DJ Watches: The Mobile Suit Gundam Franchise
I’ve always loved robots, ever since I was a little kid. From cartoons like Transformers and Go-Bots, to early anime like Robotech and Voltron, and live action shows like Power Rangers and Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad, I’ve always been thrilled and enamored by these giant machines, whether they be sentient or piloted. Even cheesy movies like Robot Jox appealed to me purely because of the mecha – and all this before I even realized the concept of anime. Oh, as a small, small child in the Philippines I had watched super robot shows and some tokusatsu locally dubbed into English by some obviously non-native English speakers, and I was aware early on that Power Rangers was pretty obviously another show spliced with new footage, but it wasn’t ‘till around the time most people my age did that I learned the term “anime,” and needless to say that opened up the whole world of mecha to me. With the advent of Toonami, came my first encounter with the franchise I’m here to babble on about – Mobile Suit Gundam, in the form of Gundam Wing.
At least, that’s what I thought, until a few years later, my family received a lot of our old photographs from our relatives, and after some digging, one of the pictures was of me. ‘Lo and behold the toy clutched in my grubby little child hands was, in fact, a big, vinyl Gundam action figure that I had completely forgotten about and honestly, I still don’t recall. It appears that the series and I had met at a very early point in my life.
All right, in all honesty, I didn’t have cable at the time Wing premiered on Toonami, but I did have a VCR, and bought the first tape on a whim with some allowance money. I was hooked. From that point on, I was all in on the series, which ended up being quite a Herculean feat that I knew not what I was getting into. From snapping up all the aforementioned Wing VHS tapes, and graduating into DVD’s for everything they decided to release over here, and dabbling in…methods for everything else, I consumed what I could with my budget, both good and bad. Then the anime bubble burst, and suddenly, Gundam stopped showing up over here. Companies started going down, and all those model kit and action figures suddenly became impossible to find. The media kept showing up, as SEED, Destiny, and OO all came over here, but once Bandai Entertainment bit the dust, that…seemed to be it. “Finding It” seemed like it might have been the only way to even have a chance of seeing any of those older AND newer shows that would seemingly never come out here.
Then Right Stuf came along, and after successfully bringing over a couple of (frankly) overpriced OVA’s on Blu-ray, they became the standard bearer for bringing Gundam out on this side of the Pacific, along with the distribution company Bluefin bringing over those model kits again. They stated that they would eventually release or re-release everything they could, and as I type they are well on their way to keeping that promise, with the release of Turn A, X, and ZZ, as well as Blu-Ray updates of the original series and Zeta, to surprising ones like Build Fighters making their way here. With all this Gundam coming out now, I, of course, fully intended to get and watch everything, but I stepped back and realized that, honestly, I hadn’t ever re-watched any of these shows before besides Wing and G, and even then, those were years ago. Really, it would be kind of weird to just start really watching ZZ out of nowhere with only memories for context, and it needed to be settled whether I genuinely liked these shows, or if it’s just my memories telling me robots are awesome and that’s good enough – or maybe a bit of both.
So, here we are. I am going to watch every single Gundam series, OVA, movie, ONA, or whatever I possibly can that’s available and is substantial enough, i.e. not just a little piece of animation made for a theme park ride or ad, in as close to chronological order as possible, naturally starting with the Universal Century. Now, chronological order is actually a TERRIBLE way to watch Gundam, especially for beginners since a lot of those OVA’s that take place before or in-between shows almost require prior knowledge of those series for any of it to have the proper context or impact, but seeing as how I’ve actually seen a lot of these before, it should work pretty well for me. When I say chronological, I mean series, I’m not going to watch, say, Mobile Suit Gundam up to Episode 10, then stop and watch an episode of 08th MS team, then continue on and splice it all together. Rather, I’ll first watch the original series, then back up and cover the different OVA’s within the One Year War like MS IGLOO and 0080 and the like in roughly the order they occur. While I ‘m going to put down my thoughts, feelings, and random ideas that pop up in my head while watching the series, I’m not going to be doing any recapping of the story or plot unless it relates to what I want to say. While I will naturally give my opinion on each entry, this won’t be a series of reviews, per say. It’s also not going to be a big thorough analysis, there are much better people on-line who can do that then I, it’s really just what I thought, both as a show on its own merits, as well as the time it came out and how it feels now.
Mostly, this is all for fun and an excuse for me to just sit down and write something, something I’ve been sorely out of practice on. So, if you’re on this ride, suit up, and get ready, because we’re going to start…. before the beginning, with technically one of the newest entries in the Gundam franchise. It’s the year UC 0068, 11 years before the One Year War, on a colony at the time known as Munzo, on Side 3…