Space Battleship Yamato
Star Blazers - The Quest for Iscandar is the English title for the Japanese aminated series, 宇宙戦艦ヤマト (literally Space Battleship Yamato). Created as a movie by Leiji Matsumoto in 1977 for adult audiences, the program was later dubbed into English and viewed as a children's cartoon in the late 70s and early 1980s.
In themes seen in many anime, an alien race, the Gamilon, are raining radioactive bombs on Earth, rendering the Earth's surface uninhabitable due to the fallout and threatening to kill humanity, now living in refuges built deep underground. When all seems lost, a mysterious message is received by Earth's military forces, revealing plans for a faster-than-light engine and that a race located in the Large Magellanic Cloud has a device which can repair the radiation damage.
Secretly, the ruin of the Japanese battleship Yamato (though referred to as the Argo in the English dub) is converted into a massive spaceship, complete with a new, incredibly powerful weapon called the "wave motion gun". An intrepid crew leaves in the Yamato to go to the Magellenic Cloud and retrieve the mysterious device, if it exists. Along the way, the crew are involved in many adventures.
Like much anime of its time, the World War Two themes and explicit violence was regarded as too explicit for Western children, and so the English dub was toned down in these respects. Nevertheless, the epic story (with echoes of many of the themes of both Star Wars and Star Trek) and high quality of the voice dub (though as the dubbing was done by non-union actors, their identities were obscured for years later) earned it many fans who remember it fondly to this day. It is a particular touchstone amongst twenty-something IT professionals.
Two more series were created after the first proved to be so successful. Originally intended to be a movie to cap off the series, Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato was later expanded into a series of its own, The Comet Empire. A third series, The Bolar Wars, was also shown on US TV. In Japan, the third series was preceded by the TV movie Yamato: The New Voyage and the ambitious theatrical Be Forever Yamato. The end of the saga was shown in 1983 with the theatrical Final Yamato.
The revolutionary SF project concieved in 1973 by producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki would undergo heavy revisions before it's final evolution in 1974 as Space Battle Ship Yamato. Originally conceived as sort of a "Lord of the Flies" in outer space, the project was originally called "Asteroid Ship" and had our crew journey through space in a hollowed out asteroid in search of the planet Iscandar. The enemy aliens were originally called Rajendora and there was to be much discord amongst the multinational teenage crew as many of them acted purely out of self interest and personal gain. When Leiji Matsumoto was brought onto the project, many of these concepts were discarded and it is his art direction and ship designs that accredit him as creator of Yamato even though Nishizaki retains legal rights to the work. In the mid 90s, Nishizaki attempted to create a sequel to Yamato set hundreds of years after the original. Yamato 2520 was to chronicle the adventures of the 18 starship to bear the name and it's battle against the Blone Empire. In place of Leiji Matsumoto, American artist Syd Mead (Blade Runner) provided the conceptual art. Due to the bankruptcy of Nishizaki's company, Office Academy, the series was never finished and only two episodes were produced. Most agree in general, that Yamato fans were underwhelmed by what little of 2520 they did see and were not dissapointed by it's cancellation.
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