Last week's bottomless linking at TVTropes.org brought Legend of Galactic Heroes back on my radar. I'm certain I came across LoGH before, but was deterred from looking into it due to its age (beginning in the mid 1980s), voluminousness (a 110-episode primary OVA series, several movies and smaller side-story OVAs), and commercial unavailability in the U.S. But due to the dedicated effort of fansubbers, the entire franchise is available online.
Discovering LoGH in 2013 is an intriguing experience. It is the kind of classic, sweeping space opera that has become an increasingly rarefied - or, if present, in increasingly diluted form - in popular media. This grandiosity is, for modern audiences weaned on the CGI whiz-bangery of more recent sci-fi anime series or even the more realistic (excepting sound in space) re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, juxtaposed with the hand-drawn space fleet battles, with the obvious technical limitations that format imposes on the art direction. But it is the ensemble cast of dozens of interesting and diverse characters, I think, that imbues the series with enduring timelessness.
Discovering LoGH in 2013 is an intriguing experience. It is the kind of classic, sweeping space opera that has become an increasingly rarefied - or, if present, in increasingly diluted form - in popular media. This grandiosity is, for modern audiences weaned on the CGI whiz-bangery of more recent sci-fi anime series or even the more realistic (excepting sound in space) re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, juxtaposed with the hand-drawn space fleet battles, with the obvious technical limitations that format imposes on the art direction. But it is the ensemble cast of dozens of interesting and diverse characters, I think, that imbues the series with enduring timelessness.
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