Our Star Blazers!

Lately I've been reading numerous articles, remembrances, and interviews of Spike Lee's movie Do the Right Thing, which opened 20 years ago this year. While I'll have more thoughts about that film in a later post, all of the hoopla surrounding the anniversary got me thinking about what other films came out 20 years ago. That lead me to this list and going over the films, I can't believe it has been twenty years since the darkly hilarious Heathers, Batman (the Michael "Beetlejuice" Keaton version), Honey I Shrunk the Kids, The Abyss, Glory, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, When Harry Met Sally, and the terribly disappointing William Shatner directed Star Trek V. All of that nostalgia got me thinking about what was on T.V. when I was younger. As you know from a previous post, I was quite the T.V.-ista and I was amazed to realize that one show I could not wait to watch each week, was released 30 years ago this year.

Star Blazers, as it was known in US syndication, was a Japanese anime import in 1979. Originally it aired in Japan from 1974 to 1980 as Space Battleship Yamato (宇宙戦艦ヤマト Uchū Senkan Yamato). Of course, I didn't know any of this at the time. All I knew was many of the shows I loved to watch in the afternoons on our independent UHF stations (trying hard to tune them in on my old two-dial black and white T.V. set), from Marine Boy, Kimba the White Lion, to of course Speed Racer and Ultraman, were syndicated anime from Japan. And Star Blazers was one I couldn't wait to see. A mini-series with a rich dramatic arch as well as a theme of displaced humans, Star Blazers to me was vaguely reminiscent of the original Battlestar Galactica, which I also enjoyed in the evenings (on ABC--ABC had so many iconic shows, many which today we would call 'cheesy', but I loved then nonetheless). As a young kid, Star Blazers was one of the first shows that I thought about all the time. From the seemly invincible "wave motion gun" of the great ship Argo (the name being "westernized" from the Japanese original Yamato) to the many perils and adventures of the ship as it ventured out of the solar system and back, I always wondered and was excited by what the next episode would bring.

POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 10:11 PM