Monday, February 11, 2008

the lost Yamato manga story

It's still hectic and crazy here at Let's Anime World Information Network Cohesive Dissemination & Fabrication Division, so to tide you over until I can get everything hooked back together, here's a post that is just to point you to another website that has some cool new old stuff.



Tim Eldred, formerly the webmaster over at starblazers.com, has, since Voyager's reorganization, moved his Star Blazers/Yamato fan website to ourstarblazers.com, this Cosmo DNA website maintaining the web portal presence of the American version of one of Japan's anime classics, AND bring together a vast, scattered denomination of information about the movies, TV shows, videos, DVDs, comics, books, magazines, LPs and CDs, model kits, fanzines, toys, doujinshi, and assorted strangeness devoted to that red and blue space battleship. There are literally dozens of fascinating articles at the site that make for hours of entertaining reading for anyone interested in Star Blazers, including never-before-translated Japanese articles, brand new features on the American Star Blazers comics of the 80s and 90s, Japanese Space Battleship Yamato doujinshi, the galaxy of Yamato model kits... more byzantine pop culture trivia than you can fire a wave-motion gun at.





ANYWAY, one of the cooler things up at the site is a translation of "Eternal Story Of Jura"", one of Leiji Matsumoto's Space Battleship Yamato manga stories from the gory glory days of the 1970s. Three different outfits had the manga rights to Yamato, so at one point you had three different versions of the Yamato blasting its way to three different versions of Iscandar. Because Japanese cartoon continuity wasn't confusing enough, right? Those of us nutty enough to buy comics in languages we can't read feverishly purchased the SF COMICS editions of Matsumoto's Yamato manga when we could find them at comic shows or Japanese grocery stores. And while there are a few slight deviations from the TV storyline, it mostly made sense.




Except, of course, for one story about mysterious big-eared space women using telepathic powers to mess with the minds of the Yamato crew. So the anime fans of the 80s were mightily confused. Confused, that is, until now, because the entire story is now translated and online for your reading pleasure at ourstarblazers.com!!




So quit listening to me and go read a classic Matsumoto Yamato manga story and spend a few hours immersed in the trivia of Space Battleship Yamato. You'll be glad you did.

Also, if you're like the guy who spoke to me at AWA last year wanting to know where he could get Star Blazers - well, you can order the DVDs right from the Starblazers.com site. That's where you gets yer Star Blazers, pal. All of it.

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