After shutting down my MySpace page, and in recognition of the nonexistent blogging potential at Facebook, I thought I'd use this blog as my dumping ground for observations about gadgets and pop culture, especially when they tie into nostalgic themes.

Last year when "JJ Trek" came out, I was quite merciless in my criticism of it, both aesthetically and storywise. I also never warmed up to the new Battlestar Galactica. And I am not a fan of the Star Wars prequels, to put it mildly.

And so I'm probably not the only Gen-Xer who was holding out some hope for Yamato Rebirth to stoke the flames of Starblazers nostalgia.

The property of Yamato has been abused even worse than Star Trek. The problem was that Nishizaki never knew when to quit while he was ahead. From the time Yamato caught its 2nd wind (around the time the original Star Wars came out) until Final Yamato in 1983 (around the time Return of the Jedi came out) Yamato "product" flew off of the assembly lines.

Now, I am not a Yamato afficionado. I haven't seen the Bolar Wars or a couple of the movies. So some of what I'm saying here comes as a matter of hearsay. But it's commonly felt that the first two series (and films) represent the creative peak of the show, and after that, it was just a matter of milking an increasingly stale property without really tapping back into what made it successful in the first place.

It's kind of the SF equivalent of Die-Hard in the sense that you have to keep generating this implausible scenario that only one "last hope" can save the day. That can work once or twice, but then the word "contrived" starts to come to mind.

As early as the 2nd film, the theme of the show had started to shift from honoring the Argo/Yamato as a symbol to outright fetishism. This reached nearly absurd levels with Final Yamato which found some way to resurrect captain Avatar and send the ship to a doom not that far off to a death-scene not unlike The Last Temptation of Christ.

The problem with writing for Yamato was that the ship and the core characters became the focus rather than the underlying mission. The first two series managed to balance the melodrama with the mission. From the end of the 2nd movie (which was excised from continuity) onward, it started to be more about "assumed" emotional investment. We're supposed to already care deeply about the Yamato and her crew to the point where every nick or cut is worthy of lengthy camera pans and swooning string sections.

Now, I'm all for melodrama. I'm a melodramatic person myself. But there comes a point where it just goes over the top.

I don't have a sub of Yamato Rebirth, so I had to just kind of guess what was going on based on the plot description and watching the Japanese dialogue. Based on this screening, it has a very Star Trek movie feel as far as rebuilding the ship and reuniting the crew with a bunch of new recruits. This includes a shuttle scene approaching the rebuilt ship in which we're all supposed to ooh and ah.

I wanted to play along, and maybe I could, if the actual style of the animation matched the originals.

That, unfortunately, is where I was let down the most.

You see, Leiji Matsumoto has an instantly recognizable style. It's recognizable enough that almost all his characters derive themselves from a few basic archetypes. The Wildstar type, the Nova type, and so on. Most male characters have knobby sort of noses. The women have long luxurious hair that look Art Nouveau, and eyes that were flat at the top with those long eyelashes.

What happened is that there was a huge schism between Matsumoto and Nishizaki. Matsumoto was barred from using Yamato in his own works, and instead he focused on building up his other properties around the Harlock and Galaxy Express 999 tentpole. The problem for Matsumoto is that, thematically, Yamato was the big prize. His other work just doesn't resonate as much.

Since Nishizaki isn't an artist or even much of a writer, with the loss of Matsumoto as a creative partner, he wasn't really able to do anything, besides fall into a pit of self-desctructive behavior.

But Nishizaki needed Matsumoto more than the reverse. That's why Yamato 2520 was a disaster.

The fact of the matter is that there is something inherently powerful about Matsumoto's artwork. I can't explain what it is. You just know it when you see it. Generic anime character designs just can not compete with it, and generic anime designs is what was on tap for Yamato Rebirth. Wildstar and Sandor are barely recognizable as older versions of themselves. And because all the ink and paint is done digitally, the organic painterly look of classic Yamato is long gone. The CG isn't terrible, but I much prefer the wobbly lines of the original rotoscoping. This contrast of then vs. now is on open display in a flashback scene to Final Yamato. It's there where you see Matsumoto's artwork again. The knobby noses. The rounded square look of the eyes. Even in the worst scripts, you always had the artwork. This was the artwork that justified the "Roman Albums" which featured (real?) cells.

Anyway, some pictures are worth a thousand words:

The original - Art that screams: "I'll make you cry like a chick-flick, damnit!"

Yamato Rebirth - Art that screams: "just another day at the office":

So you can see, the new stuff looks good, but it doesn't look right.

The star of Yamato wasn't the ship or the crew, it was Matsumoto's art. And so there's no real way to 'jones' on the new film. It's probably going to doom my ability to enjoy the liveaction remake as well with the muted leather jackets (we can't have spandex and bright colors in live action!) and the all-Japanese cast which seems to be cloning the Battlestar remake formula.

We'll see.

I already feel like I'm mourning a franchise all over again. It's not quite as cut and dried as the Star Wars prequels or JJ Trek, but it's still sad to know that you "can't go home again".