Galaxy Express 999: Episodes 59-70
"All aboooard!"
Guess I'm back. At nearly a year to the day this has to be the longest train delay in recorded history, but boarding the Galaxy Express again and settling back in is pretty effortless. In this year's batch of episodes, Tetsuro visits
America the Planet of the Fat People, Goth World, continues his galaxy-wide Che Guevara act by assisting at least three more revolutions incuding on Wild West Nazi Librarian Planet, meets his maker, causes a planet to commit suicide and befriends yet another dinosaur. Oh and of course, no journey would be complete without our regular scheduled stop at Misery Town.
Mental wounds not healing, life's a bitter shame
The trail of destruction that the GE999 leaves in its wake is really quite something. If it weren't protected by the Galaxy Railways SDF and their nuclear armed armoured space trains, you'd think whenever a planet saw it coming they'd sooner shoot it out of the sky than run the risk of it landing and resulting in either the overthrow of the government, the death of most (or all) of the population or the destruction of the entire planet, that particular event having now occured on more than one occassion. Whoever maintains the timetable is going to be pretty ticked off with Maetel and Tetsuro by the end of this journey for all the ammendments they'll have to make.
I will say this for GE999: It redefines what it means to be original. Where on earth the ideas for these episodes came from, whether it was the mind of Leiji Matsumoto himself or writers for the TV series, they surely knew how to come up with things that had never been done before and certainly haven't been emulated since. Every episode I'm now ready for the
"What if there was a planet..." and rarely is the end of that sentence anything predictable. Sometimes the ideas work (
"What if there was a planet where people lived in pitch darkness?") and sometimes they don't (
"What if there was a planet that was sentient and liked to watch people strip off?") but they certainly weren't afraid to throw anything and everything against the wall to see what stuck. Or perhaps just because it was fun to throw things at a wall. But also to despair for humanity.
Also maybe it was just me, but when Maetel was strumming her guitar it totally sounded like the riff from OMD's The New Stone Age. "Oh my God, what have we done this time?" would certainly be an appropriate lyric for our protagonists.
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