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January 23, 2006

Another Childhood Memory Bites The Dust

Like all boys born before 1980, I loved the TV show Star Blazers as a kid.

Star Blazers, if you don't know, was a Japanese cartoon set in the year 2199. Earth is being hit with deadly, radioactive planet bombs, sent by the evil Gamilons, rendering the surface of the planet uninhabitable. To reverse the damage, a group of humans ("The Star Force") goes to space aboard a converted World War II battleship, the Argo, in order to retrieve the "Cosmo DNA" from Queen Starsha of Iscandar. The Star Force has one year to get to Iscandar and back.

(Look, I know how unbelievably dorky this looks when written out on a Web page, but ya gotta believe me - as third-graders, we'd practically come to fights out on the playground about who'd get to be Derek Wildstar. And, as a valentine to all my fellow geeks out there, you can get an MP3 of the theme song here. Sing along. You know you want to.)

Season 1, "The Quest For Iscandar", totally captivated all of my childhood friends. It was followed in short order by a second season, "The Comet Empire," which also, to my eight-year-old brain, kicked enormous ass.

I freely admit that the shows were somewhat formulaic, following this rough structure:

1. Evil Gamilon/Comet Empire Guys hatch a cunning plan to stop the Star Force;
2. Cunning plan appears to work, causing the Star Force much anxiety;
3. Star Force uses the Wave Motion Gun to blow the Gamilon/Comet Empire Guys to tiny bits.
4. Show ends (cue "Hurry Star Force ... you only have 38 days left" warning).
5. Repeat.

I had the ability to catch Season 1 on DVD a few years back, and it aged OK. It wasn't going to win any awards for writing, directing, special effects, or whatever, but the show was just as I remembered it, and I suddenly found myself back in my parents' house, 7:30 AM on a Saturday morning, eagerly waiting for the latest installment with a bowl of Trix on my lap.

So imagine my surprise and delight to learn that there was a third, unaired (in the US) season of Star Blazers, called "The Bolar Wars." And imagine my further delight to see that NetFlix stocks the DVDs.

(Score!)

Well, the first disc (episodes 1 - 5) arrived last week, and I had chance to watch it this weekend.

Hoo, boy: It's bad.

Like, threaten-all-your-warm-fuzzy-memories bad. Like, make-you-question-your-love-of-the-original bad (see also: Matrix Reloaded, Matrix Revolutions).

First of all, the show seems to have been done on the cheap. The opening theme is sung in Japanese, and Japanese subtitles appear throughout the show. That's kinda bad, but forgivable ... until the American actors start opening their mouths, and you realize that any magic, any magic at all from the original two seasons has been flushed down the toilet by a bad plot, worse writing, and - wait for it - the ultimate insult: new voices for all the characters.

I didn't even finish the DVD ... I had to turn it off, lest the last remaining fondness for my childhood be consumed by this thing.

(sigh) You never can go home again. (But at least you can shop there.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer at January 23, 2006 11:22 PM. Posted to Entertainment.

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Posted by: marnie at January 25, 2006 10:40 AM

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