Here's the opening two-minutes of SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO from Fuji Television's SMAPxSMAP show broadcast on November 29th (Japan Time)! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk5AyXPfVZs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ntzxbf_NhUM "Hold onto this, while I 'ave a word with yer Mum!" ~ Classic stuff indeed!
Wow, looks a lot like Battlestar Galactica. Why would you have those ridiculous rotating yellow hazard lights on a starship bridge?
Any space adventure being made now (and there aren't any) is going to be compared to GALACTICA, even though the original BSG had borrowed from the original YAMATO (according to Glen A. Larson). YAMATO was aired in Japan four years before BSG premiered in the US. When the original BSG premiered, most people mercilessly compared it to STAR WARS... But, the only thing that they had in common was John Dykstra. Here's a review of SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO by the Japan Times' redoubtable Mark Schilling: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/ ... 126a1.html Countdown — 1 DAY LEFT UNTIL RELEASE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc7HNWiCA9E Here's a second clip from the same show; the Yamato casts off with an alien super-weapon baring down on her: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nIej5weq1U
Name three recent space adventures in addition to this that have been compared to Galactica as much as this has. This feels very much like the 2003 Battlestar Galactica. The design style, movement, and camerawork used for the CGI ships, the set design, the sound design. Even the pilot helmets look like Viper pilot helmets. The similarities are very strong, IMHO, and that makes it feel like a copycat product. I'll gladly see it if I get the chance but to me the association is going to be there.
There have been none in the wake of GALACTICA (except for STARGATE: UNIVERSE), which have a similar "war in space" plot — but, just like after STAR WARS came out, and changed cinema, everything was compared to STAR WARS. The same now holds true for the new BSG. That's my point. There were series before the new BSG, with a similar style of filming and visual effects, which were not drawn against it — such as FIREFLY and SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND (a personal favorite of mine for it's similarity to YAMATO). I was never a big BABYLON 5 fan, so I can't comment with authority in any kind of comparison. Of course, there's SGU, which has a similar photographic palate and visual effects to the new BSG. Interesting note: I've seen the entirety of both BSG and the new YAMATO film, and the one big difference between the visual effects style of them, is that in BSG, during space battles, the camera would go in and out of "focus", until it sought out it's focal point — an effect emulating documentary/news camera photo (which I saw for the first time in Shusuke Kaneko's 1999 film, GAMERA 3). Conversely, there is none of this technique employed in the new YAMATO — the "camera" is consistently "in focus" throughout.
