Satanic Dessler
I was just complaining yesterday that I hate how anime studios now are milking people so badly, they won’t even finish shows properly on TV so you have to get the DVD. This kind of strategy is ruinous, IMO. Yes, I said it, ruinous, and I don’t care if it’s appropriate in this context, because it is.
Now, what’s truly exciting is when missing footage is found, not because people deliberately hid it to later make money off of it, but because someone lost it somewhere, or because someone didn’t like it and dumped it. It just so happens that a heretofore unseen clip of Space Battleship Yamato has turned up. The fact that a remake of the first series is about to be launched makes the timing slightly suspicious, but this looks old, fellows, and I think it’s the real deal.
There’s definitely some tension between Captain and Yuki in this that would have made the show lots better if it had been kept in. And Dessler is a real Satan here. The animation quality is quite poor, though. You can hardly recognize Leiji’s character designs 😦
Kritik der Animationskraft 
Ciao! i’m a long time harlock fan, found this by looking for info on Ozma.
You’ve done well checking the original series, that’s what H and GE999 are for us who were there when matsumoto exploded. In italy, H exploded in the latter 70s… and it was glorious.
Care to add me to fb\mail? Otherwise I’ll just drop a couple lines over here.
I’m not on facebook, you are welcome to write here 🙂
I’ve seen this before. Some comedy show. They did several of these sketches. each getting sillier as they went along.
That said, the first ten minutes of the real new show look awesome if one is into space battles. It is online free
The comedy show is Warau Inu. I like to sub their skits. The only other Yamato one I’ve seen of theirs has a Gamilas baby.. They’ve also done some Galaxy Express ones.
The 10-minute clip looks neat. They’re definitely playing up the patriotism of the original.
All right, so there’s this thing I love about Matsumoto in general and the first Harlock in particular: the political view wouldn’t be acceptable today and ever less in the United States. It reeks of vengeance fantasy, despises authority and welcomes selfmade justice: more, it mocks or warns about normality (lazy hypocrites) or achievers (traitors) and self-improvement (that’s monsters in the making). Sci-fi allows authors to allude, but distance and information plays a role so think hard what they really mean when they say the corrupt politicians of the shows were about contemporary Japan’s situation. Captain Nemo was from India battling the English, now suppose Harlock being Afghani fighting the US occupiers or a Greek anarchist bombing German banks.
You had come to the conclusion that Tadashi’s lack of scenic presence was a ploy to direct you to the real, brooding hero of the show. Now Harlock’s status as such is surely undisputed, but Tadashi actually did connect to the 70s viewership with him being so damn angry. Nowadays, you would never see his character not reprimanded with the inevitable sermon that getting revenge wouldn’t bring his lost parents back to life etc. He would probably cry about it with his lady friends. Back then, it was clenched fists and getting a gun to set it right – and it wouldn’t be enough to just do it once, because the feeling progresses into that we ought to wipe them all out ’cause they’re all the same. Take out these talks about delirium of revenge and yes, Captain Harlock is a nice anime with cool costumes but that’s about it (which coincidentally is what I think about the following Harlock series).
GE999’s intro too, starts out with a notion that would be unthinkable to message kids with on one Cartoon Network today. That’s wealth drawing the line between sons of bitches and not: Earth lives a bright future of prosperity and comfort, with humanity enjoying eternal life to the fullest – all but its underclass. All quite unamerican, if you ask me. So, take a gun and answer back, when they show you how “better” those people are. And indeed savour that little detail of the Cosmo Dragoon being a warrior’s weapon: which means warfare weaponry compared to civilian hardware, since GE999’s clashes are all civil wars between neighbours and not any attacks between good and bad belligerents. The way Maetel was developed melodramatically later on, kinda diluted the social justice element of the story but you can still smell it in the scenarios of maximum poverty of Goodbye GE like the terminator-like fight on Earth and the glacial slave labor on LaMetal.
I love your analysis and I think it’s very fruitful. What you say of Tadashi specially is spot-on. The striking thing to me here is that you use examples that traditionally belong to the leftist end of the political spectrum: colonials fighting colonists, occupied fighting occupiers, anarchist fighting the state. Whereas Leiji’s primary example in his heart is the Japanese struggle against the Allies in WWII, and of course today we don’t see Imperial Japan as a leftist power at all. The leftists of conviction in Japan opposed the war and were all imprisoned during it. Of course, Leiji focuses on the “freedom” aspect of Japanese combat in WWII, which means he focuses on the last year or two of the conflict where the Japanese did essentially fight a defensive war against overwhelming odds.
Everything you say reminds me of the political thinker Kita Ikki. Have you heard of him? He was a remarkable person, who hated capitalism but loved Japanese exceptionalism at the same time. He was very influential in the 1930s. I’ve never really thought about Leiji and Ikki together but maybe I should..