Be Forever Yamato REBEL 3199

[DarrenTR1970]

Is Space Cruiser Yamato/Star Blazers the first anime series to survive its translation relatively intact with respect to the source material? I mean before this, there was Speed Race and Battle of the Planets and maybe a couple of the others I'm forgetting, but they were pretty chopped up.

 

[137th Gebirg]

The original Star Blazers was trimmed a little bit, but not too badly. IQ9/Analyzer wasn’t as much of a perv lifting up Nova’s dress a couple of times, and many scenes where the Star Force and Space Marine personnel were blowing away large quantities of Gamilon and White Comet soldiers, they were called “android soldiers”, or something like that. This is similar to why TOS Battlestar Galactica changed the Cylons from living cybernetic lizards under metal armor to pure robots. The “kiddie factor” and the “Standards and Practices” regulations in the US toned down the implied violence considerably for both of these shows back in the 70’s.

But yeah, on the whole, it was fairly faithful to the original.

 

[Christopher]

Is Space Cruiser Yamato/Star Blazers the first anime series to survive its translation relatively intact with respect to the source material? I mean before this, there was Speed Race and Battle of the Planets and maybe a couple of the others I'm forgetting, but they were pretty chopped up.

Hm, I thought Battle of the Planets was a little after Star Blazers, but it was a year before.

Apparently there were eight anime series released in the US before BotP, at least according to this article:

The First 10 U.S. Anime Imports In Chronological Order

The vast catalog of anime available for U.S. audiences isn't new. It began way back in the early 1960s.

www.cbr.com

I'm not sure how much they were altered, though I doubt any of them were changed remotely as much as Gatchaman/BotP.

 

[Noname Given]

The original Star Blazers was trimmed a little bit, but not too badly. IQ9/Analyzer wasn’t as much of a perv lifting up Nova’s dress a couple of times, and many scenes where the Star Force and Space Marine personnel were blowing away large quantities of Gamilon and White Comet soldiers, they were called “android soldiers”, or something like that. This is similar to why TOS Battlestar Galactica changed the Cylons from living cybernetic lizards under metal armor to pure robots. The “kiddie factor” and the “Standards and Practices” regulations in the US toned down the implied violence considerably for both of these shows back in the 70’s.

But yeah, on the whole, it was fairly faithful to the original.

Basically a lot of character deaths were cut or referred to later. If you pay attention in the original SBY ground infiltration to the Pluto Gamillon base they enter with a party of 6 and come out with 3; but we the audience only 'see' one of the sacrificial deaths. It's treated like they (the U.S. writers) hope the audience didn't pay attention to count how many went in vs how many came out because the other losses on that raid aren't shown or mentioned again.

They also made mention that a lot of the Gamillon Tanks were driven by robots (because there's a scene on Saturn's moon where Wildstar goes crazy and shoots into a manned Tank cockpit and makes sure everything in there is dead. In the orginsl 1974 Japanese version they WERE living Gamillas soldiers Kodai killed.

Notably in the SBY 2199 remake they made them android soldiers and added an AI subplot in one episode with I09 involved because the new producers in a sense paid some homage to the US change because the Star Blazers series was so popular in the US.

 

[Ithekro]

The oddity of having Kodai kill the tank crew on Titan in the original is the later episode where they capture a pilot and are stunned that he looks basically human. When they clearly had a body on Titan to examine after Kodai shot him. So having the tank crewed by robots protects that later revelation.

 

[137th Gebirg]

I chalk it up to the "Fog of War". Kodai was in complete berserker mode after discovering his brother's downed destroyer (Yukikaze?) on Titan (if I have my timeline of the episode correct). He was shooting indiscriminately into the tanks (which were probably somewhat dark on the inside for combat lighting), fueled by pure rage, assuming that he was going after "inhuman aliens". Further, I'm not 100% sure if his weapon was energy based or projectile, but it's also a fair supposition to make that the rounds he was firing (of either kind) were ricocheting all over inside the hull of the tank, further inflicting blind damage on his targets, and quickly making a general blueish-purple wall-salsa mess of things. I would argue he could not possibly have seen who or what he was shooting at, only that he was emptying his weapon into the vehicles of the enemy who murdered his brother. Hence, his later shock (and subequent guilt) at his realization of the Gamilas' outward humanoid appearance.

Continuity preserved...

 

[Christopher]

Notably in the SBY 2199 remake they made them android soldiers and added an AI subplot in one episode with I09 involved because the new producers in a sense paid some homage to the US change because the Star Blazers series was so popular in the US.

And that was a very cool episode. (It was kind of a loose reinterpretation of the original episode where they took a Gamilan prisoner, I think.)

And you mean Analyzer. In Star Blazers he was IQ-9. Io9 is Gizmodo's genre-media blog.

 

[137th Gebirg]

And in Battle of the Planets he was 7-Zark-7. And in Star Wars he was R2-D2.

Hmmm…. I detect a pattern…

 

[Christopher]

And in Battle of the Planets he was 7-Zark-7. And in Star Wars he was R2-D2.

Hmmm…. I detect a pattern…

Analyzer predated Star Wars by 3 years. And he looks somewhat inspired by Robby the Robot.

 

[137th Gebirg]

I know. Lucas spent a great deal of time researching Japanese culture and storytelling archetypes when he wrote Star Wars (including anime’s use of cute trash can-shaped robots). R2-D2 was pretty much ripped from Analyzer. There’s also the wizened master and the young brash apprentice - the rogue character and the princess… The Jedi (and Imperial helmet design, for that matter) lifted from Samurai, and so on.

 

[Christopher]

I know. Lucas spent a great deal of time researching Japanese culture and storytelling archetypes when he wrote Star Wars (including anime’s use of cute trash can-shaped robots). R2-D2 was pretty much ripped from Analyzer.

Is that a documented fact? I don't think I've heard before that Lucas was familiar with SBY in particular.

There’s also the wizened master and the young brash apprentice - the rogue character and the princess… The Jedi (and Imperial helmet design, for that matter) lifted from Samurai, and so on.

I do kind of wish Lucas had succeeded in his original goal to cast Toshiro Mifune as Obi-Wan, or at least gone for another Asian actor after Mifune declined. I often wonder, if that had happened, who would have played Obi-Wan in the prequels instead of Ewan McGregor.

 

[137th Gebirg]

That would have been an interesting choice. I wonder if Mifune was kicking himself in the ass once he realized what a record-breaking hit Star Wars had become globally. I've always been a great fan of Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa but he's 20 years older than McGregor and probably couldn't have pulled off a young Obi Wan. Hiroyuki Sanada maybe? He's only 10 years older than McGregor and might have been able to make it work. I could easily see Tagawa playing Qui-Gon, though.

SBY has never been mentioned specifically that I'm aware of, but Lucas is a well-known Akira Kurosawa fan and the general influences of Japanese culture on Star Wars have been studied and well documented. He has claimed that his inspiration for the droids came from a pair of characters in "The Hidden Fortress" ("one chubbier, one taller and slimmer") - a common motif in Japanese cinema (and anime). Establishing a connection between Lucas and SBY might admittedly be conjectural, although I could easily see him adjusting his narrative to attribute his inspirational choices to Kurosawa sound more "respectable" than citing some relatively obscure Japanese cartoon that nobody's ever heard of stateside. It really wouldn't be much of a stretch for him to branch into other genres of that culture when looking for ideas, especially when one moves into science fiction/space opera. Pickings of such things were slim back then, and SBY would have been an easy thing to zero in on. He may have just shown Ralph McQuarrie a fuzzy picture of Analyzer from Yamato and the "Machine Man" (Woman?) from Metropolis and told him to make the new droids look kind of like that but 20% different. That's probably one of those spur-of-the-moment conversations that we'll never know details about.

 

[Christopher]

SBY has never been mentioned specifically that I'm aware of, but Lucas is a well-known Akira Kurosawa fan and the general influences of Japanese culture on Star Wars have been studied and well documented. He has claimed that his inspiration for the droids came from a pair of characters in "The Hidden Fortress" ("one chubbier, one taller and slimmer") - a common motif in Japanese cinema (and anime). Establishing a connection between Lucas and SBY might admittedly be conjectural, although I could easily see him adjusting his narrative to attribute his inspirational choices to Kurosawa sound more "respectable" than citing some relatively obscure Japanese cartoon that nobody's ever heard of stateside. It really wouldn't be much of a stretch for him to branch into other genres of that culture when looking for ideas, especially when one moves into science fiction/space opera. Pickings of such things were slim back then, and SBY would have been an easy thing to zero in on. He may have just shown Ralph McQuarrie a fuzzy picture of Analyzer from Yamato and the "Machine Man" (Woman?) from Metropolis and told him to make the new droids look kind of like that but 20% different. That's probably one of those spur-of-the-moment conversations that we'll never know details about.

Not sure the timing makes sense there. SBY debuted on October 1, 1974, and McQuarrie's first concept painting of the droids was completed on January 31, 1975, just under 3 months later. Lucas would've had to have access to the show while it was still brand new, and back before the Internet, I'm not sure that would've been possible unless he'd been in Japan at the time, something I can find no evidence of. It seems extremely unlikely that he had any idea SBY existed at that point.

 

[137th Gebirg]

Unlikely, yes, but not impossible.

 

[Christopher]

Unlikely, yes, but not impossible.

Lots of things are possible, which is why we choose between them on the basis of which is more probable or supported by the evidence. "Not impossible" is a meaningless platitude. What matters is evidence.

Digging a little more, I found a claim that Lucas traveled to Japan in the early 1970s to look for an FX house for Star Wars, but nothing else I can find corroborates it. If someone can confirm to me that Lucas did indeed visit Japan in late 1974, then I'll concede it's a plausible conjecture. But without evidence, speculation is just empty talk.

 

[137th Gebirg]

Why does every post you write make you sound like you're such an insufferably smug and condescending little tool?

Like, literally, all the fucking time.

 

[Set Harth]

He has claimed that his inspiration for the droids came from a pair of characters in "The Hidden Fortress" ("one chubbier, one taller and slimmer") - a common motif in Japanese cinema (and anime).

R2 and 3PO are clearly based on those guys, but the shorter one ( Matashichi ) is not chubby.

 

[Christopher]

Why does every post you write make you sound like you're such an insufferably smug and condescending little tool?

Like, literally, all the fucking time.

Only you can answer that. I've found in my life that many people appreciate my way of thinking, while others react poorly to it. So the difference must lie with them. This is simply who I am; indeed, pretty much all the men in my family are the same way. Some people get us, others don't.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

I've always felt that the design of the mothership in 'Close Encounters' was based partially on the Comet Empire from Season Two.
I know that Spielberg said it was based in part on the lights from an oil refinery he saw while driving one night, and SBY wasn't on the air in North America was CETK was in production, but I remember making that connection at a young age when I saw the Special Edition in theaters.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

R2 and 3PO are clearly based on those guys, but the shorter one ( Matashichi ) is not chubby.

I got a 'Laurel and Hardy' vibe from them myself. Even though that's not the case.