Mobile Suit Gundam

• 1. The Day Anime Changed

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  Mobile Suit Gundam, a Japanese anime series created by Yoshiyuki Tomino, once drew a crowd of 15,000 people to a single film premiere on the 22nd of February 1981. Police and the media feared that the gathering could turn into a riot. The Asahi Shimbun newspaper later called the event "the day that anime changed." That is a remarkable reputation for a story about a war fought with giant machines. Why did a conflict between space colonies and Earth matter so much to its audience? What did its director want viewers to feel? Who gave those machines their shape? And how did a television series that had to struggle for its place on the air end up filling a hall on that scale?

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• 2. The One Year War

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  In the year Universal Century 0079, a cluster of space colonies calling itself the Principality of Zeon declared independence from the Earth Federation. Zeon then launched a war of independence, later called the One Year War. Zeon was the smaller side, yet it held the tactical advantage because of new humanoid weapons called Mobile Suits. Half of all humanity died in the first week. After that, the fighting settled into a bitter stalemate that lasted eight months.

  The series itself opens at the colony Side 7, where the newly deployed Federation warship White Base arrives to collect a prototype Mobile Suit. A Zeon reconnaissance team had been sent to learn about that same prototype. One Zeon soldier disobeyed orders and attacked the colony, killing most of the Federation crew and many civilians. Amuro Ray, a 15-year-old civilian, found the RX-78-2 Gundam. He had no experience, yet he destroyed the attacking Zaku II Mobile Suits, though he damaged the colony further. The survivors had little choice but to join White Base.

  On their journey, the crew keeps crossing paths with Lieutenant Commander Char Aznable of Zeon. Char fights the Federation without hesitation, but he nurses a personal grudge against Zeon's ruling Zabi family. He uses his position to pursue revenge. In one case he feeds Garma Zabi false information that gets Garma killed. His backstory emerges slowly. The name Char Aznable is only an alias, and his father was Zeon Zum Deikun, one of Zeon's original leaders before the Zabi dynasty took over.

  Char later meets a psychic named Lalah Sune, and a love triangle forms between her, Char, and Amuro. During a battle between the two men, Lalah is caught in Amuro's crossfire. When Federation forces invade the fortress of A Baoa Qu to finish Zeon, Amuro and Char fight a final duel, each blaming the other for her death. Char then realizes he has forgotten his true enemy. He breaks off to kill Kycilia Zabi, the last surviving member of the family. Amuro rejoins his comrades as the war ends, leaving the Gundam behind, inoperable after his battle.

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• 3. A Story About War

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  In Tomino's earlier television work, the villains were alien agents. Mobile Suit Gundam was the first of his projects to give the Federation human enemies. He said he wanted to tell a story about war. He aimed to expose through art the horrors of Japanese wartime aggression in Manchuria in 1939. He wanted to avoid historical revisionism and instead force viewers to face the tragic realities of war. At first he was unwilling to discuss the message, expecting audiences to reach their own conclusions. He also said he "packed his frustrations" into the series.

  The Mobile Suits themselves took inspiration from the powered armor in the 1959 novel Starship Troopers. The team conceived them as human-like robots that would not appeal only to children. Tomino compared them with Japanese religious history, most notably the worship of Buddha statues in temples. Others have compared the bond between a pilot and a suit with the way Formula One drivers treat their cars.

  Fast movement was the goal, and low gravity helped, so most of the fights were set in space. That choice made space colonies a common setting. One problem remained. How could someone as young as Amuro pilot the Gundam so well? The team answered with the idea of Newtypes.

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• 4. Drawing the Machines

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  Kunio Okawara first met Tomino while both worked on two Sunrise television series. Tomino liked his work and asked him to join the next project. That project was originally to be called "Gunboy" before the name changed to Mobile Suit Gundam. Okawara designed the robots, including the RX-78-2 Gundam, while Yoshikazu Yasuhiko handled the character designs.

  White Base, the mothership of the heroes, was drawn by Okawara using a three plane view method. Yet it was not made for Gundam at all. It was a salvaged design from the anime Invincible Steel Man Daitarn 3. The idea of a space carrier was partly inspired by the earlier anime Space Battleship Yamato, which Tomino said he admired.

  Tomino wanted White Base painted a more realistic black. Sunrise ordered it changed to white. The studio likewise ordered the Gundam repainted from a grayish white into white, red, blue, and yellow. Tomino showed great disgust at the change. After the show aired, he also noticed that the ship's shape was unrealistically non-aerodynamic. In an interview he said such a design would never appear in the real world, because fighter aircraft would treat it as a sitting duck.

  In an April 1989 issue of Newtype, Tomino went further. He said the imaginary enemies of Gundam were Sunrise, the sponsors, and the television stations.

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• 5. Gunpla Rescue

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  Mobile Suit Gundam premiered on the 7th of April 1979 on Nagoya Broadcasting Network and its affiliated ANN stations. Its ratings were low from the start, and it came close to cancellation. The plan had been 52 episodes. The sponsors, including the toymaker Clover, cut that to 39. The staff negotiated a one-month extension, and the series ended with 43 episodes on the 26th of January 1980.

  Then Bandai bought the right to produce plastic models of the Mobile Suits. That was a different market from Clover's Chogokin line of toys. Bandai's Gunpla models arrived in 1980 and sold very well. Bandai sponsored a rerun of the show, and the growing success eventually led to a trilogy of theatrical compilation films.

  When Gundam appeared, anime was dominated by the Super Robot genre. Gundam's approach was later labeled "Real Robot." The series is considered notable for showing mechs as mass-produced weapons of war. The rerun that Bandai paid for sent Tomino back to his own footage, which he would soon rebuild for the screen.

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• 6. Alternate Tellings

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  In 1979, while the anime was still airing, Tomino wrote the first novelizations of Gundam, published as a trilogy. The books let him tell the story in a more sophisticated, adult, and detailed way. They changed a good deal. Amuro is already a member of the Federation military when Side 7 is attacked. The heroes serve on ships named Pegasus and Pegasus II rather than aboard White Base. The One Year War runs well into the year UC 0080, while the anime ends at the start of that year.

  In the novels, Amuro dies in the final attack on A Baoa Qu. A Rick Dom's beam bazooka pierces the torso of his RX-78-3. Char's unit had been trying to warn him that Gihren meant to destroy the fortress and take the Federation's offensive fleet with it. Char and the crew of Pegasus II then join handpicked men under Kycilia Zabi's command and kill Gihren Zabi, after which Char kills Kycilia. Tomino later lamented that, had he known the anime would end differently and another series would follow, he would not have killed Amuro in the novels.

  The three compilation films reworked the series footage with new animation and revisions. Soldiers of Sorrow was the second film, and Encounters in Space followed in 1982. Tomino cut elements he found too unrealistic, such as the Gundam Hammer, a large spiked ball on a chain. The G-Armor upgrade parts disappeared, replaced by Core Booster support fighters. Hayato received an RX-77 Guncannon at Jaburo to replace the disadvantaged RX-75 Guntank. The third film added a substantial amount of new footage about the battles of Solomon and A Baoa Qu. It became 1982's fourth highest-grossing Japanese film.

  Manga offered further retellings. Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, the character designer of the series, wrote Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin for Gundam Ace magazine. It ran from June 2001 to June 2011 and filled 24 volumes. It elaborates on events before the original show, and from 2015-2018 that backstory became a series of theatrical OVAs. Hideki Ohwada took a lighter route with the parody Mobile Suit Gundam-san, adapted into an anime in 2014. His spinoff follows Tomino and the Sunrise staff as they make the series and its films.

  One of the 43 episodes, "Cucuruz Doan's Island," stands apart. At the director's request it was never officially released in English, and the compilation films left it out. On the 3rd of June 2022, an animated remake of the episode was released. Yasuhiko directed it. The film follows the same order of events as his Origin manga, but he insisted it be treated as a remake of the episode and not titled after The Origin. A one-shot manga by Junji Oono, a prequel focused on Doan and Rolland, appeared on the 24th of June 2022.

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• 7. Crossing Oceans

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  In February 1980, Italy became the first country outside Japan to broadcast Mobile Suit Gundam. The satellite network Animax later aired the series across Japan, and still does. Its networks carried the show to Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and other regions.

  English-language readers met the story through print in September 1990, when Del Rey Books published Tomino's novel trilogy in a translation by Frederik Schodt. No official romanized names existed yet for certain words in the franchise. Many proper nouns were written in katakana, which leaves wide room for different renditions. Years later, when the series was licensed in North America, the rights holders drew up a list of official spellings. In 2004 Schodt revised his translation to match. Stone Bridge Press issued it as a single 476-page volume titled Mobile Suit Gundam: Awakening, Escalation, Confrontation.

  The films reached English-speaking viewers on VHS in 1998, with subtitles, as part of Bandai's AnimeVillage releases. A year later Bandai released an English dub, with Michael Lindsay voicing Amuro Ray and Steve Blum voicing Char Aznable. That dub said "Gun-dam" and renamed the Principality of Zeon the "Duchy of Zeon." Sunrise prevented it from being re-released after its debut on VHS.

  The television series reached American screens on Monday, the 23rd of July 2001, on Cartoon Network's Toonami block. Bandai Entertainment released a heavily edited English dub, hoping to build on the success of Gundam Wing the year before. The ratings did not match Wing's. After the attacks of 9/11, many American stations pulled violent and war-themed programming, and the series was cancelled early. Its finale ran in Toonami's "New Year's Eve-il" special on the 31st of December 2001. On Saturday, the 8th of June 2002, the show restarted from episode one on Adult Swim, but low ratings pulled it again.

  On the 30th of May 2006, Bandai Entertainment released the English dub as a 10 volume DVD set. It had no Japanese audio track, apparently because Tomino felt the original mono mix was in too poor a condition. The 2007 Japanese DVD release sold over 100,000 copies in a month. Bandai Entertainment closed in 2012, and the series went out of print. Sunrise announced a plan at New York Comic Con 2014 to return it through Right Stuf Inc. Blu-ray and DVD editions followed in October 2015.

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• 8. Giants and Echoes

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  Mobile Suit Gundam was the first winner of the Animage Anime Grand Prix, covering 1979 and the first half of 1980. The magazine Wizard listed it as the second best anime of all time, and it also placed second in a TV Asahi poll of the top 100 anime. By the end of 2007, each episode of the original series had averaged 80,928 copies sold across all formats. Critic John Oppliger credited Amuro Ray, whom young Japanese viewers could easily relate to, and Char Aznable, who was "simply … fascinating." Anime News Network praised the way the series portrays war, while noting that its animation has aged poorly.

  At Keio University, mecha creator Shoji Kawamori studied in the same years as Hiroshi Ōnogi and Haruhiko Mikimoto. Together they ran a Mobile Suit Gundam fan club called "Gunsight One." Years later, they used that name as the call sign of the bridge on the spaceship SDF-1 in their series Macross. Guillermo del Toro has cited Gundam as an influence on Pacific Rim. American guitarist Richie Kotzen released the album Ai Senshi ZxR in Japan in 2006, mixing Gundam covers with original songs. Andrew W.K. released Gundam Rock in Japan on the 9th of September 2009 to mark the 30th anniversary.

  At Fuji-Q Highland in Fujiyoshida, Yamanashi, the dark ride Gundam the Ride: A Baoa Qu opened on the 20th of July 2000. It placed riders in an escape shuttle leaving the battleship Suruga during the final battle. Mikimoto designed all of its characters. The ride closed on the 8th of January 2007 and was replaced by Gundam Crisis. Its main feature was a full-size Gundam model lying flat inside the venue, which visitors activated by hunting for information with handheld devices.

  The 30th anniversary also produced Real-G, announced on the 11th of March 2009. It was a plan to build a 1:1 scale Gundam in Japan. The 18-meter statue was completed in July 2009 and displayed in a Tokyo park. It was later rebuilt in Shizuoka Prefecture and finally reopened in Odaiba, Tokyo, on the 19th of April 2012, beside a gift shop called Gundam Front Tokyo. The Odaiba statue was dismantled in March 2016.

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