Forum - View topic

What are you watching right now? Why? (please read 1st post)

Watching Uchū Senkan Yamato (Space Battleship Yamato) because it is an important naval history documentary. OK, the real point is to be familiar with all the references that crop up on real naval history forums.

I missed the original broadcast run due to factors such as not living in Japan during preschool (which of course we walked 10 miles each way uphill through the snow every day to get to and from). The cut and English dubbed Star Blazers broadcast was half a decade into the future (by which time upper middle class families typically had basic cable and VCRs).

Surprising how crude the animation and backgrounds look, likely due to Japan still being second class economically and technologically at the time (other than a few select sectors such as motorcycles, the onslaught of low cost but high quality Japanese manufactured goods was still a couple of years into the future). Big budget animation such as Looney Tunes from 20 years earlier looks more modern, but those were intended to be shown in theaters and not NTSC (disparagingly known as "Never Twice the Same Color) format television broadcast.

Other surprising thing is that despite the setting, all the characters are drawn as vaguely European instead of Japanese. Wish there was more background information on why this decision was made.

Star Blazers was the show that had may waking up early just to see it!

Beltane70 wrote:

Star Blazers was the show that had may waking up early just to see it!

I am in the minority here, but I much prefer Japanese (of which I understand about 1% that is spoken) with subtitles to dubbing. (To be fair, I was traumatized as a child by bad dubbing of shows that sounded similar to a that of a dubbed speech in a news cast).

Found out that the ending of Saraba Uchū Senkan Yamato Ai no Senshitachi (Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato) was controversial, where after most of the other primary characters are killed Susumu Kodai pilots Yamato in a kamikaze attack on the Comet Empire to save Earth and humanity.

What many may not now think of is when the movie was released, a large proportion of the Japanese population alive at the time (1978) had trained in suicide attacks to oppose the anticipated invasion of Japan in 1945/1946.

I am in the minority here, but I much prefer Japanese (of which I understand about 1% that is spoken) with subtitles to dubbing.

Found out that the ending of Saraba Uchū Senkan Yamato Ai no Senshitachi (Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato) was controversial, where after most of the other primary characters are killed Susumu Kodai pilots Yamato in a kamikaze attack on the Comet Empire to save Earth and humanity.

What many may not now think of is when the movie was released, a large proportion of the Japanese population alive at the time (1978) had trained in suicide attacks to oppose the anticipated invasion of Japan in 1945/1946.

Piglet the Grate Wrote:

Quote:

I am in the minority here, but I much prefer Japanese (of which I understand about 1% that is spoken) with subtitles to dubbing.

Not as much of a minority at you might think. Since almost everything that is legally available is offered subtitled regardless if it is also offered dubbed we don't have that much to complain about

Found out that the ending of Saraba Uchū Senkan Yamato Ai no Senshitachi (Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato) was controversial, where after most of the other primary characters are killed Susumu Kodai pilots Yamato in a kamikaze attack on the Comet Empire to save Earth and humanity.

What many may not now think of is when the movie was released, a large proportion of the Japanese population alive at the time (1978) had trained in suicide attacks to oppose the anticipated invasion of Japan in 1945/1946.

Since 1978 was thirty three years after the end of the war, you would have to be in your late thirties at a minimum to remember this. It may have effected the writers but would not impact the intended audience.

I suspect it was to reflect the fact that the last voyage of the real Yamato was in fact a suicide run. The intent was to ground the ship on Okinawa and use it as a gun platform until destroyed. In the event, it was sunk long before it got there.

I thought that shows like these in Japan were intended for a primarily adult audience, unlike Hollywood cartoons which stopped being so almost entirely by the late 1960s? The first Space Battleship Yamato movie was released in theaters the same year as the original Star Wars movie and had the larger box office receipts of the two in Japan, which indicates much wider appeal than to just children

...This concerted ‘media mix’ created a self-fulfilling prophecy of queues around the block, and resulted in 2.3 million ticket sales, and box-office revenue of 0.9 billion yen (Tada 2002: 28).

Yamato fandom’s own self-commemoration claims that this set a ‘box-office record’ (Eldred 2008c), and anime-industry histories remember it as a ‘great hit’ (Seto et al. 2002:
173) or for its impact on mainstream media (Yamaguchi 2004: 111). However, while it broke records at particular theatres, particularly for that summer’s domestic exhibition (Masuda 2011: 50), its overall takings were no recordbreaker in a year dominated by Hollywood imports such as King Kong, The Enforcer (Dirty Harry III), and Rocky. Tradition often confuses its success with that of its sequel, Saraba Yamato (1978, Farewell Yamato), which truly did break records and remains one of the all-time top-twenty anime at the Japanese box office (Tada 2002: 69).

I was not complaining, but merely observing that there appears to be a considerable demand for dubbing (in the general population there are a lot of people who will not watch foreign language with subtitles; I am not certain how different the anime watching subset is). Certainly no one would go to the expense of dubbing if there was not a demand.

I will complain about the lack of annotations in subbing as we used to get on the old fansubs, but then I am one of those weird people who likes to use footnotes.

...While I think annotations are a good idea, I would prefer them printed as AnimEigo did as there is a strong possibility of them being intrusive in the show. An alternative would be a file of translators notes as an extra, I thing ADV did this on one show.