You have to push pretty hard to top the premiere of a new TV series, but the publishing community did its best with the last big wave of Be Forever books as Yamato III moved toward center stage. Here’s how it all played out…
October 1: Bouken Oh [Adventure King], November issue
Bouken Oh did its part to promote Be Forever Yamato throughout the summer, and they kept the fire going into the fall. They started with an ad for the first Be Forever Anime Comic (coming later in the month) and a Movie Terebi Magazine mook (due out in November).
This color spread for Yamato III could be found just a few pages away, promoting an October 11 premiere and something else very few expected…
…a full-on Yamato III manga adaptation! It had been ten months since Leiji Matsumoto’s previous series came to a premature end, but he wasn’t involved this time. Instead, it was drawn by his former assistant Hiroshi Aizawa and would last for ten issues. It was highly compressed, getting the ship off the ground by the end of the first chapter. On TV, it took three episodes.
See this entire series (in both Japanese and English) here
October 1: Kinejun #795
After steady Be Forever promotion in August and September, the biweekly Kinejun magazine got around to reviewing the film in its Japanese Film Criticism column. Reviewer Junichi Kadokura related his experience with a somewhat jaded tone, and an inadvertent admission that he completely missed out on Yamato 2.
On a rainy day, I went to a Tokyu cinema to see the third Yamato movie. Even though it was more than 30 minutes before the show, a line had formed from the Sanseido bookstore on the first floor below. I thought this was typical of Yamato, but the line was actually people waiting to enter the planetarium on the 8th floor. A real astronomical phenomenon — the peak day of the Perseid meteor shower, which was said to be the best conditions for the event — defeated Yamato.
In the second film, Susumu Kodai and Yuki Mori piloted Yamato, ramming into the enemy ship in a suicide attack. Its story was canceled in the telefeature The New Voyage, and is back in theaters as Be Forever Yamato. This time, the opponent is the Dark Nebula Empire in a 145-minute death match. As usual, there is the huge flywheel rotating wave engine, a system that uses humans instead of computers, and a spiral nebula 100,000 light-years away, accompanied by a dark galaxy with no stars. And it all disappears in an instant.
Why would they travel 400,000 light years to attack Earth? Well, there’s no point in saying this. Space Battleship Yamato is supposed to be a space opera. But is that really the case? It’s a rather graphic story. The militaristic style is also suspicious.
Perhaps Space Battleship Yamato is no longer science-fiction. The potential for SF in the anime I first saw at the 2nd Japan SF Show (already 6 years ago) is already gone. It’s the same feeling I got when I heard Momoe Yamaguchi’s LP Cosmos and was disappointed. I guess it just doesn’t work in Japan?
But there are high expectations for Japanese animation. It seems that Japan has been able to create a world of animation that is completely different from America, which cannot escape the Disney line. In fact, several excellent works have been produced. I hope they keep up the good work.
Yamato has become a phenomenon, causing a movement that rivals America’s Star Trek. The young people who flock to Yamato are not essentially SF fans. They and we are connected by the fact that it is a science-fiction work, but our hearts are different. Rather, I have higher expectations for the people lined up at the planetarium. Sense of wonder is a worn-out phrase, but it is no longer there in Yamato. All that is left is the beautiful animation.
“The universe is full of life” is a line that appears at the beginning of the movie, but humanoids are not the only life. They cannot talk about love (a word I don’t like to use) without fighting a war. It’s about time to put an end to it. However, Yamato, which once died, has come back to life and appeared on the screen. The Space Battleship Yamato series has become the first parallel world series in history. No matter what anyone says, it will always come back to life, regardless of the story from the previous episode.
October 5: Be Forever Yamato Anime Comics Vol. 1
“Anime comics” were something new to the world, starting as an experiment in Terebi-Kun magazine, which produced a serialized version of The New Voyage in 1979/80. Akita Shoten took the idea and ran with it, starting with a Space Pirate Captain Harlock paperback (1 of 4) in September 1980. The first volume of Be Forever was next out of the chute with many more to come. It retold the story of the film in color stills with word balloons for dialogue.
Read more about anime comics here
October 5: Be Forever Yamato special
This was the largest Be Forever publication in terms of page size, a full-color 10″ x 14.5″ tabloid-format special edition of Screen movie magazine (from Kindaieigasha, which also published The Anime magazine). Totaling 68 pages, it opened with large-scale highlight scenes, moved through a photostory of the film interrupted by a gigantic centerfold of the Yamato cutaway art, and finished with a look back at past stories and a collection of staff comments.
October 10: Animage Vol. 29
This issue hit newsstands and bookshops one day before the first episode of Yamato III went on the air. It contained a 7-page article that gave us a look at the mecha, starting with the Cosmo Hound and delving into the fleets of the new enemies. Reporters visited the production studio to collect comments from artists and the recording studio to talk with voice actors on their first day.
Read the article here
October 10: The Anime Vol. 12
At four pages this month, The Anime‘s coverage was increasing, but the content was still comparatively thin. There were descriptions for three new characters: Domon, Ageha, and (oddly) Bando, who didn’t have much to do in the end. But it’s always interesting to compare first impressions with hindsight. There was some excitement about how Yamato‘s next launch would be staged, and a brief report on the first voice acting session.
Read the article here
October 10: Be Forever Yamato drama album
The extraordinary length of Be Forever meant that even when edited down it still needed three LPs to hold it all…which lead to the first Yamato triple album set. It opened up into a 14-page color storybook with substantial passages from the script. Like the movie, the first half is recorded in mono and shifts to stereo with the ‘Warp Dimension’ changeover.
Cassette edition
The song Life of Love was covered by singer Mitsuko Horie in order to clear the copyright for Nippon Columbia, and since a sample of Tchiakovsky’s Swan Lake (Act 3 No. 17 Allegro and Waltz) was used as source music inside the lair of Dezarium, the track itself appeared on this album.
October 10: Be Forever Yamato & All of Space Battleship Yamato Perfect Memoir Deluxe
“Perfect Memoir” was the name of a series of small-format paperbacks published by Leed Co. The “Perfect Memoir Deluxe” had an unusual horizontal format measuring 8.25″ by 5.75″. What it lacked in page size was made up for in thickness, covering the entire saga up to and including Be Forever in 258 pages.
Starting with 34 pages of film story, it moved on to an extensive encyclopedia of characters and mecha, a section on favorite scenes and a collection of song lyrics. It concluded with 70 pages of tightly-packed model sheets from Be Forever.
Newspaper ads for the premiere of Yamato III
October 11: Yamato III Episode 1
In the eyes of the general public, Series 3 sort of came out of nowhere. But it had been in production since early in the year, starting around the same time as Be Forever with a skeleton crew that expanded greatly after the film wrapped in late July. An army of assistants and coordinators assembled to help configure and manage the rotation of artists, and the work situation was no more severe than the industry norm – a big change from Series 1 and 2, which were pretty much on constant emergency status.
The series was broadcast Saturday evenings at 7pm, the same time slot occupied by Yamato 2 almost two years earlier. The overall plan was expansive: a 52-episode adventure that would take Yamato all over the galaxy in search of a new home for the human race, complicated by an ongoing galactic war between the Galman Empire and Bolar Federation. At the time Episode 1 premiered, this plan was very much intact. Reality, however, would soon have something to say about it.
Read the full story of Yamato III‘s production here
The Solar System Faces Destruction!
Kodai is promoted to Captain of Yamato, and his first job is to take a new crew of freshly-trained cadets on board. Their mission: find a new home for humankind as the sun threatens to destroy Earth.
Read our commentary on this episode here
October 18: Yamato III Episode 2
Great Battle in the Milky Way!
A battle between the Bolar and the Galman fleets moves from Planet Berth to an Earth outpost on Alpha Centauri. Yamato‘s crew is in the midst of planning its mission when runaway solar radiation bathes the Earth and disrupts electrical systems all over the planet.
Read our commentary on this episode here
October 20: Be Forever Yamato Secret Notebook
This was Leed Co’s second Yamato volume in their Perfect Memoir series (Volume 11), a compact 210-page Be Forever guidebook measuring just 3.75″ x 7.25″. It contained a story digest, highlight scenes, character and mecha encyclopedia, staff and music notes, a glossary, and product catalog.
Leed’s first Yamato book was Volume 4 in the series (Jan 1980), covering everything up to The New Voyage and they would pop again with Volume 17 in July 1981, dedicated to Yamato III.
October 20: Be Forever Yamato storybook
A landscape-formatted storybook of the film was the only known Yamato product from Jitusgyono Nippon Co. It combined color and black & white stills with text to tell the story of the movie and came with its own slipcase.
October 20: Be Forever Yamato Encyclopedia
The fourth Yamato book in the Keibunsha series (published by Kodansha) matched the established format of previous editions. At 320 pages, it started with a story digest and continued with encyclopedic pages of model sheets and black & white stills. The production notes included an overview of the saga and information on products and fan clubs. (The dustjacket of a 1999 reprint edition is pictured here.)
October 20: Be Forever Yamato Roman Album
The fourth Yamato Roman Album came 7 months after the third (for Yamato 2) and showed another tremendous leap forward in sophistication. It was Tokuma’s finest volume yet in terms of layout and design with sections now labeled in English, perhaps as a nod to the growing international audience.
Its 122 pages contained a Cine Digest (photostory), Special Area (highlight scenes), Art Area (locations), Character & Mechanic Areas (model sheets), and a Staff Area (commentary). Support material included original illustrations of Yamato hardware and promotional coverage.
Read staff essays from the book here
October 21: Roadshow, December issue
After taking a cursory look at Yamato III, this would be Roadshow‘s last check-in for a few years. The “TV Lottery” column in this issue included the following writeup…
Dessler is back! Youthful Yamato crew members also appear! Space Battleship Yamato 3
Space Battleship Yamato 3 finally started airing on October 11th (Yomiuri TV, every Saturday night 7:00-7:30). It is scheduled to be completed in 50 episodes over the next year. Since Space Battleship Yamato and Yamato 2 were 26 episodes each, the story will unfold on an even grander scale than before.
The basic pattern of Yamato is that Yamato saves Earth and humanity from a crisis within a limited time. The threat of destruction this time is a sudden abnormal increase in nuclear fusion in the sun, which will turn into a supernova, leaving humanity with only one year to survive on Earth.
The cause of this abnormal increase is that Dessler, who left for space in search of a new home planet in The New Voyage, established a powerful interstellar nation called the Galman Empire in the center of the galaxy. A stray missile (giant missile) flies into the sun during a battle with the interstellar nation called the Bolar Federation, which is plotting to conquer the universe.
Susumu Kodai is the new captain of Yamato in the search for a second Earth. New crew members include Ryusuke Domon, Hajime Hirata, Miyako Kyozuka, Goro Raiden, Namio Sakamaki, Dairoku Akagi, and Takeshi Ageha. But what fans are most looking forward to is the human drama and cosmic spectacle with a complex mix of friendship and hostility that will surely unfold between Dessler, Yamato, and Kodai.
The upcoming broadcast schedule is as follows: October 25th: Episode 3, Destruction of the Solar System (Part 2). November 1st: Episode 4, Great Galactic War (Part 1). November 8th: Episode 5, the same (Part 2). November 15th: the same (Part 3).
[Translator’s note: these episode titles turned out to be incorrect as we’ll see in the next report.]
October 23: The Best One, December issue
Gakken’s monthly entertainment magazine was back with the start of regular coverage in the Anime Channel section. First up in this issue was their introduction of Yamato III…
Yamato sets off in search of a new planet!!
There is less than a year until the Earth is destroyed! Yamato has set out into space in search of a safe planet, but the enemy Galman Empire’s Dagon fleet has already reached out…! With Yamato now joined by new members, the young captain Susumu Kodai shows his fighting skills for the first time. A fierce battle that Yamato fans must see is about to begin…!
October 24: Star Blazers news
Over a year after its debut in American markets, Star Blazers was still in the news. This article from Backstage magazine gives us a glimpse into what was happening at the time.
October 25: Yamato III Episode 3
Due to the explosion of anime production in Japan at this time, Yamato III differed quite a bit from its predecessors. Out of necessity, directors and subcontractors were given more control over the look of their individual episodes. Episode 3 was the first example, subcontracted to Studio Live, lead by Toyoo Ashida (whose credits went back to Series 1). Ashida would also handle Episodes 7 and 14.
Yamato Sets Sail at Dawn!
Aihara has arrived after meeting and falling in love with a girl he met back home. He almost leaves the ship the night before launch, but changes his mind when the same girl arrives and lays his fears to rest. The next morning, Yamato launches on its new mission to find a second Earth.
Read our commentary on this episode here
October 25: Fan club magazine Vol. 19
The fan club magazine naturally had the most to offer at this early stage: fully half of its 24 pages contained a generous helping of design art and story synopses for the first 11 episodes of Yamato III. This represented all the shows that were in some stage of production at the time. A warm introduction to the series by Yoshinobu Nishizaki glowed with limitless passion for the grand new adventure. The back cover (above right) teased two new model kits comeing from Bandai.
See this coverage here
Sharp eyes noticed that the publishing entity indicated for this issue was no longer “Office Academy”; it had changed to “Nishizaki Music Publishing” without explanation. The reason for this will be covered in the next Vintage Report.
October 30: Be Forever Yamato manga Vol. 1
Akira Hio’s Yamato manga is not remembered as well as Leiji Matsumoto’s, but he was the record holder in the early years for page count, since he adapted Series 1 and four movies for paperback with Asahi Sonorama as the publisher. Hio’s Be Forever followed the lead of his New Voyage adaptation, meaning that the script he worked from had not yet been edited for film production. So once again, the manga captured a version of the story that didn’t make it all the way to movie theaters.
Read all about it here
October 30: Space Battleship Yamato All Mecha Big Collection
This thick, small-format paperback was Asahi Sonorama’s response to the popular Keibunsha series published by Kodansha. Using a combination of stills, model sheets, and artwork derived from Sonorama blueprint sets, every mechanical device up to and including Be Forever was examined in black and white, punctuated by occasional color, over 320 pages.
Also spotted in October
Glico’s Yamato III campaign launches
Ezaki Glico, Japan’s giant confectionary company, had been a major player in 1978-79 merchandising and maintained a steady pace as Be Forever lead the way to Yamato III. They progressed smoothly from their first generation of Yamato products right into their second without missing a beat. Most of the actual images they used came from Be Forever, but coincided with Yamato III‘s broadcast. With Glico products in every store, Yamato would have been hard to miss.
See a product gallery here
Dark Nebula Empire Three-legged Tank model kit
With the vast majority of its efforts going to spacecraft, Bandai surprised everyone with the first-ever ground vehicle from a Yamato story. It was never reissued afterward, except in Star Blazers packaging.
Popy’s Yamato III toys launch
Popy was the toy-manufacturing branch of Bandai, and when Yamato III was announced as a year-long TV series they eagerly signed on as a licensor. Taking lessons from Nomura’s 1978 efforts, they had a good idea of what would sell and what wouldn’t, and essentially launched a “Mark II” version going into the last quarter of 1980.
The first three out of the chute strongly echoed Nomura’s concepts: two differently-scaled diecast/plastic Yamatos (Popynica and Popynica DX) and two smaller rubber versions. Plenty more would soon follow.
See the whole Popy lineup here
Isao Sasaki album
The full title of this one was Isao Sasaki Singing 2 Big Anime, Space Battleship Yamato vs Galaxy Express 999. Released by Nippon Columbia, it featured six Yamato songs (two each from the three feature films) and six Galaxy Express songs (from the TV series).
Compilation albums
Also from Nippon Columbia came a pair of double LP sets, both of which represented all-star anime lineups. Fantastic Animation 24 (left) had OP and ED themes from 12 series: Yamato, Captain Harlock, 999, Gatchaman, Triton, and more. Terebi Manga Hit Parade 24 (right) did the same with Yamato, Doreamon, Lupin III, Star of the Giants and others. If you bought both, there was enough crossover to cancel out one record between them.
Be Forever Yamato sonosheet books
Asahi Sonorama published a two-volume set of panel books (printed on thick card stock) that retold the story of the film for children (18 pages per volume), combining simple text with large color stills. “Sonosheet” was Sonorama’s term for a 33.3rpm flexi-disc of the Yamato theme that came with Volume 1 and The Scarlet Scarf that came with Volume 2.
Be Forever Yamato Anime Picture books
Shueisha, meanwhile, offered a three-volume set in the same format with original art and paintings based on animation stills. Each of these volumes was also 18 pages.
If you bought all three of them at once, you might have taken home this slipcase to store them in.
Anime magazines published in October
Animage Vol. 29 (Tokuma Shoten), The Anime Vol. 12 (Kindaieigasha), Fanroad #2 (Rapport), OUT Dec issue (Minori Shobo).
What’s next
As the crew of Yamato take off on a mission with unexpected twists and turns, the same thing happens on Earth with Yoshinobu Nishizaki and Office Academy…which suddenly vanishes from the landscape to be replaced by something called West Cape Corporation. You can bet there’s a story behind it, and we’ll investigate next time in Vintage Report 31!
Newly-discovered backlog
October 31, 1975: Fantoche Vol. 1 article
Yamato had gotten a fair share of coverage in manga-oriented magazines over its first year, but Fantoche was Japan’s first magazine dedicated to animation. Editor Kazuyoshi Hirose had worked as a color designer on Yamato, which gave him inside connections and would lead to a Leiji Matsumoto interview in Volume 2. This time, he managed to get the following news flash into print:
From October to March of this year, Space Battleship Yamato (a production by Office Academy Co., Ltd.) was aired on Yomiuri TV as a full-scale science fiction TV anime for adults. Now, it has been edited into a feature-length two-hour film for overseas export sales.
Due to a tight schedule and over-expenses, Yamato was shortened from a planned 39 episodes to 26, and disappeared from the brown tube. Directed by Leiji Matsumoto, Supervised by Aritsune Toyota and Eiichi Yamamoto, Directed by Ishiguro Noboru, it was a major work with a lineup of big names.
Previously, Producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki re-edited Mushi Pro’s Wansa-kun after it had finished airing, to make a feature-length film for loaning out, and also edited Yamato‘s highlights into a 40-minute medium-length film that Min-On is taking turns renting out.
I’m happy that in making it a feature-length film, he made major changes to the absurd story at the end of the TV broadcast. The story is a bit revised when they arrive on the planet Iscandar. Starsha is already dead, and they return to Earth without any romance with Mamoru Kodai. Okita dies, of course, and Kodai and Mori are reunited, and the Earth is saved. It’s a happy ending. If I have the chance, I’d like to see the film.
Note that I didn’t hear this from Nishizaki himself, so there are many things I don’t know, such as where it will go, when it will be released in theaters (?), etc. Next time I have a chance, I’ll ask him.
May 1, 1979: Terebiland, June issue
Published the month after Yamato 2 ended on TV, this lively 7-page article titled Record of a fierce battle, Yamato won in this way!! offered a capsulized overview of the story, ending with a 2-page spread of original art for the climax.
See the article here