleet of ships in about a year with Andromeda launching a year after Yamato returned to Earth. The Earth fleet was smaller than in Yamato 2202, but they still build 40 or so battleships and carriers, plus hundreds of lighter ships in just over a year's time...only for nearly every ship to be destroyed by Gatlantis at the Battle of Saturn.

In Yamato 2202 at least, the Earth fleet does at least partly survive and fight another day. By the end they have rebuilt the ships of the fleet via the Time Fault....but they have more ships than they have people to crew them. So they've come up with other approaches in the four years since they shut down Time Fault (dimension collapsed in December of 2203) when the Rebel 3199 starts (according to the website, the series begins in October of 2207.)

 

[Christopher]

I find it interesting that Star Blazers didn't use the Gatlantis name, just calling it the Comet Empire. I mean, it's derived from Atlantis, which is a familiar Western term, and sounds exactly like the kind of name an American cartoon might give to a bad-guy nation. But then, maybe they thought it sounded too much like "Gamilon."

 

[Tuskin38]

I find it interesting that the Japanese logos for the series also say 'Star Blazers' on it.

I guess to catch the eye of those who grew up with the English dub of the original?

 

[BillJ]

I find it interesting that the Japanese logos for the reboot series also say 'Star Blazers' on it.

I guess to catch the eye of those who grew up with the English dub of the original?

Age of the internet, I imagine. These projects have global reach from the getgo, so they're reminding people who know the originals as Star Blazers, that this is that IP.

 

[Christopher]

I find it interesting that the Japanese logos for the series also say 'Star Blazers' on it.

I guess to catch the eye of those who grew up with the English dub of the original?

Yeah, no doubt. I think Japanese creators always have an eye on the Western market, given how many manga, anime, and tokusatsu series have English or part-English names. Kamen Rider has been incorporating "Masked Rider" or "Kamen Rider" in Roman script in their title logos for decades (they switched from "Masked" to "Kamen" in 2009, shortly after the adaptation Kamen Rider Dragon Knight aired in the US, which I suspect was not a coincidence).

 

[DarrenTR1970]

As for the Time Fault, I don't entirely remember the original season 2, but my impression was that the Time Fault was something the remake invented to rationalize the implausibly rapid fleet rebuilding in the original.

In the original version, the Earth just build up a fleet of ships in about a year with Andromeda launching a year after Yamato returned to Earth. The Earth fleet was smaller than in Yamato 2202, but they still build 40 or so battleships and carriers, plus hundreds of lighter ships in just over a year's time...only for nearly every ship to be destroyed by Gatlantis at the Battle of Saturn.

That's what I don't understand. The one hundred or so ships that were built in the original series seems like a reasonable number of vessels to be built in a year or so.

If we were to use a real-life example, when the United States faced the IJN at the Battle of Midway on June 4, 1942 - the Navy went into battle with three fleet carriers, seven cruisers, one anti-aircraft cruiser, seventeen destroyers and two oilers. Most of those ships, apart from the carrier Enterprise, would be sunk in subsequent battles with Japanese up until the end of 1942/early 1943

Two years later, in June 1944, when the United States faced the Japanese at the Battle of the Marianas - the Navy had 7 fleet carriers, 8 light carriers, 7 battleships, 8 heavy cruisers, 6 light cruisers, 4 anti-aircraft cruisers, and 66 destroyers; only one, the carrier Enterprise, was a pre-WWII ship - everything else I've described, with the exception of a few of the Fleet Carriers and a pair of Battleships, were laid down, constructed, launched, commissioned and entered service after Pearl Harbor.

I don't see why Earth can't rebuild its fleet to a level I've described in a rapid expansion program after the Cosmos DNA reversed the damage of the planet bombs

 

[Ithekro]

That all of those ships, aside from Yamato, were built in the nine months after the shipyards were rebuilt. Along with the rest of civilization.

The reason they extended the series to 2202/03 was because of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami being recent and not being repaired in such a short period of time. That made it seem unreasonable to have Earth recover so quickly as it had in the OS.

 

[Christopher]

The reason they extended the series to 2202/03 was because of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami being recent and not being repaired in such a short period of time. That made it seem unreasonable to have Earth recover so quickly as it had in the OS.

It still seemed a little fast for it to recover to that degree, even with the Cosmo Reverse System. I mean, Earth was completely barren and waterless after the bombardment, so how did it get the oceans back? Well, I guess they could've used those asteroid-moving magnetic probes to direct some comets to Earth and soft-land them, but that seems like it would take decades at least to restore the oceans, if not centuries.

I found the ending of the live-action movie to be more convincing -- it showed the surface still scarred and cratered but with vegetation starting to return.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

It still seemed a little fast for it to recover to that degree, even with the Cosmo Reverse System. I mean, Earth was completely barren and waterless after the bombardment, so how did it get the oceans back? Well, I guess they could've used those asteroid-moving magnetic probes to direct some comets to Earth and soft-land them, but that seems like it would take decades at least to restore the oceans, if not centuries.

I found the ending of the live-action movie to be more convincing -- it showed the surface still scarred and cratered but with vegetation starting to return.

That happened in the original series.

In the second episode, Wildstar and Nova take an aircar to the edge of the city and when the road ends they find themselves in an area that still shows the scars of the planet bombs, with the implications that there are certain areas of the planet that will never fully recover.

 

[Christopher]

There were some residual craters here and there in SBY2202 -- on the side of Mt. Fuji, for one -- but I have a hard time buying the oceans coming back to their original coastlines in just 3 years, unless the Cosmo Reverse was basically magical, or if the name means it literally turned back time in some way (which could explain the time fault). But there was no indication that the population lost to the bombardment had been restored, I think.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

There were some residual craters here and there in SBY2202 -- on the side of Mt. Fuji, for one -- but I have a hard time buying the oceans coming back to their original coastlines in just 3 years, unless the Cosmo Reverse was basically magical, or if the name means it literally turned back time in some way (which could explain the time fault). But there was no indication that the population lost to the bombardment had been restored, I think.

No, in one of the episodes of 2202 it is mentioned that Earth's population is 1/3 of what it was pre-bombardment and would take decades to recover, if at all.

 

[Christopher]

Even a third of the population is a higher survival rate than season 1 implied. After all, "If they don't in just one year, Mother Earth will disappear!"

 

[Ithekro]

The Cosmo Reverse is more or less magic. Essentially it took the memories of Earth from a soul (Okita) and reverted the planet to something near that state. It wasn't perfect as memories are not perfect. The Time Fault was a side effect of the process.
Starsha somewhat explains what Wave Motion Energy and the Cosmo Reverse do on a cosmic level in her I suppose denouncement of Iscandarian history during Yamato 2205. And why the Dezarium believe wave motion energy to be "cursed".

 

[Christopher]

Incidentally, one minor thing that struck me as odd when I finally watched a Yamato production in Japanese: The original term for the Wave Motion Gun is Hadou Hou (波動砲), which would be more accurately translated as "Wave Cannon" or "Surge Cannon." I can get going with "Wave Motion" as a more interesting name than just "Wave," but I'm surprised the original translators for Star Blazers called it the Wave Motion Gun instead of the Wave Motion Cannon. For that matter, "Surge Cannon" would've been a pretty impressive name.

The programmers of Google Translate must be Yamato fans, by the way, since they actually have 波動砲 in their dictionary, and they do in fact translate it as "Wave Cannon."

 

[Ithekro]

Possibly to match lip flaps. Both the gun and the engine share the same start but the engine places the English word "engine" after it, meaning two syllables for Hadou, which you could cover with "cannon", but not when you have "engine" afterwards.

The separate Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato English dub from the 90s did "Undulation Cannon" instead.

 

[137th Gebirg]

^^^ I remember that! Such a curious choice of words. "Undulation Cannon". It's almost... obscene sounding...

 

[Christopher]

Possibly to match lip flaps. Both the gun and the engine share the same start but the engine places the English word "engine" after it, meaning two syllables for Hadou, which you could cover with "cannon", but not when you have "engine" afterwards.

I thought of that, but rejected it, because while "Hadou" is technically three syllables, it's effectively more like two in terms of timing, so it doesn't match "Wave Motion" anyway. Although come to that, hou is two syllables too, ho-o. (We spell it with a u by convention, because oo suggests a different sound in English.)

Besides, prior to Akira, anime didn't do lip sync. It just animated characters flapping their lips randomly and had the actors dub in the lines afterward. (I tried watching some early Lupin III on Crunchyroll and couldn't deal with how often the characters' lips started moving one or two whole seconds before they spoke.) Ironically, English dubs actually had better lip sync than the original animation, because the dubbers were the only ones who tried to match the lip movements. So the lip movements in the original SBY wouldn't have corresponded to the dialogue anyway -- not to mention that the different word order would've often put the phrase at a different part of the sentence.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

Back when the library carried the old Star Blazers DVDs, one of the extra features was interviews with the actors who voiced Wildstar, Nova and Desslok. I don't remember what they had to say about the scripts they were voicing, but I do remember that they were non union actors and their work was done "off the books" and they were paid "under the table" as it were, with vocal sessions held in a Manhattan recording studio usually late at night/early in the morning after the staff had gone home, so they wouldn't get in trouble.

One of the things that stuck out to me was that the actor who voiced Desslok modeled his speech patterns after Boris Karloff.

 

[137th Gebirg]

IIRC, Avatar was voiced by Casey Kasem. He was the only “A-lister” on the cast.