From the Star Blazers/Yamato Premium Fan Club magazine (October 2023): an extensive interview with the personnel who brought almost 50-year old footage up to today’s digital standard. Remake scriptwriter Hideki Oka asks them about the process in detail and adds some fascinating trivia to an already rich historical record.
The “hidden story” behind the movie’s first TV broadcast is still one worth telling, because it represents both Yoshinobu Nishizaki at the peak of his power and Yamato at the peak of its popularity. Here that story is told in two 1978 news articles.
From Como le va magazine: Toei Pictures Chairman Noriyuki Tada shares his memories of the 1977 Yamato movie. As a young staff member of Toei at the time, he got hooked on the TV series before the movie came along, and his account fills in some interesting details in the Yamato success story.
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.
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.
The explosion of diverse media coverage continued well after the August premiere of the Yamato movie brought anime into Japan’s mainstream entertainment culture. October 1977 felt like a collective breath of air after the avalanche of September, but the next wave was coming.
As summer gave way to fall, Yamato‘s fortunes just kept on climbing in an unprecedented increase in demand. Media attention widened and deepened as it became increasingly obvious that Yamato had evolved from fad to phenom and was here to stay.
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.
It is no exaggeration to state that the period covered in this report was the most pivotal time in all of Yamato history. The movie that would change everything was already in production as the year began and there was low-level buzz about it, but getting that movie in front of the public was the key to everything that followed.
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.
In 2009, film journalist Morihiko Saito examined the unprecedented success of the first Space Battleship Yamato, writing with a passion that only an original-generation fan could bring to the table. It became a chapter in his book The law of Anime Hit Movies and is presented here in full.
Founded in 1969, Hobby Japan‘s very first Yamato coverage came in the December 1977 issue (published in October) just two months after the feature film worked its magic. Here is that vintage article in full, which also provided a rare glimpse into Yamato fandom – and the delightful bonus of a future star sighting.
The purpose of the many Time Machine collections here is to chart the evolution of both Yamato and anime journalism. Manga Shonen was an early source for both, a hugely popular magazine that was there to chart Yamato‘s rise to greatness just as the word “anime” entered the pop culture lexicon for the first time.
What happened when a ‘zine publisher found her way into the inner circle back in August 1977? Something that could never happen again – completely candid interviews with Yoshinobu Nishizaki and the main voice actors on the eve of super-stardom. That makes this issue of Yamato one for the history books.
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.
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.
The Yamato movie was the biggest blockbuster in Japanese cinema history. This new phenomenon was full of surprises. Never before had thousands of fans camped out overnight, nor had a merchandising campaign taken off so swiftly, nor had music played such a powerful role in bringing an anime to the public eye.
The Yamato movie sounded the first official Anime Boom, and the world would never again be the same. When the time came for home video releases, it was at the head of the line. Often sharing release dates with the other films, it was always first in everyone’s hearts as the one that started it all.
Part 2: The Comeback
Although the excitement had begun to build well ahead of the Yamato movie’s premiere, licensors maintained a wait-and-see-attitude. It took Bandai three months to release their first movie-related kit, but it was just as revolutionary as Yamato’s comeback.
Examining all the books devoted to the first series and movie provides the broadest glimpse at the evolution of anime publishing from a children’s medium into one for all ages and interests. As a result, anime publishing is still healthy today, and Yamato is still a part of it as this record will attest.
The explosive success of the Yamato movie lead to the founding of an official fan club and a huge selection of products that helped to establish the franchise as a multimedia phenomenon. Many of these products survive to this day and have become fodder for serious collectors. See them all right here.
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.
Yamato began as anime, but didn’t end there as this review of the many different novelizations demonstrates. Some viewed the story through a different lens, and others took it on a very different path. Find out what they had to offer in terms of both art and story.
The merchandising campaign for the movie was absolutely enormous and pasted Yamato onto everyday objects that had likely never before been linked to anime. Products were designed with teens and young adults in mind, and this collection should leave no doubt that a vast new territory was being opened up. [2 pages]
