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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1977 spotlights: Matsumoto and Nishizaki

With the explosive success of the Yamato movie in 1977, anime creators themselves emerged from the shadows to become full-fledged celebrities. Here we present two such examples from magazines published during the heyday, which put the spotlight on both Leiji Matsumoto and Yoshinobu Nishizaki.

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Flying off to Iscandare for the Cosmo DNX!
Can we defeat the Gorgons?

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.

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Office Academy Publications

Many publishing companies were involved with Yamato, but the home office was always the leader of the pack. Since all the resources and quality control Office Academy could want were at arm’s reach, the excellence of their publishing efforts was second to none. Here is a rundown of their lineup for the first story.

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