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Reviews
Uchû senkan Yamato (1974)
Absolute Classic
Combine Star Wars and Star Trek, and mix in a little Battlestar Galactica, and you've got Space Battleship Yamato - or as we Americans knew it, Star Blazers.
What a show. The animation was magnificent for its time, and the story was both compelling and fascinating. I remember dozens of times my friend Tom and I were watching the show, which aired in the early mornings on KPDX-49 in the Portland area, and we would have to rush out as soon as the episode ended so we could run to school to make it in time. We never missed an episode of the first or second series.
By the way, skip the third series, it is a rehash of the first two vastly superior series.
Uchû senkan Yamato III (1980)
Not Even Worth It
I was a massive Star Blazers fan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I happily sat through the first two seasons and was blissfully unaware of a third. After the release of the live action movie in 2010, I found out quite by accident that there had been a third. I recently picked up the DVD's to take to a friend in Montana that had grown up with me watching the series as well, and we were eager to get into it.
Immediately, we noticed that the original voice actors were not included, and none of the new characters caught our interest. When we tried watching it, we got through about a third of the episodes and were completely baffled, because the Gamilas are called the Gamilons in the American version, and the Galvans, looking exactly the same, were not clearly explained and made no sense to us. We then realized that the entire series was a near-complete copy of the first season, right down to the Argo crew needing to save the Earth within a year.
It took the series FOREVER to even get the meat of the story, it was five or six episodes in and they hadn't even left he planet in the Argo yet, but by then we had lost all interest. This was a gigantic drop in quality in storytelling from the rambunctious second season, and nowhere near the level of the first. It was boring, it was confusing, and it left me very unhappy - Star Blazers has been many things, but boring was never one of them.
I will go back and finish it at some point, but reading other reviews shows that my early opinion was correct - there is a reason it was never released in the United States, and that would be because it is terrible.
Shoot the whole third series with the Wave Motion Gun, immediately..
I Am Your Father (2015)
Nice Enough Documentary, But Teases What It Doesn't Deliver
This documentary is a nice enough retrospective on the history and legacy of veteran British Hammer Horror film actor David Prowse, the actor who filled the dark shape of Darth Vader in the original trilogy of Star Wars films.
However, the documentary teases throughout a particularly fanboy mind-blowing scene in which the director of the documentary allows Prowse to reprise the penultimate scene in Return of the Jedi in which Darth Vader, who lay dying, removes his mask and reveals his face to his son Luke for the first time.
In the original film, Sebastian Shaw played the face of the man behind the mask, much to the chagrin of Prowse. The director of this documentary teases that he has reshot this scene with Prowse restored to the role of the dying Vader, and very nearly shows part of it, but cuts away before fans are treated to what they have dreamed of seeing since 1983.
Given that Disney allows fan films to be made in the Star Wars universe, and that Lucasfilm has had a long history of doing so, showing this to the world would cost the director nothing. Granted, Lucasfilm did not give permission, but Lucasfilm doesn't give tacit permission to anyone who asked to do something specific with the Star Wars universe if there is a profit involved. For a not-for-profit cause, such as just showing the clip to all of us fanboys really want to see the scene, it would cost them nothing. All it does is tease your interest all the way through the credits, hoping you will see it in this documentary.
Spoiler warning: you don't.