My friend Sherrye and I met in sixth grade. We were totally "sympatico" from the first. She was the only person I ever allowed to read my stories, and we pretty much had the same taste in television, although she was crazy about SWAT and Starsky and Hutch, both which I tolerated for her sake, and I never could get her into Doctor Who. Our reading tastes diverged occasionally as well--I remember she devoured Asimov's "Foundation" books and then gave me a set for Christmas; I couldn't get beyond the third page of the first book. I didn't hear any "this is great" comments from her about Nick O'Donohoe's Crossroads series that I sent her, so I figured it was a miss as well.

But she did turn me on to two television series I still love to this day. The first was Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds, which was unusual for me as I didn't usually like stuff that involved techy gadgets. The other was my third foray into Japanese anime.

I'd already watched programs like Kimba the White Lion (ran every day at three on Channel 56, then WKGB, in Boston) and Speed Racer. When Sherrye talked to me about this newest find, she was wholeheartedly enthusiastic. "You have to see this."

So I tried it one day when I was home sick, which was possibly a bad time to do so. I clicked around the channels and came to WSBK-TV38 (ah, there's Channel 38 turning up in my stories again) to find it, but couldn't make heads or tails of the plot, which seemed to involve a whole bunch of mostly guys in funny white uniforms with colored markings floating around space in an old battleship.

What Sherrye turned me on to, of course, was the infamous Space Battleship Yamato, known here in the US as Star Blazers. At that point, however, I couldn't figure out what she saw in the series.

A month or so later I finally had the opportunity to watch the series from the beginning--since I had realized that it was some sort of serial story. And I was suddenly in love with the show: I had never seen a cartoon--excuse me, an animated television series--that contained characters that grew older, experienced life, made mistakes and learned from them, and even fell in love. Even in Jonny Quest Jonny and Hadji stayed eternally ten years old.

I ended up eventually audio taping all the episodes, which involuntarily got my mother watching the series--I don't think she ever liked it, but she did end up watching it--when right in the middle of the rebroadcast of second season, Ch. 38 switched it to 7:30 a.m., right when I was leaving for work. I'd prop the tape recorder next to the speaker of the television in the kitchen, cue it at 7:30 after giving my mother a kiss and asking her please not to make a lot of noise, and then zip out the door! (Mom was patient, can you tell?) Audio tape wasn't as good as watching an episode, but at least I knew how the story progressed and finally ended.

By the time I had a VCR, Star Blazers had moved to Ch. 25, WXNE. Tapes were very expensive back then--my first 2-hour videotapes cost $25 apiece!--so I only recorded a few episodes of the series, and almost none of second series. Ch. 25, as its call letters indicated, was a Christian Broadcasting Network station, and they would cut out big hunks of the plot of any series that went contrary to their beliefs. (Why purchase series you're planning to butcher???) Series 2 of Star Blazers involved a woman named Trelaina who had powerful "mind powers" (she could destroy planets by getting angry). The CBN people thought any "mind powers" came from Satan and carefully bleeped any mention of Trelaina's "ungodly problem" (even though the point of the story was that Trelaina realized her mind powers should not be used to destroy innocent people and she refused to use them and was repentant of the one time she had!). Naturally these big cuts also made the story a little hard to follow!

Over the years and through more Japanese anime, I have managed to keep my fondness for Star Blazers. Some of the cable channels show anime late at night and although the animation itself is much better than in years past, I find I don't warm up to these incredible characters with their cool ways and overwrought English-dubbed dialog as much as I did to the very human characters aboard the Argo. On Star Blazers I could see past all the "cool tech-y stuff" like the wave motion cannon and the "Flying Tigers," etc. and still identify with Nova Forrester and Derek Wildstar, and my especial favorite, Mark Venture. So a few weeks back I bit the bullet and ordered the Series 1 and 2* sets. So once again I am traveling to Iscandar and Telezart with old friends and enjoying the journey immensely.

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* I never did get to see Series 3, "The Bolar Wars"--Ch. 25 was scheduled to show it and then reneged--and I really didn't have the funds for the DVD set. I'm intrigued, but heard several reviews that they changed the voice actors for the Bolar episodes and that they weren't as good as in the original two series. Maybe a rental copy will be available some day...

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 12:27:00 PM

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