"Wow, what a great episode! This show cannot sell a toy to a child to save its life." - My fiance Hayley somewhere around Miharu's death.
So if you haven't heard, the year 2024 had two fun developments in my life:
I finally commenced Hormone Replacement Therapy
I started dating a friend of five years who then also came out as a trans woman and later I asked her to marry me
There are of course consequences to completely entwining your life with another. Moving house, adjusting sleep habits and discovering that the love of your life is sorely lacking an education in large robot cartoons. Thus, we've started watching Gundam.
Every Gundam. In production order. Thus, it's time for me to start discharging my thoughts on each entry as we finish them. We probably won't do IGLOO and we'll see how much Universal Century nostalgia milking we'll be able to tolerate when Unicorn or NT roll around but for the moment, assume I'm going to write about every television show, OVA and movie as they're done.
So, Mobile Suit Gundam (1979). One of the most influential anime ever made. Japan's Star Trek: The Original Series moment. Over the years I've often tossed people the version re-cut into a movie trilogy and sold it to them as worth watching as a historical curiosity. I sincerely apologise to anyone who's experienced the work this way.
This is an incredible piece of television.
What we have here is a military sci-fi drama trapped in the shell of a 70s superhero show. That's not to say it's the first anime of its decade to take itself seriously. Nor is it the first directed by Yoshiyuki Tomino. Hell, Voltes V and Daimos were touching on the pain of war and the fires of revolution years earlier! All of those kinda roll with the punches though. They're not struggling against their shackles the way this show does. Sure our episodes all need a preview of next week which shows too much of what's to come, but no other accompanies those with a narrator simply asking "Would you have what it takes to survive?".
For the most part this isn't a show about bold heroes thwarting an overwhelming menace. It's about a slapdash group of people in the wrong place at the wrong time doing whatever they can to make it through the mess they're trapped in. Wriggle in the mud like that for long enough and you'll find that even when offered an out that you'll sign on to see this war through to the end.
I should probably give a plot synopsis to each of these for anyone unfamiliar with this franchise.
It's the year Universal Century 0079. Humanity's been steadily moving out into space as space colonies in the O'neil Cylinder model are built. People born in space are considered a bit of a poorer underclass. The cluster of colonies furthest out from Earth began a protest movement which was hijacked by a rich businessman who saw more to gain by pivoting to monarchical fascism. This new christened Principality of Zeon declared war on the rest of space (led by a vaguely Singaporean style military government called The Earth Federation), gassed out a space colony then dropped it on Sydney.
The first couple of months of this war wiped out roughly half of humanity's total population so a treaty was signed to cut down on the WMDs and war crimes lest there be no home to keep fighting over. The next six months or so are a stalemate where Zeon demonstrate more advanced technology (they have cool robots!) while the Federation simply has more troops and space you have to try holding.
Things change when the Federation sneaks a prototype weapons development project into a civilian space colony. A Zeon scouting party finds it, panics and opens fire on everything they can find. The ensuing destruction kills almost all Federation military personnel and the only people able to pick up the slack are some hapless civilian teenagers who happened to be nearby.
Our lead character Amuro Ray runs against the mould of the gutsy, cool male leads common to the era. He doesn't drive a motorbike or know any martial arts or have bold ambitions. He's an introverted autistic nerd so engrossed in tinkering with some circuitry that he didn't even notice the air raid sirens. He's the one to find and pilot the titular Gundam, the EF's new prototype robot because he was in the wrong place. He was able to do because he had the sense to read the operator's manual.
And so various civilians and a 19 year old Ensign in charge of them desperately flee with the prototype warship carrying the robots and spend the next 30 or so episodes trying to find some damn reprieve. They're chased to Earth and botch their entry, falling deep into Zeon territory. When they're able to meet up with Federation forces, their ability to simply not die means commanders keep assigning them to diversion operations. Slowly but surely they're integrated as an irregular cog in a machine which can steadily put Zeon on the back foot.
Meanwhile, Zeon itself is prone to the sort of in-fighting you'd expect from space nazis. The ruling Zabi family's youngest son is killed in battle, causing the founding patriarch Degwin Zabi to fall into an apathetic melancholy. Oldest son Gihren Zabi yearns to ramp up the killing so he can have a smaller, easier to rule populace. His sister Kycilia keeps eyeing off his job. Dozle Zabi keeps draining resources in insane weapons development projects. On top of that, the son of the original Seperatist movement has infiltrated Zeon's ranks and is slowly hatching plans to assassinate as many officers as possible. What's worse is he's also one of the best damn pilots and a gifted tactical field officer so he has to keep being allowed to do what he wants.
None of this is delivered in a remotely subtle fashion. We're working with a television template often used for children's shows after all. Even so, there's always these little flashes of brilliance to the visual acting of characters and their vocal deliveries that adds so much humanity. The overall visual style of the show is tremendous as well. Bold colours at critical moments, surreal backgrounds and an increasingly psychedelic feel as the show rolls on.
Late into the show it's revealed that as people have started being born and living their entire lives in space that it's doing weird things to their brains. People are gaining faster and faster reaction times and may even be developing forms of mental telepathy. It's explored through some villains of the week before serving as a nuclear strike on our lead boy Amuro's brain when he kills someone he seemed to be developing a psychic connection to. It all builds to a rough proposal that perhaps with time, humanity will be capable of evolving into a species with such innate understanding of each other that conflicts will cease to occur.
Sadly any such optimism is obstructed by a few things. For a start there's 43 episodes' worth of grizzled aging NCOs we have to kill to stay alive. Second, we were supposed have 50 episodes' worth. The show was axed for poor ratings and terrible toy sales. The way this show handles its shiny new toy requirements is interesting as well. For the first 25 or so episodes there's almost no new robots. Just the Gundam, Guncannon, Guntank and endless green Zakus to fight. You're lucky if there's a blue Gouf or a black Dom in the episode! However, word of the Gundam's resilience causes a shift in Zeon's doctrine: "we must build more prototype superweapons". It's a fun conceit to start shoving increasingly goofy new robots each week and it serves as a neat reflection on Nazi Germany's fixation with its own dumb prototypes. My only criticism here is nobody makes a joke about inventing your own stupid Zeonic pipe thread measuring system like Mercedes did with the bloody Panzergewind format I have to deal with in my day job back in reality.
The music rules. Late 70s disco tracks with analogue synths fully set to sound as "space" as possible. It's a bit camp and silly but that only adds to the unique atmosphere this show has. It's ambitious because it strains at its bonds. When those limitations are removed, it's going to become something different. That push and pull against and with the times are part of what makes this show feel so unique even within its own franchise.
I'm doing a terrible job convincing you but you should watch this show. It's a classic.
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