>get slapped
>become MAN OF DESTINY
So, chances are, you’re running out of stuff that’s worth watching. And, maybe, while you dig giant robot shows, you’re also the (hopefuly non-existant) sort that still somehow thinks the Real Robot genre started with Evangelion (in which case, you’re wrong). May I recommend Mobile Suit Gundam 0079? Because the original series (and more) will be available for streaming over on Funimation.
Funimation put out the word a couple of days ago that the 1979 series was finally going to be streamable, both subbed and dubbed, along with Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn (which is great, but to be frank, is more appreciable when you’ve seen both Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam and Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ, as well as Char’s Counterattack, all of which are not currently streamable outside Japan) and both Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny (never watched either, but I’ve heard super mixed things).
Gundam 0079 is super unique for its time, and is definitely worth watching if you haven’t. That said, you’ll have to put up with a larger-than-usual amount of wonky 70’s animation in a show that was – no shit – almost cancelled after 39 episodes, with the staff actually having to push to get the final episodes to a count of 43. It’s also weird in that, despite being the first Real Robot show, you wouldn’t know it by how it was initially marketed; the original toys are kinda terrible compared to the detailed model kits you get now, and, hell, the original theme sounds more like something from a Super Robot show than what’s become typical of the brand in general, and the Universal Century in particular. Hell, you wouldn’t expect it, but it’s harder sci fi than anything currently available on the domestic market right now, even accounting for the giant robots with their crazy nuclear reactors and the space psychic stuff.
At its core, Mobile Suit Gundam is a war story, with the battle between the space nazis Principality of Zeon and the space nazis Earth Federation taking center stage. The show actually goes out of its way to show that there’s good people on both sides of the war (and also ungodly monsters on both sides), and location, personal circumstances and politics play a much larger role in the perception of good and evil than you’d normally think. And that’s a level of subtlety that you really don’t see nowadays; I wonder why? To really drive the point of all of this home, here’s the vocal piece from the second compilation movie, Ai no Senshi, and the English cover version below by Andrew W.K.:
Also, you know, it has an antagonist (which over the course of the UC goes back and forth on being good and bad) in Char Aznable so iconic, almost every series since, including non-Universal-Century series, tends to have a clone of him of sorts. He’s also the origin of the red ones going 3 times faster, at least in Japan. So there’s that.
I could probably sit here and talk about the damn show for hours (it took me as long to write this far, because I kept looking stuff up). So I’ll leave it there.
Funimation started streaming Mobile Suit Gundam as well as the other shows mentioned above, on November 25th. So, you have no reason not to join the Gouf Troop (because Ramba Ral is awesome). Who knows, maybe they’ll get Zeta and ZZ (the latter will be a coup, as its only dub is super defunct and bad so it’d probably have to be sub only) up there soon, and you can finally understand all those Gundam jokes in Gintama.
Source: iO9
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