n the year 2199, Earth is on the brink of destruction. An alien race called the Gamilon has attacked the planet, showering it with radioactive "planet bombs," rendering its surface uninhabitable. The remnants of humanity are living in underground cities, but the radiation continues to eat through Earth's crust. In one year, even the underground retreats will be poisoned, and humanity will die out completely.
A small hope comes in the form of a message from Queen Starsha of the distant planet Iscandar. Starsha says the "Cosmo DNA" will restore Earth, but humans will have to come to Iscandar to retrieve it. By way of assistance, she sends along plans for a revolutionary warp drive, the "Wave Motion Engine," which will enable an Earth ship to make the 148,000-light-year journey.
The question is whether they can make the round trip before Earth's final year has elapsed. Earth's space fleets have been all but obliterated. But one ship, the Argo, has been cobbled together from the wrecked hull of the World War II-era Japanese battleship Yamato, and outfitted with a Wave Motion Engine and a newly designed Wave Motion Gun. Cadets Derek Wildstar and Mark Venture are pressed into service as the Argo's gunnery officer and pilot, although Wildstar is nursing a seething grudge against Argo's Captain Avatar, who oversaw a battle
where Derek's older brother Alex was killed while flagrantly and suicidally defying his orders. Naturally Alex's cocky overconfidence runs in the family, and Derek's soon defying orders as well, as he, Mark and Avatar, plus a pretty nurse named Nova and an annoying "genius robot" called IQ-9, all shepherd the Argo through a series of confrontations with the Gamilon.
In these opening episodes, the Argo comes to terms with its new engine and weapons, fights Jupiter's gravity, attacks a Gamilon base on Pluto, and holes up in the asteroid field caused by the Gamilon destruction of the solar system's 10th planet. With only 300-odd days to go (as each episode stringently points out), they've barely begun their quest, but at least they've left their home solar system.
This future past has surely passed
As one of the first Japanese series to make it to the States--and one of the shows that originally started the animation boom in Japan--Star Blazers has built up a lot of nostalgia-based goodwill in American fans' minds. That goodwill evaporates pretty quickly upon actually watching the series today.
The grainy, crude animation, overwrought dialogue, simplistic character interaction, drab color palette, and blah voice-overs are to be expected in a 25-year-old series, but the constant factual errors and blatant self-contradictions come as a vastly irritating surprise. It's bad enough when Captain Avatar says the warp drive will let the Argo travel the "thousands of light years" between the moon and Mars (!) in minutes instead of the "months" it would take using conventional engines, but when those conventional engines get the ship to Jupiter 24 hours later,
it becomes pretty clear that there's no continuity from episode to episode. (A series high point comes in episode 11, where the animators suddenly decided their villains should all be blue instead of human-flesh-colored, and established characters suddenly change color in mid-scene.)
It doesn't help that series writer/director Leiji Matsumoto (creator of Captain Harlock and innumerable spinoffs) lays the melodrama on as thickly as possible. He doesn't hesitate to contradict past episodes in order to bring more bathos into the plot, and he seizes any available symbols to
exploit for emotional effect, regardless of whether they fit into the established continuity.
As the series progresses and the plot deepens, Star Blazers does hit its stride, reaching something of an even keel. Episode #13, in which the Argo's crew gets their first actual look at a Gamilon, is actually fairly interesting, though its ending is beyond belief. Still, Voyager might get more response by packaging these new DVDs as historical relics, concentrating on subsidiary material. As it is, the bare-bones DVDs, which lack even a bilingual option, don't give collectors much reason to invest in this lengthy series. Voyager may be moving in the right direction, though--Vol. 2 does contain one scene that was edited out of the American Star Blazers release, while Vol. 3 includes a nifty "Virtual Tour" of the Argo that's really just a well-packaged art portfolio.
