Like Bob, I caught the very first episode and was hooked.
Labor Day 1979. I had already been watching Battle of the Planets. And they actually advertised the previous week that this new show Star Blazers would be taking over the time slot. I was so disappointed at first, then I saw the commercials for the new show, and "Wow... That looks REALLY neat!"
So, forewarned, I actually caught the first episode.
The story does not start with the Argo. It instead starts with Captain Avatar as captain of one of the last Earth Battleships commanding our last spacefleet. They are trying to attack the forward base the Gamilons have at Pluto. The base where they are raining nuclear planet bombs on Earth.
The Earth has no seas. Almost no atmosphere. Poisonous radioactivity seeping into the ground. Poisoning the last underground strongholds (They didn't use the word back then, but the underground cities are definitely Geo-Fronts). In little more than a year, all remaining life on Earth will be extinct, even in the underground cities. In a flashback, as Avatar looks back from his vantage point aboard his battleship leaving for Pluto, the Earth looks more like Mars than the blue-green globe we are familiar with.
Flash forward to the battle. The Gamilons call for our surrender. Captain Avatar tells his comm officer to send them one word, "IDIOTS!" The man has cajones!
Earth's forces are getting their asses kicked. Our beam weapons don't have the range on the Gamilons. And while our missiles can kill them, we don't have nearly enough. One ship after another is destroyed. Finally only two are left, Captain Avatar's Battleship and a destroyer called the Paladin. The Paladin pulls a delaying action in order to let the larger ship escape. The Paladin fights fiercely and to the last, but the outcome is never in doubt, she goes down with all hands.
Captain Avatar's ship limps for home to the blasted Earth.
That's how this series STARTS!! That's the first TEN MINUTES!!!
As the first episode unfolds, we learn that two cadets, Derek Wildstar and Mark Venture, are stationed on one of our last outposts on Mars and have found the wreck of a starship that just crashed. It's not one of ours, but it's not one of the Gamilons either. There is an escape pod and a dead girl carrying a message capsule.
The two cadets retrieve the capsule and are ferryed back to Earth by Captain Avatar. Along the way, Derek finds out that his brother, the Captain of the Destroyer Paladin, has been lost.
The girl was the sister of Queen Starsha, who has sent the plans for a faster-than-light drive called the Wave Motion engine. She also offers the Earth a device called the Cosmo DNA, a device that can remove the radioactivity from the entire planet and restore it. She cannot send that to them herself. But with the FTL Wave Motion Engine, Earth is more than welcome to come and get it. But her home of Iscandar lies in the Great Magellanic Cloud, over 148,000 light years away. The Earth Defense Forces set an audacious plan into motion...
A couple of weeks later, Derek and Mark are lounging around the hanger of the local military base when an alert comes in. There is a Gamilon recon ship in the vicinity. Derek, incensed, convinces Mark to come along with him and they take a fighter up to confront it. But they have engine problems and crash in what was once the Japan seabed. They hop out and look around as they wait to be rescued. They wonder, why was that Gamilon plane all the way out here? What's here to look at?
Walking up the rise of low hill, they are startled to come upon the remains of the ancient Battleship Yamato, lying exposed... in the dying rays of sunset...
You talk about searing an image into one's brain. That series will stay with me forever. I just typed all of that from hard-coded memory. No looking up of sources.
-Logan
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Legolas - Obviously an Elvish word meaning "Gatling Gun".
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Labor Day 1979. I had already been watching Battle of the Planets. And they actually advertised the previous week that this new show Star Blazers would be taking over the time slot. I was so disappointed at first, then I saw the commercials for the new show, and "Wow... That looks REALLY neat!"
So, forewarned, I actually caught the first episode.
The story does not start with the Argo. It instead starts with Captain Avatar as captain of one of the last Earth Battleships commanding our last spacefleet. They are trying to attack the forward base the Gamilons have at Pluto. The base where they are raining nuclear planet bombs on Earth.
The Earth has no seas. Almost no atmosphere. Poisonous radioactivity seeping into the ground. Poisoning the last underground strongholds (They didn't use the word back then, but the underground cities are definitely Geo-Fronts). In little more than a year, all remaining life on Earth will be extinct, even in the underground cities. In a flashback, as Avatar looks back from his vantage point aboard his battleship leaving for Pluto, the Earth looks more like Mars than the blue-green globe we are familiar with.
Flash forward to the battle. The Gamilons call for our surrender. Captain Avatar tells his comm officer to send them one word, "IDIOTS!" The man has cajones!
Earth's forces are getting their asses kicked. Our beam weapons don't have the range on the Gamilons. And while our missiles can kill them, we don't have nearly enough. One ship after another is destroyed. Finally only two are left, Captain Avatar's Battleship and a destroyer called the Paladin. The Paladin pulls a delaying action in order to let the larger ship escape. The Paladin fights fiercely and to the last, but the outcome is never in doubt, she goes down with all hands.
Captain Avatar's ship limps for home to the blasted Earth.
That's how this series STARTS!! That's the first TEN MINUTES!!!
As the first episode unfolds, we learn that two cadets, Derek Wildstar and Mark Venture, are stationed on one of our last outposts on Mars and have found the wreck of a starship that just crashed. It's not one of ours, but it's not one of the Gamilons either. There is an escape pod and a dead girl carrying a message capsule.
The two cadets retrieve the capsule and are ferryed back to Earth by Captain Avatar. Along the way, Derek finds out that his brother, the Captain of the Destroyer Paladin, has been lost.
The girl was the sister of Queen Starsha, who has sent the plans for a faster-than-light drive called the Wave Motion engine. She also offers the Earth a device called the Cosmo DNA, a device that can remove the radioactivity from the entire planet and restore it. She cannot send that to them herself. But with the FTL Wave Motion Engine, Earth is more than welcome to come and get it. But her home of Iscandar lies in the Great Magellanic Cloud, over 148,000 light years away. The Earth Defense Forces set an audacious plan into motion...
A couple of weeks later, Derek and Mark are lounging around the hanger of the local military base when an alert comes in. There is a Gamilon recon ship in the vicinity. Derek, incensed, convinces Mark to come along with him and they take a fighter up to confront it. But they have engine problems and crash in what was once the Japan seabed. They hop out and look around as they wait to be rescued. They wonder, why was that Gamilon plane all the way out here? What's here to look at?
Walking up the rise of low hill, they are startled to come upon the remains of the ancient Battleship Yamato, lying exposed... in the dying rays of sunset...
You talk about searing an image into one's brain. That series will stay with me forever. I just typed all of that from hard-coded memory. No looking up of sources.
-Logan
----------
Legolas - Obviously an Elvish word meaning "Gatling Gun".
----------