Captain Harlock and The Queen of A Thousand Years - Production

Production

After the success of Robotech, Harmony Gold sought to expand their syndicated television production in other animation series originating in Japan. The account according to Carl Macek, producer of Robotech, was that he was subsequently asked what other Japanese animated series he was interested in dubbing, and he expressed an interest in Leiji Matsumoto’s Captain Harlock.

After the rights were obtained, Macek was informed that Harmony Gold had allocated airtime for 65 episodes. Captain Harlock, however, was only 42 episodes long, prompting Harmony Gold to buy another Matsumoto series, Queen Millennia. It then fell to Macek and his team to combine the two shows into one series.

Unlike Robotech, it was decided to combine the two series simultaneously instead of simply running them one after the other with some “connecting” episodes. At the same time, it was also decided to change the timing of episodes, thus creating a situation where clips from episodes at various points in the original series would appear in a single episode in the American series. This resulted in a wildly different plot from both of the original sources. The Queen Millennia television series also ran 42 episodes, with the result that many episodes were dropped from both series (including the final episodes of the Millennia series, which therefore ended in a cliffhanger) in order to create the 65 American episodes. Additionally, despite the title of the series, the two titular characters never appeared together on-screen as the original shows took place in different continuities.