Trailer arrives for anime adaptation Space Battleship Yamato

Now, to the unwary, the trailer for Space Battleship Yamato will look very strange, indeed. And if you've never heard of the classic 70s anime series before, you may squint at the promo footage below and wonder, "Why does that spacecraft look like a boat? What's Captain Birdseye doing on there? And is that really Aerosmith playing in the background?"

For the bewildered among you, here's a brief explanation. Space Battleship Yamato, otherwise known as Space Cruiser Yamato, or even Star Blazers if you're from the US or Australia, was an epic space opera anime series that originally aired in 1974.

Directed, written and designed by Leiji Matsumoto (whose immediately recognisable, elfin character art can also be seen in such classics as Captain Harlock, Galaxy Express 999 and Starzinger), Space Battleship Yamato opened in 2199, where the population of Earth is beset by the nuclear weapons of an alien race called the Gamilas.

Desperate to cleanse the planet of radiation, humankind resurrects the Yamato, a real-life Japanese warship sunk in 1945, fits it with faster-than-light warp drives, and sends it off to the planet Iscandar to find a device called a Cosmo-Cleaner D.

Already adapted into numerous Manga books, spin-off shows and movies, the new live action Space Battleship Yamato film, directed by Takashi Yamazaki, is said to have cost around $20 million to make, and is set to kick off an entire franchise of deep space epics.

Sticking faithfully to the original anime's first series, the Yamato looks remarkably similar to its 70s counterpart, and some of the alien ship designs are spectacular. The weird, bendy craft glimpsed in the first five seconds is, in our opinion, nothing short of awesome.

And, yes, that really is Aerosmith's Steven Tyler in the background, bellowing out his own rendition of the original show's theme tune, Love Lives...

Space Battleship Yamato hits Japanese cinemas on 1 December.