THE DARK KNIGHT RISES Secret Catwoman Poster Revealed
New Images from THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN
Josh Brolin Talks MEN IN BLACK 3, GANGSTER SQUAD, OLDBOY, LABOR DAY and THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone Talk THE TOMB, THE EXPENDABLES 2, Their Careers and “Male Pattern Badness”
THE DARK KNIGHT RISES Set Visit Preview and 4 Awesome New Posters!First Footage From Live Action SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO (STAR BLAZERS)
by Steve 'Frosty' Weintraub Posted:December 31st, 2009 at 7:08 pm
|
|
 |
|
.jpg "Star Blazers image (4).jpg")
In the age of Twitter, Facebook and instant info, it’s very rare for me to be surprised by a film in development. I think the last movie that come out of nowhere was Cloverfield. So when I was emailed a link to the first footage from a live action Space Battleship Yamato (Star Blazers) movie, I thought it was an April Fool’s joke.
But it wasn’t. More after the jump:
.jpg "Star Blazers image (8).jpg")
It ends up Toho in Japan have made an estimated 2 billion yen (about $20 million USD) movie based on the 70′s cartoon. While I don’t know exactly how close it’s going to follow the original storyline of the cartoon, here’s wiki’s summary of the first season:
The plot opens in the year 2199, with planet Earth facing extinction within one year due to radioactive pollution caused by Gamilon planet bombs. A message arrives from Queen Starsha, of planet Iscandar, providing Earth with plans to build a superluminal engine and the promise that, if Earthlings can reach Iscandar, enduring what obstacles the Gamilons might put in their way, the Queen will give them a machine — the Cosmo DNA — that can neutralize the deadly radioactivity. But can the Star Force travel 148,000 light-years and back in just one Earth year? Not if the Gamilons can stop them.
According to the film’s wikipedia page, the movie is going to use this storyline, but perhaps changes have been made to tell the story in a two hour film. Also, the cartoon took place in 2199 and the film is set in 2220.
If you grew up with Star Blazers or ever watched the cartoon, you will not believe this footage. And if you never saw the show, as someone wrote on Wikipedia:
Star Blazers was the first popular English-translated anime that had an over-arching plot and storyline that required the episodes to be shown in order. It dealt with somewhat more mature themes than other productions aimed at the same target audience at the time. As a result, it paved the way for future arc-based, plot-driven anime translations.
This was the show that got America started on anime.
Space Battleship Yamato will be released in December 2010 in Japan and and it’s been directed by Takashi Yamazaki.. No word on a domestic distributor. Expect plenty of updates on this film as I get them.
Here’s the original opening to the 70′s cartoon
Thanks to Nippon Cinema (via Quiet Earth)for this.
-
Please Like Collider on Facebook
|
|
|
|
Frosty that was the coolest thing I’ve seen all week…it made up for the news blackout!
Frosty that was the coolest thing I’ve seen all week…it made up for the news blackout!
Don’t get this mixed up with Yamato:Rebirth, which is the recent animated release. That’s the movie with the Black Hole storyline. This trailer (and the wiki artilce referenced above) makes it pretty clear this live action film must be a retelling of the original war with Gamilon storyline.
thank you for telling me this. I altered my story to reflect what you said.
Happy to help!
Happy to help!
thank you for telling me this. I altered my story to reflect what you said.
Actually the latest animated release is Yamato Resurrection.
Don’t get this mixed up with Yamato:Rebirth, which is the recent animated release. That’s the movie with the Black Hole storyline. This trailer (and the wiki artilce referenced above) makes it pretty clear this live action film must be a retelling of the original war with Gamilon storyline.
thank you for telling me this. I altered my story to reflect what you said.
Happy to help!
Actually, the show that got anime started in America was probably Battle of the Planets. Star Blazers was on in some pretty bad market time slots (early morning hours, Sundays, etc.) while BoTP was on after school hours as I recall. I was disappointed to learn that the recent movie “G-Force” was actually a film with anthropomorphic animals in it instead of BoTP which is otherwise known as “G-Force”. A live action Yamato movie is great (and this fan has been waiting for 30 years for that) but there will have to be a lot of changes, the first being that no one will look European/American as they did in the cartoon. But then, that anime was done at a time when the USA was on top of the world and everyone wanted to emulate them. And the storyline of the lone Japanese battleship fighting it out against hopeless odds (retelling WWII so the Japanese win, no?) will no doubt have to be tweaked for international sales. Can anyone tell me if this is a good budget for a Japanese film? I mean we’re probably not going to go the state-of-the-art Avatar/Star Wars work but hopefully the actors will make the film much more character driven and we’ll need less SPFX work. At any rate, I’m curious to see the finished product. Hopefully you’ll keep up with updates on this project as time goes on.
At least in the Atlanta market, BotP was shown at an awkward kid time of 6:30PM (I actually learned to tell time on an analog clock in order to know when it was time for BotP). Here, StarBlazers was shown weekdays at 3:30PM, which was shortly after I got home from school. And Woe be to the man woman or child who was in my path to the TV at the time.
The 6:30PM timeslot for BotP was in the News timeslot, and so adults had control of the TV at that time.
Actually, the show that got anime started in America was probably Battle of the Planets. Star Blazers was on in some pretty bad market time slots (early morning hours, Sundays, etc.) while BoTP was on after school hours as I recall. I was disappointed to learn that the recent movie “G-Force” was actually a film with anthropomorphic animals in it instead of BoTP which is otherwise known as “G-Force”. A live action Yamato movie is great (and this fan has been waiting for 30 years for that) but there will have to be a lot of changes, the first being that no one will look European/American as they did in the cartoon. But then, that anime was done at a time when the USA was on top of the world and everyone wanted to emulate them. And the storyline of the lone Japanese battleship fighting it out against hopeless odds (retelling WWII so the Japanese win, no?) will no doubt have to be tweaked for international sales. Can anyone tell me if this is a good budget for a Japanese film? I mean we’re probably not going to go the state-of-the-art Avatar/Star Wars work but hopefully the actors will make the film much more character driven and we’ll need less SPFX work. At any rate, I’m curious to see the finished product. Hopefully you’ll keep up with updates on this project as time goes on.
At least in the Atlanta market, BotP was shown at an awkward kid time of 6:30PM (I actually learned to tell time on an analog clock in order to know when it was time for BotP). Here, StarBlazers was shown weekdays at 3:30PM, which was shortly after I got home from school. And Woe be to the man woman or child who was in my path to the TV at the time.
The 6:30PM timeslot for BotP was in the News timeslot, and so adults had control of the TV at that time.
Heh. Back in the early ’80′s, home VCRs were still new and there was no such thing as a Video Store, much less NetFlix and BitTorrent. I found Star Blazers on cable TV in a hotel room one night on a business trip to D.C. Seeing one episode (the artificial sun near Balun), I went home and told a friend about this crap with an interstellar WWII battleship. He said, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s actually good if you see the whole story’. Whole Story? You mean someone is actually telling Story?!? I started taping. And collecting. and trading for missing pieces with friends. (Remember, no video stores, and the stations didn’t necessarily air it in order…) Trying to figure out the right order to the episodes was a piece of work, esp. in second season – no ’243 days left’ to give a hint.
Eventually we had the whole thing. All episodes present and accounted for. Scattered over multitudes of cassettes, and with commercials intact. Then began the editing. Recopying the episodes into the right order, taking out commercials, taking out opening and closing credits except at the beginning and end of each finished cassette.
The commercials – I still to this day suffer very bad reactions to ‘Hungry Hungry Hippos’ and ‘Sam Elliott as Hugh Cardiffe in “Wild Times”‘.
But we ended up with gold – five cassettes with, essentially, two 510 minute movies (a little over 19 minutes / episode after removing commercials, opening and closing, recaps and previews). First and second seasons were In The Can.
And when I ran video rooms at SF conventions in the early ’80′s, the vid rooms were the only part of the con you could get in without a badge, since we didn’t want to be seen as charging money to watch these tapes. One room ran a miscellaneous assortment. The other room ran all 17 hours of The Prisoner, followed by all 17 hours of 1st and 2nd season Star Blazers. Back in the dim and misty past, when you just couldn’t get this stuff without a lot of work.
Now I edit DVDs on my PC, clean and digital, and remember the Good Old Days, and give thanks for those who kept the flame alive.
A live action Space Battleship Yamato feature?!?! HELLS YES, I’M THERE!!!
Heh. Back in the early ’80′s, home VCRs were still new and there was no such thing as a Video Store, much less NetFlix and BitTorrent. I found Star Blazers on cable TV in a hotel room one night on a business trip to D.C. Seeing one episode (the artificial sun near Balun), I went home and told a friend about this crap with an interstellar WWII battleship. He said, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s actually good if you see the whole story’. Whole Story? You mean someone is actually telling Story?!? I started taping. And collecting. and trading for missing pieces with friends. (Remember, no video stores, and the stations didn’t necessarily air it in order…) Trying to figure out the right order to the episodes was a piece of work, esp. in second season – no ’243 days left’ to give a hint.
Eventually we had the whole thing. All episodes present and accounted for. Scattered over multitudes of cassettes, and with commercials intact. Then began the editing. Recopying the episodes into the right order, taking out commercials, taking out opening and closing credits except at the beginning and end of each finished cassette.
The commercials – I still to this day suffer very bad reactions to ‘Hungry Hungry Hippos’ and ‘Sam Elliott as Hugh Cardiffe in “Wild Times”‘.
But we ended up with gold – five cassettes with, essentially, two 510 minute movies (a little over 19 minutes / episode after removing commercials, opening and closing, recaps and previews). First and second seasons were In The Can.
And when I ran video rooms at SF conventions in the early ’80′s, the vid rooms were the only part of the con you could get in without a badge, since we didn’t want to be seen as charging money to watch these tapes. One room ran a miscellaneous assortment. The other room ran all 17 hours of The Prisoner, followed by all 17 hours of 1st and 2nd season Star Blazers. Back in the dim and misty past, when you just couldn’t get this stuff without a lot of work.
Now I edit DVDs on my PC, clean and digital, and remember the Good Old Days, and give thanks for those who kept the flame alive.
A live action Space Battleship Yamato feature?!?! HELLS YES, I’M THERE!!!
Heh. Back in the early ’80′s, home VCRs were still new and there was no such thing as a Video Store, much less NetFlix and BitTorrent. I found Star Blazers on cable TV in a hotel room one night on a business trip to D.C. Seeing one episode (the artificial sun near Balun), I went home and told a friend about this crap with an interstellar WWII battleship. He said, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s actually good if you see the whole story’. Whole Story? You mean someone is actually telling Story?!? I started taping. And collecting. and trading for missing pieces with friends. (Remember, no video stores, and the stations didn’t necessarily air it in order…) Trying to figure out the right order to the episodes was a piece of work, esp. in second season – no ’243 days left’ to give a hint.
Eventually we had the whole thing. All episodes present and accounted for. Scattered over multitudes of cassettes, and with commercials intact. Then began the editing. Recopying the episodes into the right order, taking out commercials, taking out opening and closing credits except at the beginning and end of each finished cassette.
The commercials – I still to this day suffer very bad reactions to ‘Hungry Hungry Hippos’ and ‘Sam Elliott as Hugh Cardiffe in “Wild Times”‘.
But we ended up with gold – five cassettes with, essentially, two 510 minute movies (a little over 19 minutes / episode after removing commercials, opening and closing, recaps and previews). First and second seasons were In The Can.
And when I ran video rooms at SF conventions in the early ’80′s, the vid rooms were the only part of the con you could get in without a badge, since we didn’t want to be seen as charging money to watch these tapes. One room ran a miscellaneous assortment. The other room ran all 17 hours of The Prisoner, followed by all 17 hours of 1st and 2nd season Star Blazers. Back in the dim and misty past, when you just couldn’t get this stuff without a lot of work.
Now I edit DVDs on my PC, clean and digital, and remember the Good Old Days, and give thanks for those who kept the flame alive.
A live action Space Battleship Yamato feature?!?! HELLS YES, I’M THERE!!!
I loved BoTP also. In Dallas when I was a kid Starblazers was on at 3:30 so I rushed home each day to see it. Battle of the Planets is the first one I saw also but Starblazers really drew me in with the arc storyline, and three seasons. I havent seen any of the films but I am going to watch them now. Robotech was the second long running anime series that I got into and that sealed the deal for me. Honestly the little bit we see in the trailer is magnificent looking. I am so happy we didnt get a low budget production with powerranger level cgi. The Yamato looks spectacular. And just judging from the fact that Derek is wearing the white and red uniform just like in the anime, leads me to believe they are atleast trying to be true to the original series. IM TOTALLY STOKED AND HAVE BIG MUTANT GOOSEBUMPS!
I loved BoTP also. In Dallas when I was a kid Starblazers was on at 3:30 so I rushed home each day to see it. Battle of the Planets is the first one I saw also but Starblazers really drew me in with the arc storyline, and three seasons. I havent seen any of the films but I am going to watch them now. Robotech was the second long running anime series that I got into and that sealed the deal for me. Honestly the little bit we see in the trailer is magnificent looking. I am so happy we didnt get a low budget production with powerranger level cgi. The Yamato looks spectacular. And just judging from the fact that Derek is wearing the white and red uniform just like in the anime, leads me to believe they are atleast trying to be true to the original series. IM TOTALLY STOKED AND HAVE BIG MUTANT GOOSEBUMPS!
I loved BoTP also. In Dallas when I was a kid Starblazers was on at 3:30 so I rushed home each day to see it. Battle of the Planets is the first one I saw also but Starblazers really drew me in with the arc storyline, and three seasons. I havent seen any of the films but I am going to watch them now. Robotech was the second long running anime series that I got into and that sealed the deal for me. Honestly the little bit we see in the trailer is magnificent looking. I am so happy we didnt get a low budget production with powerranger level cgi. The Yamato looks spectacular. And just judging from the fact that Derek is wearing the white and red uniform just like in the anime, leads me to believe they are atleast trying to be true to the original series. IM TOTALLY STOKED AND HAVE BIG MUTANT GOOSEBUMPS!
OMG! I'll learn Japanese to watch this movie in original language/format!!! I loved this show as a kid and still hear the music and the phrase, “there are only XX days left” Thank goodness this is one of those shows they are bringing back!!!
The only way that this Movie can be successful is, If the caracters were all American. I'm sorry if this sounds racists but it's not. The only reason I say this is, in the original Star Blazers Animation the Characters looked American therefore the movie should be portrayed the same way. Remember, you want to try keep it as original as possible. I really like the production that was put into this movie by the Japanese very well done.
I hope that someday an American Director that might have watched this while growing up decides to create an American version while keeping the original Japanese storyline. I can hardly wait for the Japanese version of this movie, who knows maybe they won't need to make an American version after all. But i know by seeing the trailer for this, won't be well received in America but we'll see.
The movie fooatge has ended last December, now they are working on post-production, specially CGI effects that will take a long time to accomplish (unless they managed to build a 1:1 scale Yamato
)
The movie could easily flop in US due the lack of audience for that anime. I'm 40 and only find people around that age that actually know (and miss) the show. Nonetheless, as a prove of this anime resilience, my 10 years old son simply LOVE the “flying ship” as he call it, although he knows the real name, and even the original Japanese show theme by heart:). He is looking forward to watch the movie in the theaters, so I am!
I hope the narrow mind distributors around the world give this movie a chance. It is a fantastic appeal to kids to see big ships taking flight from the ground (or water in this case) that cannot be disregarded easily (trust me, show some episodes to your kid and let me know the results…pick up an episode from the third season – Bolar Wars.
Cheers
Nonetheless
The movie fooatge has ended last December, now they are working on post-production, specially CGI effects that will take a long time to accomplish (unless they managed to build a 1:1 scale Yamato
)
The movie could easily flop in US due the lack of audience for that anime. I'm 40 and only find people around that age that actually know (and miss) the show. Nonetheless, as a prove of this anime resilience, my 10 years old son simply LOVE the “flying ship” as he call it, although he knows the real name, and even the original Japanese show theme by heart:). He is looking forward to watch the movie in the theaters, so I am!
I hope the narrow mind distributors around the world give this movie a chance. It is a fantastic appeal to kids to see big ships taking flight from the ground (or water in this case) that cannot be disregarded easily (trust me, show some episodes to your kid and let me know the results…pick up an episode from the third season – Bolar Wars.
Cheers
Nonetheless
Just checked out the movie, while there were some pretty cool things about it (the costumes, some of the sets, the cast, the Yamato and most of the spaceships) The Gamilions, were as uninspired as Spielberg’s WotW lazy ass ID4 alien ripoffs, and a very very big letdown, which pretty much squelched this movie for me. I was looking forward to Leader Desslar and Starsha and what was substituted were Gamilons in name only. Some of the effects looked unfinished, giving the the whole movie a small uneven TV special feel to it, not an epic motion picture which it’s supposed to be- IMHO the equivalent of Star Wars in Japan. There was too much of a BSG riff here and there, and it felt like there were 42 people on the Yamato at all times, instead of hundreds or dare I say thousands – seriously only 5 Marines? Perhaps 7 or 8 fighters? If I have to fight my way through alien occupied space and back, I’m gonna be armed with enough weapons and personnel to leave a trail of destruction that would put the Death Star to shame! Watch the anime you won’t be disappointed, watch this and you will be saying WTF again, and again, and again. This movie didn’t deliver it all for me nor my wife.
Just checked out the movie, while there were some pretty cool things about it (the costumes, some of the sets, the cast, the Yamato and most of the spaceships) The Gamilions, were as uninspired as Spielberg’s WotW lazy ass ID4 alien ripoffs, and a very very big letdown, which pretty much squelched this movie for me. I was looking forward to Leader Desslar and Starsha and what was substituted were Gamilons in name only. Some of the effects looked unfinished, giving the the whole movie a small uneven TV special feel to it, not an epic motion picture which it’s supposed to be- IMHO the equivalent of Star Wars in Japan. There was too much of a BSG riff here and there, and it felt like there were 42 people on the Yamato at all times, instead of hundreds or dare I say thousands – seriously only 5 Marines? Perhaps 7 or 8 fighters? If I have to fight my way through alien occupied space and back, I’m gonna be armed with enough weapons and personnel to leave a trail of destruction that would put the Death Star to shame! Watch the anime you won’t be disappointed, watch this and you will be saying WTF again, and again, and again. This movie didn’t deliver it all for me nor my wife.
How did u check it out? Is there an English version of this floating around already?
Scattered over multitudes of cassettes, and with commercials intact.
Pretty great post. I just stumbled upon your weblog and wanted to say that I’ve really loved surfing around your blog posts. In any case I?ll be subscribing to your rss feed and I’m hoping you write once more very soon!