Terry Burr said:
I bought yamato and didn’t realize it was the live action. I wasn’t a fan. I’m gonna look for the anime one in a dubbed version. I’ve been told that starblazers is the same thing, just the american version. Another I am watching is attack on titan.
Terry
Terry NO the live action is NOT the same as either anime beyond the barest bones, most of it is completely different from the source, don’t go by it as a basis for the rest of the series, I’m not a fan of the live action version either because it went so far off the rails and changed so much as to be worthless to any fan of the anime.
Starblazers really only westernized the names of the characters and changed the Yamato to the Argo. This was because WW2 wasn’t all that long ago in 1978 and the US distributors didn’t want to ruffle any feathers so they went with a safer western name and in the western version makes a certain sense. Otherwise the story is unchanged from the Japanese version. I saw the condensed movie version of Yamato in 1976 and then the Starblazers series in 1978 and was impressed by how much of the Japanese version it retained, this was reinforced when I finally got to see the whole Japanese series later in the 1980s. Starblazers is Yamato only with sillier cartoon character names. Otherwise still a landmark series in either language.
I highly recommend any Anime versions, but be careful with the original Japanese versions to start with the first, there are three series and I think two or three movies, all in more or less chronological order. Starblazers did the three tv series in English. But my highest recommendation is still the 2199 version.
Check them out but keep in mind that these were made by hand before computers and CGI made things like Attack on Titan so amazingly smooth and fluid.
(edit) Dam…I just realized, I saw Yamato in 1976, that’s a year BEFORE that little film from that Lucas guy was released.(http://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-tongue-out.gif)