Matsumoto HERO

[Michael Hopcroft]

Right now I'm watching a couple of old classic Matsumoto series in fansub -- Space Battleship Yamato and Galaxy Express 999.

 

Yamato was released in an edited foorm in America as Star Blazers. It details the lonely quest of Man's first FTL starship, sent on a desperate mission to the planet Iscandar to obtain an antidote to the radioactive poisons that will exterminate Mankind in a year.

 

Galaxy Express 999 features interstellar travel by means of the "Galactic Railroad", but that's only the setup. the real story concerns the fact that Earth's upper classes have replaced their bodies with mechanical ones, and the only hope of the poor is to find a way to get to Andromeda where they can get a mechanical body for free. A young boy named Testuro, who has just seen his mother murdered in cold blood by cyborg "hunters", is given an opporutnity to go to Andrtomeda on the Galaxy Express 999 by a cool and mysterious woman named Matael. but Tetsure faces many perils along the way, along with many encounters with people who have had their bodies replaced and had cause to regret the decision.... It's a transhumanist story twenty years before 'transhumanism" was a term.

[Curufea]

Re: Matsumoto HERO

 

"We've been hit on the third bridge!"

;-p

 

You wouldn't happen to know what was edited out of Starblazers?

[Michael Hopcroft]

Re: Matsumoto HERO

 

"We've been hit on the third bridge!"

;-p

 

You wouldn't happen to know what was edited out of Starblazers?

Not having seen Star Blazers, probably not. But there's a lot of stuff in yamato that would have made no sense to American audiences of the time. For one thing, they built their starship around the actual hull of the WWII dreadnoguth that was sunk by the Americans near the end of the war. There is a long scene describing thge sinking of the Yamato, including shots of American pilots saluting the courage of the sinking ship.

 

There is also a long scene describing the bonbardment of Earth with "meteor bombs" and the deaths of Susumu Kodai's parents. Also, Kodai is somewhat of a berserker at times -- he even attempts to kill a gamilon prisoner at one point out of sheer hatred for the people that had ruined his life and wiped out his entire family.

 

Another element that would have to have been altered was Dr. Sado; in the orgiinal he has severe alcoholism and is almost never seen without a huge bottle of sake nearby. Yet, oddly enough, he seems to be an effecitve physician in spite of it.

 

I also don't know how Star Blazers handled the "radioation injury" that is slowly killing Captain Okita. Okita himself is portrayed as a fairly ruthless figure, willing to make sacrifices of lives in order to fulfill his mission and insiting on a sort of discipline that sometimes defies common sense. (In one episode, Kodai instinctively fires an anti-air missile battery to detsroy oncoming missiles that would have blown up the Yamato. Captain Okita strikes him for not waiting for an order that Okita could not have given -- because he was incpaacitated at that momewnt.)

 

I also don't know if Star Blazers included the peisode where the members of the Yamato crew got one last chance to send messages home before contact with Earth became impossible. Strong men wept from this experience.