Best of the best. Damn fine animation. Talk about whetting a young kids appetite for more with the episodic 365 day countdown at the end of every show til they reached missions end. Ran like a madman from the school bus stop to catch this everyday after school.
I remember this! My station would show them out of order and I just hated that.
During the first broadcast, my friends and I were convinced there were going to be 365 episodes.
Fire the wave motion gun!!
I feel old seeing this referred to as "obscure media". It aired every afternoon on my local TV station for years.
That is a major flaw in this subreddit. Many users mistake "old" for "obscure". The two things are totally different.
A television show that runs for years and is popular enough to have a DVD box set cannot, by definition, be obscure. Now, if you had a lost episode that only aired once or not at all, that would be obscure.
Well, old does sometimes mean "hard to find online" for pre-Internet media.
Yeah, I'm perfectly happy finding online versions of stuff like this. I wouldn't buy a DVD set, but I'd stream it or watch it on YouTube
And I think that cuts to a generational divide on this issue. In my opinion, if it was on TV in the 20th century, and lots of people watched it, it isn't obscure -- whether it's on YouTube or not.
I know not everyone agrees on this, but that's how I see it.
That's the whole nub of the matter when it comes to the topic of "obscurity" though, things can be well known yet are completely lost when it comes to the internet, a place known for holding the most unknown of unknowns. Couple this with stuff like regional divide or foreign media, and suddenly the whole thing gets decidedly and increasingly muddy.
Does me saying the words "Tots TV" make me the "know-it-all" at the awards show of actual geniuses or just Cassandra, doomed to speak the truth but never be believed...
I don't see it that way, personally.
To me, if something has enjoyed mainstream success and entertained many people, then it is necessarily not obscure, even if everyone involved in the project, as well as everyone who ever witnessed it, are long dead.
If something has not been seen by many people, and has some significance that makes it interesting, then it is obscure.
I guess this is where we get into the community and the voting system making the judgment call.
In my opinion, if it was on TV in the 20th century, and lots of people watched it, it isn't obscure
I'd say that there's some degree of wiggle room (especially in cases where the program is largely lost and has not circulated since first broadcast)- but, yes, this isn't something I'd regard as obscure in the slightest.
I’m just waiting for the day someone shares an episode of an obscure TV show called Gilligan’s Island.
Plus Space Battleship Yamato is as big in Japan as Star Wars is in the US.
I'm 44 and I've never seen this. Got big Robotech energy from it.
Macross was originally an answer to a combination of Space Battleship Yamato and the original Gundam by a cohort of animators who grew up on both.
The first third of Robotech was the bastardized, heavily censored American version of the first Macross show. Which spawned a franchise that's ongoing to this day, but because of some legal fuckery on the part of the company that licensed the original show back in the 80s, is just now starting to become legally available outside of Japan.
It's also why half the mechs you know and love from 80's Battletech disappeared for 30 years. FASA directly licensed them from the original creators, but Harmony Gold (the company behind Robotech) claimed ownership in the US and kept them in legal limbo for decades.
Don't forget that epic intro!
Best theme song EVER.
Agree, but it loses a little bit its punch without the dulcet tones of Isao Sasaki.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gHORDBZuOA
I was a latchkey kid in the late 70s. Every day after school I’d let myself in and watch this show and Speed Racer while waiting for my mom to come home from work and beat me for whatever reason. Good times!
Great memory but I'm not sure this is obscure media. There's a DVD box set around (I bought one for a friend a while ago).
I loved this series back in the day. I remember getting detention and the thing I was most pissed about wasn't the actual detention, it was getting home too late to watch Star Blazers.
Fun fact, Space Battleship Yamato was a favorite within the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, who pulled off Japan's deadliest domestic terror attack.
“Fighting with the Gamilons, we won’t stop until we’ve won..”
I loved this show so much as a teenager!
I used to rush home to watch this when I was a kid. Now I can't help but notice its not very practical to launch something that weighs 65,027 tons into space.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_battleship_Yamato
Not with that attitude, sailor!
It landed in a few US TV markets around '78 or '79, all inexplicably playing at 6 in the morning. Yes, I got up to watch them.
I think that happened with a lot of anime before around 1997. I remember watching Sailor Moon before school in 1995, it aired at either 6:00 or 6:30 in the morning.
No anime weapon name has ever been cooler than “Wave motion Gun”.
Goddamn it 40 years later I still remember the name without googling
Anybody Else watch this on the Captain Cosmic show on KTVU 2 San Francisco? Oh man that show had a profound influence on my life.
Edit: Man, I'm old.
I got the decoder card, but have since lost track of it.
I miss Bob Wilkins.
He was a great host of Creature Features. I remember being sick and staying home and watching Dialing for Dollars and because the host "lost a bet" with Bob, the movie was that weird Dr Who Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D with Peter Cushing. I loved it.
I miss Bob Wilkins.
A legend in two media markets at the same time!
in the late 1970s, this would come on our tv at 3:30pm, the exact same time school let out. i'd have to haul ass to get home as soon as possible to not miss much. my favorite show when i was a kid.
I watched this show growing up every chance I got. I loved it. It went off the air locally when I was about 4 or 5 years old and over time, I forgot the names. I couldn't remember the name of the show, or the ship, or the crew. I ended up having a vague recollection of the show and that was all, until one drunken night in college, when I asked a friend who was into cartoons and anime about it. All I could remember was that it was a literal WWII battleship in space, they had a giant gun they could only fire once per episode, and each episode ended with them being urged to hurry because there were X days left before everyone on Earth was dead. My buddy instantly said, "Yeah, that's Star Blazers. Space Battleship Yamato." It didn't ring any bells. Then I got home, got on my dial up internet, and heard the theme music. I was awestruck. When I eventually got it downloaded, at some point there were tears during that first rewatch in 18 years, I'll admit it. Star Blazers is my favorite show of all time, and I'm pretty sure I enjoy it more because I forgot about it and had the chance to rediscover it.
Great stuff!
This was the greatest thing I had ever seen on tv from the age of five to 14/15 when Twin Peaks premiered.
Deslock! Deslock! Deslock!
Hey I just found some sealed vhs of this show
I watched this beloved show on my grandmother’s black and white TV after school every day. Best anime ever!
This and Robotech were my whole life for a while growing up!
Unpopular opinion. I prefer the art styles for vintage anime. I mean look at how awesome Liji's character designs are! It just looks cooler and somewhat less generic
The Remake of this from a few years ago is surprisingly great. Definitely worth checking out if you were a fan of the original.
2199 is very good I've heard the follow up series isn't so hot but I have not seen it.
I hadn’t heard much about it but honestly the first series wraps things up well enough that I had no real desire to watch the second.
I loved this show.
Holy Christ this is the one that started my journey.
This and Battle of the Planets were the OG anime in America. I worshipped them as a kid. I wish I could find subbed versions of Space Battleship Yamato and Gatchaman (the original anime that Battle of the Planets is a bastardized version of)
Battle of the planets, and space giants... remember that kid with the whistle
I never saw Space Giants. I would have loved that. We got Vectorman instead. I faked being sick for a week in 2nd grade just so I could watch that one.
Hahahahaha righteous.
They remade battle of the planets I think it's called g-force or something
Yah, they made a live action remake of it in 2013.
Or Spectreman.
Oh, crap! I was wrong about Vectorman. Spectreman is totally what I meant! Thanks for the save!
Well technically Astro Boy, Speed Racer and Kimba the White Lion were the OG anime in America.
Gigantor?
GigantooooOOOOOOOoooooor!
GigantooooOOOOOOOOoooooor!!!
If you count tokusatsu, Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot?
I never got to see those, we didn't have enough TV stations at the time, but I saw Starblazers and BOTP. I did get to see Speed Racer and Gigantor later though. I saw Starblazers and wondered why every show didn't have a continuous storyline, it was so much better than the carbon copy cartoons on Saturday, where every show was the same, only the locations and names changed.
When one of the characters sacrificed himself in one of the episodes and was gone from that point forward it blew my mind. I was six and every show I had seen up to this point, almost all cartoons, reset after each episode. This was literally my introduction to serialized storytelling.
True. Those were before my time though.
Amazing three and and Marine Boy?
I love that show like no other when I was a kid but I tell you this now do not watch it. It does not hold up.
I'm pretty sure Princess was my first crush. Before Velma, even.
Wasn't BOTP called G Force or something??
Yes!
Pretty sure I have dubbed Gatchaman on blu-ray.
Gatchaman is available from right stuff anime I believe.
I don't know if there's a legitimate subtitled version of Yamato available in the US