This past weekend my dad and I explored some of the cartoons he remembered from growing up in the 1970s - naturally, a good amount of them were anime imported and re-edited for the US market. Like "Battle of the Planets" adapted from Science Ninja Team Gatchaman - which confusingly received another US edit in the 80s called "G-Force: Guardians of Space".
One of the few that really caught my eye was what he remembered as "Star Blazers", intro above. We were both stunned by the presence of male choir vocals that made the intro sound like a war anthem - which it basically is, according to the lore dropped in those lyrics. I was especially keyed in because I knew I'd definitely seen that ship before, somewhere.
It's based on Space Battleship Yamato, and a mostly faithful adaptation at that. It seems Yamato was immensely successful in Japan - I've heard that the film edit of the first season, released in 1977, overtook Star Wars in theaters, and it's enjoyed a high level of success since; there have been several sequels, remakes, live action films, etc., most relegated to Japan, but if they are brought over, for some reason the "Star Blazers" branding must still hold weight with Gen-X'ers like my dad and uncle, because it's still commonly used in the US. [EDIT: the rest of this paragraph is Wrong, that composited title card seems to only exist on the US DVD release, so.] I must admit a slight affinity for the obviously composited title card in the above intro, which I can't imagine how they pulled off - Star Blazers released in 1979, a year before the first Macintosh, 6 years before the first Amiga, and 11 years before the Video Toaster. I supposed they must've used some dedicated titler hardware.
Anyways, I was delighted to find the original Japanese intro is mostly the same, albeit ending much better, trailing off mysteriously as the ship slowly shrinks away.
But then, my dad remembered something else about the show. A weapon that was only used two or three times, which the whole ship had to be powered down for, that was based on barely-understood alien schematics. And he remembered the name. The wave motion gun. Now, why would my father still remember the name of this sparsely used weapon nearly 45 years later?
Well, just imagine yourself as a 10-12 year old kid in the late 1970s, and seeing this on TV:
Yeah, that would be permanently implanted into my memory too.
(the low quality is appropriate to the experience of watching broadcast television on a CRT in 1979 ok)
Say what you will about the American bastardizations of anime from this era by the likes of Saban and Turner, at least it was a way of introducing foreign media to American kids - even if it had to be covertly done, disguised as a US production, only fooling people because at the time nobody knew what anime looked like.