Trivia / Space Battleship Yamato

• Anime First: One of the earlier examples. Some fans claim that the whole idea of anime as a medium of its own and not just an outlet for manga started with this series.^*  It actually started much earlier in the early-mid 1960s with Toei's first animated TV series Ookami Shonen Ken ("Ken the Wolf Boy"). It was one of the first ones to become popular, however.
• Creative Differences: Yoshinobu Nishizaki and Leiji Matsumoto both claimed they are the sole creators of Space Battleship Yamato. (The court system sided with Nishizaki.) Both made their own separate Yamato projects^* the short-lived Yamato 2520 OVAs from Nihizaki's camp, and Matsumoto's Great Yamato manga between 1983 and their settlement in the 2000s. Ironically, the one remake/revival that actually managed to be a success was Space Battleship Yamato 2199, in which neither of them had any involvement.^* Though to be fair, Nishizaki not having any involvement is inevitable, as he had died by the time 2199 premiered.
• Dated History: It turns out that the wreck of the Yamato is rather less intact than Leiji Matsumoto and company thought. Converting it into a spaceship, while incredibly cool, is simply not realistic no matter what the level of technology available might be. This fact wasn't discovered until over a decade after the anime was conceived.
• Dawson Casting: Kodai's actor in the live-action movie, Takuya Kimura is old enough to have watched the original. Says it all, really.
  • On the other hand, Kodai is said to be 37 (Kimura's age at the time of filming) and a retired former soldier in the Live-Action Adaptation.
• Follow the Leader: Star Wars and both versions of Battlestar Galactica drew heavily from Space Battleship Yamato, sometimes practically scene-by-scene. See also Older Than They Think.
  • Both Crusade and the third season of Star Trek: Enterprise were essentially the first season of Yamato transplanted into their respective continuities.
  • On the other hand, the 2010 live-action movie clearly takes inspiration from Battlestar Galactica (2003) in multiple ways, from Gender Flipping multiple characters, to taking more cynical spins on their original premises (e.g. Captain Okita's revelation that he made up "Iscandar" and the radiation-cleaning technology, just because humanity needed hope — and because the fact the message capsule removed the radiation from around Kodai when it landed gave him hope.) The effect of the ship emerging from warp also looks exactly like the "kawoosh" from Stargate.
  • Albedo: Erma Felna EDF shares many points with Yamato. The author admitted he took some inspiration for the plot in an interview, along many sources.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: There's still no western release for the three seasons of the original Japanese version.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: The Voyager Entertainment releases of Star Blazers, printed continuously since 2001, have become these. $29.95 was at the border of an acceptable price for a 5-episode DVD back then. It is not now (and there are no box sets, just bundles of each season priced between $50-70 each).
• The Other Darrin:
  • Series 3 (The Bolar Wars) was dubbed by a different team in New York than the previous two seasons, and thus the entire cast was replaced. Many of the replacement voices may be familiar to those who watched Speed Racer.
  • Similarly, the dub of the movies did this too. The films used a different cast than that of the series; while also seeing the cast of the first film (which included Marvin Miller of Robby the Robot fame and Dabney Coleman) being replaced with a different LA-based cast for the second comprised of many regulars of the anime/Power Rangers dubbing scene.
• Production Nickname: The Mexican voice actors of the dub of the film tended to call the titular ship Acorazado Espacial Clamato (Space Battleship Clamato) after the (in)famous brand of tomato juice.
• Referenced by...: In Skylanders, you can get an upgrade for Trigger Happy called the Golden Yamato Blast.
• Science Marches On: Quite a bit of this in the original series (which was broadcast in 1974), notably Titan is shown as a frozen moon with a clear atmosphere and Pluto is indicated to be "half the size of Earth" (although the show does correctly guess it has at least one moon, possibly more than one as it's named as "a" moon of Pluto). Both would be revealed to be quite different in a few years due to Voyager 1 revealing Titan's haze and the discovery of Charon allowing estimates of Pluto's mass to be corrected to being considerably smaller than Earth's own moon.
• Screwed by the Network:
  • The first season was supposed to have 39 episodes, but was reduced to 26.
  • A bigger example was that the number of episodes for the Bolar Wars was originally 52 episodes, but was reduced to 25.
• What Could Have Been: Before Leiji Matsumoto joined the project, the Yamato wasn't even in it, instead there was a ship made from a hollowed-out asteroid called the Icarus. The show was originally pitched as essentially "Lord of the Flies In Space", with the crew suffering a catastrophic breakdown in discipline during their voyage through deep space. Virtually the only thing both versions had in common was that both involved a quest to find a planet called Iscandar. Fortunately, many of the concepts Matsumoto threw out when he took over were later used to make Infinite Ryvius.
  • The short-lived Star Blazers comic book by Argo Press makes an homage to this by giving the Earth Defense Force an asteroid base called Icarus.
  • The asteroid Icarus makes a cameo in Be Forever Yamato. Its hollow core is the hiding place for the Yamato, and the release of the ship shatters the asteroid.
  • Also, the first season was originally supposed to be 39 episodes instead of 26. The extra 13 episodes would have been used to introduce a new series character named Captain Harlock.
  • Before the series was cut down to 26 episodes, Mamoru was supposed to have become a Space Pirate calling himself Captain Harlock instead of being found alive on Iscandar.
  • ...and he's in most of the promotional materials produced from the early drafts of the script, the first novelization and it's in both manga versions - Matsumoto's and the "official" tie-in version... and there's no implication about it - it's outright stated, and he's treated as a major character! In said novelization there's an even bigger shock that didn't make the final cut: Captain Okita is his father... though anyone who's seen Matsumoto's manga version of the WW2 Arcadia of my Youth flashback might have had a suspicion or two, given the character design for the elderly Harlock in the framing story...
  • Resurrection and Rebirth are acturally spawned from the same draft for a Yamato movie in the 2000s.

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