Uchû senkan Yamato III

I was a massive Star Blazers fan in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I happily sat through the first two seasons and was blissfully unaware of a third. After the release of the live action movie in 2010, I found out quite by accident that there had been a third. I recently picked up the DVD's to take to a friend in Montana that had grown up with me watching the series as well, and we were eager to get into it.

Immediately, we noticed that the original voice actors were not included, and none of the new characters caught our interest. When we tried watching it, we got through about a third of the episodes and were completely baffled, because the Gamilas are called the Gamilons in the American version, and the Galvans, looking exactly the same, were not clearly explained and made no sense to us. We then realized that the entire series was a near-complete copy of the first season, right down to the Argo crew needing to save the Earth within a year.

It took the series FOREVER to even get the meat of the story, it was five or six episodes in and they hadn't even left he planet in the Argo yet, but by then we had lost all interest. This was a gigantic drop in quality in storytelling from the rambunctious second season, and nowhere near the level of the first. It was boring, it was confusing, and it left me very unhappy - Star Blazers has been many things, but boring was never one of them.

I will go back and finish it at some point, but reading other reviews shows that my early opinion was correct - there is a reason it was never released in the United States, and that would be because it is terrible.

Shoot the whole third series with the Wave Motion Gun, immediately..