YMMV / Space Battleship Yamato

• Awesome Art: Tim Eldred, the artist for both the Argo Press Comic-Book Adaptation and now the Star Blazers webcomics, just nails the look of the original series perfectly.
• Awesome Music: For the new Live-Action Adaptation, Steven Tyler's Love Lives.
  • The original theme music by Isao Sasaki definitely qualifies. At least, it's damned catchy.
  • For Space Battleship Yamato 2199, they got together around 40 of the greatest anison singers, and redid the original theme music. As anyone can expect, they managed to take the CMOA levels of the song up to eleven.
  • What about Dessler's theme? It just screams Magnificent Bastard! The lyrical version? Makes him sound like the Hero of Another Story!
  • Every invading battlestation needs it's own pipe organ and discoteque
• Complete Monster:
  • The monstrous Emperor Z(w)ordar of Gatlantis, ruler of the White Comet Empire, is a despot who lives to conquer and destroy all he finds. Sacking the Andromeda galaxy, killing countless innocents until the survivors submit, Zordar has them placed in labor camps as slaves before intending to move on to the Milky Way. Arriving at the Milky Way at the season's end, Zordar wipes out Earth's defensive fleet and proceeds to offer the Earthlings a chance to submit to him as slaves or face annihilation. Upon the Yamato fighting back, Zordar abandons his subordinates to die and begins bombarding Earth, deciding to simply take it for himself after wiping out all humanity.
  • Prime Minister Bemlaze of the Bolar Federation has enslaved the people of the first season's villain Abelt Dessler, the Gamilas people, in cruel tyranny after Dessler's Heel–Face Turn. When the prisoners try to resist, Bemlaze orders them massacred and later has the entire planet blown up out of spite just to kill the rebellious prisoners. Pursuing the Yamato to destroy it, Bemlaze arrives when the battleship is attempting to stabilize the sun to save Earth, intending on destroying Earth and Yamato by dooming the former to cooking from the heat of the sun out of sheer spite.
  • Yamato: New Voyage & Be Forever Yamato: Emperor Scaldart of the Dark Nebula Empire leads his armies in brutal conquests where planets are harvested of resources and then destroyed. First coming to Yamato's attention, Scaldart commands the invasion of the world of Iscandar, resulting the complete destruction of Iscandar and its heroic queen Starsha. Scaldart returns to conquer Earth after annihilating its fleet, having any dissenters killed and setting up a bomb to destroy the planet and the minds of every human should they resist. When Yamato is hurled into the future, Scaldart attempts to lure them into a trap to destroy them only to attempt to activate the bomb anyways, even murdering Starsha's daughter Sasha when she attempts to save the Yamato for the sake of the Earth.
• Fair for Its Day: A dubbing example. Star Blazers was one of the earliest examples where the dubbers actually gave a damn about how the series was dubbed, and was astonishingly faithful for the time. Compared to today's dubs, the translation is a Macekre. That said, the voice acting is still head and shoulders above a lot of what's done even today.
• Fridge Horror: Invoked in-universe in artist Tim Eldred's official webcomic Rebirth. While it's only tangential to the plot, Desslok mentions to Wildstar that, out in the Andromeda Galaxy, the hostile empire that Zordar hailed from is still there. "For all his might, Zordar was only a prince."
  • This fact is also the basis of the first story arc in Comico's Star Blazers title.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: When mining for cosmonite in Episode 6, our heroes turn it into neat cubes rather than break it into rocks...
• Iron Woobie: Queen Starsha is the Sole Survivor of a dying planet whose only remaining family dies in the first episode. Despite all the tragedy, she offers her aid to a planet she knows barely anything about and calmly accepts her planet's destruction as inevitable.
• It Was His Sled: Most fans know that Iscandar and Garmillas are twin planets and both are dying, especially since the original version spoiled the former twist in episode 3.
• Jerkass Woobie: Albet Dessler (Desslok) lets out a blood-curdling cry and grabs his hair in frustration. The loss of Starsha seems to affect him more than the loss of Garmilas.
• Magnificent Bastard: Albelt Dessler is the charming, sophisticated supreme ruler and dictator of Gamillas. Desiring a peace in the galaxy through ultimate control, Dessler has expanded the Gamillas empire but keeps new conquered races happy by allowing them to prove themselves equal citizens in the empire on pure merit. When earth proves more difficult to conquer, Dessler deals with the matter by assigning a failed commander to either give Dessler more knowledge of the earthlings' tactics, or removing an incompetent without him lifting a finger. Dessler also outplays any who attempt to usurp his authority and when defeated, he promptly reemerges to take the Yamato over to restore himself to glory, convinced that his success is the glory of Gamillas itself.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Desslok Desslok Desslok!"
• Moment of Awesome:
  • "Nuts! Now reply them with this."
  • To people who have never seen any of the source material, the trailer for the Live-Action Adaptation could count.
  • The Yamato's launching from the Revival movie, complete with the series' original opening theme.
  • Episode 25 of Season 2 is a massive Moment of Awesome for the Yamato and her crew, as the battleship, nearly crippled in the last battle with Deslar, first chase off Earth the space fortress Gatlantis, then launch an Airstrike Impossible to pave the way for a commando raid that cripples the target, and then the Yamato destroy Gatlantis. A space fortress that four episodes earlier had wiped out the entire Earth Defense Force fleet without even trying!!!
  • Lampshaded by a random bystander in the crowds when Yamato reappears: "It's Yamato! We still have Yamato! We're going to WIN."
  • As the Comet Empire moves on victorious to Earth, Jordi Venture, little brother of the Star Force's helmsman , is looking up at the sky from his balcony unconcerned, thinking "My brother is still out there. He'll beat these guys".
  • A quieter version of Jori's moment, during the evacuation of the Earth Defense Moonbase In Yamato 2202, Saburo Kato's wife tells their son "You want to know a secret? Your daddy is a real life hero" as we cue the Main Theme and much ass kicking as the Yamato penetrates the Comet Empire's final line of defense once and for all.
  • In season 2, in one of the episodes close to the end. Leader Desslok had earlier accepted a commission from Prince Zordar to defeat the Star Force, so he pins the Yamato by teleporting mines over to surround it. To escape, the Yamato executes a small warp and rams Dessloks' ship. Deputy Captain Derek Wildstar boards the Leader's ship. The two of them face off on the bridge. Desslok slowly levels his pistol at Wildstar, while goading Wildstar to shoot him. But Wildstar, already injured earlier, falls to the deck while drawing his. His love interest, Nova, dashes out of hiding, grabs the pistol, blocks Desslok's aim, then aims Derek's pistol at Desslok . Moments later, she drops the pistol, places Derek's head in her lap, and comforts him while he remains semiconscious. Desslok gets his Villainous BSOD as he is witnesses Nova's simultaneous display of extreme bravery and extreme devotion. It makes him change his mind about pursuing the Star Force, he declares to Nova that the war between Gamillon and Earth is over, and he offers her advice on the Comet Empire's one weak point in its mobile fortress. Doubles as a Heartwarming Moment!
• Moral Event Horizon: Emperor Lugarl firing his Neutrino beam to stop Yamato and killing Prince De Zahl for being a failure. When he about to kill Kodai, the Dengilian boy, so-called child of his father leap in and protect Kodai. Kodai calling him out disbelief while holding the dying Dengilian boy by ask how Lugarl can have the same blood in his veins as humans. Lugarl’s only answer is to turn on his heel and walk back to his throne. It descends into the floor and out of sight.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Many, but probably the most notable is the warm-up and then firing of the Wave Motion Gun. Boop boop boop bididididididididi click, ch-whom... WREEEEEEEEEEEEEEYOWOWOWWWWWWWWWWWMM! Oh goodness, yes.
• My Real Daddy: An effective custody battle began in the late 1990's between Yamato's original creator Yoshinobu Nishizaki and the legendary Leiji Matsumoto (who rewrote much of the premise as soon as he joined the project, and has the critics and most of the fanbase on his side). Both creators have attempted their own Revivals of Yamato, with various degrees of success. The legal dispute dealt fatal blows to both Nishizaki's Yamato 2520 and Matsumoto's later Great Yamato project (which had to be retitled Great Galaxy and have the Serial Numbers Filed Off after the verdict that Nishizaki had the rights to the Space Battleship Yamato name.) After Nishizaki's death, 2199 has been much more successful in winning audience loyalty.
• Older Than They Think:
  • Star Blazers is occasionally MisBlamed for being derivative of Star Wars, which is impossible because Space Battleship Yamato premiered in 1974.
  • One of the biggest changes in the 2010 film, where Iskandar and Garmillas are both the same planet, was used in a rejected script from when Disney was trying to make a Star Blazers film in the 1990s, though some of the details are different.
  • Newer Than They Think: As YouTube comments will tell you, there are also a lot of latter-day fans who think the Death Star was based on the Comet Empire. Not likely, as the Comet Empire was introduced in 1978.
  • Yamato did benefit from the popularity of Star Wars in one way. After A New Hope broke box office records in the US, Series 1 of Yamato was edited down to a theatrical movie, where it outperformed A New Hope at the Japanese box office. Yamato Series 1 was not very popular when it first aired, thus the four year gap between Series 1 and the movie that regenerated interest in the franchise.
• Nightmare Fuel: The reveal of Skaldart in Be Forever Yamato. The soundtrack consisted of eerie, theremin-style music, and including the horrifying shriek of the woman turns into grotesque banshee that resonate with the music. To make it worse, the planet that the Yamato crew thought to the future Earth unveil the planet's true form - a skeletal frame shell with a metallic core. The core is attached to the outer frame by a long tube at its poles. The name of the planet is Dezarium.
• Retroactive Recognition: Sgt. Knox in Star Blazers was dubbed by Chris Latta, who is best known for being the original voice of both Starscream and Cobra Commander.
• Values Dissonance: In the live-action film, the speech about how the Yamato previously sailed on a desperate mission in the time of Japan's greatest need might not have precisely the intended reaction among non-Japanese audiences (especially Americans, Chinese, New Zealanders, Koreans, British, Australians and South-East Asians) if they think about it.
• Woolseyism:
  • The dub has Captain Avatar's bottle of water from a "beautiful clear spring" near his home, now destroyed by Gamilon bombing. That's actually a lot more poetic than just a bottle of wine.
  • The dub made Mamoru sacrifice himself against the Gamilons to give Okita time to escape, rather than out of martial pride. Every other adaptation of the series has gone with this reason.
  • The original series version ends its first season without actually showing us the Iscandarian device restoring Earth, potentially leaving a sliver of doubt for the viewer. The English version ends with the narrator speaking over the closing shot of the ship above Earth, saying definitively to the accompaniment of triumphal music, "In the year 2200, the Star Force returned... and saved Earth." It is a deeply satisfying moment.
  • The original version spoiled the that Iscandar and Garmillas/Gamilon were twin planets in episode 3, long before the characters find out. Star Blazers instead hides this info, turning it into a genuine plot twist when the characters find out.
  • Captain Hijikata's death in the original version was explicitly shown onscreen. In Star Blazers, it instead has it occur offscreen, having his final message to the other characters cut off. Many have admitted that this change, done to censor the scene, instead made the scene far more haunting.