The "Anime Space Race" created by Battle Of The Planets

[Cure DragonEagle 255]

Battle Of The Planets was an iconic show but one of the biggest legacies it has that hasnt been brought up is the "Anime Space Race" it created. When it aired, at the red hot heat of Star Wars it created a bigger demand for outer space shows in the USA. The biggest of these being Star Blazers (Space Battleship Yamato) which had the company that brought it brag "Most Space shows are really repackaged and edited super hero shows (directly criticizing Battle) but our show is outright set on space!"

[Stardust]

Technically we could argue it did have to do with outer space to a degree. It dealt with an alien entity coming to our planet to take over for their planet. Messing with twins and forcing them to merge, and then hanging out for about 15 or so years waiting for said merged twins to grow up some and make the poor mutant his puppet. All while building up Galactor.
Then at the end of it all, he tells Katse see ya, I lied to you, and blasts off into outer space. Only to return and ruin some other poor child's life.

[Cure DragonEagle 255]

Technically we could argue it did have to do with outer space to a degree. It dealt with an alien entity coming to our planet to take over for their planet. Messing with twins and forcing them to merge, and then hanging out for about 15 or so years waiting for said merged twins to grow up some and make the poor mutant his puppet. All while building up Galactor.
Then at the end of it all, he tells Katse see ya, I lied to you, and blasts off into outer space. Only to return and ruin some other poor child's life.

Too bad Battle cut all of that out lol. Gatchaman has that backstory and ending but not Battle. The only addendum I would tell that Starblazers guy "There is an space alien but the reveal was cut out!"

[Stardust]

True enough. At that time having an individual that carried both sex parts and can change at will was just something American minds weren't ready for apparently. Same reason why ten years later Sailor Neptune and Uranus we're dubbed as cousins.
I appreciated it when they re did Sailor Moon and not only took away the cousins crap, but had Uranus be non-binary.

[The Other Jason]

Hi Cure DragonEagle,

Battle Of The Planets was an iconic show but one of the biggest legacies it has that hasnt been brought up is the "Anime Space Race" it created. When it aired, at the red hot heat of Star Wars it created a bigger demand for outer space shows in the USA. The biggest of these being Star Blazers (Space Battleship Yamato) which had the company that brought it brag "Most Space shows are really repackaged and edited super hero shows (directly criticizing Battle) but our show is outright set on space!"

After Star Wars re-ignited the interest in the genre, there were going to be a lot of space-based follow-up projects no matter what. But Sandy Frank’s Battle of the Planets beat most of them to air. His unreal sales success was noticed by other North American program buyers, as well as where he got his content. It proved Japanese animation was a viable option again.

There was an earlier dubbed version of the Yamato feature film that got syndicated to some parts of the US in 1978, It beat Battle to air by more than half a year. But despite its content, it didn’t seem to have created much of a stir. It was offered to the US under different circumstances though, and didn’t have Sandy’s push behind it.

Without Battle, I really wonder how long it would have taken for anyone else to take notice of things from Japan. Surely, I think Japanese studios would have pushed their space-based programming harder after Star Wars. So something likely would have happened. But how soon? Without Battle, would Yamato have been chosen as the first post-Star Wars Japanese series to be developed, or would another series have capitalized on it?

If that was an actual statement from the promoters of Star Blazers… well, they weren’t wrong!