Space Battleship Yamato (宇宙戦艦ヤマト Uchu Senkan Yamato) is a Japanese science fiction anime series created by Leiji Matsumoto, and the name of its eponymous space craft. It is also known to English-speaking audiences as Space Cruiser Yamato or Star Blazers; an English-dubbed and partly edited version of the series was broadcast on American and Australian television under the latter title. In Spanish it is known as Nave Espacial, in Portuguese, in Portugal as A Força Astral, in Brasil it is known as as Patrulha Estelar, in Arabic as Nousour El Fada (Space Eagles) and in Greek as Διαστημόπλοιο Αργώ (Spaceship Argo).

Conceived in 1973 by producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki, the project underwent heavy revisions. Originally intended to be an outer-space variation on Lord of the Flies, the project at first was titled "Asteroid Ship Icarus" and had a multinational teenage crew journeying through space in a hollowed-out asteroid in search of the planet Iscandar. There was to be much discord among the crew; many of them acting purely out of self-interest and for personal gain. The enemy aliens were originally called Rajendora.

When Leiji Matsumoto was brought onto the project, many of these concepts were discarded. It is his art direction, ship designs and unique style that accredit him in fans' eyes as the true creator of Space Battleship Yamato, even though Nishizaki retains legal rights to the work.

The first season began airing in Japan in 1974. Set in the year 2199, an alien race known as the "Gamilas" ("Gamilons" in the English dub) are raining radioactive bombs on Earth, rendering the planet's surface dead and uninhabitable. Humanity lives in refuges built deep underground. When all seems lost, a mysterious message is received by Earth's military forces, revealing plans for a faster-than-light engine and containing a message that Queen Starsha of the planet Iscandar in the Large Magellanic Cloud has a device, the Cosmo-Cleaner D (Cosmo DNA), which can cleanse Earth of its radiation damage.

The inhabitants of Earth secretly convert the ruin of the Japanese battleship Yamato into a massive spaceship, the Space Battleship Yamato of the title, complete with a new, incredibly powerful weapon called the "wave motion gun". In the English dub, the ship is still the historical Yamato and referred to as such, but is renamed the Argo (after the ship of Jason and the Argonauts) once rebuilt. An intrepid crew leaves in the Yamato to go to the Large Magellanic Cloud and retrieve the mysterious device, if it exists. Along the way they discover the plans of their blue-skinned adversaries: the planet Gamilas, sister planet to Iscandar, is dying; and its leader, Lord Desslar ("Desslok" in the English dub), is trying to irradiate Earth enough for his people to move there, at the expense of the "barbarians" he considers humanity to be.

The first season contained twenty-six episodes, following the Yamato 's year-long voyage across the Galaxy and back. A continuing story, it features the declining health of the determined captain Okita (Avatar in the English dub), and the transformation of the brash young orphan Susumu Kodai (Derek Wildstar) into a mature and capable-acting captain, as well as his budding romance with female crewmember Yuki Mori (Nova).

The series was condensed into a ninety-minute theatrical movie by selecting a few key episodes, editing them heavily, and sticking them together; as a result, the first-season movie leaves large gaps and doesn't flow very well. Additional animation was created for the movie (such as the scenes on Iscandar) or recycled from the series' test footage (such as the opening sequence). The movie was edited down further and dubbed into English in 1978; entitled Space Cruiser Yamato or simply Space Cruiser, it was only given a limited theatrical release in Europe, though it was released on video.

From Wikipedia