It has to be said that Tim Eldred does a phenomenally good job in curating and running the COSMO DNA fan site devoted to all things STAR BLAZERS and SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO. It’s a gloriously thorough place covering all aspects of this now-ancient show and its recent revivals. You can find it here:
But this time, he has come into a windfall of a glorious sort, and it’s all exciting enough to me that I cannot help but share.
Recently, Eldred was able to bid on and win on an almost complete set of the original dialogue scripts for STAR BLAZERS season two. He’s going to be posting them in their entirety over at that site two at a time, with the first two available in full now. The specific page is here: https://ourstarblazers.com/vault/548a/
That said, I can’t help but to post a few quick excerpts from the listings here, as this is an amazing treasure trove that gives a ton of insight into how the show was put together.
It’s worth noting that the earliest batch of scripts are still labeled under the title STAR FORCE, which was going to be the name of the series right up to just before launch, as seen in the promotional advertisement at the top of this page. STAR BLAZERS debuted o September 1979, so as late as this final draft of Episode 37 in late June, the show was still called STAR FORCE. The reason for the name change is pretty simple: the producers were worried that Lucasfilm would come after them legally given the overwhelming power of STAR WARS even then. I wonder if they had to re-record portions of the theme song over after the fact.
I’m also a bit surprised that Sergeant Knox’s name is consistently spelled Nox throughout the production. So we’ve been getting it wrong for 40 years.
There are also bits of dialogue that wound up getting cut, likely for time. All of the editing, on top of needing to excise any violent or content from the shows that wouldn’t have flown on broadcast syndicated television in the late 1970s also had to bring each episode in at a shorter run-time than its Japanese source material.
And occasionally, there are full scripts for scenes that wound up on the cutting room floor in an attempt to get these episodes down to the necessary run time, such as the one above.
The final script is dated August 8, 1979, just a hair over a month before the show would premiere, which is an incredibly tight timeframe to have not done the dubbing and editing. STAR BLAZERS must have been a frantic production.
Anyway, that’s enough to give everybody a taste–I’d encourage anybody who is in the slightest bit interest to check out Tim’s site, where the full scripts will be serialized, and there’s an amazing ton of deep-dive content as well.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 