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Here’s the situation: you’ve got a successful Japanese anime program you want to bring to the United States. Here’s the problem: Japanese and American episode number requirements are different, so there won’t be enough Japanese episodes to do a full U.S. season. Here’s the solution: grab another anime series, do a little slice and dice editing, redo the script when you record the dubbing, and hope that nobody will notice.

 

Space Pirate Captain Harlock was another Japanese hit for anime artist Leiji (Reiji) Matsumoto. The show took place in the year 2976, and told the story of the Captain who was forced to take his pirate business to outer space after all the earth’s oceans had been destroyed.

 

Harmony Gold (importers of Robotech) took Captain Harlock to America, but his 43 episodes were 22 episodes short for American syndication schedules. Enter another Matsumoto series, Queen Millennia. Set in 1999 and completely devoid of space pirates, editors chopped both series’ together for U.S. audiences in 1985, and called it Captain Harlock and the Queen of 1000 Years.

The newly made-up storyline went something like this: now, Harlock is a good guy, using his ship and his crew to destroy drugs and alcohol from a futuristic, decadent, hedonist-style world. Of course, Harlock still looks like a pirate, eyepatch and scar and all. His nemesis is Queen Lafresia, the evil ruler of the Zetons (called the Mazones in the Japanese original). The Zetons are warrior plant women whose planet could no longer support life and they’re out to take over Earth instead. They kill Professor Hairball (named Daiba in the original) who had warned people that they were coming, and frame Harlock for the murder. Hairball’s son Terry (also called Tommy in another version) promises to take revenge of the Harlock, but soon discovers the truth. He joins the Captain and his crew on the ship Arcadia, and they continue the fight against Lafresia.

 

Obviously, the two main characters could never appear on screen together, and the show never made an impact with American audiences – a big disappointment to licensees who had been successful with the Robotech series. A different dub was released by Malibu Comics in subsequent years, but that didn’t work either – there’s only so much editing and re-writing you can do in a case like this.