Documentary DVD scheduled for April
We
made the first announcement of this exciting new project in our last
update, and since then we’ve begun to plan for an April
2005 release. When we first conceived of the documentary, it was to commemorate Space Battleship Yamato’s
30th anniversary, which occurred last October. But as time went by and
the project expanded far beyond its original scope,
we decided that we could release it on an even better anniversary: this
April will mark 25 years since Star Blazers first went on the
air!
We could go on and on about how great Star Blazers was and the impact
it had on the generation of fans who first saw it, but then we’d just
be repeating ourselves, since past website updates are only a couple clicks
away. So instead, let’s take a detailed look at what this documentary
will be all about.
To begin with, it is structured on a year-by-year framework starting
when the first Yamato TV series was conceived, and stepping forward a
year at
a time. In 1973, the concept was just in its infancy, and even had a
different name: Asteroid Ship Icarus. The arrival of Leiji Matsumoto
brought the
series into the configuration we know and love. In the program we’ll
get to see this whole process through the early conceptual artwork and
descriptions from the staff members.
1974 was the year Yamato first debuted on Japanese television, and as
we all know, it wasn’t exactly a smooth start. The series ended its
first run in March 1975 and the ratings had pretty much decided there would
be no more adventures for Yamato’s crew. This was a tough pill for
the staff to swallow after sweating blood for months on end, and we’ll
hear about it in their own words. The next couple of years were relatively
quiet on the surface, but the fan following grew steadily thanks to reruns
and a huge momentum was building to crescendo.
This finally exploded in 1977 with the release of the first Yamato movie
and a new lease on life. Producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki decided that a
followup was called for, and got his staff back together to create another
movie,
Farewell to Yamato, for a 1978 release. Nishizaki took great pains to
make everyone understand that there would never be a third movie; this
one would
bring the story to a decisive ending. But as we all know, Farewell was
a monster hit and Nishizaki had to concede that the fans’ desire
for Yamato to fly again was stronger than his own reluctance.
Yamato 2 arrived on television and delivered us into the year 1979, when
everything started to happen at once. There was The New Voyage, the planning
for the next movie, Be Forever, and the American production of Star
Blazers.
(See this month’s story “Brothers of Yamato” for more
about this busy year.) The 25 years since Star Blazers’ debut have
been the most jam-packed in the history of pop culture, but it’s
easier to see it in context with the series as a starting point, and that’s
exactly what this documentary will demonstrate.
We don’t have a precise running length as of this writing, but the Yamato story is so full and detailed that 90 minutes may not even be enough time to tell it. Regardless, it’s a story that has been waiting 25 years to be told, and we don’t plan to leave anything out.