Ah, yes. Do you have your pass? I sure hope you have your pass. I sure hope you have your pass on your person and also your name is written on it. We’re like twenty planets removed from Earth and the current planet we’re on is ruled by tyrannical cyborgs who hunt humans for sport and then display their hollowed husks as trophies. And yes, I’m aware that happens on Earth as well. There’s a lot of planets like that in this galaxy.
I really hope you haven’t misplaced your pass.
#Galaxy Express 999: An Introduction#
A 1978 anime adaptation of the manga by Leiji Matsumoto, Galaxy Express 999 very quickly became one of my absolute favorite anime series I’ve ever watched. But it took me quite a while to actually muster up the nerve to finally dive in. After all, 113 episodes is quite a lot. Plus, for some reason, I was concerned about if this was the right series to start with in the "Leijiverse."
The first thing I want to tell you is if you are also worried about such a thing… don’t be. I know it looks a bit daunting, but just jump in with Galaxy Express 999. Characters from other series by Leiji Matsumoto do occasionally show up from time to time, but I would consider their appearances in Galaxy Express 999 to be more like fanservice. Like sure these characters do exist in the Galaxy Express 999 universe but I wouldn’t assume they’re the same versions from their original series. Or the various continuities to match up??? Especially Captain Harlock...
~~Though to be fair, my knowledge of the full Leijiverse is still very far from complete.~~
Just step aboard and get settled. As it’s going to be a long ride. I personally would definitely recommend only watching one or a couple of episodes per day. Because as much as I love this series, there generally is a basic flowchart for a lot of the episodes. But I'll get to that later...
#Tetsuro Hoshino#
This series is centered around a young boy named Tetsuro and his journey from Earth to Andromeda which lies pretty much at the end of the galaxy. In the universe of Galaxy Express 999, Earth isn't exactly the kindest place to live if you're a natural human. Forced to live in dark slums underneath the bright lit cities belonging to the cyborgs, humans struggle to survive and are often even hunted for sport by the cyborgs.
This is how Tetsuro's story begins. Five minutes into the series, and he is forced to watch as his mother dies in the snow after being shot down by Count Mecha. Upon being saved from freezing to death alone in the snow by a woman named Maetel and being offered a ride on the Galaxy Express 999 to Andromeda where he can get a mechanical body, Tetsuro first goes out and claims revenge on his mother’s murderer.
After having his body critically damaged, a shambling Count Mecha begs Tetsuro to not destroy his brain. After all, his body can always be repaired. His brain can’t be. Tetsuro ignores this plea and bashes Count Mecha’s brain. Fleeing from the cyborg authorities, Tetsuro and Maetel successfully board the Galaxy Express 999. And Tetsuro assures to Maetel and himself that once he obtains his mechanical body, he will return to Earth.
I very, very quickly found myself liking Tetsuro. I would probably guess that a lot of people that like this series probably like Maetel more, but to me, Tetsuro is obviously the heart of this series.
If you want to nitpick, you could argue that Tetsuro should have seen the folly of getting a mechanical body from the very start. After all, Earth isn’t exactly the nicest place to be. ~~Which is directly caused by the cyborgs.~~ But Tetsuro is stubborn, or rather, determined that once he would get his mechanical body, he would remain the same on the inside.
He would not become like Count Mecha or the other cyborgs that rule Earth. But as they continue along the galaxy railways, Tetsuro undergoes tragic experiences one after another upon his adventures on the planets the Galaxy Express stops at. Quite often cyborgs are involved… and very rarely in a positive light. He comes across so many who are in possession of the eternal life he so covets… and yet…
So many of them are unhappy. Yet Tetsuro still tries to hold firm onto his original goal, no matter how many moral of the story discussions he and Maetel have as the Galaxy Express departs from the episode’s planet. He begins to realize that while he may have left Earth behind, there wasn’t going to be finding a greener grass…
#A Galaxy of Sadness#
To be quite honest, looking back on it, I had absolutely no idea what I was signing up for when I boarded this train. Or rather, I didn’t know that two out of every three episodes, the series was going to swing an emotional sledgehammer straight at my face with absolutely no regard for my safety. They go for the kill almost every single time.
This would actually be a complaint.
If it hadn’t worked on me so often.
I watched Captain Harlock after this and that turned out to at least have some hope in it. Or rather, the Captain Harlock character himself was fighting to create that hope. But in Galaxy Express 999…
Death and tragedy is around every single corner. Even outside of the planets under the influence of the cyborgs, there are just so many dystopian planets ruled by dictators or oppressive governments and/or societies… or just planets that have already been ruined or are just wild wastelands.
I’ve not actually bothered to look back and tally the number of planets that end up just straight up getting fucking destroyed or ruined by the time Tetsuro and Maetel depart on the Galaxy Express, but I have no doubt that the number would probably be troublingly high.
This brings me to perhaps one of the most important things to keep in mind if you decide to embark upon this series.
#Suspension of Disbelief is Required#
Even with as much as this series had me hook, line, and sinker, I still definitely found myself wondering why the fuck Tetsuro just doesn’t stay on the train. Hypothetically speaking, there’s really nothing preventing him from just sleeping in his seat the whole way to Andromeda.
And of course, there’s the immediate counterargument “well yeah he could just stay on the train, but then you don’t have a series.” But to be fair, Tetsuro and Maetel’s expeditions onto the planets they stop at along the way to Andromeda usually end in a limited number of ways:
- As previously mentioned, the planet gets fucking destroyed with them barely escaping.
- Tetsuro and/or Maetel’s train passes are stolen.
- Tetsuro or Maetel are kidnapped. If Tetsuro is kidnapped, it’s probably a maternal figure that resembles his mother who seeks to “adopt” him. Or Tetsuro was nice to someone on an awful planet, and that person immediately tries to keep him.
Very, very rarely does one of the planetary stops end without Tetsuro having to have at least one gunfight. You would think after the fifth or tenth time this happens, Tetsuro would realize that getting off of the train is a bad idea. Especially after the stop at the fossil planet ends up with Tetsuro gaining a pretty bad scar on his back… which he actually keeps for the rest of the series.
It surprised the hell out of me because while it does make sense he’d be scarred from this event (he did get hit with a fucking sword after all), any other series I would have probably just expected it to have “healed” by the next episode.
Additionally, putting aside the general danger of just getting off the train in the first place, there's the fact that the passes for the Galaxy Express 999 that Tetsuro and Maetel carry are incredibly coveted. Hence, over and over again, Tetsuro finds that someone has stolen his, Maetel's, or both of their passes. Eventually, after this happening a decent amount of times, there's one incident where a thief actually makes it to the Galaxy Express 999 with Tetsuro's pass...
...and the Conductor actually points out that Tetsuro's name is on the pass. I don’t think it’d even be an exaggeration to say that their passes probably get stolen at least ten times before this episode. So what was everybody else's plan? Hope that the Conductor was actually incompetent and just didn't check???
Yet, even while the “steal Tetsuro and Maetel’s passes” idea is often doomed to failure, there’s true danger there for Tetsuro. Because you know, even if the Conductor’s obviously gonna know in most cases the impostor holding Tetsuro’s pass really isn’t Tetsuro, what if they end up just dropping or losing his pass somewhere outside of the train?
Then he’s completely stranded on whichever planet he happens to be on when he loses his pass. And most of the planets, if not dystopian hellholes, aren’t exactly “I want to stay here for the rest of my life and not because I lost my only pass for galactic travel” material.
Which really just begs the question why Tetsuro doesn’t defend that pass with his dear goddamned life after the EIGHTIETH time it’s stolen. This boy gradually becomes essentially a skilled battle hardened gunslinger over the course of this series and he just cannot keep his hands on this pass.
Whoops, second to last planet and some kid who wants to get a cyborg body to make anime stole my Galaxy Express 999 pass!
FOR FUCK SAKE TET--
#An Episodic Yet Unforgettable Journey#
Anyways, those sorts of details really don’t matter. It really doesn’t matter how many times Maetel is kidnapped or they lose their passes. As I was watching this series, I wasn’t repeatedly thinking “oh wow, Tetsuro had his pass stolen yet again.”
~~Or at least, it wasn’t what I was primarily thinking about.~~
I was usually thinking, wow, this is a pretty fucking cool planet.
The reason why this series never got old to me throughout all 113 episodes was that I was always interested in seeing where Tetsuro and Maetel ended up next. Which is of course the absolute best reaction you could hope for from a viewer when your entire series is about two characters just traveling the entire galaxy.
And sure, they have a planned destination, and you know in one way or another the journey’s eventually going to come to an end, but not once did I ever think over the course of all 113 episodes that it should be a shorter series. Even though you could make the argument it definitely could have been.
~~I think personally I would have maybe rethought the value of eternal life after the mere tenth encounter with evil cyborgs reveling in or cursing their immortality.~~
But still, this series is nothing more than just one big journey.
We watch as Tetsuro goes from some poor kid who was forced to watch his mother die in front of him at the hands of cyborgs to a battle hardened traveler of the stars. He seeks to get a mechanical body and thus eternal life because that is what his parents wished for him. And to be fair, eternal life is quite the dream when you're lowly humans struggling to survive as cyborgs cavort in neverending luxury in cities that literally tower over the pitiful slums you're trapped in.
Even as he finds himself having to overcome obstacle after obstacle as the Galaxy Express 999 continues along its charted route, he’s still grappling with the grief of losing his mother and the fact at the end of this journey, he’s going to discard everything that makes him a breathing and living organic human.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like Galaxy Express 999 is completely dark and sad or that Tetsuro just mopes 100% of the time...
But that’s still some heavy shit for a character to carry on their shoulders. Let alone a newly orphaned kid setting off on a journey to the ends of the galaxy with a strange woman he literally just met.
The best thing about it is while Tetsuro overcomes over a hundred episodes’ worth of life threatening trials, it’s not as if Tetsuro is a flawless character. I mean not to continue to dwell on it, but he starts the series by completely buckling in to his desire for revenge. Maetel offers Tetsuro a way off of Earth and an actual opportunity to obtain eternal life. But Tetsuro being the incredibly stubborn kid we’re to follow for over a hundred episodes refuses to leave without claiming revenge.
And while Count Mecha completely deserves what’s coming to him, this action costs Tetsuro the ability to freely return to Earth. Count Mecha begging Tetsuro not to damage his brain underlines it. I mean there’s a reason why Maetel tried to stop Tetsuro.
“Maybe you shouldn’t stoop to their level and resort to murder.”
But I mean just imagine being in Tetsuro’s shoes. His mother is gone. There’s no returning her. And the cyborg bastard responsible for it is begging him to not destroy his brain as he doesn’t want to die.
...I know I’m beating a dead horse with going on about how much I like Tetsuro as a character, but I just truly cannot recall the last series I was so utterly invested in a character from the very start.
#The Galaxy Express 999 Continues On…#
To be honest, I'm kind of at a loss of how to actually end this review. If you can even really call this a review. This whole thing is just a rambling mess of how much I love this show.
I even bring up its genuine flaws (its repetitive nature with many episodes being Tetsuro simply just trying to get his pass back) but I basically dismiss them in the very same breath.
And... I don't even care. I just love this series that much. Hell, I'd bet money I'd be here saying the same exact thing even if Tetsuro's journey had stretched onto 200 episodes. It's not even fair. This series is essentially everything I like just thrown together in one big pot.
I like episodic series. As a kid, I was super into trains and even as an adult the idea of a fucking magical ~~(it's not magical at all it's sci-fi)~~ train blasting through space is awesome to me. I like world building a lot and while obviously all the planets mostly contained to one episode, I just liked thinking about how living in this galaxy would be like with all of these fucked up planets. Speaking of, I'm especially a fan of darker series, and while Galaxy Express 999 doesn't go into an outrageous territory with it...
...What was I saying? Oh right. Ahem. While Galaxy Express 999 doesn't go into an outrageous territory with the darker stuff...
~~...You know what? Nevermind.~~
Anyways, I think a part of why I'm so overwhelmed by my positivity towards this show is that I truly did not think it would capture and retain my attention the whole way through. I just immediately assumed from the episode count that there would be periodic lulls. That every once in a while there would be… I don’t know, filler I guess? I just didn’t think this series wouldn’t run out of interesting/entertaining planets by the end.
But yet every single episode, I wanted to see where the Galaxy Express 999 would go next. I wanted to see what sort of moral quandary or mortal peril Tetsuro would be facing. I don’t think any other episodic series I’ve done or watched pulled me in to the extent that Galaxy Express 999 did.
Galaxy Express 999 for me, without a doubt, is a 10 out of 10.
