Two cartoons I remember fondly and vividly from my youth are Speed Racer and Star Blazers. Why? Because they were the first ones I saw that had characters die, sometimes in giant fireball explosions.
Now production company Benderspink is picking at that nostalgia scab and planning their own live-action Star Blazers. The property previously spent years languishing at Disney before getting shoved into their vault until the rights option lapsed.
The original epic Star Blazers animated series (a dubbed version of Japan’s Space Battleship Yamato) took place in the late 22nd century after a race of blue-skinned aliens called Gamilons dropped a whole bunch of radioactive bombs on our planet (their method of terraforming), forcing mankind’s survivors into underground cities. The benevolent queen of distant world Iscandar sends a message to Earth offering a device that can repair the damage to the planet (too bad they couldn’t have called a little earlier and said “Buy haz-mat suits! Oh, and… duck!”). So the remaining humans salvage an old battleship and make it spaceworthy, collect a disparate crew, and head off through the galaxy punching huge holes in things with the Wave Motion Gun.