I don't remember when I fell in love with stories, but I do remember when I discovered Star Blazers. I was six years old, and every day after kindergarten I would fly down the stairs to the basement, turn on the TV, fiddle impatiently with the rabbit ears, and settle back to let the sweet sights and sounds of black and white, monophonic science fiction wash over me. Though many of the plot's subtleties were lost on me at the time, I had a sophisticated enough grasp of the narrative to understand the basics:
It's 2199, and the Earth is under attack. The Gamilons, a race of humanoid aliens from distant space, have destroyed their own planet and set their sights on Earth as a replacement. From their base on Pluto, the Gamilons have deluged Earth with radiation bombs. The entire surface of the planet is uninhabitable, and the remaining Earthlings have evacuated to underground cities. In a little less than a year, the radiation will penetrate the surface, and all human life will be destroyed.
Earth's military forces have been obliterated. In fact, only one deep space battleship remains operational, and even it has been heavily damaged. Just when it seems that all hope is lost, Earth's commanders receive a mysterious message from a woman named Starsha on the distant planet Iscandar. She has a machine - the Cosmo DNA - that can remove the radiation from the planet. But Iscandar is light years away, and time is running out.
Only one hope remains. An old naval vessel, a battleship sunk in a long ago war, has been retrofitted as a starship. Starsha has sent the Star Force the technical plans for a new kind of engine that will allow them to travel faster than the speed of light. Will this new "wave motion" engine allow them to travel to Iscandar and back in time? Will they be able to defeat the Gamilons and save the Earth?
This is my story, the first epic I remember learning. It's possible that I had internalized some biblical epics by this point in my life, but they never had the visceral hold on my imagination that Star Blazers did. My sense of good and bad, of heroes and villains, of loss and honor, were all shaped by the fertile imagination of Japanese animator Leiji Matsumoto.
Though Star Blazers first aired in America (dubbed into English) in 1979, it was already well known and loved in Japan as Yamato. In 1974, audiences in Japan were thrilled and captivated by the story of the young heroes who resurrected the great battleship in order to defeat the enemy and his radioactive bombs. Though American audiences saw it as a well crated space yarn, Japanese audiences saw it as a love song for a fallen empire: the great Yamato - which, by the way, is a historic name for Japan - rises from the ashes of its destruction and soars off to glory once again. Less than 30 years after the twin bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the main cultural export from Japan to the US was the story of the Yamato, coming back from the dead and using superior technology to defeat the foe that had crippled them not long ago.
But all this cultural subtext was lost on me as a child. All I knew is that they were in space, they needed to save the world, and they only had 347 days left in which to do it. What did I care about resurgent nationalism and the ghosts of empire? Nothing.
Nothing, that is, until I introduced it to my kids last September.
More in part two.
