Discount Yamato
a Rogue’s Gallery of Knockoffs

NOTE: This article was originally posted in 2008. It has been significantly updated here with many new discoveries.

Where there is a great success story, imitators usually spring up looking for a free ride like Star Flies on a Space Battleship. (Clever turn there, eh?) Amid the flood of merchandising that followed the first two Yamato movies in ’77 and ’78 there could be found a predictable number of knockoff products, tailor-made to fool the eye of the uninformed (or indiscriminate) consumer. The problem eventually became widespread enough for legitimate companies to take protective action in the form of foil stickers (called “Hanko Marks”) on their own packaging to indicate a legitimately licensed product. It may not have stopped the flow of counterfeits, but it did help to educate the public against them.

On the upside, it does take a creative (if misguided) mind and a sort of endearing chutzpah to push these things out into broad daylight, and it can be great fun to examine them with a trained eye.


Model kits

Let’s start with two models that truly personify the nature of knockoff products. First, the reason they can exist at all is because the name “Battleship Yamato” is in the public domain. Thus, just about anyone can create a “Battleship Yamato” product and call it that. The packaging is another matter. In many cases, this was a grand experiment in going right up to the line of plagiarism and tweaking it just enough to dodge liability.

The model at left was made by a company called “Cosmos,” and is called simply “Plastic Model Battleship Yamato.” The use of a very recognizable font and ship image put this one right on the line.

At right is a completely different package for exactly the same model. This one is called “Space Battleship” (no “Yamato”) and the artwork ties itself in knots to avoid liability, giving us a truly bizarre distortion. There’s no maker’s mark, so this may or may not be the same company. And since we’re in pirate land, the second product could actually be a knockoff of the first.

Also in the mini-model category we have the World War II Japanese Navy Battleship Yamato from Doyusha with box art that would not look at all out of place in the EDF space fleet. This kit came with a tiny motor to turn what must have been a tiny propellor.

Other companies avoided the name and just went for a box art style that would grab Yamato fans by the eyeballs. The Nakamura company used it to lift some fairly conventional submarine kits to higher visibility, and they may have been right. On the left we have the Thresher Space, the Seawolf Space, and the “Unreadable because of camera flash” Space. On the right Nakamura offers us the Cosmo Hunter, Star Viking, Saturn Devil (which could also be read as Satan Devil — yikes!) and Orion Echo.

Nakamura went even further with a series of powerboat model kits. By themselves, they were completely unremarkable and had nothing to do with space travel, but the power of box art has sold a lot of otherwise underwhelming models. The first kit in Nakamura’s “Powerboat Series” was the Red Arrow.

Powerboat No. 2 was the Mirage. If you look carefully, you’ll see very little difference in the boat design and only a color variation in the parts. In other words, this was probably the same model in different boxes.

Other images on the box shows two more boats in the series: Blue Impulse and Hustler Eight. Good luck against the Gamilons, captain!

Yamato was only one of the high-profile anime programs imitated in these kits from the Arii Company (which would go on to legitimacy when it scored valuable model kit rights to Macross and Orguss in the early 80s). Arii’s Galaxy Machine series was a line of pseudo-SF hot rods with generic-looking cardboard anime characters whose purpose was to be run over. Galaxy Machine 007 is being inspected by some familiar faces.

These Arii kits pulled on the same threads, liberally swiping images from Lupin III, Blue Noah, Galaxy Express 999, and Yamato for a lineup of “Spyware.” Kids could build and use these everyday objects (a lighter, a cassette player, a telephone, and an 8mm camera) to launch tiny plastic missiles at their unsuspecting friends.

Countless kids were probably heartbroken to discover that the 8mm camera could not shoot flames, as demonstrated by fake Shima Daisuke on the box cover.


Battle Tiger (see a modelbuilding video here)

Moving up the model kit food chain, we come to the Space Battleship series from a company called Marui. The kits themselves were fairly ordinary SF vehicles (which were also sold under different branding), but the box art traded heavily on Yamato- inspired” imagery. It was another case where the finished product didn’t live up to the box art, but they get an A for effort.

The first four models shown here comprised “Series 1,” and each came with a bonus “Space Beam Gun” that actually just fired spring-loaded shells at a coardboard target. But that cardboard target got HIT, baby! The vehicles also had wheels and a windup motor, very much like Bandai’s first Yamato model.


Cosmo Warp


Battle Tiger & Cosmo Warp instructions


Cosmo Shark


Tiger Zero


Main Carrier

“Space Battleship Part II” was the second series from Marui, undoubtedly timed to capitalize on “Yamato Part II” being high on the recognition scale.


New Military Cruiser


High Speed Battleship


Magnetic Tank

Then along came the third series, “Space Battleship Part III,” probably when everyone was wondering what would follow Space Battleship Yamato Part II.


Wave-Motion Missile Ship

This was the last known kit in the Marui line, which would have been a mercy for all involved.

A mainstream model kit manufacturer named Aoshima also stepped into the breech. They had a line of cut characters named “Robo Dachi” with all sorts of vehicles and playsets. This one, named “Battleship Island,” was about 20 inches long when assembled and came with 12 figures. One guess which battleship was used as a reference.

But that’s not all! Aoshima surpassed all others with a huge line of its own transforming spaceships under the umbrella title of Redhawk Yamato, which was so complex and expansive that it deserves a page of its own. See that page here).


Toys

Moving from the model to the toy world, we have the Great Ship Battleship Yamato, a spinning-propellor tub toy which came in two colors and fired plastic missiles from a cannon set into the bow – just like the real thing!

In all fairness, this wasn’t the only time Yamato would be allowed to launch something from its nose. The artwork at right added a similar feature when it was painted in 1976 for the European release of the English-dubbed Space Cruiser Yamato movie. Obviously, it was not painted in Japan.


This bag of gum-rubber “Space Battleships” was very similar to legitimate ones released by Amada in 1979, but in far more headache-inducing colors.

Next is the Battleship Yamato from the “World Ship Series” which probably wasn’t a series at all unless you count the different colors of rubber.

We ran into the “Cosmos” company at the top of the page. Now they’re back again to inflict more woe upon us. The gum-rubber ships at left were released under the name “Senkan Yamato, and they coincidentally happened to look just like Akira Hio’s balloon-like version of the ship from his first manga series. Now that this image was obviously NOT official, apparently some deemed it fair game in the fight for your Yamato dollar.

More rubber ships from the same company , shrink-wrapped together onto a card with some very actionable artwork. The ships themselves are just ever-so-slightly modified versions of Yamato, Andromeda, and a Cosmo Tiger.

Also from the world of miniatures, we find these keychains, easy to make and easy to foist on an undiscerning public. They lack even a name connection, though the label shown upper left is derived from another anime series entirely called Brave Raideen. The manufacturer “Fuji” (shown at right) didn’t even customize the card label, opting instead for the all-purpose “Lucky Keyholder.” And honestly, who wouldn’t feel lucky with one of these “treasures” dangling from their key ring?

One more gummy Yamato was so sneaky, most people may have missed it completely. It was inexplicably smuggled out in a line of Supercar minis.

They thought they could sneak this one past us, but we got up earlier than they did.

Moving from gummy ships to gummy characters, we have this nightmare fuel from someone who evidently wondered what Space Battleship Yamato would have looked like if Terry Gilliam designed it.

These cuter versions take the edge off, but they’re still pretty weird. Manufacturer unknown. Thankfully.

Moving on to the inescapable handgun toys, here’s a Cosmogun knockoff remodeled into a squirt gun by a company called “Panther.” You can see their logo on the side.

Here’s one of those generic SF toy pistols that lent itself to endless repackaging. In this case, it gets a double prize for grabbing images from both Yamato and Gatchaman/Battle of the Planets. If it were sold in US toy stores in 1979 or so, it would have been well-timed to capitalize on both.

The manufacturer of this rather cool-looking disc-shooting SF pistol is unknown, but the images being used to sell it are quite familiar. And once again, it’s simply called Battleship Yamato on that strip along the bottom. (Or to be fully accurate, it’s spelled with kanji characters that were once pronounced “Dai-Wa” but were popularized in Japan as “Yamato.”) Must be a coincidence…


Paper products

Of course, Yamato knockoffs were not limited to toys and models since paper goods were much cheaper and easier to make. Chief among these were examples of mega-popular “Menko Cards,” which were made by the ton for Japanese children with tiny allowances. For just a few yen, kids could buy cards with color pictures on one side (often pirated from popular movies and TV shows) and a montage of graphics on the other that could be used to play various games. Such cards were usually packaged in just-as-cheaply made envelopes that shipped in bundles such as those shown above right.

Similar envelopes contained dirt-cheap stickers like these. Once again, they were marketed under the unassailable “Battleship Yamato” name.

Here are some of the stickers you could find if you dug deep. Take note of the “Quizzical Captain Hijikata” there at the top. We’ll be seeing more of him…

These nameless “Gum Cards” were another type of menko, obviously meant to capitalize on Farewell to Yamato.

They came with color art on one side and game elements on the other. Borrowing a page from the Glico playbook, they also had reflective “pekari plates” to dangle from your schoolbag.

The images above rank among the better Menko Card efforts, again derived from Farewell to Yamato and almost certainly rendered by the same artist who did the “Gum Card” art. These were sold in uncut sheets with quiz questions on the back.

Here are two products created, if not by the same company, then certainly by the same artist. Above left is the label for an “SF Yamato” sticker set and above right is a game pack. Both combine Yamato with other Leiji Matsumoto characters, redesign the crew uniform to look like a playing card, and depict a Wave-Motion Gun that looks ready to chow down on whatever it doesn’t blow up. See a selection of the stickers here.

It’s tempting to think that this picture card set was legit, since it appears to have used actual spaceship art from Yamato movie posters, but given the radical departure in character design, it’s far more likely that this instead was the boldest bootleg card set of them all. Even its packaging was a swipe from the megapopular mini-card booklets developed by the high-profile Amada company, which was a legitimate licensor.

See a selection of these cards here.

Elsewhere in the world of cards was this well-meaning but not-ready-for-prime-time set of playing cards. Fake Yuki is looking somewhat wistful about her lot in life…

…while Fake Kodai just pretends to be enthusiastic. But he can’t fake a smile.

Look! Quizzical Hijikata is back. And he’s wondering why you would spend money on this pathetic excuse for a drawing pad.

Not even origami paper escaped being infected by fake Yamato images. These packs offered two different styles…

…both of which grabbed images from all sorts of different sources, apparently in a bewilder-them-long-enough-to-make-our-escape strategy.

Next we have this bewildering “Space Game,” a poster-size cardboard foldout probably meant for children’s parties, since its backside sports a pin-the-face-on-the-clown game. This bootleg was an equal-opportunity borrower, haphazardly combining Yamato images with Captain Harlock, various paintings from design house Studio Nue, and who knows what else. The mechanics of the “Space Game” were pretty conventional; lose a turn, jump to number XX, etc. But if you made it a “Where the heck is that from” game, it would be a genuine challenge.

…and because one is never enough, here’s the “SF Fantasia” game, probably bootlegged by the same gang of miscreants.

Yep. Three’s the charm. Zordar’s a Gamilon and Hijikata is even more quizzical.

Okay, one more. All of these games are foldouts with their own carriers. Here’s the carrier portion of this fourth game. If you look very closely under the handle, you can see a bitey-looking pseudo Yamato, ready to take a chunk out of that logo. Then there’s the pseudo Kodai and Yuki off to the right.

The game itself is another hodgepodge of 1970s ephemera. The two kids in the center look like a Kodai and Yuki from the 1950s.

Closing out the paper products category, we have something truly bad for the eyes: a set of what appears to be trading cards that make heavy use of images pirated from Akira Hio manga, but subject them to such a psychedelic color treatment that the artist must have overdosed on something with Yellow Submarine on a 24-hour loop.

See the set of 15 cards here. This website bears no responsibility for the results.


Other products

We’re not done yet! Above left is the fabulous “Mini Kite,” which would be utterly embarrassing to fly at the beach if it looks anything like the closeup drawing. On the other hand, the inflatable floater ring doesn’t look bad at all. It’s just the lack of an official Yamato logo that makes it suspect.

Here are two nasty pieces of work indeed, possibly the cheapest kites ever conceived. As knockoffs go, they don’t get much knockier.

Another kite features a spaceship that started out looking like Andromeda but quickly devolved as colors and missiles were attached to it.

The geneology of this one also raises questions. What are the chances that a kite originating in Japan would have the English words “SKY COMMAND” on it? That would be fun to know.

As long as we’re up in the air, here’s a “Space Battleship” glider that would probably be actionable if the fighter craft on the left was a Cosmo Tiger.

Talk about mudflaps, my bike’s got ’em! Yes, these are mudflaps for a bicycle. The idea was you’d hang them off the back of your seat so they’d catch whatever your back tire coughs up. And where there’s a surface for printing on, there’s room for Yamato. Or something your parents accidentally bought instead.

Where Yamato goes, could Musashi be far behind? Nope, just look down and you’ll see it on your slippers. These size 20s were apparently made by a company called Ahinu Shoes.

One can only wonder what sort of stares this pencil case attracted when kids took it to school, especially from another kid who had an actual Yamato pencil case. It would have been a valuable, early lesson in identity economics.

This all-plastic children’s lunchbox is a bit of a mystery. The blue one was discovered by Star Blazers superfan Michael Pinto at a New York City flea market, and the red one was found elsewhere by Scott Kinney. It combines Yamato characters with spaceships from Crusher Joe and Gundam without actually naming any of them.

Though the origins of this product are unknown, the source material for its artwork is not; compare it to a poster (left) that was published in a 1981 issue of Animedia magazine.

At right we have an unnamed clipboard found by Star Blazers superfan Derek Wakefield, pulling together images from Be Forever. The awkward placement of Kodai’s finger practically begs for a caption.

This is probably as far as anyone could take a Yamato knockoff, but to be fair it knocks off a lot of other anime, too. This DVD label is for a 1979 Korean-made “anime” masterpiece titled Earth Spacefleet. Evil aliens attack Earth’s flagship (a dead ringer for Andromeda) from their evil floating half-planetoid space fortress, flying Cosmo Tigers with evil paint schemes.

Earth’s greatest moustache-wearing scientist is captured, so his two children and their robot teddy bear enlist the help of three interstellar Musketeers to get him back and defeat the enemy. Yamato, Gundam, Zambot 3, and Message from Space all “contributed” something to this 15-minute story that somehow got stretched out to an hour.



Finally, straddling the world of real and ripoff is this well-intentioned “Pocket Mates” Juvenile SF novel, Space Battleship Musashi. (You knew someone had to try it, right?) Published in 1980 by Bunka Shuppankyoku, it was written by Ken Wakasaki, a writer of detective fiction and a prolific novelizer of such anime programs as Baldios, Galaxy Express…and Yamato.

Adventurers Takeshi, Yuki and Horei are searching for treasure at the bottom of the ocean, using their naturally gifted psychic power. They are young people of the Planet Bantera but cross-bred with Earth, which was conquered by Baranoa Galaxy Empire in the 21st century. They are caught up in a marine tornado and escape by teleportation. During their escape, they find the invincible Battleship Musashi, built by the Imperial Japanese Navy. They revive it as a space battleship (sound familiar?), dreaming to visit their old home, the Baranoa Empire. (Special thanks to Michiko Ito for translation.)

Special thanks to Yamato superfan Carol Hutchings for suggesting the title of this article.

One thought on “Discount Yamato
a Rogue’s Gallery of Knockoffs

  1. I would bet heavy that the ‘space sub’ that can’t be read due to flash is named ‘Skipjack’ as that would be in keeping with the other sub names. Also that one kit with the Gatlantis carrier called out on the internal cardboard? That’s a double bootleg as it’s a swipe of the Spectrum SPV from the Gerry Anderson series ‘Captain Scarlet’.

    It’s sad I want to build some of these atrocities. LOL!

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