title_name=Galaxy Express 999
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銀河鉄道９９９
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Galaxy Express Three-nine
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Science Fiction
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Animanga/Anime| Information
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(銀河鉄道999; ''Ginga Tetsudō Three-Nine'') is a
Manga written and drawn by
Leiji Matsumoto , as well as various
Anime films and TV series based on it. The manga is published in
English by
Viz .
The story is set in a space-faring, high-tech future, where mechanized people with "machine bodies" are pushing humanity towards irrelevance and extinction. A street
Urchin named Tetsuro Hoshino desperately wants an indestructible machine body so that he can avenge the death of his mother, who was hunted down for sport by the robotic Count Mecha. While machine bodies are impossibly expensive, they are supposedly given away for free on the planet Andromeda, the end of the line for the space train Galaxy Express 999 (Technology has advanced to the point where space-faring vehicles can assume any shape, such as the classical locomotive in the story.).
]]
Tetsuro meets up with a beautiful woman, Maetel (sometimes translated "Maeter", both from the Latin ''mater'' for mother), who is the spitting image of his dead mother. Maetel offers him passage on 999 if he will be her traveling companion. Tetsuro agrees.
Along the way, he meets many machine people, including Count Mecha himself, whom Tetsuro kills with a gun. Increasingly, Tetsuro realizes that a machine body won't fix all of his problems. In fact, most of the machine people he meets regret the decision to give up their humanity. Most pathetic of all is Crystal Clare, who works aboard 999. Her body, always nude, is a beautiful clear crystal, yet she longs for the warmth of a human touch, like Tetsuro's.
It is also strongly implied that Maetel has a machine body, as she visits her human body on Pluto, where discarded human bodies are encased in ice in a giant planetary tomb. Maetel also says she has been endlessly travelling with young men like Tetsuro. In the manga, she is referred to by one of the characters as "the other universe that I fear!", raising the question of who, or what, she truly is even more nebulous. However, the nature of her character is revealed in the movie as she replaces her body with a new human one to live forever.
Characters from other Matsumoto works appear in GE999, notably
Captain Harlock ,
Emeraldas , and the ship (sans crew) from
Space Battleship Yamato (aka Star Blazers), and vice versa, creating a shared continuity often called the "Leijiverse."
Unapologetically melodramatic, with highly episodic morality-tale stories, Galaxy Express 999 has a philosophy perhaps closer to that of
Friedrich Nietzsche or
Ayn Rand than the eastern mysticism often found in anime.
In 1996, Matsumoto began a new GE999 series, set a year after the original, in which the Earth is destroyed and Tetsuro sets out to discover the source of the "darkness" that threatens all life in the universe.
's North American editions of the second Galaxy Express 999 manga.]]
In 1981,
Roger Corman produced an
English-language dub of the first GE999 movie, which changed the character names, saddled some with
Accent s, and subverted much of the story. A later dub from
Viz , titled ''Galaxy Express 999: The Signature Edition'' released on VHS, is more true to the source material. Viz also released ''Adieu, Galaxy Express 999'' on VHS, but have yet to release either movie on DVD. The only current official English-language release of Galaxy Express 999 material on DVD are the two movies released in Korea, which utilize Viz's subtitle scripts.
Viz later released five volumes of the second Galaxy Express manga, which was the basis for the third film, ''Galaxy Express 999: Eternal Fantasy''. The original manga has yet to be translated into English.
- Footage from the movies and TV series was used to create two North American video games, the Laserdisc -based arcade game "Freedom Fighter", and the CD-i home game "Escape from Cyber-City".
- In the episode The 30% Iron Chef of Futurama , you can see an old train flying through the space.
- First series, serialized in Hit Comics, 1977-1981
- New series, serialized in Big Gold, 1996-??
- TV Series, 1978, 113 episodes + 4 TV special
- Movie, ''Galaxy Express'', 1979
- Featurette, ''Galaxy Express 999 Glass no Clair'' (Glass-made Claire), 1980
- Movie, ''Adieu Galaxy Express 999 Terminus Andromeda'' (aka ''Sayonara Galaxy Express 999''), 1981
- Movie, ''Galaxy Express 999 ~Eternal Fantasy~'', 1998
- Old School Style
