Vintage Report 10: 1978, Part 2

As 1978 approached its midpoint, Yamato fever was heating up. The publicity campaign was just starting to ramp up, but production was running at full speed as the premiere date loomed ever closer. Here’s everything that brought us to the end of June, a period that included major announcements and the birth of anime journalism.

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Japan Remembers

Few people give us gifts we can carry for the rest of our lives, even fewer from across oceans on the other side of a language barrier. Leiji Matsumoto was indisputably one of them. Collected here are memories and news stories that exploded across Japanese media (and elsewhere) upon the news of his loss.

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Vintage Report 8: November/December 1977

If we were to name this specific stretch of Yamato history, the appropriate word would probably be “Afterglow.” The feature film was still burning up the box office after three months, media coverage was still very active, and important new things arrived to firmly plant Yamato‘s flag into the soil of the future.

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Yamato movie time machine, 1977

When the Yamato movie hit pop culture like a tidal wave, it earned so much attention that the term “Yamato Boom” spontaneously emerged in newspapers and magazines. To get the full force of that boom from a media perspective, here is a chronological index of all the magazine coverage (found so far) from this breakout year.

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Vintage Report 5: August 1977

The whole world changed for the better in August 1977, and that is not an exaggeration. With the August 8 premiere of Space Battleship Yamato, the entire anime industry in Japan experienced a seismic shift that still gives us aftershocks today. In this report we’ll go through that pivotal month one step at a time and see how the future began.

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