Here, we continue our look back at how Final Yamato media coverage in Japan progressed month by month up to the premiere in March 1983. This Time Machine includes articles from The Anime, My Anime, and Animage magazines published in July, 1982.
In April 1982, Yoshinobu Nishizaki conducted a press conference that officially broke the news of Final Yamato‘s production. He gave editors plenty to sink their teeth into, and beginning with their July issues (published in June), they kicked off what would become almost a year of non-stop Yamato coverage.
The irony about the Series 1 score is that despite being everyone’s hands-down favorite, it had the toughest time getting a commercial release. This was entirely due to the underdeveloped anime music industry of the early 1970s. It was the mighty Yamato Theme that eventually turned the tide. Here is the complete music discography.
The Space Battleship Yamato theme is now universally recognized as a classic, approaching the level of a national anthem in Japan. Here we examine the circumstances of its recording and present a broad overview of the many, many times it has been released to the public.
One of the biggest surprises to fans outside Japan is the existence of two additional verses to the famous theme song. For the first time anywhere, the complete 4-verse version is presented here in English.
There was a huge lineup of early Yamato products for Series 1, almost none of which looked much like the anime they came from. Neverthless, it’s fascinating to look back at the standards and trends of the time and see a different take on Yamato that was all about fun.
A series of columns for New Type Ace magazine by Ryusuke Hikawa, the original Yamato superfan. Looking back from the vantage point of the 21st century, Hikawa examines the indelible impact of the original Space Battleship Yamato with unparalleled depth and insight into the art of anime production.
There’s an interesting story behind the name Space Cruiser Yamato, and an entire production to go with it. To best understand that story, it’s necessary to lay out some context. For that we’ll set the time machine to early 1975, when the future did not exactly look bright for the world’s greatest SF anime saga.
Kinejun is one of the longest-running entertainment magazines in Japan. Concerned as much with the business side of movies as the entertainment, its editors were always on the lookout for a good story, and when the Yamato movie thundered in seemingly from nowhere in August 1977, they knew they had found one.
With Final Yamato, everyone had the chance to track a Yamato project from its first moment of development. Nishizaki welcomed it, wanting the fans to have an active role in deciding the course of Yamato‘s last journey. The result of this openness was more media coverage than any other film to date, and it all starts here.
When Yamato first rippled across mainstream pop culture in 1977, it caught the attention of editors across a broad spectrum of publications. In this case, it was literary magazine Weekly Bunshun, which makes this interview with exec producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki a unique piece of the Yamato puzzle.
Yamato took well over a year to create as Executive Producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki slowly gathered his dream team and carefully crafted his masterpiece. Fortunately for us, all the major stages of that process were preserved, and this series of articles tracks Yamato‘s origins from start to finish.
An essay written by Yoshinobu Nishizaki in 1977, discussing the earliest phases of pre-production, from the first hint of the idea through the rigors of world-building and the arrival of Leiji Matsumoto. Nishizaki’s words provide an invaluable personal record of this remarkable period in anime history.
Keisuke Fujikawa was the most prolific writer of the entire saga, responsible for well over half of all the TV episode scripts and a major figure in the writing of the movies. His story proposal was written in April 1973, the earliest attempt to capture in words the story we would eventually come to know.
