You're listening to season nine of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of Sci-fi mega franchise, Mobile Suit Gundam, researching its influences, examining its themes, and discussing how each piece of the Gundam canon fits within the changing context in Japan and the world from 1979 to today. You.
This is episode nine point eleven. Music soothes the savage beast. And we are your hosts. I'm Tom Gundam. Fan and intergalactic. Rock and roll. Roadie.
And I'm Nina. And they say that when you're tired of Gundam, you're tired of living.
Who says that?
Bondi Namco Filmwork, a wholly owned subsidiary of Bondi Namco Entertainment Incorporated, a company very excited to sell you Gundam merchandise for every part of your home and aspect of your life.
Yeah, that makes sense. They would say that.
Momosu Breakdown is made possible by 708 paying subscribers. Thank you all for keeping us genki, and special thanks to our newest patrons, ben S, Shima Apologists and Akgai Is. Best guy postscripts. We usually thank new patrons within a week or two of them signing up. If I seem to have missed you, please reach out and let me know. Patreon changed some things in their interface and notifications which have made it a bit easier to miss people, but it's important to us to acknowledge everyone. This also applies. If you happen to change your name and would like to be thanked under a different name, reach out and we are happy to do that. Two more special shoutouts this week. The first to Mongoose and sun for supporting us on Kofi, and the second I mentioned this in the talkback, but Patron Mosquitoes offered their services as a native Japanese speaker to help us with some of the trickier parts of Transcribing and translating this short. We definitely could not have gotten through that song without their help. So thank you very much, Mosquitoes.
The translation will stand in lieu of research this week, and you'll find a link in the show notes to our translation. This week, we are covering the first of three independent stories that make up SD Gundam movie SD Gundam Matsuri or SD Gundam Festival, which played in theaters starting on March 13, 1993. The first segment, SD Command War Chronicle Gundam Force Super GRMs final formula versus Norm Gather runs 14 minutes from titles to credits and depicts a deep space sci-fi battle between the heroic Captain F 91 of the Super GRMs task Force and his rival, the villainous Furor, commander of Cosmo Zetarion, plus the rock bands and Eldritch monstrosities that keep interfering. Some English sources, including the Gundam Wiki and the Anime News Network Encyclopedia List final formula vs. Norm Gather as the last part of SD Gundam Matsuri rather than the first. But this is contradicted by the Japanese sources the NADB database, our own home video copies and the original posters for the movie, which all list it first. So we're going with that order. Final Formula versus Norm Gather was directed by Amino Tetsuro, who oversaw the creation of most of the animated SD Gundam content that we've already covered. In the three years since the release of SD Gundam Mark Five in 1990, amino stayed busy directing OVA adaptations of The Body high school romcom YJ band Lemon Angel, the Fish Out of Water comedy, High School Jingi, about a yakuza who becomes a high school social studies teacher, and the medieval fantasy epic Heroic Legend of Arslin, as well as the 52 episode soccer anime Ashta Free Kick. In 1994, Amino will reunite with many of the staff from Estigunda Matsri to make Macross Seven, another show about a deep space band changing the course of desperate battles through the power of rock and roll. For this reason, Final Formula versus Norm Gather is sometimes described as a precursor to the more famous Macross Seven. Besides showcasing remarkably good animation for an SD short, the most distinctive feature of the film is the Socalled rock opera performed diegetically during the course of the film by the band Penalty Kick oldies in five movements that in full run for more than 20 minutes, significantly longer than the short itself. The lyrics for the rock opera were written by Amino Tetsuro, and the piece was composed by Kenji Kawaii Orikasa I. The voice of lead singer Tron Chan also performed the song in a Legendarily Grueling marathon recording session that ran until after midnight and saw Amino rewriting lyrics on the fly to make them better fit the tempo of the anime to the mounting frustration of sound director Otsuki Toshimichi. Orikasa AI is a prolific voice actor with too many prominent roles to name here, but she is going to have major parts in both Victory Gundam and Gundam Wing and has already played Al's mother Michiko in 80 War in the Pocket, as well as cool rocker girl Dorothy Moore in F 91. Her costars in the short included matsumoto Yasunori playing captain. F 91. He previously voiced Night Gundam in the SD Gundam guidance series, as well as Yanara Kyoyuki who voiced Cyclopean Crossbone vanguard ace pilot Zabine in F 91 and Gun Cannon the Fighter in SD Gundam guideen played the Furor commander the character designed for Tron chan was done by Kia Asamiya, and she was named for his company, Tron Studio, which was in turn named for the Disney movie. Tron. Final formula vs. Norm Gather is loosely adapted from the manga series SD Command Senki the Senki or War chronicle in the title is the same word that was used in the name of the Kaku Senki genre that I explored back in episode nine. Two. Command Senki largely follows the exploits of Command Gundam. The same one who showed up in SD Gundam Warrior Knight Command emergency scramble. The first arc, G Arms, is focused on Special Forces style military operations. The second arc, Gundam Force, focuses on First Responders in a near future city, and the third, Super G arms moves the setting into space, which is where SD Gundamatsuri picks up the story. So now the recap.
In the depths of space, two factions are at war the bad guys, cosmos, atarion, and the good guys, super g arms. Into this conflict, a new ally arrives to join super g arms, the rock band penalty kick oldies. Yes, they really are a band. And while music might be a metaphorical weapon, demoralizing the enemy and encouraging the super g arms, the penalty kick oldies also have weapon weapons, and they do some serious damage to the enemy fleet, while dodging every attack aimed their way. While everyone is preoccupied with the latest skirmish, a member of cosmos, Atarion fury commander, tries to sneak away, but is pursued by those pesky penalty kick oldies. He has sent word for captain f 91, a member of super g arms, to meet him for a private duel. And the captain decides to go, keeping his destination and purpose secret from the rest of the super GRMs team. Despite admonitions from both parties in the duel to stay out of it, the penalty kick oldies continue to Harry fury commander with music, taunts and explosives on the super GRMs ship command, f 90 sneaks a peek at the private letter captain f 91 received, hoping for a clue as to what his comrade is up to. What he finds is instant cause for panic. The location of the duel is planet denomos, where, unbeknownst to the duelists, the superhuman battle machine gather is held captive. The energy released by the duel has already awakened the Gather from stasis. Only the containment switch is keeping it from breaking out and putting the whole universe in danger. So of course, one of the duelists steps on a hidden switch in the ground, causing the containment switch to open. Out of the side of a huge stone tower, the lead singer of the penalty kick oldies sits on the switch and the enormous monster gather is freed. Furor commander and captain F 91 set aside their duel to focus on this new enemy. But when they attempt to flank the Gather, it splits in two and the duelists collide. They are engulfed in a crackling, glowing ball of energy, and when the light dissipates, they have combined into a single dragonlike mobile suit, capable of stopping the gather in its tracks and trapping it once more. You. So initially when I looked at the band, when I looked at penalty kick oldies, I was wondering if tronchan, if their lead singer was the only human. But now I actually think they're all mobile suits, including Tronchan.
She's some sort of advanced, like, flesh mecca.
She's an android, I don't know.
But I mean, she is like running around in deep space.
Exactly. With no helmet, no suit. Apparently she's totally fine just zooming around space. So obviously it's not which ones are human, they are all sentient.
No, no, she's just protected by a field of Mzakovsky particles tchaikovsky particles I don't know. The power of music keeps her safe.
In deep space tchaikovsky particles was good.
Thank you.
I was looking ahead at my next notes, and so I missed a beat. And then once it hit me, I was like, oh, that's funny. That deserved a laugh. The design of the band is really fun, although I'm sure I missed a lot of small details in it. For instance, I have no idea what mobile suits the various bandmates are, though I bet Tom is about to tell us.
I think actually a lot of them are unique to the band. I know they have names like Hurricane Gundam, Heavy Metal Gundam Amazing as SD Gundam has gone on, and at this point, you can really see it. It has deviated pretty far from the source material. Like, one of these characters is based in some sense on the F 91 Gundam. But, like, why is he gold? Visually, character wise, we're really only taking the barest hints from the original source material.
I actually wonder how many of the members of the band are based on actual musicians, because they have quite a few pretty distinctive traits in their design. The designs are fun. They're moving around so much throughout the episode, you don't necessarily get much time to appreciate them unless you're pausing it a lot like we were. The mask that the drummer is wearing is like the Blobby Gundams, kind of a little bit.
Yeah.
And then another one is wearing a sort of Jason esque hockey mask. Tronchon's hair is green with red bangs. It's like lima green with red bangs. One of them has sort of ginger hair, but it's in a swoop. One of them has, like, hair metal style, just like a massive amount of blonde hair.
Is it hair metal or is it tengu hair metal? Because doesn't that kind of look like the big shrubbery sized mane of hair that you sometimes see in depictions of tengu or characters based on them? Like shift tree from Pokemon.
That's true, but in that case, I would expect to see that hair on the character wearing geta instead of on a separate one.
Fair.
And you cannot deny the luxurious locks of Mini, a hair metal performer, or a glamrock band.
In the story of Super G Arms, the Penalty kick oldies are actually all in disguise to protect their identities.
This isn't just so. This is a gem. And the holograms? Almost. Wait, are Gem and the holograms in disguise? Are they superheroes? I actually don't remember.
I was going to make the Ziggy Stardust comparison because they're also a band in their real lives. But when they become a battle band to stand up to Cosmos Terion, they have to put on these disguises to protect their secret identities. So it's not just costumery. Yeah, they're cool designs. Very heavy metal, very visual. K kind of like over the top.
I got strong visual K vibes from the lavender haired one because he's wearing like a loose tank top, like the kind of shirt that sort of hangs on a skinny body and feels like it's not covering much of anything. One of the bandmates is wearing geta is wearing like the big wooden tall sandals that are very traditional in Japan, which is part of what made me wonder if they're inspired by specific people because that feels awfully specific. And I can imagine a rock star wearing them as part of their of them.
One of his arms is a different color, so it's like he's wearing one sleeve.
Tronchan is wearing cutoffs and a little like vest that looks like the sort of leather jacket vest style, but in a bright color. Lots of fun design that feels very heavily inspired by, if not directly lifted from rock stars and pop stars.
Tronchan, she's the most toned down probably of all of the designs except for the two tone hair with the bright red in the center. And then most of her hair is bright green. When she first shows up on screen, before we know who she is, I thought she might be based on Kiara from Double Zeta.
Yeah, same.
I wonder if she's not just like also based on Cindy Lauper.
And I think we're right to think of kind of like mainstream popular musical artists for a couple of different reasons. But one of the big ones is that their ship is clearly inspired by those big stadium shows or the kinds of huge concerts that you have at festivals over the summer. Because the stage that they have on their ship is huge. There are all these laser lights. I don't think we see the machine, but there's smoke as if from a smoke machine.
And it is like a converted battleship. And so it made me think of that really famous performance that Cher did on the deck of that US navy ship.
Everywhere that ought to be like an engine is actually a speaker. When Tronchan is jetting around space, her quote unquote veneers are actually speakers. Everything about it reads huge. Sold out concert. Rolling Stones at the Budokan kind of thing. I feel like I should clarify. The Budokan is a very famous venue in Japan. Budokan means it's built for martial arts. It's made for like martial arts competitions and huge events. But a number of famous concerts have also occurred there. I believe the Rolling Stones one is one of the most famous to have happened there. But it was a big concert venue for a long time and I think still is.
Like a lot of live concert recordings are done at the Buddha Con. There are a lot of albums that are such and such band live at the Buddha Con.
It must have great acoustics then, or like a good recording setup or something. Anyway, they are that kind of band centering.
The band like this in the episode really just hits you real hard over the head with how good the music is and how prominent it is in the episode. And thinking about that really drives home how important music has been for SD Gundam throughout its whole run. The music has always been standout. It was very different from the sort of music we expect from Gundam, especially in this period, but it was carving out its own niche for itself. And the music from those early SD Gundams really stands on its own. They released albums of the SD Gundam music.
I listened to a couple of the tracks from one of those albums as we were trying to figure out what the song lyrics in this episode were saying, and they're fun tracks.
It's good music, it's poppier, it's more rock and roll than Gundam is accustomed to giving us. It's sort of an undiscovered gem that there's all this good music hidden away inside the old St. Gundam stuff that most people skip.
The music also plays a really important role in keeping the energy of this episode up even in its slower moments, because there are a few of those where they take a little extra time for transformation sequences for reveals of the big, bad and such, and provides another point of comedy that fits really well with the show. Shout out to Patron Mosquitoes, who helped us with this translation. We could not have gotten the song translated without them because sung Japanese is much harder to understand than spoken. Also, because usually when we're trying to translate a work, part of what we're doing is comparing what we hear to what would make sense in the context. But a bunch of the song is extremely silly. It doesn't necessarily make sense, and the context is not always helpful in determining what they are singing about. That contrast, though, contributes to the overall sort of humor and ridiculousness of the short itself.
But the song does have a lot to do with the events of the show for the most part. Yeah, the song is being played by the characters as the events happen, and really they're making it up as they go along, and it is about what is happening in front of them in particularly dangerous moments. You get Tron chan singing like, I'm not going to die, I'm not going to die, I'm not going to die.
I'm fine, I'm fine. And I love the whole sequence after she sits on the switch, not knowing what it is, and releases the Enemy has a whole verse about like, I don't know anything about that. It wasn't me. I don't know anything about that. It doesn't have anything to do with me, I swear.
It's sometimes said of Amino Tetsuro, the director, that it's actually characteristic for him to really focus on the interplay of the music and the visuals. And in this case, when he had his meeting with Kenji Koai and the recording director and the rest of the sort of sound and music staff and gave them their instructions for what he wanted for the music, the music menu. He had it all laid out really precisely. Like, at this second, the music needs to be like this. At this moment, it needs to be like this. It needs to be like this for this amount of time and then shift to this other really, really precise to a degree that was shocking and alarming to Kawhi and the rest of the music staff. And this is why Amino was there for the recording session, rewriting the lines as they went to make sure that they fit with the timing that he had worked out for this whole thing. It's incredible to think about. Must have been so, so much work.
It is very striking to the extent that you are able to follow along with the Japanese, if you are if you read Hiragana, we will include those translations along with the episode as a whole. And parts of it are in the episode dialogue as well. But the way the syllables fit with the tempo of the music, even as the tempo of the music changes and.
Shifts, and it is constantly changing, is.
Quite impressive how they manage to construct all these lines, all these lyrics, to sort of fit perfectly. And it often doesn't feel like a stretch. It doesn't feel like they are sort of twisting and pulling the syllables to make them fit. It feels very much like it fits.
Together a lot of those early St gundam shorts. The directing was a little rough, like the timing was off, the cuts weren't quite right, and here it's just absolutely nailed. All those years of practice, all those rough drafts have clearly paid off because they did a great job on this one. In terms of the visuals, it's also a very good looking short. When I initially watched it, my thought was like, oh, wow, the animation in this is great. On further and closer examination, I think to be a little bit more precise, often the animation is not particularly good. Which is not to say that it's bad, just that there's not a lot of it going on. Because the character designs for Fur Commander and F 91 are so complicated.
Yes, all the mobile suit characters really feel very detailed.
Furor Commander, by the way, who's, like, got dragon mouths coming off of him in every different direction. Everyone's incredibly spiky, and obviously their limbs don't allow for a whole lot of motion. He's supposed to be based on the Mark II Gundam, which, sure, whatever. Why not? Might as well be if this short had been made now, I would say that these designs were intended for 3D CGI, where you can get away with greater design complexity because you only have to model it once. But in this case, it's actually because these designs were made for manga, where you do have to draw them over and over again, but not nearly as many times as when you're doing animation. You can, however, see the direct design lineage that connects these to the SD Gundam designs that are being made now, which are being animated in 3D CGI. So yeah, often, especially with the mobile suits doing the fighting, they're just kind of posing at each other. There's not a ton of animation, but the effects work. Yeah, real good. The effects do an enormous amount to cover up the lack of actual movement. And when the band is playing they did animate the band.
Well, they'd have to, because it's the band that is really the emotional core of the short, which is to say the source of most of the humor. Not all of it, but most. As with most other S and DS, a lot of the humor has been very slapstick, very Looney Tunes. There is this irreverent kind of rock and roll attitude to the band, but not in a way that's really threatening. Like they're writing graffiti on enemy ships and on enemy mobile suits themselves. But it's all silly doodles of like dragons and it's nothing very racy or revolutionary. They pull faces, but it's just like sticking a tongue out, pulling the eyelid.
Down, going D. It's very much about tweaking the noses of these pompous, self serious mobile suits but it feels very.
Much like the kind of thing that would appeal to kids. Right? It's the way kids want to treat adults.
It's like the most perfectly childish thing in the world to get up in somebody's face and make a loud noise and just be like or like play music really loud next to their ear. Which is what the band does to a furor commander at a couple of moments.
And then they have some literal music based attacks. The guitarist just like plays a sick riff and it tears the ship apart. And then at one point they use a gong to destroy the window of the bridge of one of the ships since all of them can breathe in outer space. Doesn't really mean anything, but is destructive and annoying.
It's more like a windshield than anything else. Keeps the mobile suits inside from getting hit by micrometeors.
There's that moment where Tron chains Fury commander to his own ship. And so when he is trying to fly away and break the chain, he doesn't break the chain, he just tears his own ship in half. That felt very Looney Tunes at one point. Command F 90 is trying to see the letter that Captain F 91 has received and his eyeballs do that like stretched out thing that they do in Looney Tunes sometimes. But I do think we should talk about the name of the band real quick.
The penalty kick. Oldies.
Yeah, sure. Penalty Kick is a reference to soccer, to football. They say and do a number of different sports related things they have a.
Brief volleyball match with some bombs.
There's the volleyball match, there's the kicking of bombs or of speakers as though they were soccer balls. I think it does get used outside of a sports context, but in the song lyrics, there's the term hansoku, which is penalty in sports. And then I was curious about the term oldies, so I did some very cursory digging, and it seems that in Japanese oldies references much the same thing that it would in English music from a certain period of time. They're probably talking about American and English hits, like popular songs from the, which is not the kind of music the band is playing. I don't know that we can say much more about that, but it is an interesting juxtaposition. It makes me wonder what kind of major sports things were going on at the time that they would want to maybe name the band for them.
And it could be the most, like, inside joke kind of thing. Like Tron Chan being named for the artist's studio, which is named for the Disney movie, right?
It could be an in joke from like an in office soccer tournament or something, for all we know.
And it's probably like the secret origin of the penalty kick oldie's name is probably explained in one of these manga issues. The thing about SD Gundam is that we are just like scraping the cream off of the top of a vast soup bowl of churning cannon. There's so much of it hidden away in these manga.
And at least according to my very limited understanding of Japanese office culture, mostly gained from manga. It is not uncommon for workplaces, when they have like, company family days or go on a company retreat, to have different departments, field sports teams, and to play little competitive tournaments among the departments. So if it were in some way a reference to that, I wouldn't be surprised. We may never know. But like you said, maybe it's deep in the lore. If only we were delving into every last bit of SD Gundam, which we're not going to do.
Someday some podcast will pick up where we left off and they will cover every SD Gundam manga.
Love the design of the combined Fury commander and Captain F 91. It has this kind of like dragony thing going on with wings and a tail. There's double swords that they then bring together in front of them, so it becomes like a laser beam cannon. Yeah, it's cool. Light side, dark side.
This is not the first time we've done two rivals, like clash and then fuse in order to defeat the secret giant monster Big Bad. Like, that was also how SD Gundam gaiden ended. I'm not even mad. It works. It worked here, it worked there. They'll probably keep doing it. It's just a hallmark of SD Gundam, just mash those two toys together. So while the final formula is kind of a retread of the what was it? Knight superior Dragon from Gundam Guiden. The Norm Gather the Big Monster is a great design because it feels both new and interesting, and there's a lot going on with it. But also it is still kind of familiar. It still picks up little elements visually from the Gundam that it's drawing off of. Like it kind of has a noya zeal look to it, especially when it first emerges. And then it also kind of resembles the monstrous Zabi Palace from first Gundam.
As with many of the SDS, it's a more organic looking design. There's like mouths and eyeballs all over it.
It's like 60% mouth, 30% eyeball, and then 10% snake. Not a pleasant ratio, I will say. I think if you have been avoiding SD Gundam because you think it's just not very good, you owe it to yourself to give this one a shot. This is probably the best looking and best sounding of the SD Gundams so far. I don't think it's the funniest. It has some great moments, but it plays a lot of the space struggle between F 91 and Fury Commander Strait, and lacks some of the creative thrill and Gundam based humor of some of the earlier efforts. But it's solid. And especially if you're a Macross Seven fan, I think you really ought to watch it.
It's so short, it would have to be pretty bad not to recommend it. I mean, it doesn't feel special or revolutionary particularly, but it's fun. To wrap up our discussion when we first watched this short before we had decided to do the little research only interlude, I did write some next time ons for this short. And a few of them are funny enough that I want to say them, even though I didn't get to use them as next time ons First Up garms. They call him Garms. Oh, no, wait. That's g arms.
Yeah. G arms. Zabby, the youngest of the Zobby clan.
I'm going to call him Garms now.
Sorry, garma fans. He's garms now.
Are those Bernards on that pop star's back? Oh, no, they're speakers. They just look like Bernards. Bernards is just fun to say.
Come on.
Human characters are wearing mobile suit masks. Mobile suit characters are wearing different mobile suit masks. The traditional method for settling conflicts space volleyball. Extremely looney tunes behavior. And it wasn't me. The accidental freeing of Ancient evil remix.
So those have been our last time. Ons this time ons the linear nature of time is troublesome.
Next time on episode Nine point Twelve tom researches the Homo Avus flying machine from Zetagundam while we translate the second part of St gundam Matsuri. Don't worry, it won't take as long as part one. And a heads up that two weeks from now we will be taking a week off for a friend's wedding. Very exciting stuff. Should be a lot of fun. And then we'll be right back to working on Estiga. Namatsuri with fill ins of old research ideas. Until then, stay genki, folks.
Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina in scenic New York City within the ancestral and unceded land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is Wasp by Misha Dioxen. The closing music is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio. The recap music was Olivia by Hyisen. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the Lenape people and more in the Show notes and on our website, Gundampodcast.com. You can get in touch with us on Twitter or Instagram at gundampodcast or by email to hosts@gundampodcast.com. And thank you for listening.
Are we ready to dust off those talkback muscles?
Yeah.
Every time we do one of these, after not having done one for a while, I feel like Ron Howard doing narration of that new season of Arrested Development they did for Netflix. How do you oh, and in the very first episode, when he first goes into narrator voice again, he starts a line sort of like clears his throat and puts himself back into his narrator voice. It was day fifth.
Well, as any comedian will tell you, nothing is better than being told that your joke was funny, especially if it didn't get a laugh in the moment. One of them has like what is it called when the hair goes straight up? Well, it's not a flat top because it's all spiky on top, but that's.
Also not a pompadour.
No.
I mean, it basically just has his hair spiked straight up and it's lavender colored. I wondered very briefly whether the monkey bot was based on Data the monkey Bot from Mega Man Legends. But it seems that Data is only in Mega Man Legends, which didn't come out in Japan until 97.
10%. Snake. Not a pleasant ratio.
The cars outside agree.