Star Blazers: Space Battleship Yamato 2199 Heads to the UK on FunimationNow!
The cult classic adaptation of the Yamato franchise is now available in legal streaming form.
A couple days ago distributor Funimation announced they would be bringing the long lost-in-limbo anime series Star Blazers: Space Battleship Yamato 2199 to their services. They even confirmed that it would be made available with a simuldub (in other words an episode in English dub form added weekly).
Today we can confirm that the series will be available for the United Kingdom and Ireland region alongside the United States and Canada. The series will begin streaming starting 8th November 2017 at 21:00 (9:00pm). The show page is available here.
The year is 2199. The human race has been crushed in their war with the Gamilos, driven into underground cities by the invader’s assault. Scientists estimate they have only a year left. The young officers Susumu Kodai and Daisuke Shima receive a mysterious capsule from a ship that made an emergency landing on Mars and return with it to Earth. It contains humanity’s last hope: the planet Iscandar on the other side of the Magellan Galaxy has the technology to defeat the Gamilos and restore the planet. The space battleship Yamato is entrusted with this task, but they have only one year before humanity ends.
The reason we call this a ‘long lost-in-limbo’ title is because of how it was being distributed. While the show was never licensed for the UK prior, Voyager Entertainment in North America acquired the license and released only parts of the series on Blu-ray & DVD in subtitled form. The rest was never released and the previous sets went out of print as a result. There were some good news however, as the entire series have been made available with English subtitles on the Japanese Blu-ray sets including the Movie. Unfortunately, the sequel Yamato 2202 does not offer any English support.
Assuming Funimation holds the home video rights as well, we could also expect Crunchyroll to stream the English subtitled version at some point.
