The 1970s animated sci-fi series Star Blazers has been optioned for a film update by David Ellison, the son of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison whose production credits include stuff like True Grit, but who really loves to make movies about flying things. Christopher McQuarrie has been named as the writer who will likely take on adapting the series—which was itself just a dubbed and bowdlerized edit of the Japanese anime series Space Battleship Yamato—about a World War II-era warship transformed into a spacecraft upon which a crew races to save the nearly extinct human race from alien invaders. Although the whole battleship vs. aliens thing has come up recently with Peter Berg’s adaptation of the Hasbro game, the idea for a live-action Star Blazers has actually been kicking around since at least the ’90s, with Disney developing a script that was shelved after Michael Eisner left. And of course—like the recent plans to mount a live-action Death Note—Japan has already beaten America with its own live-action version of Space Battleship Yamato, which was released in December. But we can’t let the Japanese win; we must ensure that fake Americans save the fake Earth.