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actually Jakester is right, this was the 70's.
Robotech, Battle of the Planets and Voltron were the rage in the 80s
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There's a Space Battleship Yamato movie being made?
Posted by Patrick Sauriol on Sunday, January 3, 2010
One of the best things I've found about being plugged into the film world is that feeling of surprise you get upon learning of a new project. The downside to this is that being plugged into the news sphere means that rarely does something something sneaks up on me that I didn't know existed until I've seen footage from it. This is why it's kind of cool that I just discovered there's a live-action Space Battleship Yamato movie in development -- and it has a teaser trailer.
For North American kids that grew up in the early 1980s, we remember Yamato under its English adaptation title Star Blazers. It was one of the first mangas taken from Japan and cut up into episodic format. I never got into Star Blazers the way that other kids at my school did but I certainly watched some episodes of the show and knew of its popularity from the grade school equivalent of water cooler talk.
During the 1990s Disney grabbed the screen rights to Yamato and tried making a big budget Star Blazers movie. Even though several drafts were comissioned from screenwriters Disney couldn't attract the A-list talent to give their Star Blazers movie a greenlight. Flash ahead ten years and now out of the blue we've got Toho Company (the owners of Godzilla) making a $20 million dollar Yamato movie. From the footage below the movie looks pretty faithful (at least visually) to the cartoon: arrow logo jackets, the bushy-bearded captain, the wave motion gun and the theme song that comes at the end of the ad. Check out this 30-second preview that Nippon Cinema uploaded a couple of days ago:
According to the site the movie's star is a boy band singer by the name of Takuya Kimura. Actress Meisa Kukori plays Yuki Mori and two of the formerly male characters are now gender-reversed and played by actresses. Takashi Yamazaki is the director of Space Battleship Yamato and Toho has a December 2010 release date already announced for their movie. Something tells me that if Toho is already hyping up their movie to TV viewers a year in advance they expect that the kids that grew up watching Star Blazers/Yamato are going to come back en force to see what spoky anime hairstyles look like in real life. This could be a Transformers-sized hit for J-audiences and a niche domestic market of fanboys.
-Nippon Cinema.
Of course I'm right. Voltron was rockin' as well. I never got into Robotech, and somehow only caught Battle of the Planets occasionally, but I did like it.
That trailer looks awesome.
Richard Gozinya, Harold Snatch and Wilbur Jizz. Together we are the law firm Gozinya, Snatch and Jizz.
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Jakester
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Posted: 15 years 19 weeks ago
Heh. I used to worship Star Blazers as a kid and would run home from school every day to catch a new episode. I think for some of The Comet Empire, it got moved to 7:30am, and that really annoyed me as I had to watch it while getting ready for school. Oh, and this wasn't the 80's. This was the 70's, dude. I was in 2nd or 3rd grade.