After having not seen it for 20+ years, E and I rented the first few episodes of Star Blazers last week. I'm going to be accused of sacrilege for this, but it was just awful. Terrible-quality animation, weak storylines, appalling English voice acting, and, worst of all, boringly talky and lacking in action. The villains are laughably ridiculous. The only real pluses were that the Argo (nee Yamoto) and its wave motion gun are still cool, and that Nova is still hot in her skin tight star force uniform with the giant arrow pointing at her junk.

Of course, it all seemed really cool when I was a kid. And the disappointing watching experience resembles what happened when I rewatched Robotech Macross a few years ago. With Robotech, the terrible animation etc was soon overcome by its gripping soap operatic story (Rick! Minmei! Lisa!). But with Star Blazers, I don't really wish to give it more time to see if I become engrossed. For one thing, it's even worse than Robotech, quality-wise, and has less-gripping action sequences. For another, Macross and its story made a big impact on my adolescent self and I still remember much of it; I hardly remembered anything about Star Blazers except its comically bad theme song and its impressive space battleship. So uh, sorry Star Blazers. Next up: Battle of the Planets?