grinninfoole

It's a bit upsetting to listen while your brother makes noises like he's dying, and more so when he perhaps might be, so I'm going to write about something else of equal gravity: a sound effect in a cartoon I loved growing up.

Starblazers was created in Japan as Space Cruiser Yamato, and was staggeringly popular in the 70s and early 80s. The basic idea is that aliens are bombarding Earth with radioactive bombs and, using technology sent to us by helpful aliens, humanity takes the rusted wreck of the Japanese battleship Yamato (250 years after US bombers sank it) and retrofits it into a space ship to fly across the galaxy to get a machine that will undo all the radiation poisoning. I enjoyed the hell out of the show as a kid. (Obviously, it's also a fantasy parallel to World War 2 that casts Japan as virtuous in the face of US aggression, and includes a wish-fulfillment deus ex machina to undo the effects of nuclear attack.)

Despite that, there was a lot to like about the show: for example, the pacing was deliberate and several episodes featured characters on both sides doing nothing except getting ready to do something. I know that lots of anime does this, but the design of this show featured space ships that were all modeled after ships and planes from World War 2. An episode in which the evil aliens muster their forces could easily have bored the crap out of a nine-year-old with ADD, but I was hooked.

Another important element was the portrayal of Leader Desslok, the head evil alien in the first series, and recurrring nemesis throughout the whole show. The Japanese original featured a deep-voiced, gruff-sounding, warrior-emperor like a thousand other anime bad guys. In the English language version, actor Eddie Allen voiced the blonde-haired & blue-skinned Desslok in a higher register, and with the bored affect of an aesthete, born to rule and barely tolerating all these boring distractions from his privileged existence. Instead of Mifune Toshiro in Throne of Blood, it's more Peter Cushing in Star Wars.

When I watched it all again a couple of years ago, though, the thing that struck me was that, while some of the animation was weak, and some of the episodes were treacly, and continuity was sporadic, and using ships and plane designed to operate in an atmosphere or ocean and a gravity well in deep space is fundamentally daft, the music and sound effects are really good. They still hold up, and at least to some extent carry the show over its weak points.