uh oh I’m going to go into nostalgia mode: I don’t remember the year but I was very young and glued to this. So much horror, death and devastation and I loved all of it because we were going to Isctandar, Earth’s far away Twin to find the cure for the radiation and restore mother earth to life… :: sniff :: the feels from some of those deaths…
18. Star Blazers (1979-1984)
Star Blazers aka Spaceship Yamato, was an early anime import along with Speed Racer and Battle Of The Planets.
It debuted in the U.S. during 1979, perfect timing given post-Star Wars mania.
Earth was a nuked out wasteland and a ship is sent to a distant world which has a cure to reverse the ecological damage.
It’s amazing the show aired here at all. American cartoons never showed killing, but Star Blazers was some bleak shit. People got killed en masse each episode! And not just red shirts, major characters! You actually got emotional over losing these wide-eyed, rapid speaking folks.
The money shot each episode was the Wave-Motion Gun, a giant laser cannon that fired from inside the heroes ship the Argo. It seems like that weapon would just make whole ship blow up, but boy did it look cool:
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Multiple important people DIED each episode. Hell, in the PREMIERE you get attached to one guy just to see him die a bleak and horrible death all alone, by himself, with no contact and abandoned and you’re like WTF… [well, more like, “NOOOOOooooooooooo”]
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dang it… this FF stuff threw me WAY back in time and I ended up researching StarBlazers (Battleship Yamato), a death-filled anime that probably should never have aired4kids that I was hooked on… and I’m getting teary-eyed watching someone wearing a pink onesie with a tail playing the extended theme song (with the sad requiem “earth is oh-soo far away and Earth is scorched and we must save it by visiting our Origin planet Iscantar but it’s so far away and we’re looking back in time because we’re so far away now and can see how it used to be before the nuclear devastation by the Gamalons….)…. ugh. lateral but thank you https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D77OQ1gc7Ds
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amazing they aired it at all on US TV back then. WAY too gruesome and devastating. Multiple important people died each episode and it was very bleak for most of it. I was little but I felt like I was taken seriously by the show and not treated ‘like a kid’. Left a strange lasting impact.
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