Star Blazers the Quest for Iscandar.

The bus arrived at the bus stop just after 7:30. Star Blazers was on from 7 – 7:30. I had less then 5 minutes to get out of the house and to the bus before it was too late. Sometimes I made it, sometimes I didn’t. I got pretty good at grabbing my lunch and running to the bus stop in record time though.

I was just a little one then, and now I’m in my thirties and I haven’t watched, much less thought about Star Blazers in a long time until recently. Why you ask? Well, my boyfriend recently bought some Robotech DVD’s. I guess they’ve released that series on DVD. I don’t know anything about Robotech, nor (I have found) do I really like it much, but it brought back old memories of Star Blazers. It must have been done about the same time because the animation looks identical. So, I got curious, and went to Amazon.com to perform a search. And sure enough, they had Star Blazers on DVD too! So I began buying the DVD’s. I have the whole 1st series now (The Quest for Iscandar) and I love it. Watching it is a fun nostalgia trip for me. It makes me wonder why I haven’t thought about the series since I was little.

Plot? Earth is under attack by a mysterious force, so the Star Force sets off to Iscandar, a far away planet that has sent a message saying they have a machine that can save Earth. On the way, the Star Force encounters the (eventually blue) skinned Gamalons who try to stop the Star Force from reaching Iscandar at every turn.

There is excellent character development in Star Blazers. Everyone from Derek Wildstar (the main hero) to IQ-9 (the R2-D2 like robot) has an important role in the series and they are all great characters. I always thought Star Blazers would be a great movie, but as much as I would love to see that, I just don’t think it could ever work. Hollywood has a way of ruining things like that, and the Star Blazers story is far more epic then you can fit into a 2-hour movie anyway. It would have to be a Lord of the Rings type trilogy, and they’ll never do that.

The Argo is still one of the greatest spaceships I have ever seen. The once waterbound Argo, equipped with what is still I think the most impressive weapon ever put on a spaceship (the wave motion gun), has yet to be surpassed by anything flying in space in any Sci-Fi fantasy out there. And dating a geek, trust me, I’ve seen a few ;-)

The DVD’s themselves are pretty basic. Some of them contain a little bit of extra stuff, maps to Iscandar, character bio’s etc.. but nothing too interesting. I wish they had done some commentary, give people like me who grew up with this series as a kid some neat adult insight into the series. But unfortunately, there’s nothing like that included. The episodes hold up on their own though still. Things like the space warp take a bit of a 70’s psychedelic trip, but it isn’t too bad. Especially if you grew up with the series. The nostalgia alone should easily override any cheese factor.

For some reason though, the last disc in the Iscandar series (part VI) is a bit messed up. I don’t know if it’s just my copy or what, but if you try and select a chapter after watching part of an episode, the disc seems to jump to a chapter other then what you selected. It’s different every time too, as if it just chooses at random. Though if you watch the episodes straight through, there’s no problem. I may have just got a bad copy; I have no way to tell.

The bottom line is, if you watched this series either before or after school as a kid, then you’re going to love the DVD release. If you didn’t, you’ll probably feel as I do about Robotech. Never heard of it, never watched it, no nostalgia, don’t much care. :-)