

Season 3 • Episode 25
LatestSpace Battleship Yamato is a Japanese science fiction anime series featuring an eponymous spacecraft. It is also known to English-speaking audiences as Space Cruiser Yamato; an English-dubbed and heavily edited version of the series was broadcast on North American and Australian television as Star Blazers. The first two seasons of this version were broadcast in Greece in 1981-82 as Διαστημόπλοιο Αργώ. An Italian-language version was also broadcast under the name Star Blazers in Italy, and a Portuguese-language version was successfully shown in Brazil under the title Patrulha Estelar and Viaje a la Ultima Galaxia or Astronave Intrepido in Spain and Latin America. It is a seminal series in the history of anime, marking a turn towards more complex serious works and influencing works such as Mobile Suit Gundam and Neon Genesis Evangelion; Hideaki Anno has ranked Yamato his favorite anime and credited it with sparking his interest in anime. Yamato was the first anime series or movie to win the Seiun Award, a feat not repeated until the 1985 Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.
Score
That horn section will live in your head rent-free forever.
Direction
Leiji Matsumoto's visual poetry makes spaceships feel like funeral barges.
Writing
Serialized storytelling that actually killed characters permanently. In 1974!
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
This resurrected the sunken WWII battleship Yamato as humanity's savior—a controversial reclamation of imperial military imagery that sparked decades of debate in Japan.
Hideaki Anno's obsessive fandom led him to storyboard entire episodes from memory; the 'white comet' finale of Evangelion directly quotes Yamato's wave motion gun aesthetics.