Space Battleship Yamato (宇宙戦艦ヤマト Uchū 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 and Star Blazers; an English-dubbed and partly edited version of the series was broadcast on American television under the latter title. In Spanish it is known as Nave Spacial, and in Arabic as Nousour El Fada (Space Eagles).

The first season, titled "Quest for Iscandar," began airing in Japan in 1974. Set 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 Stasha ("Starsha" in the English dub) of the planet Iscandar in the Large Magellanic Cloud has a device which can repair Earth's 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 Desler ("Deslok" in the English dub) is trying to irradiate Earth enough for his people to move there.

Like much anime of its time, the World War II themes and explicit violence were regarded as too explicit for Western children, and so the English dub in 1977 was toned down in these respects. Nevertheless, the epic story and high quality of the voice dub (though as the dubbing was done by non-union actors, their identities were obscured for years afterwards) earned it many fans who remember it fondly to this day.

The first season contained twenty-six episodes, following the Yamato 's year-long voyage across the galaxy and back. A ninety-minute theatrical movie version of the first season was made 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. This compilation movie was actually edited down further and dubbed into English in 1978, prior to the dubbing of the episodes as Star Blazers. This movie version, entitled simply Space Cruiser, was only given a limited theatrical release in Europe.

A theatrical movie titled Farewell to Space Battleship Yamato or Arrivederci Yamato followed, to bring an end to the story of the Yamato. In this film, the Yamato and her crew take on the Comet Empire and die valiantly as they save Earth once again. But as the popularity of this franchise became clear, a second season ("The Comet Empire") of the television series was produced, ignoring the movie and presenting a different plot against the movie's enemy without killing off the Yamato or its primary characters. The second season has generally tended to be the favorite of most of the series' American fans.

The theatrical movies Yamato: The New Voyage and Be Forever Yamato came next as prequels to a third television series, "The Bolar Wars." All three television series were dubbed in English and broadcast on American television. The Bolar Wars, however, only played to a small test market at the time and was not as widely seen until its release on VHS and DVD. "The Bolar Wars" has been criticized by most fans of the series since the now-familiar voice cast of the first two seasons was completely replaced in the third. This appears not to have been entirely the fault of the American production company, however, since the original cast members were non-union, and the production company had no way of contacting them following the long interval between the second and third seasons since most of them were students and had moved elsewhere in the meantime.

The saga ended in 1983 with the fifth theatrical movie, Final Yamato, in which the great ship is detonated like a bomb to protect Earth from an intergalactic tidal wave guided by yet another evil enemy. Melodrama abounds in this film, which takes inordinate amounts of time to show the remains of the ship repeatedly 'sinking' beneath the waves somewhere out beyond Earth.

- From Wikipedia