It is set in a spacefaring, high-tech future in which humans have learned how to transfer their minds and emotions with perfect fidelity into mechanical bodies, thus achieving practical immortality.

Matsumoto was inspired to create Galaxy Express 999 by the idea of a steam train running through the stars in the novel Night on the Galactic Railroad by Kenji Miyazawa.

[5] An impoverished ten-year-old named Tetsuro Hoshino desperately wanted an indestructible machine body, giving him the ability to live forever and have the freedom that the unmechanized do not have.

While machine bodies are impossibly expensive, they are supposedly given away for free on the planet Andromeda, the end of the line for the Galaxy Express 999, a space train that only comes to Earth once a year.

The series begins with Tetsuro and his mother making their way to Megalopolis where they hope to get jobs to pay for passes for the 999.

As he succumbs, he cries out an apology to his mother for failing to fulfill her wish and hopes that in his next life, he will be born as a robot to begin with.

Tetsuro is surprised to awaken by the fireplace in the home of a beautiful woman, Maetel, who is the spitting image of his dead mother.

Maetel tells him she had heard the entire incident with a long-range directional microphone she had been idly scanning around the area with.

Along the way, Tetsuro has many adventures on many different and exotic planets and meets many kinds of people, both human and alien, living and machine.

He is shocked by the cruelty and indolence of the machine people there and witnesses a mechanized human committing suicide, an event to which the others react with scoffs and derision.

When Tetsuro mentions the name of his traveling companion, the man is horrified and tells him that Maetel is the daughter of Queen Prometheum, the supreme ruler of the Machine Empire and that she is thoroughly untrustworthy.

With the help of her father, Dr. Ban (only named in the film), whose consciousness resides in a pendant she wears around her neck, Maetel destroys her mother and the planet.

Tetsuro, now a fifteen-year-old freedom fighter, is shocked when a messenger brings him news that the 999 is returning and that Maetel wants him to board it.

Although Tetsuro finds that Maetel is not present on the 999, he does meet Metalmena, a machine woman who has replaced the waitress Claire.

Shortly after leaving La Metal, the 999 is forced to dock at a station where Tetsuro meets a mysterious machine man named Faust.

She reveals the horrible truth to Tetsuro that the energy the machine people use is drained from living human beings, and that they were transported there by the Ghost Train.

As a patrol of guards comes to arrest the group, Metalmena, disgusted and enraged by what she has learned, attacks and destroys them, apparently at the cost of her own life.

Also, space battleship Yamato, from the Japanese show of the same name, and the English version of Star Blazers, which are both Matsumoto creations, make a cameo appearance.

The latter includes a newly produced English dub by Sound Cadence Studios in Dallas, Texas with a new cast.

[9] Two-part OVA Maetel Legend serves as a prelude for Galaxy Express 999 and explains the series' backstory.

The OVAs featured Maetel, Tetsuro, and the Conductor, with their original voice actors from the Galaxy Express 999 television series.

For unknown reasons, this series started production earlier than Galaxy Railways: Crossroad to Eternity, but was aired much later.

[16] In 1986, Harmony Gold produced rarely seen English dubs of two of the GE999 television specials, Galaxy Express 999: Can You Live Like a Warrior?

Released on VHS, this dub was produced by Ocean Studios in Vancouver, British Columbia, and was more true to the source material.

They contain a new upscale that preserves more detail and grain, in contrast to Toei Company's Blu-ray boxes that showed smeared colors to make the picture look smooth.

It contained episodes 77–113 along with TV specials Eternal Wanderer Emeraldas and Can You Love Like a Mother?, the latter's dub also being restored.