Everyone who sees hand-drawn animation knows intuitively what they’re looking at. But before Kanada came along, few realized the hidden potential of that fact. His gift to the anime industry was to unlock that potential. Space Battleship Yamato was just one of many beneficiaries.
Yamato events are now long over with, but enough documentation remains to provide a substantial and entertaining record of this unprecedented phenomenon. If you were enough of a fan to follow Yamato from place to place Grateful Dead style, this is what your calendar would have looked like from 1975 to 1983.
Ever wonder what Japan thought of Star Blazers? One place to find out was the magazine of the official Space Battleship Yamato fan club. It featured unique articles on Star Blazers over four consecutive issues in 1986, providing this rare Japanese perspective on what was done with Yamato in the U.S.
Producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki fully recognized the contribution of private fan clubs to Yamato‘s smash success in 1977. Hot on the heels of his announcement that there would be a Yamato sequel, he set into motion phase two of Yamato fandom: the founding of an official fan club. Read all about its most exciting years here.
The internet bursts at the seams with Star Blazers and Space Battleship Yamato content. If you’ve backed away in terror at the sheer magnitude of it all, this page is here to highlight some of the more noteworthy artifacts that have emerged on YouTube, either directly related to Yamato or inspired by it.
The six participants in this 1993 interview discussed their experiences from the early years and their work on the forthcoming Yamato 2520, which at the time was simply referred to as New Yamato. The fact that 2520 would not work out as planned makes this a particularly interesting read.
A once-in-a-lifetime round table discussion between three luminaries: director Leiji Matsumoto, composer Hiroshi Miyagawa, and auteur Hideaki Anno. Translated from the 1998 Railway of Fantasy concert program.
Yamato Mechanical Illustrations, published in 2011, contained this discussion between Tenjin and the editor of Yamato Fact File magazine. Their conversation explores some unique philosophical ground, mapped out by the responsibilities and pitfalls of visualizing SF anime’s most iconic spaceship.
An interview with Michael Pinto and Brian Cirulnick! Their mutual love of Star Blazers and their privileged perspective put many opportunities in their path and enriched their lives in ways neither could predict. As you will see, they do far more than fit the category of superfan — they define it.
Star Blazers fan clubs in America didn’t have quite the same numbers as Space Battleship Yamato clubs in Japan, but they were absolutely equal in terms of passion, dedication, and motivation. This unique collection of documents from the early years puts all of that on full display.
OUT was a magazine by fans for fans. This article perfectly represents that approach; the transcript of a round-table discussion at a Yamato fan club meeting. At the time, Yamato 2 was just past the halfway point of its first broadcast and with each new episode enlarging the context of the saga, there was plenty to discuss.
Yamato toys exploded like shotgun pellets past the model kit revolution and peppered the Japanese “play” culture with whole new categories. This article gives a broad overview of the toys made by Popy, Nomura, Mimuko, Liberty Planet, Megahouse, and many others from 1974 to the present day.
When a Yamato sequel was announced in November 1977, Nomura decided to get involved. By the time pre-production for Yamato 2 began in May 1978, Nomura had signed on as a key sponsor, gambling on the notion that they could deliver what the fans would expect. Fortunately for all concerned, they were right.
In 1981, the new magazine My Anime included autobiographical essays. Nishizaki was the first to take up the invitation, and he wrote a very personal account of his early struggles in the anime business. It’s a great snapshot in time and an unusually candid self-expose that can’t help but inspire.
The history of Yamato cutaway art
A surprising number of interior diagrams have been published over the years, almost none of which entirely agrees with the others. Here is a comprehensive look at how Yamato has evolved from the inside out.
The Yamato saga was the result of skillful intentions and some very lucky accidents. These factors combine to make Yamato an ideal frame through which a pivotal period in anime history can be observed and measured. One way to do that is to examine the design evolution of the Yamato itself.
During the early years when Yamato seemed gone for good, fans took it upon themselves to review and expand the experience the only way they could: fanzine publishing. Carol Hutchings examines where this unique art form has flourished among today’s fans through the work of her personal favorites.
From its very beginnings right up to today, the Yamato series has had as big a presence in manga as in anime, sometimes moreso with multiple adaptations existing side by side. Then there are the Star Blazers comic books that appeared outside Japan. They are all examined in this comprehensive history.
“Anime Comics” was the term publisher Akita Shoten devised to catch the attention of Japanese fans in 1980. They were composed of stills derived from film frames, arranged on a page to retell the story of the film. They did an excellent job of making anime comics look easy to assemble, but they most certainly were not.
Any devoted anime fan with some cash to spend can easily bury themselves in all manner of publishing from to manga to magazines and more. But one form of print media is still off the radar of English-only fans: novelizations. Examining the history of Yamato novels reveals a lot about who published them.
Part 9: Crossing the Ocean
Starting in 1985, Twentieth Century Imports brought many of Bandai’s Yamato kits to America under the Star Blazers name, which resulted in the very first mass-market Star Blazers merchandising. See the entire lineup here.
Star Blazers fan fiction has been around for decades, but in the spring of 2010 it finally stepped into the next logical medium: a fan-made audio drama produced by superfan Devin Cox and Forward Momentum Productions. Season 1 | Season 2
Also produced by Yoshinobu Nishizaki, Triton had made its TV debut two years before Yamato. These programs and another named Blue Noah formed a triumvirate of action/adventure shows that made Office Academy an industry leade. Let’s examine these “brothers” of Yamato and see how they fit into the overall picture.
Immediately after 1979’s The New Voyage, two new projects demanded Yoshinobu Nishizaki’s attention: the development of Be Forever Yamato and the conversion of the first two series into Star Blazers. Despite the insane workload, he added a third project to the mix: the TV series Space Carrier Blue Noah.
In the spring of 1990, a small group of dedicated Japanese fans assembled at the official fan club headquarters to put their experiences on record. They kept the homefires burning, and some of them are still doing so today. Their discussion was published in the club magazine and is presented here.
Yamato Party is an event run by Masaru Enomoto, the unofficial leader of the fan community. Formerly known as the top Yamato collector in the entire country (until he sold off most of his acquisitions), he now pours his boundless passion and energy into this one event, and you feel it from the moment you step in.
Who are the Yamato fans of today, and what do they do to keep the flame lit? Meet some of them face to face and see what they had to offer their fellow fans at Yamato Party 2009…
In February 2010, Akihabara added another notch to its belt of positives when Space Battleship Yamato burst up from under the pavement to blast its mighty Wave-Motion Gun into the heavens. Or at least, that’s how it looked on February 13 and 14 when a very special gathering took place called Yamato Expo ’10.
In May 5 2011, an impromptu gathering was held for Yamato fans to raise donations for earthquake relief, featuring some special guests with veteran status. The place and the date were quickly chosen. Did many people come? Was the event a success? The answers are yes, very many and very successful. Here is an firsthand report.
It is difficult to determine exactly how many fanzines poured out of the first-generation fan clubs, so it’s impossible to guess what percentage is represented here. But this sampling, which covers the years 1975 to 1980, is certainly enough to grasp the wide range of quality and creativity that was devoted to keeping Yamato alive.
