Vengeance Of My Youth's Arcadia

 

 

Sure. Have a pummeled kid look up mid-thrashing, exclaim “Captain Harlock!” and let the audience figure out that guy from the wanted poster earlier, with the eyepatch and the skull-and-crossbones suit, that guy is probably a space pirate. That’s how Captain Harlock debuts in 1979’s Galaxy Express 999 film, a walking bit of iconography at home among the movie’s space trains and cosmic frontier towns.

Three years later, Captain Harlock would get his own feature film in Toei’s Arcadia Of My Youth. Appearing at the tail end of a space-opera fad, Arcadia puts Leiji Matsumoto’s most iconic character front and center, gambling his charisma is enough to carry a picture without advance public-relations buildup from any juvenile galaxy-train passengers. Here’s everything in one package, how Harlock became a cosmic corsair and where his space battleship Arcadia came from, in a film filled with romance, tragedy and conflict, and yet ultimately, weirdly, confusedly unsatisfying on first watch. At least, that’s how it was for me. 

 

 Sure, no movie’s gonna live up to the anticipation we had for Arcadia. “We,” of course, being the anime nerd crew I hung with in the early days of Reagan’s second administration. Warped by afternoon syndication of Star Blazers, we sniffed out Roman Albums and “Special Mooks” at local comic shops and comic cons. “Animation Comics” taught us about someone named Captain Harlock, his name regularly spelled out in English. Was he a space pirate? Looking like that, he’d better be.

 

 

We had definite Harlock expectations, mussed slightly by the whimsy of the nascent home video industry, which would bring us New World’s Galaxy Express dub with a renamed, celebrity-soundalike Harlock and the two ZIV International VHS releases of selected episodes of the 78 Harlock series. ZIV’s localizations, stonily accurate or wildly nonsensical, were bookended with a theme song that exhorted us to “Take to the sky!” And when Harmony Gold stitched that entire ‘78 series together with 1981’s Queen Millennia to create the “Captain Harlock And The Queen Of 1000 Years” teleseries, the retooling was an entirely different, comically inferior experience. Our gang wanted to see the REAL Captain Harlock, and to us that meant Arcadia Of My Youth, the film that shows us how Captain Harlock met spaceship engineer Tochiro Oyama and enigmatic female space-freebooter Emeraldas, and how they all became outlaws flying freely through the immensity of space.

By the time Celebrity Home Video released a package of edited, dubbed Japanese anime features that included Cyborg 009 Legend Of The Super Galaxy, Locke The Superman, and Arcadia Of My Youth as “Vengeance Of The Space Pirate,” our local crew had a few years of tape swapping and video-room programming under its belt. We’d seen the Macross movie and Project A-Ko and the rest of that period’s shiny, high-tech productions, filled with cute girls and expanding transformable robots. Might we have grown past Arcadia without even realizing it? But there Arcadia was, at a MRSP eight times the minimum hourly wage. Our dream movie was finally in our hands, sadly complete with lackluster dubbing and clumsy edits, one more piece of Bad American Dubbing, another obstacle on our path to True Arcadia Satisfaction.

Arcadia's previous American VHS releases

 

The 1990s rolled around and anime found itself embraced by a home video market hungry to fill Suncoast and Mediaplay shelves. That’s when pioneering American localizer AnimEigo released Arcadia Of My Youth, uncut and subtitled in English. Here it was, the full film without edits or bad dubbing, available at Blockbuster or at your local anime con. Here’s that Captain Harlock movie in the form you’ve been demanding, surely this satisfy your Harlock needs, right? This SHOULD be your favorite movie ever. And it... still wasn’t. Kind of a letdown. Was it too slow? Too long? Dependent upon a vast scope and a widescreen spectacle that 1990s VHS and tube televisions simply could not deliver? Maybe… maybe that last part.

Let’s skip a few decades, to when Discotek Media delivers a beautiful Blu-Ray of the film, matched with their release of Arcadia’s TV sequel Endless Orbit SSX. North American viewers- that’s me- could maybe, finally, mercifully get past that Celebrity hack’n’slash job and AnimEigo’s well-intended but slightly hazy release. This high-def version of Arcadia appeared on various streaming platforms, potentially into every internet-enabled home, at a point where North American anime culture has been prepped by English-language releases of the 1978 Harlock series, the Galaxy Express 999 films, and Leiji Matsumoto’s ‘70s Harlock manga. In other words, American audiences- again, that’s me- could watch Arcadia and be closer than ever to the film’s original context, freed from the murky expectations built up by fanzine synopses, Roman Albums, and fuzzy, badly dubbed VHS. How does this Arcadia feel now? Short answer: this movie finally works.

Let’s start with the film’s title itself. The legitimacy of a claimed a Goethe quote is largely dependent upon there being very little crossover between Goethe fans and anime nerds. More prosaically, Arcadia Of My Youth recalls “Marianne Of My Youth,” a 1955 French/German film starring Horst “the German James Dean” Buchholz as a Bavarian boarding school student who falls in love with a mysterious girl played by Heimatfilm star Marianne Hold. Hold would inspire Leiji Matsumoto’s Maetel, as well as songs by Japanese avant-garde rockers Jacks and power balladeers THE ALFEE.

Arcadia the film avoids Harlock’s previous anime iterations, instead building out from two of Leiji Matsumoto’s mid-1970s “Battlefield Manga” stories. The job of bringing all this into the thirtieth century fell to Arcadia screenplay author Yooichi Onaka, who seems to have done a little TV writing and two Arcadia novelizations. Battlefield’s “Stanley’s Witch” becomes the basis for Arcadia’s pre-credits scene starring our hero’s early 20th century ancestor Phantom F. Harlock, voiced here in his final role by actor Yujiro Ishihara, brother of ultranationalist Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara. Flying his “Arcadia” tagged biplane, Phantom F. pits his life against the challenge of crossing the Owen Stanley mountains in New Guinea, unwilling to give up his dream even if it costs him everything.

As Arcadia Of My Youth’s credits roll we find ourselves back to the future, where Pacific War comparisons move from subtext to text as our home planet surrenders to hegemonic galaxy invaders the Illumidas, whose greenish skintone splits the difference between that of Yamato enemies Gamilas and the Comet Empire. Any comparisons between the Illumidas occupation of Earth and the American occupation of Japan are purely coincidental on purpose, you understand.

Amidst Earth’s collapse, Solar Federation captain Harlock tries and fails to run the alien-invasion blockade and is forced back to Earth with a cargo of refugee passengers. His command and career are kaput, and he can’t even hang out with his willowy blonde girlfriend Maya because she’s deep undercover DJ’ing clandestine Earth resistance radio. There’s nothing for Harlock but to join the rest of the hungry Earthman masses struggling to find a meal in the ruins. This is where he meets fellow former Federation officer, genius engineer and future best friend Tochiro Oyama, during a silly bar fight that supplies most of the film’s comic relief.

The Illumidas policy is to recruit conquered citizens and exploit them for police-state grunt work. This means there aren’t any hard feelings when officer Zoll of defeated planet Tokarga arrests our heroes and Illumidas brain-machines investigate both their genetic structures; Zoll is just following orders. This brings us to our second “Battlefield” excerpt, a lengthy memory-flashback starring Harlock and Tochiro’s ancestors, who met each other during WWII in an attempt to flee to an episode of Heidi, Girl Of The Alps (Zuiyo Eizo, 1974). Back in the 30th century, we find the conquered Earth military is managed by sneering traitor Triter. Earth’s forces are offered a devil’s bargain of preferential treatment if they will prove their loyalty to Illumidas by crushing previous Illumidas subjects the Tokargans. Will Harlock captain that mission? He will not. He’s got his pride, and anyway, he’s got to stick around Earth for the sake of Maya’s radio career.

Maya’s morale-lifting broadcasts are ostensibly for all Earth, but get real; she’s passively-aggressively speaking just to Harlock. Before the two wise up and start talking privately, the Illumidas Communications Commission raids her broadcast studio. Harlock gets caught in the crossfire and well, let’s just say the film has leveled-up in its quest to show us Harlock’s origin.


Confiding in his newly one-eyed bestie, Tochiro reveals he’s secretly built a giant space battleship. Would Harlock like to be its captain so they can ditch this square world and blast off for kicksville? Boy, would he. But first Tochiro finds himself entranced by recent arrival Emeraldas, the free space trader whose giant spaceship has been damaged trying to make it through the Flame Stream Prominence, a dangerous stellar phenomenon dubbed the “Owen Stanley Witch Of Space.” I wonder if our heroes will challenge it later?

This assemblage of main characters is interrupted by La Miimay- not the blue-haired Miimay from the ‘78 show, but an incredible blonde simulation- who’s overheard big news during her secretarial job in Illumidas HQ. The command’s going out to demolish Tokarga. The entire planet is condemned.

Zoll and the Tokargans want to commandeer Tochiro’s spaceship and return to protect their home, but Tochiro knows you shouldn’t loan money, books, VHS tapes, or starships. Instead, Tochiro and Harlock will fly to Tokarga while Zoll and Earth resistance fighters do what they can to protect the Earth. That means we’re about an hour into the film before we finally meet our real star, the Arcadia. Erupting from its underground cavern helpfully built beneath what used to be the Solar Federation’s headquarters, we’re both amazed at the impressive scenario and curious as to how Tochiro intended to launch this thing if the bad guys hadn’t conquered the Earth.

Rescued from an Illumidas firing squad, Emeraldas receives her iconic scar (check another box, film) and Maya is also wounded, earning the full-on “Love Story” treatment, becoming more beautifully radiant the sicker she gets.

Arcadia the film sends Arcadia the ship through outer space and to a ruined Tokarga, now inhabited by corpses and Illumidas death-robots, overdue for annihilation. Rescuing a few stricken survivors and Harlock standby Mr. Bird, the Arcadia must challenge the Flame Stream Prominence to return to Earth, defying the peculiar life-energy attraction force these stars generate. Sure, that’s a strange quality to develop in a celestial object that by its very nature is inimical to all forms of life in the first place, but before we can question yet another illogical thing in this space pirate origin movie, a heroic sacrifice gets our heroes through this crisis. 

Harlock and the Arcadia return to Earth to mourn their dead, and right away blast off again for the film’s climactic final battle, where Arcadia comes closest to its thematic template– not the WWII-In-Outer-Space of Yamato, but the Hollywood pirate flicks of the 1930s and 1940s, in which enormous Age Of Sail ships of the line would blast broadsides at each other, until eventually our hero, a once-respected noble forced into piracy by cruel happenstance, would swing over the rigging and duel the enemy hand to hand. That’s how Arcadia Of My Youth ends, half an hour of whooshing space noises and staccato commands, laser blasts, gravity-warping explosions and swashbuckling extravehicular boarding, culminating in a cosmic burial-at-sea and a Captain Harlock finally fully equipped with goth fashion, iconic spaceship, and a helpful supporting cast, prepared at last to roam freely through the expanses of space, fine, nobody’s stopping you, go do it already.

Fandom writing about Harlock and AOMY from the 80s

Rising above Arcadia’s 130 minute haze is the character design and animation direction by the great Kazuo Komatsubara, the man behind the ‘78 Harlock series and a ton of other successes from super robots to magical girls. However, here K. Kazuo’s work isn’t lively enough to offset the film’s overwhelming lassitude. The direction by Tomoharu Katsumata is competent enough, with rare moments of quiet beauty, but he’s content to film great chunks of action in long shots, to frame gigantic space battleships in the middle distance without giving us a sense of size or mass, to pan across still shots of characters standing still. Compared to the nervous, organic motion of Rintaro’s Galaxy Express or to his reality-warping, electronic-music-soundtracked sequel Adieu, Arcadia’s risk-averse cinematography seems even tamer. The same year as Arcadia Katsumata also lensed the less-than-sizzling feature Future War 198X, and in 1985 he’d helm the legendarily tiresome Odin: Photon Sailer Starlight, another outer space non-actioner. Like an expensive sports car minus an engine, Arcadia Of My Youth doesn’t really go anywhere fast, but looks great doing it. 

My Ruler In Arcadia

It’s certainly not the film we were promised in the trailer, which in the best Hollywood tradition is made up largely of footage not seen in the actual film. The preview delivers spectacular spine-jarring footage of the Arcadia blasting its main cannons, shock obliterating the frame for seconds, smoke and dust and cosmic detritus swirling in the vacuum of space, whoops, this is footage lifted clean from 1979’s Galaxy Express. We see Harlock’s pal Zoll of Tokarga put a burst of unfriendly cosmo-gun energy right into Harlock’s eye, absolutely not how the film goes. The trailer’s soundtrack leans heavily on Dvorak’s New World Symphony, which can’t help but make the actual Arcadia’s Toshiyuki “Golgo 13: The Professional” Kimori soundtrack seem less than memorable and kind of a bait and switch on both the audience and Kimori.

As Arcadia Of My Youth ends with a purported Goethe quote, we’re left with more questions than are answered. Who are the Illumidas? Should their name actually be spelled “Ilumidus”? Why did they conquer Earth in the first place? Why bother conquering Tokarga years before, only to blow it up? If a film deliberately evokes the American occupation of Japan, can we speculate here that maybe the Earth deserved it? Did the Solar Federation’s astro-political mouth write some checks the Solar Federation’s astro-political ass couldn’t cash? How did Tochiro excavate a giant cavern, equip it with machinery, and construct a giant space battleship all by himself? What, exactly, is the relationship between Harlock and Maya? Are they brother and sister, are they dating, are they both, like in that Folger’s ad? Maybe he’s just an obsessed stalker, which would explain why she runs from him at one point. If they are actually a romantic couple, Arcadia needed to show us the pair walking in a meadow, laughing in slow motion, or shopping at Ikea. Any relationship signifier would do. A 130 minute film can give us Date Night Harlock along with Air Pioneer Harlock and Luftwaffe Ace Harlock. Except it can’t, because outside of the cockpit of an airplane or the bridge of a warship, Harlock doesn’t really exist. He doesn’t grow or change, there’s no Harlock character arc, he wasn’t turned into a grim specter of vengeance by outlaw bikers or sneering thugs or The System, Man, he was broody and stoic before this movie and he’ll be broody and stoic after it’s over, because being an eternal archetype means never having to evolve as a character.

That being said, I’ll admit I’m not being fair to Arcadia. This movie was released in 1982 to a Japanese audience that had already absorbed 42 episodes of a Captain Harlock TV series, two Galaxy Express films and a TV series featuring Harlock as a supporting character. The Japanese crowds watching AOMY didn’t NEED to know who Harlock was, or why, where and when, or convincing rationales for invading aliens and their whimsical planet-exploding foreign policies. They accept the film and its heroes for what they are; archetypes moving on a fixed course, past the background scenery of galactic empires, through narratives as unchangeable as any samurai epic, rubber-suit kaiju eiga, or gangster thriller. This is a film about a space pirate with a skull-festooned space battleship, created by Leiji Matsumoto, who’s made a career out of nostalgia-infused, iconic-character science fiction. Adjust expectations accordingly.

My dissatisfaction with the “Vengeance” release is not as qualified. The dub is mediocre; villains attempt bluster or smarm, heroes are quietly heroic, and some voice work, especially that of Maya, is awkward and stilted, hardly the diction of a supposed radio pro. Objectionable material is cut without regard to continuity or soundtrack. Entire scenes are missing, including the flashback opening sequence, leading to a print thirty minutes short. While I do think that Arcadia could do with a bit of trimming, this is clearly too much, and the Just For Kids box art depicting a not-appearing-in-this-film scene from the trailer merely confuses. AnimEigo’s release is of course superior. However, here in the 21st century the Discotek version is the one to watch and perhaps radically change opinions about Arcadia, featuring a big-screen hi-def image and an uncut “Vengeance” dub along with the original Japanese audio.

Arcadia humor comics in Animec Rapport Deluxe 6

I’ve spent a few decades trying to honestly assess Arcadia, trying to force my one-track brain away from teenage nerd expectations. Years of speculation, countless screenings of a trailer and two contemporaneous, arguably superior films starring essentially the same characters all have their thumb on the scales. However, regardless of presentation or context, Arcadia defies casual dismissal; if the test of a truly superior fictional character is his ability to transcend merely average material, Harlock passes with flying skull-and-crossbones colors. It’s obvious there’s a big difference between fuzzy VHS and the high-def home video of today, and in the case of Arcadia the differences are bold. Quieter scenes are filled with detail lost in tape-to-tape-to-tape transfers, and more subtly animated shots work as they were intended, rather than blurred out of existence. Viewers such as myself who might have last watched the movie on somebody’s living room tube TV back in the ‘90s might need their opinions recalibrated upwards, especially considering how Arcadia’s themes of holding on to principles in the face of sacrifice and failure seem to hold a lot more power after life has knocked you around for a few decades.

"Arcadia" comic by Dave Mitchell

Sadly, we can’t go back in time and tell ourselves to wait for the maturity that only years can bring, or even for the invention of better home video. What remains is the realization that perhaps Arcadia Of My Youth’s tagline needs updating – to paraphrase a paraphrased Goethe quote, at the end, men realize what their youth’s Arcadia needed was simply some solid Matsumoverse context and a Blu-Ray upgrade.

-Dave Merrill

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across the leijiverse

Leiji Matsumoto: Essays On The Manga And Anime Legend
McFarland & Co.
Editors Helen McCarthy and Darren-Jon Ashmore

Leiji Matsumoto isn't as well known in the English speaking anime-fan world as, say, Osamu Tezuka or Hayao Miyazaki. Tezuka’s manga career impacted every facet of the Japanese industry, and his animation aired across America for decades, while Miyazaki’s Academy Award-winning films have become their own aesthetic, a byword for the global reach of Japanese animation as serious cinema. Both are names any lazy entertainment media editor will drop into a headline for maximum clickbait value.

But Leiji? In America his most successful work was the syndicated TV cartoon Star Blazers, the localized Space Battleship Yamato. This series had the bad luck to hit an audience distracted by toy-commercial cartoons starring transforming robots. And yet, Leiji Matsumoto had undeniable impact here in North America. The film based on his Galaxy Express 999 manga was the first non-kiddie anime movie to get a national theatrical rollout. His artistic vision inspired American comics based on animated series that never aired in the States. His predilection for willowy, mysterious blondes ran rampant across syndicated cartoon television, the children's section of your local video rental, and the TVs of your local anime clubs - only Russ Meyer has had a larger impact on the visual portrayal of specific body types of women in the media. But while Tezuka and Miyazaki both have bookshelves worth of English-language texts exploring their lives and careers, Matsumoto has... zero.

However! This Leiji-shaped pothole in our anime knowledge has finally been measured, marked, filled, and steamrolled smooth, no longer impeding our progress. Leiji Matsumoto: Essays On The Manga And Anime Legend, recently published by McFarland & Co., is the long-awaited hard-copy exploration of his six-plus decades of artistic labor. Editors Helen McCarthy and Darren-Jon Ashmore have assembled a dream team of theorists and craftsmen that explore Leiji Matsumoto's popular works like Space Pirate Captain Harlock, Galaxy Express 999, Space Battleship Yamato, and The Cockpit, with every chapter featuring a different researcher exploring a new facet of Leiji Matsumoto's creativity, skill, and ethos.

With pieces from ten different contributors, the essays are naturally going to differ in tone and focus, language ranging from casual to academic and referencing everything from low-rent comic book publishers to highbrow philosophy. As an academic work Leiji Matsumoto: Essays On The Manga And Anime Legend isn’t the dashed-off pop culture typical of media fad publishing – this is a serious book that demands and rewards the reader’s extra attention.

Helen McCarthy takes us to then-Akira Matsumoto's youth in Fukuoka Prefecture, Kyushu, raised by parents that instilled diligent self-determination without neglecting culture, art, and film. I knew his father had flown fighter planes in the Pacific during WWII. What I didn't know, and what I learned from this book, is what Dad Matsumoto did AFTER the war, and how his moral code directly affected his family's fortunes and became an example for young Akira. His family survived postwar tragedy and hardship and while the younger brother eventually became an engineer and professor, Akira took the midnight train to Tokyo to find his fortune in the burgeoning manga industry, joining Tezuka, Ishinomori and others brute-forcing an entire medium into existence.

Licca-chan meets Captain Harlock

Matsumoto's early shoujo manga work, in part produced with his wife, fellow manga artist and Licca-chan fashion doll creator Miyako Maki, gave Matsumoto the track record and experience needed for his move out of the girls' school. With a pen name change to Leiji Matsumoto, he moved into worlds of science fiction, adventure, melodrama, and licensed Toshiba mascot characters, doing work for Tezuka's COM and adapting Night On The Galactic Railroad for "Friend of Hope" magazine. As a result, Leiji Matsumoto was perfectly placed to become the visual manager for Yoshinobu Nishizaki's Space Battleship Yamato project. Matsumoto remodeled the series, foregrounding the WWII In Space aesthetic and helping to spur not only a "Yamato Boom" but his own manga stardom, making his style inescapable for the rest of the decade.

Darren-Jon Ashmore explores the infinite canvas of Matsumoto's space opera, contrasting the transformative journey of characters like Captain Harlock, Tochiro Oyama, and Tetsuro Hoshino with Matsumoto's own regional express-train "bildungsroman," traveling as he did from Kyushu to Tokyo to become a man amidst a recovering Japan. Goethe and Wagner both reveal their inspirations for Matsumoto's worldview and Ashmore details the history of space opera with "Doc" Smith's Skylark and Lensman novels, their roots in western pulp fiction, and how Matsumoto combined several genres to push boundaries in late-50s shoujo epics like Marie Of The Silver Valley. Captain Harlock's origins as "Captain Kingston", derived from Sabatini's Captain Blood, reveal where young Matsumoto's dreams were moving; out, away from mundane troubles, to boundless oceans, towards the endless "wheel of time" we all cycle through.

Tim Eldred brings the eye of a professional animator and comic artist to a process-oriented chapter that examines how Matsumoto's work was modified for mass production both here and in Japan. We learn how Matsumoto's ethereal brush line was changed for animation, and Eldred delivers a fascinating look into a forgotten corner of American comic publishing, when comics based on Japanese anime properties could sell in the tens of thousands. His eyewitness look at what it took to publish Eternity's Captain Harlock comics is a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes. The problems of quickly rendering fleets of space battleships and of compressing the more relaxed narrative pace of a Leiji Matsumoto space opera into the rigid 24 pages of American periodicals are all detailed. Also reported firsthand: his own evening visiting Leiji Matsumoto at home, finding out what Matsumoto feels is Matsumoto's most representative work and whether Yamato influenced Star Wars or Star Wars influenced Yamato or both (it's both).

Jonathan Tarbox dives into Matsumoto's war stories, little seen in the West but perhaps the best example of comics exploring the human tragedy of warfare since Harvey Kurtzman was editing EC’s Frontline Combat. The Japanese ideals of purity and sacrifice in pursuit of a doomed goal are highlighted against Western concepts of heroism, as Joseph Campbell's mythic thousand-faced hero stacks up against the "noble failed hero" described by Yukio Mishima translator Ivan Morris. We're shown how notions of the ephemeral beauty of human achievement in our fallen world permeate Matsumoto's work, particularly in the three-part OVA series The Cockpit, where three different WWII stories show three different characters wrestling with sacrifice and duty.

1980s American VHS releases of Matsumoto anime films

Stefanie Thomas gets to tackle perhaps the most tangled knot in Matsumoto's intertwining space operas, the world of women and gender roles. What can we learn from Harlock’s female characters - the traditional, mothering Miimay, the boundary challenging Kei Yuki, and the cranky kitchen matron Masu versus the Mazone, who appear to be beautiful, seductive women, but who we're told are asexual plant creatures bent on dominating and/or destroying men? How does Maetel navigate both the 999's galactic railroad and her own character's journey from "mother figure" to "object of sexual desire" and back again? On what page does she name-drop Corn Pone Flicks (126)? Thomas examines the evolution and interplay of these characters against decades of women's rights campaigns in Japan and Matsumoto's own ideas and ideals of womanhood, informed by the women around him during his Kyushu childhood and the femininity presented to him in popular culture.

Captain Harlock TV and Galaxy Express 999 film laserdiscs

Edmund Hoff’s chapter looks at the origins of cosplay culture in 1980s Japan. First-hand reports of the controversies surrounding costuming at fan events like Comiket, the origins of the word "cosplay" itself, and how Matsumoto’s characters fueled the scene all enter into the investigation. Meanwhile, here in the present, award-winning costumers Ondine and Matthew Montoya deliver a detailed how-to guide all about building your own Captain Harlock and Captain Bainas (from 2012's Ozma, based on Matsumoto's 1961 manga) outfits from the ground up, including plans for a Mr. Bird puppet and how to get the proper facial scars without actually, you know, scarring your face.

Translator Zack Davisson speaks to his struggles at translating Matsumoto's poetic idiom into English, finding the rhythm and tone of opera serving as context for rendering the inner monologues and dramatic declarative statements of characters like Emeraldas and Captain Harlock. In live "translation battles" his approach is tested against that of Harvard professor Jay Rubin, and seeing the contrast between their takes on the material is an enlightening look at a process many anime and manga fans might take for granted.

Leiji Matsumoto in Kenya

In the final chapter Ashmore interviews Matsumoto for a wide-ranging conversation that bounces from his love of classical music, the origins of his iconic female characters, the impact of films like Shochiku’s 1943 The Spider And The Tulip, Fleischer’s 1941 Mr. Bug Goes To Town, and Scarlett O’Hara’s determination to never be hungry again. Matsumoto speaks to his early years in the newspaper and print industry, the coldness inherent in digitally-produced animation, and holds forth on the theories of race memory and time dilation that have come to the foreground in his work; the cyclical nature of universal time seeing iconic characters appear and re-appear in new yet familiar guises. Also discussed: how he and Ishinomori were accused of running an illegal underground cinema.

The usual adjective for books like this is “essential,” and usually that’s just overblown hype. In this case, Leiji Matsumoto: Essays On The Manga And Anime Legend is the real deal, honestly a one of a kind must-have. Informative, unique essays, revealing interviews, and an exhaustive appendix of Matsumoto’s manga and anime career guarantee you’ll be returning to this again and again. English-language work on manga-ka is rare enough, and to finally have the career and philosophy of one of the prime movers of the worldwide success of Japanese animation laid out for us is a pleasure long overdue.

Diecast Arcadia toy (author's collection)

Without Leiji Matsumoto, the infrastructure and industry that’s grown up around Japanese animation in North America would be very different. Certainly without his work I wouldn’t be here writing these words. If you’re interested in Japan or Japanese comics or animation, let alone Space Battleship Yamato or Galaxy Express 999 or Captain Harlock or Queen Millennia or anything else from his lifetime of creativity, Leiji Matsumoto: Essays On The Manga And Anime Legend needs to be on your bookshelf for every single revolution of that wheel of time.

-Dave Merrill

with special thanks to Stephanie Nichols and McFarland

collect 'em all!

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SSX, Eternally Orbiting

The 1980s! Not the sexy Miami Vice 1980s of pastel blazers, cocaine, and insider trading, but the nerdy suburban 1980s of cartoons, comic books, and computer clubs. Specifically the computer club in Conyers Georgia, where I'm off in the corner luring future Bill Gateses and Steve Jobses away from their Commodores and Apple II s with Eternal Orbit SSX on a 13 inch color TV. 

Eternal Orbit SSX was a TV sequel to a movie we'd never seen, itself the prequel to a TV show we'd also never seen, starring characters we didn't know in a language we didn't understand. But none of that mattered, because of Japanese animation's power to entertain across cultural boundaries in general, and specifically because SSX is all about Captain Harlock in black leather and scars and big stompy space boots, tooling around outer space in a giant battleship with a skull on the front, blowing things up in ways that nerdy 80s teens literally could not stop watching. 

Especially riveting for that computer club crowd was a scene in episode 4. Harlock's blasting his way through a space station crawling with faceless enemy-alien Illumidas soldiers. Suddenly he finds himself at bay, faced with a squad holding Kei Yuki and her space-journalist father hostage. They open fire. Harlock uses his cloak to mask his movements, Shadow style, and leaps from the ceiling to blast down the rest of the soldiers. Struck down, the Illumidas commander struggles to lift his pistol. Harlock stares as the gun barrel rises, pauses, falls. Then Harlock casually raises his own Cosmo-gun and blasts that Illumidas commander point blank in the skull. 

This is not the kind of cartoon hero behavior we expected in the 1980s. In fact I don't know if we expect this kind of behavior now. What I do know is that when screened for unsuspecting '80s audiences, this was surefire 100% entertainment. And yet, in spite of moments like this, Eternal Orbit SSX failed to find a TV audience in Japan, was cancelled after half a year, and took thirty-six (!!) years to legitimately reach English-language audiences. 

SSX wasn't popular in Japan and it wasn’t particularly popular with the Western anime fans that finally caught up with the show later in the decade. Raised on the transforming fighter planes of Macross and Mospeada, the space colony mecha warfare of Zeta Gundam, and the male-gaze girls' school battles of Project A-Ko, these 1980s-style anime nerds didn't have time for yet another trip with a very 70s space pirate. 

Were we experiencing Matsumoto burnout? After three series and four films worth of Space Battleship Yamato, after one Harlock TV series and a Harlock movie, after Galaxy Expresses and Danguard Aces and Starzingers, with a Queen Millenia looming on the horizon, maybe we'd had enough of Leiji Matsumoto for a while. SSX became a coda for that era, a winding down of a time when SF cartoons meant fleets of battleships, impossibly thin female leads, and supporting casts of squat dudes with crazy hair and thick glasses. All that would vanish with SSX. 

A sequel to the 1982 Toei feature Arcadia Of My Youth, Eternal Orbit SSX (airing October 13, 1982 – March 30, 1983) continued that film's narrative of an Earth defeated by the Illumidas Empire and how forcibly demobilized Solar Federation space battleship captain Harlock chases away those defeat blues by teaming up with his engineer pal Tochiro Oyama, donning a new set of sharp space pirate threads, and blasting off in the giant unstoppable space battleship Arcadia, conveniently built by Tochiro just in case some cosmic freebooting became necessary. Together with galactic free-trader Emeraldas (herself another satisfied space battleship owner) the trio seek freedom in the cosmos away from the quisling Earth Occupation Government and the ever expanding reach of the Illumidas. 

SSX literally starts before Arcadia Of My Youth ends. The film's final battle scene is recut for TV to include audience-identification character Tadashi Monono, a young wanna-be bounty hunter who splits the difference between 999’s Tetsuro and the 1978 Harlock’s Daiba - he’s too young to shave, but old enough to know he’s better suited cooking for the Arcadia’s crew than he is as a space gunslinger. In a Matsumotoverse that usually extols the never-flinching last-stand steadfastness of never ever backing down, Monono shines as one of the few characters allowed to change his mind, exhibit personal growth, and to royally screw up on occasion. 

The rest of SSX’s supporting cast also feels like slightly-off version of characters we’ve previously seen. Revi fills the “little girl” position Mayu will fill in 1978, while being a carbon copy of (and sharing a voice actor with) the doomed Mira we saw in the Arcadia movie. Dr. Ban is probaby the most professional and least alcoholic of any of the squat Matsumoto space doctors. Kei Yuki, here the daughter of a space journalist instead of a space scientist, is still rocking that red and blue outfit, but gets even less to do here than in 1978. The faceless lady alien quota is filled by Arcadia Of My Youth's La Mime, who is not the Miime we saw in '78, but that Miime’s sister, or so we would have learned, had SSX not gotten the axe. 

no ghosts or onions on the Arcadia, please

Emeraldas, the X in SSX, remains an enigmatic astral traveler, but spends most of this series absurdly unseen. She stars in a slew of her own easily adaptable manga adventures that could easily fill a third of the screen time, but SSX won't let her. Even episode 7, “X is Emeraldas”, is mostly people talking about Emeraldas, or Emeraldas seen in footage from Arcadia Of My Youth, or our Arcadia crew rescuing Emeraldas from an Illumidas trap. We'll see the same in the other Emeraldas-themed episode, “Save Emeraldas.” With only 22 episodes, this series shouldn't be repeating itself. 

Apologies to the gals but this is Captain Harlock's show and he's in just about every shot, whether he's looking stern at the wheel of the Arcadia, dodging Illumidas task forces, negotiating his way through a galaxy under occupation, or trying to tie together plot threads that dangle all the way from the Galaxy Express film to the '78 Harlock series, counting on his baked-in charisma to carry SSX past the rough patches of clunky animation, creaky sci fi-cliche stories, and a ponderous cosmic seriousness leavened only slightly by Tochiro Oyama's everyman lack of pretense. As a genius inventor Tochiro is always there to repair machines, act as comedy relief to Harlock's straight man, deliver useful expository dialogue to supporting characters, and pine after Emeraldas, whom he never really spends any time with at all. Aren't they supposed to have a kid together? 

Tochiro built the Arcadia, but his other technological triumph is the SSX. Not the SSX that stands for the Illumidas outlaw designations assigned to Harlock, Tochiro, and Emeraldas, but the SSX that's the codename for the orbiting fortress Tochiro built during the war as a secret supply and repair base. The Solar Federation's capitulation forestalled its deployment, but Harlock and crew find it indispensable. The SSX is a central unit with eight disc-shaped sections that can be deployed independently, is sometimes disguised as a comet, and the whole thing travels in an endless orbit (get it?). 

SSX the TV series also meanders a bit. The show coasts on the epic Wagnerian cosmic-opera momentum of the Arcadia film, but fails to generate its own Weltanschauung. SSX doesn't have charismatic arch-enemies or an evil master plan to thwart. We're never told exactly where the Illumidas came from or why they're hell-bent on conquering the galaxy. Give it a few episodes and we start to wonder exactly how the Illumidas conquered their empire in the first place. They seem to be a collection of incompetents and screwups run ragged by a one-eyed guy in a tacky green spaceship. The Illumidas don't have Desslars, Domels or Hakkens or any of those handsome Matsumoto bad boys you love to hate. Just faceless green goons, their storm troopers sleek and slim, a faint echo of the Mechanized Empire troopers from Adieu 999. 

Arcadia vs Deathshadow

The most memorable SSX enemies are all turncoat Earthmen forced by circumstance to fight for the Illumidas, who at least exercise commendable thrift in putting their conquered foes to work. Grounded space captain Bentselle signs on to fight Harlock in Harlock’s old ship the Deathshadow, last seen crashlanding in the Arcadia film.This tragic encounter leaves Bentselle a mechanized survivor, who, having apparently seen the Galaxy Express 999 film, eventually beaches the Deathshadow in its designated parking spot on planet Heavy Meldar. Former Solar Federation spaceship designer and 1850s riverboat gamber fashion victim Mr. Zone becomes the show's primary antagonist by default. Carrying out a prewar grudge against Harlock by wheedling ships and crews out of the Illumidas and using them up in one ill-fated scheme after another, Zone's obsession has its own hidden agenda, as we learn late in the show. Speaking of turncoats and quislings, the traitor Earth prime minster Triter briefly reprises his role from the Arcadia film. Triter shows up for two seconds early on and then vanishes completely from the narrative, depriving SSX of what might have been an enjoyable, thoroughly contemptible character. 

the hateful and stylish Mr. Zone

How does this hands-off management style work for the Illumidas? Poorly. The Arcadia flies rings around the junkyard of lame, non-souped-up wimpmobiles that creak out of the Illumidas’ outer-space shipyards. Their fleet includes cigar-shaped wuss-boxes, flattened shoebox deathtraps, and agglomerations of cylinders and cubes that seem like rejected mechanical designs from other, more successfully designed series. These are not space battleships anybody would want to build model kits of, perhaps another reason SSX didn’t last very long. 

The Illumidas were perhaps intended as filler; the original Eternal Orbit SSX plan was for the series to wedge itself firmly into the Galaxy Express 999 mythos. There's a hint of this in the first episode, in which 999's Maetel is listed as a wanted criminal alongside Harlock. Supposedly the machine people were to rise up as a menace, Toei would insert that sweet Harlock footage from the 999 films, eventually they'd battle the Black Knight as seen in Adieu 999, and then SSX would end right where the 1978 Harlock series starts. I'll give team SSX points for anticipating the current trend of prequels and sequels and timeline-jumping that replaces actual interesting writing in today's genre media, but we'll never know if SSX's version of the Mechanized Empire would have clicked with TV audiences or not, because those TV audiences had had quite enough of SSX, thank you. 

The series is Harlock with the weird edges filed down, minus all the meandering ancient astronaut stuff from 1978 and with the WWII metaphors dialed way, way back. SSX lacks Space Battleship Yamato's quasi-religious sense of the unknown galaxies and there’s none of the wistful romanticism of Galaxy Express 999. SSX is all business, and that business is watching the clock and waiting for quitting time. Contrast that to a show where cute girls fight for the love of a transforming robot fighter-plane pilot amidst 80s pop music, and you might see how viewers would change channels. 

It's late in the SSX game when the series finally starts delivering the baroque Greek ruins and recovered memories leading to the show's ostensible story arc, the search for the legendary lost planet Arcadia. We only see the SSX a few times in SSX as the Arcadia searches for the planet Arcadia and the audience gets vaguely irritated at having to keep track of all the different SSXs and Arcadias. Somewhere out there is Arcadia, the source of some sort of vague ultimate power that apparently can both power a galaxy and give plot momentum to a TV anime. If Harlock has a specific plan as what to do once he finds this mystery planet, this “Treasure Island in Space,” he’s keeping it close to his eyepatch. Meanwhile Mr. Zone has very precise ideas about what he’s going to do with Planet Arcadia's St. Valkyrie’s Fire. This space MacGuffin / particle energy force is controlled by SSX's last minute entry into the pantheon of Leiji Matsumoto Space Goddesses, the Queen of Arcadia, and she gives it away free of charge to anyone brave enough to travel to the end of space through many dangers, including that hoariest of SF cliches, the graveyard of lost spaceships. 

Eternal Orbit SSX races to its conclusion in a panicky rush. Tochiro bravely battles his incurable space disease long enough to repeat the consciousness-transference scene we saw in the Galaxy Express film. Mr. Zone reveals his plan all along was to (spoiler!) use the super energy from Arcadia to destroy the Illumidas and take over Earth for himself. We learn in one timely bit of dialog that he'd spent months executing his complicated scheme to secretly crew the Illumidas fleet with loyal Earthmen, who revolt at his command and smash their Earth occupation forces. That's right, it turns out Harlock has spent 22 episodes showing off and making big speeches in outer space while the ostensible villain has been the only character taking concrete steps to bring about actual change. Of course, the first thing Mr. Zone does with his new found authority is to send his fleet to attack Captain Harlock, which turns out pretty much the way you’d expect it to. The Illumidas are dispensed with by half a minute’s worth of deux ex machina handwaving, leaving Harlock free to blast off into obscurity after ditching Revi and Tadashi Monono on Earth with orders to fix the joint up. 

This isn't to say there aren't enjoyable moments in SSX. If you're a fan of Captain Harlock, Tochiro Oyama, Emeraldas, and Leiji Matsumoto's character and worldbuilding in general, you'll find enough happening in the show to keep you coming back. That's how strong these characters are. There are, of course, standout episodes where the animation and story rise to the challenge - Episode 17 (The Great Sandstorm: Communication Impossible) and 18 (Rescue Emeraldas) are some of the best. Shingo Araki, the guy who put Rose Of Versailles on the anime map, defined the magical girl anime style, and who, along with Michi Himeno, made Saint Seiya a worldwide hit, here continues his streak of designing characters for Matsumoto series (he’s the guy that slicked up Danguard Ace). With SSX, Araki brings his bold yet delicate touch to Harlock, Kei Yuki, Emeraldas, the Professor, Mary Ann, and the rest. Araki directed four episodes and they’re generally the best of the bunch, filled with goofy moments where Tochiro battles the newly-arrived cat Mii-kun and Kei Yuki actually gets to do something, where the series almost matches its potential. Instead, there's a lot of repurposed Arcadia Of My Youth animation, or static shots of people staring at things, or long shots of the Arcadia moving from one place to another, or a boring looking Illumidas spaceship moving from one place to another. Hardly the dynamic, innovative Japanese anime we’d been promised, and not nearly as interesting as the Eternal Orbit SSX pilot film. 

our first glimpse of the SSX Pilot Film, as seen in the Arcadia Of My Youth Roman Album

Included on Discotek Media's recent DVD release, the pilot is one of those legendary anime artifacts previously glimpsed tacked into the last few pages of the Arcadia Of My Youth Roman Album, a collection of tantalizing images teasing new and much stranger adventures for Harlock and his crew. Promising a SSX that's weirder, more colorful, and certainly more distinctive than the SSX we got, the pilot is a sizzle reel of the Arcadia blasting its way through spaceships lifted from other shows, while strange aliens lurk past six-guns, WWII tanks, and spaghetti western lynchings, altogether a lusty, violent, beer-drinking, and Dvorak's New World Symphony-filled (you can't have a Harlock anime pilot without the New World Symphony) anime that, sadly, the actual show failed to deliver. 

it's SSX pilot film beer o'clock 

Discotek’s SSX release is itself a pleasant surprise for a lot of us who never thought we’d see the show available in North America. The 22 episodes are on three standard DVDs, subtitled in English, and the set includes original TV commercials and the SSX pilot, which somehow looks sharper than the slightly fuzzy, less than optimal transfer of the actual SSX episodes in this set. My old SSX laserdiscs might be delivering better video, but of course, they aren’t subtitled. And try buying a LD player these days! Eternal Orbit SSX is also available for streaming on Crunchyroll, a veritable Arcadia of SSX content for the anime fans of today that can now access the show without risking the  wrath of the Illumidas, the dangers of the Sargasso Of Space, or the slight inconvenience of getting off the couch. 

TV ad for SSX sportwear

We might still feel nostalgic for the 1980s, but I think we've all moved on from 8th generation VHS tapes of sequels to prequels to TV shows in foreign languages without benefit of subtitles or even bad American dubbing. We might have lost a touch of our innocence now that we know what's actually happening in Eternal Orbit SSX, a show that might not have lived up to the dramatic space opera we conjured up thanks to youthful enthusiasm and bad language skills. And clearly, we can live without dragging our TVs and our VCRs through the Georgia heat to a computer club clear across town. But will we ever again feel that electric, slightly outrageous thrill at seeing Captain Harlock dispense brutal cosmic Dirty Harry-style space-frontier justice for the first time? Maybe we're all somehow chasing our own youth through the cosmos, with our own code numbers, in our own Eternal Orbits. 

-Dave Merrill

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