Set in the year 2199, an alien race known as the “Gamilas” are raining radioactive bombs on Earth, rendering the planet’s surface dead and uninhabitable. Humanity lives in refuges built deep underground, but the radioactivity is slowly infiltrating the underground cities too. Earth’s space fleet is hopelessly outclassed by the Gamilas and all seems lost until a mysterious space probe is retrieved on Mars. Blueprints for a faster-than-light engine are discovered, and a message from Queen Starsha of the planet Iscandar in the Large Magellanic Cloud says that she has a device, the Cosmo-Cleaner D, which can cleanse Earth of its radiation damage.

The inhabitants of Earth secretly convert the ruin of the Japanese battleship Yamato into a massive spaceship, the Space Battleship Yamato of the title. Using Starsha’s blueprints, they equip their new ship with a warp drive and a new, incredibly powerful weapon called the “wave motion gun” that fires out the bow. A tiny but intrepid crew of 114 leaves in the Yamato to go to the Large Magellanic Cloud and retrieve the mysterious device, if it exists. Along the way they discover the plans of their blue-skinned adversaries: the planet Gamilas, sister planet to Iscandar, is dying; and its leader, Lord Desslar, is trying to irradiate Earth enough for his people to move there, at the expense of the “barbarians” he considers humanity to be.

The first season contained twenty-six episodes, following the Yamato’s year-long voyage out of the Milky Way Galaxy and back again. A continuing story, it features the declining health of the determined captain Okita, and the transformation of the brash young orphan Susumu Kodai into a  mature and capable-acting captain, as well as his budding romance with female crewmember Yuki Mori. The foreign edits tend to play up the individual characters, while the Japanese original is often more focused on the ship itself.