You're listening to season 11 of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of sci fi mega franchise Mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.
This is episode 11.1, three big gundams in little Shinjuku and we're your hosts. I'm Tom, and thanks to Kyoji, I've attained unconquerable podcasting power.
And I'm Nina, new to G Gundam and pumping my fist, pointing at the
screen, making loud but incoherent noises.
Happy version.
Hooting, hollering.
As an ad free independent podcast, Mobile Suit Breakdown couldn't exist without the dedication and dare I say it, devotion of our paying subscribers. Thank you all and special thanks to our newest Radu P. Quinlan B. Axiomatic, An Autumn Moth and Matthew P. You keep us Genki. Extra special thanks to Jacob D. And the ghost of Sigmund Freud for supporting
us on Ko Fi rip.
To Sigmund Freud, you would have loved the collective works of Tomino Yoshiyuki. This week we're covering g Gundam episode 13, Dai Pinchi Tekiwa Go Dai Gandamu or Big Trouble. The enemy is five big Gundams. Originally broadcast on July 15, 1994. No notable new names in the credits this week, so let's skip ahead to the play by play.
Welcome back to historic ruined Shinjuku on this beautiful sunny day as we await the start of the first ever Gundam fight race between former King of Hearts and winner of the 12th Gundam Fight Competition, Master Asia, piloting for Neo Hong Kong, and his young protege, Domon Kashu, current King of Hearts and pilot of Neo Japan's Shining Gundam. Though the two are expected to lock
V fins at some point during the
Gundam fight, they have agreed to today's race as a demonstration of amity and sportsmanship. The race course has been set along the path of the old subway line from the safe zone near the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building to Tokyo Tower.
From the starting line in the Yotsuya
neighborhood, the two Gundam fighters will race past the National Diet Building, then through Kasumigaseki on their way to the finish line. While the Death army continues to infest the area around the track, our two Gundam racers can expect little in the way of fighting to distract them during the race. Let's now go live to our local team for an update. How are the track conditions down there?
Bad.
That's great.
Both Gundam fighters are arriving at the starting line now. Domon, as always, is accompanied by his pit crew and coach, Rein Mikamura, while Master Asia appears to be alone. It's an unusual approach, but one that has served him well in the past. They're now taking their positions as last season's champion. Master Asia will be starting in pole position, while Domon, as the only other Gundam racer participating, will start in third. They appear to be conferring now. And yes, it seems Master Asia has elected to abandon his Mobile Fighter and race on foot. A bold strategy, and one that few other Gundam fighters would even contemplate. But when it comes to the Master, nothing surprises us anymore. And now it looks like Domon is coming out of his Gundam too.
He's conferring with his pit crew.
It seems there's something wrong with the Gundam's right hand. I'm not sure how that would impact its racing performance, but Domon has decided to continue on foot as well. Well, it hardly counts as a Gundam race now, but this is a pay per view broadcast and we are not giving refunds, so let's keep those cameras rolling. There's the starting piano, and Domon is entering the subway. Visuals for this portion of the race are provided in crystal clear Seichi vision
From cameras set up along the course,
Domon has chosen to board an all too convenient train heading toward the tower, which may save him some time, but now brings him face to face with the first surprise obstacle of the race. Mr. Chibidi Crockett and his energy fist, Hadouken. To get through this obstacle effectively, Domon will need to duck, dodge and weave.
But oh no.
He's taken the first fist right in the face. It looks like he walked right into it, expecting to face the same old Chibidi. But this one overflows with a mysterious power. Domon has broken away from Chibidi now, but he'll have to do better than that if he wants to win this race. Next up is the Train Pincer, followed by Argo Golsky's omnidirectional Train toss. But let's take a moment to check back in with our local team waiting with Domon's pit crew, it looks like they've come under attack by a swarm of Death Beasts. How are things going down there?
Bad.
Great. I hope you survive. Now, back to the race. Domon is through the Golski Train toss and has reached the final obstacle. George Desand. The piano manned. If he wants to reach the podium today, he'll need to defeat three Kyoji Boosted Gundam fighters and one guy who just plays the piano, but in like
a really menacing way.
I'm afraid it's not looking good for Neo Japan. Is their new power just too much for a single Gundam fighter? Even one as skilled as the King of Hearts? Oh my stars and Gundams. The shining Gundam has just crashed through the wall, pursued by some kind of new black and red monster Gundam. Folks, it looks like this Gundam race is about to turn into a Gundam fight after all. And not a moment too soon. Let's get ready to Gundom. The two opponents are facing each other down. They're moving into combat position. They're raising their hands to each other. They're still pointing their hands at each other. Now the hands are emitting light and darkness. They're emitting darkness and light. They're standing and glowing at each other. They're still glowing. They're still glowing. They're. They're still glowing. Oh, the black Gundam just moved its hand forward slightly. The shining Gundam is retaliating by glowing ever more brightly. And oh, he's really attacking that darkness. And it's all over. The shining Gundam produced the brightest light yet. And the other Gundam withdrew. Truly a fitting conclusion to what I am contractually obligated to call the most thrilling Gundam fight yet.
And now we see why it was so important to spend four episodes getting to know these various Gundam fighters better. Demonstrating for the audience that they are Domon's bros, his pals, his reliable friends. Because now the sting of betrayal hits all the harder.
Can I just say, for those of
you who are watching the dub rather
than the sub, the Japanese title opens with Dai Pinchi. Because Pinchi is like a problem trouble. But I've always found it really cute that that is one of the loan words that made it over to Japanese.
Pinchy.
Domon is in a big pinch.
He's in a real pinch.
I listened to this episode both in Japanese and in English during my various watch throughs for note taking. And so for the first time, I realized that the way Rain pronounces his name is more like Domon. Domon. We're in some trouble now.
Oh dear. It's probably an overcorrection. Initially they might have said Damon. Just reading it from English. And then, oh no, they're long O sounds. Domon do Moon.
Everybody else in the dub is saying Domon. And so it's like, oh, she was not in the same booth with anybody.
I found it really funny that you opened with all of the other guys because I have almost no notes about them. I found them one of the least interesting parts of this episode.
That's a shame, because they take up most of the runtime.
Oh, I know though. Shout outs to Chiboti for reading the New York Times on a subway.
Just classic problematic.
Well, the Gray lady has fallen out of favor.
It's true. This was in the 90s when things were different.
Yeah, Annette.
Apparently he can do an energy fist
attack now thanks to DG cells, the influence of Kyoji martial arts Ki particles. Well, and Argo can like lift and throw around subway cars like he was always strong. But that's. That's next level. Saisaichi has apparently developed computer hacking skills.
Mysterious.
And Georgia just plays the piano a bunch. Chibidi punching and an illusory fist like flies through the air and blasts Domon back through the door of a subway car. Reminded me of that one Tumblr post about the Wizard War. Do you remember this one?
No.
Well, conveniently I saved it for this very eventuality. It's a little blue, so I'm gonna have to do some editing on the fly as I read it. Dang, man, this Wizard War is wild. I just saw a guy clap his hands together and say the Ten Hells or some similar thing, and everyone around him turned inside out, had their tibias explode and then disappeared. The camera didn't even go onto him. That's how common stuff like this is. I'm out here casting frostbite and level two poison. I just heard someone yell power word scrunch. Two groups over. I gotta get outta here, man.
Amazing.
And this goes for Master Asia too. You've got these guys in their generic defense mobile suits shooting their little peashooters at the Death Army. And Master Asia can turn into an electro bullet. He can jump in the air and bounce off of bullets as they're flying past him.
Well, and were those even bullets? Or were those like beam shots?
No. So I think the little like spiky ball that he catches in his scarf and throws through the eye of the Death army mobile suit. They love eye damage in this episode.
They do.
They love eyeballs.
He also, I think he first punches a hole in whatever that glass screen, window, face plate, whatever is. And then he throws that spiked ball through it.
He's not even his mobile suit. He's just doing this by hand and scarf. But no, I think those little spiked balls are the bullets being shot by the Death Army.
Okay.
And then he's catching them and throwing
them back, dancing around on top of them, jumping from one to another, running along, gun barrels going, ah, tata.
And no one watching. This is like, how is this possible?
What is going on?
Everyone's like, that's Master Asia stuff.
That's just what he can do.
That's what Gundam fighters do.
So they're not at all surprised by the abilities. They are surprised by the willingness to court danger. Someone at the command center comments that these men seem to enjoy danger. And the reply from one of the soldiers is, those Gundam fighters are a different breed.
Yeah, they're not normal. This is what I'm saying about the Wizard War. Those guys are out there casting level two beam gun. And Master Asia and Domon and Chibidi are using martial arts D particles to do impossible things.
At one point, Master Asia is running
in like a wheel of ribbon. And I don't entirely understand what the ribbon wheel is for.
It's like a hamster wheel. It's for exercise.
Okay.
To make it more difficult, actually, because he's bored and needs the exercise.
He needs enrichment in his environment. They've been caged in here at the Tokyo Government Building for question mark amount of time, and they're getting bored.
Oh.
There was one thing about all the other Gundam fighters that I thought was funny, which is that they reveal that all of them will be here as opponents to Domon at the very beginning of the episode. The. They don't really.
No surprise.
There is that bit of tension in that. We know, but the characters in the show don't know. We're watching Domon and Rain and Master Asia and we know that these guys are waiting for them, but they don't know yet. So you do get some tension and drama from that. But it is funny to just be like, and these guys are here. They're evil.
Now.
Whatever drama is to be extracted from that turns quickly into comedy and I think unintentional comedy. By the time Domon is meeting like the third and fourth of them, by the time he runs into Saisaichi and George, it's like, Domon, buddy, everybody you've met down here has been kyoji maxing and trying to kill you. Why would you ever think ominously playing piano? George was not going to do the same thing. How are you still surprised by this?
Well, at first, he didn't know it was George at first. I mean, he hasn't realized it's a trap.
Again, how has he not realized it's a trap? It's the most obvious trap in history.
He's a very good fighter, but I don't think anyone has ever praised Domon's intelligence.
I'm gonna assume for the first five years of his training with Master Asia, he was just getting hit in the head over and over again.
I mean, I would like to point out at basically every instance in this episode that Tomon says something to or about rain. He is 100% wrong. When the train shows up after Rain has told him that the trains are running, he's like, just as reliable as Rain's information always is.
Like, well, in that case, she said the trains weren't running, and now a train is running. I think he's justified in that moment
to be a little sarcastic later when he sees the converging energy signatures and
lizards thinking to himself, oh, but I'm
sure Rain got away already. And then when he initially tries to send her away in the battle at the end, Wrong, wrong and wrong.
The bit with the four energy signatures converging when they first detect the four energy signatures that have the power of a Gundam. There's a little bit of a discrepancy between the two versions, between the subtitles and the English dub. It's a small one, but in the subtitles, the implication is very much that there are four Gundams over there. But in the English dub, Domon says something along the lines of, how could they have attained the power of a Gundam? So the idea is that, like, these are Death army mobile suits that are as powerful as Gundams, which is an interesting idea. And since we know so little about how the Death army is actually constructed, maybe the four, you know, Maxter, Rose Dragon and Bolt Gundams, maybe as they are increasingly corrupted, they will become more and more like Death army mobile suits. That'd be cool. Eh? Eh?
Are they gonna turn into skeletal versions of themselves?
Ooh, perhaps Saisai. She will be transformed into that which he fears most. An evil mummy.
I'm reminded of the zombified characters from that one Monkey island game.
I think that's Tales from Monkey island, the telltale one. I do not now remember what it was in the episode that made me think this, but I have a whole thing in my notes here where I'm riffing on the idea of whether Master is a title for Master Asia or not.
Or his name.
Like how you used to call boys Master so and so, right?
Or calling someone Sensei when they're your teacher or a doctor out of respect or whatever.
Yeah.
So he could be Monsieur Asia, Mr. Asia, Sir Asia, Professor Asia, Lord Asia, 3rd Baron Punchester. And he has this idea as they're walking into the most obvious trap in history, to split up and have a race on foot to see who reaches the tower first. And then he just Disappears for most of the episode. What's going on? What do you think is going on with Master Asia there?
Ooh, I don't know. There's this obvious interplay between the two of them, Master Asia and Domon, where
Domon is clearly so happy to be
praised by Master Asia and to be fighting alongside him.
Again, there's this obvious trust in each other.
Very strong.
Just like the good old days vibes. And then at the end, at the very end of the episode, there's that line about, is this Kyoji or someone else?
And the ending shot is of that government building again,
so someone other than
Kyouji is also involved in these events. Mmm.
And we meet a new Gundam. This, like, cone headed would imply that it has, like a pointy head. This is more like cones headed.
It made me think of the moths
with the fuzzy antennae.
Oh, okay, okay. I can see that.
Also because it's got a cape that sort of looks like bug wings when it's out in wing shape, but then
completely surrounds it like a cloak when it's not flying around.
It might be meant to be more like a bat. Some bats have ears kind of like that.
Yeah, yeah, they do. It made me think actually of fancy hairstyles for medieval ladies.
Yeah, the weird, like, shaped headdresses and everything.
It has hands like humanoid hands, but that end in claws rather than stubby fingers and makes kind of monstrous but robotic sounds.
Like. It reminded me of parodies of old super robot shows where the robots are like.
And it doesn't move much. Right. Once it deploys, like, it flies around, but once it lands and transforms, it basically just raises one hand. Darkness Finger Again, like a tokusatsu villain in a rubber suit who can't move around too much.
And really the high point of the episode for me is Rain putting on the fight suit.
Because she has to.
Right? She's in a scenario where she can't not fight. She has to at least try. Is it really that painful to put on latex?
It's a very tight latex. That's the only reason. I can't imagine why else they would do that elaborate scene of Raine moaning and groaning and wincing and stretching as the latex is slowly applied to every square inch of her body.
But she clearly knows some martial arts, so she does a few moves in the cockpit. You know, even if she's certainly not
at Domon or Master Asia's level, she
kind of knows what she's doing and
then that it feels as though she
can finally convey to Domon when he
tries to send her away that she wants to be partners.
She doesn't want him to be her chivalrous knight.
She doesn't want him to protect her. She wants to fight alongside him.
She wants to help shoulder his burdens.
She wants them to be real partners
in a more egalitarian kind of way.
She's allowed to be quite effective as a fighter. She does a really good job of taking out these Death army mobile suits, especially considering that she's not a professional fighter.
And it really looks as though Domon
couldn't have defeated the Darkness Finger without her.
And the moment when they fight together is the moment that I gasped out loud the first time I saw it. I was like, yes.
When they do they're like paired dance routine to deploy the double power Shining Finger.
Yes.
It's really good. First note on this. Rain has a unique fight suit. So either the system in the Gundam is smart enough to recognize her and generate an appropriate pilot suit for her based on her desires or something, some sort of mind reading technology, or this was anticipated from the beginning and a unique fight suit was designed for her.
I have a alternate, not at all fun, extremely practical explanation, which is that as the lead engineer and the only engineer traveling with Domon, she might need to do like calibrations and tests and need a fight suit for that purpose so that she can test various systems.
That's fair.
But I like your explanation better.
Second point. There have been female pilots of Gundams in the past. It's been a thing since First Gundam, but they're usually not allowed to be very effective. If you actually like, watch their combat performance, count up their kills, compare them to their male counterparts. They're present and they are flying around and fighting. But generally speaking, there is a distinct difference in effectiveness.
Unless they're a villain.
Yep.
So it's nice to see Rayn out there like fighting very effectively and she gets a couple of really cool kills. Besides taking a few of them out with the Vulcans, she has that one really slick saber kill where the Death army is like leaping at her and she holds up the saber and it impales itself.
Total sidebar But I loved the attack where Domon strikes one of the Death army mobile suits through a building with his beam saver. That was so cool.
So both of these are references to First Gundam. The the kill that Raine gets is the same way that Amuro takes down denim in the first episode of First Gundam.
Slender denim jean.
And then the way Domon, like, spears that mobile suit through the eye, through a building. Amuru does that to izaku in episode 11, the one where they kill Garma in the. In the ruins of what is maybe, depending on version, Seattle, Amuro shoots the bazooka through a ruined office building and takes out a Zaku's eye in just the same way that Domon does with the saber. It's good stuff, good fighting, which is good because it's an episode almost entirely of fighting.
One thing that stood out, and I wonder if you noticed it, the atmosphere of the whole episode. It's daytime. Previously, most of our fighting was at night in Shinjuku. Now it's day, and there is all of this dust and smoke hanging in thick clouds over the city. And unlike a lot of previous explosions in this show, in Gundam in general, where explosions frequently are very colorful, actually,
whether they're fully animated or just kind
of like painted, all of the smoke from destroyed Death army mobile suits is just clouds of brown.
Hmm. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. It was like pink and purple in some of the early shows, and sometimes
there's a bit of yellow or orange.
Yeah. Yeah.
And I don't know if on the
practical side, is it that they were
already using too many colors for various other parts of the episode, and they were like, we have to get the colors down.
Do single color explosions.
Or is it, like, meant to convey something in the story?
Because to me, I see that brown smoke and it looks and feels dirty and sort of, I want a word
for like, diseased or plagued.
Contaminated. Yeah.
It feels grimy and pathogenic, I guess, in a way that the normal and obviously, like, all explosions create a mess is what explosions do. But this felt different and potentially is
kind of meant to just distinguish the
nature of the Death army from the
nature of these other mobile suits. Because this kind of thing can function as a visual cue to the audience without having to show us the pilots, without having to show us the innards of these machines, that it's not just the good guy mobile suits and the enemy mobile suits or bad guy mobile suits. There is something different and deeply, like, horrifying and wrong about the Death army on a cellular level, literally.
And the fact that they don't even explode in the same way, they don't
even burn up in the same way. It could be another visual cue about that.
Yeah.
Or they just ran out of money for colors.
Well, could be. But we've already seen inside the Death Army. We know that there are. There are skeletons in there, right?
Right, but that's a very easy thing to forget about if they don't keep
showing it to you.
Sure. But I'm saying is that these are like. These are corpse machines.
Yeah.
And when you think of corpses, often the associations are dirt, earth, ash, or
a shriveled mummy of a corpse. Right. And what color are they? Sort of like mid to deep brown, usually.
Also, all of the Gundams are from space. The Gundams were all presumably manufactured in the colonies we saw in the first episode. All of the Gundams coming from the colonies landing on Earth. The Gundams are creatures of the sky, the Death Army. However they've been constructed, they appear to be creatures of the Earth. It's a sort of dust to dust moment. They rise from the Earth, and when they are destroyed, they are reduced to
Earth, but not in the to contrast with victory. Not in the sort of like natural you live, you die, you rot, you return to the Earth and you feed the creatures and new life comes from your death kind of way, but in
sort of a pestilential, diseased, evil way.
We've seen enough Tomino Gundam at this point to make the assertion that Tomino believes in the essential goodness of the Earth and of the natural cycle of life and death. Like this is spiritually very important to his work. And there's an element of neoprimativism to his work as well. I don't think Imagawa has that. I don't think Imagawa sees return to the Earth as inherently good to the extent it's still here in G Gundam. It's because that's one of the characteristic elements of Gundam as established by Tomino during his run.
And for Imagawa, as Getz stated pretty
explicitly, Earth is actually a prison for most of humanity. Some of them want to live on Earth.
Absolutely. And there are parts of Earth that are very beautiful and where people want to be there.
But for a lot of people, Gundam
fighters or no, Earth is a prison. And that is in large part because
of the actions of these governments.
It's certainly not the Earth's fault, but there's also nothing like intrinsically more valuable about the Earth than about space or the space colonies. Except that it's where most of the poor people live.
And again, in Tomino's Gundam, the pursuit, the active pursuit of transcendence beyond human limitations is generally bad. You're not supposed to try to transcend your humanity. Look at the horrors of cyber new type labs. But martial arts, especially in a G Gundam context, where it allows you to do literally superhuman things is about pursuing personal transcendence. And in G Gundam, that pursuit of personal transcendence, that pursuit of exceeding your own limits, going beyond the known possibilities of what a human can do, that's good, that's virtuous. It's a completely different attitude. The quest for the stars, like the quest to win the Gundam fight, is a noble aspiration.
Well, it's part and parcel of the
sort of journey of self improvement and
the improvement of the whole species.
And there is something admirable in it. Obviously it depends on the individual fighter and their motivations. But for the most part, it's not cast as selfish. It's cast actually as something that gives
ordinary people something to dream about, something
to aspire to, or if not to personally aspire to, a sense of someone
who can carry their own hopes and dreams into the future.
Great Man Theory of Gundam Fighting Another thing about this episode that struck me, and I think again goes to the difference between Tomino's approach and Imagawa's approach, is the way the panoramic monitors in the Gundams function. The panoramic monitor gives you 360 degree visibility, but only in a fairly narrow band, not above your head and not below a certain angle. So when you see the perspective of Domon in Rain, as the new black cone's headed, Gundam comes flying towards them, the perspective is that of a person watching a film. It looks like you're watching a widescreen movie in a theater, which is very
natural for Imagawa Sasuke Imagawa.
Seeing the world as though through a film screen, that's how Gundam fighters see it. But in Tomino's work, the 360 degree panoramic monitor is truly 360 degrees every, every direction, up, down, it doesn't matter. The point of that is to make the viewer feel lost in space. To make the viewer feel that they are like in the vastness of the
cosmos, it's more immersive.
It makes you tiny, makes you small.
And you lose the sense of the mobile suit as protecting you. It gives the sense of being exposed, of being vulnerable.
And then in G Gundam, what it actually does is magnifies you. Because you see the world as though you're watching a movie, except you affect it. You are the main character of the movie.
Almost like a video game.
My God.
Relevant to my research this week, the mediums, they're merging.
They're merging. And finally, before we get to that research, which I'm very excited to hear, I thought since this is where all four of the other Gundam fighters reappear it might be a good time to look back on what Imagawa said. Each one of them represents for him. Okay, he says, when they first hired me to come onto this project, they said, we don't really need the Imagawa touch on this. We don't need your personal style. Just. Just make a very normal Gundam. For to which Imagawa initially said, okay, I guess I'll try. And then after making a few episodes, was like, that's stupid.
Like what are they gonna do? Take the show away from him and find a new director in the middle?
Yeah, they would never do that, ever.
Let him cook.
So he decided to cook and they let him. And he talks about bringing the rawness, the term he uses over and over again. But for him, this means really putting himself into the work, his raw feelings and the way this is expressed through the other Gundam fighters. I already said Sae Saishi reflects his like, regret about his own childhood, his childhood embarrassments, the things he wishes he had done better, his desire to redo childhood and do it right this time. Argo represents his like envy of physical strength that is absent in his own weak body. George, unsurprisingly, represents a sense of elegance that he feels he could never hope to embody. And then chibidi is his inferiority complex about being cool, a coolness he could never attain. But what's most interesting about this is at the end, he says and rain
well
and leaves it unanswered. I can think of a couple of possibilities.
I can think of many. One of them involves gender feels now
I'm going to play the transition music. And as you wait for Nina's research, think about the possibilities.
Motion capture, often abbreviated to mocap and sometimes called performance capture, has become a near omnipresent and increasingly accessible technology. It's frequently used in film, TV and video game production, is used for robotics controls and VR gaming, and VTubers or virtual YouTubers use mocap equipment to control their virtual avatars. But what is it exactly? How does it work? How did the technology develop? And why might it be relevant to G Gundam? Per Britannica, motion capture is the process used to translate physical movement in three dimensional space into a digitized and tracked computer format. Motion capture is used primarily in creative animation as actors or objects can be filmed and have their movement data transposed onto animation assets. Although the consumer facing uses for mocap are the ones most of us are familiar with, an article from Engadget points out that for many of the companies that produce the necessary equipment and software, the Bulk of their business isn't film or gaming. In one example, the motion capture technology company Vicon Biomechanics use cases make up a full half of their business. Their client list includes hospitals, consumer goods companies that make athletic equipment, and universities. I assume their lucrative sports programs, with the other half a fairly even split between entertainment and robotics. Different sources date the earliest developments related to MOCAP tech to very different times and technologies. The website of the Motion Capture Society goes all the way back to the late 1700s, when Johann Heinrich Lambert developed spatial resection, or calculations and techniques to determine the position and orientation of a camera from the known positions and orientations of objects in a photograph. This led to the mid-1800s use of daguerreotype and photography for cartography, and by the 1890s, the development of these techniques into a new photogrammetry. Side note that the Motion Capture Society's history timeline includes a lot of the technical and mathematical developments that underpin this technology. Things like planar motion analysis, time matching cinefilm from multiple cameras for analysis, and techniques for eliminating perspective error in 3D, most of which is too technical for me to go into in any kind of detail here, but which was essential for the development of motion capture into what it is now. The website of the motion capture technology company Motion Analysis and several other sources instead point to Eadweard Muybridge's work with sequential photography in 1872, when he used banks of cameras with tripwires to photograph a figure in motion. If you've seen the famous sequential photographs of a galloping horse, which were taken to settle a bet, that's Muybridge. Then in 1880, Etienne Jules Marais developed sequential or animated photography into a separate field, chronophotography, an essential precursor to cinema. By 1882, Murray had created the chronophotographic gun, capable of taking pictures at 12 frames a second. Unlike Muybridge's sequential photographs, Marey used multiple exposures on a single plate. This made it easier for the viewer to compare the relative positions of the subject and to see the flow of movement, but often obscured slower or smaller movements. If you've ever seen the sequence of photographs showing a person holding a cat up by its feet, then letting go, and the cat twisting in midair so that it lands on its feet on the ground, those were taken by Marey in a fascinating detail. Both Muybridge and Mouret experimented with putting subjects in very simple form, fitting suits, usually white against a black background, or vice versa for contrast, and marking out a skeleton on them. With thin strips of reflective material and placing shiny buttons at the joints, very like the suits and markers used in passive optical motion capture systems many decades later. At the time, their interest was less artistic than scientific. The purpose of these techniques was to analyze human and animal motion. The Science and Media Museum explains that reducing the subject to a stick figure like outline meant that up to 100 photographs a second could be taken without obscuring the movement. Mouret also made an adjustment to the chronophotographic gun so that every 10th imprint on the plate was twice as intense, making it possible to determine the amount of time different movements took simply by looking at the photograph. You should check out the museum's article on the origins of motion capture linked in the show notes for an example of what this looked like. It is surprisingly similar to rudimentary stick figure models used in some stages of computer animation. Another example in the lineage of motion capture is the work of Frank and Lillian gilbreath. In the 1910s, they were industrial engineers and efficiency experts hired to conduct motion studies of factory workers to improve overall productivity. For example, if the right hand was doing more than the left, distributing the tasks more equitably would improve flow of movement. This might involve rearranging their workstation. One method they used, which they called Chronocycle Graph, involved attaching small incandescent bulbs to the subject, usually to their fingers, then taking long exposure photographs that showed the paths traced by the bulbs. When the Gilbreaths wanted the image to show duration of movement, they used flashing bulbs, which would appear in the photograph as dashed lines with dashes of different lengths. The whole process has a lot in common with later active optical motion capture systems, which place flashing LEDs on a subject. Still other sources point instead to Max Fleischer, animator and director, and his 1917 invention rotoscoping, a technique where an animator traces over a projection of single frames of live action film. Rotoscoping was famously used by Disney in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for the animation of Snow White and the Prince, not to mention many later Disney works. Rotoscoping demonstrated that recorded live action performances could be used to create more realistic movement in animation. By the 1950s and 60s, light markers and strobe illuminated reflectors were being used for applications like analyzing athlete movement or analyzing car collisions. Also in the 1960s, a Disney animator and engineer, Lee Harrison III, invented a rudimentary mocap suit using potentiometers, which are a kind of resistor. This suit and the computer it was connected to were able to record and animate an actor's movements in real time on a crt. This system was called Animak and was used for the first digital character driven by human motion, as well as for some of the animatronics at the Disneyland theme park. Throughout the 1970s, the transition to true motion capture rather than rotoscoping was driven by biomechanical and military research. And in 1983, Tom Calvert, a professor of kinesiology and computer science, developed a motion capture system specifically for medical purposes. His system employed an exoskeleton with potentiometers as sensors. The data fed into a computer animation system. It didn't take long before the animation industry adopted and refined the exoskeleton, and it remained in use for a long time as a low budget alternative to optical systems for decades. These wearable armatures were not only cheaper, but more accurate and smoother. The downside was that it was much harder for the subject to act while wearing the suit, even as suits became lighter. For a sense of the state of computers at the time, in 1985, it took a Sun1 computer 17 hours to compute the coordinates of just eight points from four cameras on three seconds of video. And yet by 1989, motion capture had been used in a short CG movie, and by 1990 it was used in TV commercials and feature films, Though ironically, its first use in a feature film was a failure. They tried to use it for the X ray scene and total recall, but systems at the time often weren't able to differentiate sensors on different figures in the same scene, and they wound up
having to rotoscope the scene instead.
Rotoscope was also used to great effect in Jordan Mechner's 1989 computer game Prince of Persia, a game I vividly remember watching my dad play. Mechner used film of his brother running, jumping and climbing to create the game's character animations. The website Mocap Online describes the animation quality as far exceeding contemporary games, with movement that had remarkable weight and fluidity, and goes on to credit Prince of Persia with planting the seed for an industry wide adoption of motion capture in the following decade. Heading into the 90s, higher processing speeds and other computing improvements led to what Engadget calls a mocap boom. And this period saw the first use of motion capture specifically to animate faces, as in a 1992 TV commercial for Mario and its first use in a music video. Peter Gabriel's Steam Next Generation magazine, in an article for their October 1995 issue, described this as the decade when Motion capture technology transitioned from a research curiosity to a game development stage staple. This was when the first dedicated mocap studios for game production were built. And the use of motion capture for character animation in the 1993 Sega game Virtua Fighter set a new standard for fighting game authenticity. Even though a full optical motion capture setup cost hundreds of thousands of dollars at the time, it undeniably produced a more realistic animation of human movement and was quickly adopted for sports fighting and action games. And Virtua Fighter was a phenomenon released for Arcade in 1993 and for home console on the Sega Saturn in 1994. At least in Japan, it is widely recognized as the first 3D fighting game released. The grandfather of 3D fighting games, it was one of Sega's best selling arcade games of all time and a top selling SEGA Saturn game in Japan where it sold almost one to one with the console. In 1994, Virtua Fighter was the highest grossing arcade game in Japan and one of the top five highest grossing arcade games in the United States. The arcade version holds the distinction of having been inducted into the Smithsonian's Permanent Research Collection on information technology in 1998. So that's a lot of history. And it touched on the methods. But how did motion capture actually work? Circa 1994, sensors were placed strategically on an actor's body or on a suit they would wear. Mostly these sensors were at the joints. The motion would be performed and recorded, then converted into either a series of XYZ coordinates or further processed with proprietary algorithms into rotational data about each of the body's major joints. Rotational datasets map angular motion between a performer's body segments rather than coordinates within a capture area. Sensors could also be put on the face for facial animation and lip sync. Or on hands. You get it? At the time, 23 markers was regarded as the minimum for accurately capturing human motion. The recorded data would then be mapped to a skeleton in the animation software. Many different systems had been tested, including an acoustical one. But by the mid-1990s, the two main systems used in video production, animation and gaming were magnetic and optical passive. In magnetic motion capture, the sensors on the performer's body are receivers and are wired to a monitor. They collect positional and orientational data relative to antennae transmitting DC pulses. Calibration was necessary to compensate for the effect of the earth's magnetic field on the sensors. One system, Ascension Technology's Flock of Birds, could track a maximum of 30 receivers. And each receiver could make up to 144 measurements per second. Magnetic systems had Several benefits vis a vis optical systems. They're not affected by obstructions to line of sight. The animation armature could be monitored in real time and they were significantly less expensive. An industry expert quoted in one article said they were a quarter of the price of optical systems. But since this person was selling magnetic mocap systems at the time, this is probably an exaggeration. On the other hand, the sensor receivers were all wired, inhibiting the movement of the performer. There was the possibility of ferrous interference and the capture area was relatively small. About a 16 foot hemisphere. In an optical passive motion capture system, high resolution cameras equipped with strobed LED on axis lighting sources track reflective balls attached to a performer. This is what many of us picture in our heads when we think of the mocap suit. The footage from the cameras is then processed in proprietary software for export to animation software as either coordinates or rotational data. It was tetherless, had a relatively large capture area at 20 by 20ft, could track up to 100 markers, and at the high end could capture 240 frames per second. However, the processing time for the data meant you couldn't monitor the output in real time. It was difficult to set up and calibrate. Misaligned cameras could produce ghost markers and additional data processing was needed. If a sensor was ever occluded or blocked from view, they would have to interpolate that sensor's positions during the time when the system lost it. At the time, some companies actually used both systems, but each for different applications. Sega, for instance, uses the magnetic tracker for their everyday quick and dirty work. And then when they want to do some high speed maneuvers like martial arts, they'll go to an optical one. We take for granted why a company might use motion capture, but the use of a new technology is never a foregone conclusion. So what were the driving factors? Although it would eventually become a timesaver for animators, it's unclear whether it was during this era. Some sources describe it as speeding up the animation process a little, while others describe it as nearly as painstaking as rotoscoping. So that probably wasn't it. Several sources point to increasing consumer demand for realism in video games. Despite improvements in hardware processing power, rendering character animation remained an obstacle to creating convincing graphics. Natural movement has remained an elusive goal, said one industry insider. The article in Next Generation magazine contends that of all the visual information received by the brain, movement is processed first, ahead of both form and color, and that our awareness of what real human movement looks like is very difficult to fool. A game Developer might create rich, detailed, realistic environments, but gamers would be completely thrown if human movement in the space felt off. It's easy to giggle over Virtua Fighter and Tekken when we look at them now, the polygons. But the smooth and realistic motion made them sensational. They were at the cutting edge of MOCAP's use in video games, but garnered huge amounts of excitement and attention within the industry and among consumers. And think about how quickly this technology improved. There are just a few years separating these games from Lord of the Rings and Andy Serkis famous performance as Gollum. The relevance of all of this to G Gundam is probably fairly obvious at this point, but I'm going to spell it out anyway. The control scheme for the Gundam fighters is motion capture, as opposed to the controls in previous series which more closely resembled controls for say, fighter jets. In G Gundam, a fighter can control their Gundam with natural movement through the motion capture fightsuit. The fight suit is even covered with little sensors like a motion capture suit would be. In the mid-90s, there was a strong belief that the future of motion capture was less with animation and film production and more with the creation of fully immersive VR.
They really thought fully immersive VR was like right around the corner. And the portrayal of the fight suits
in the Gundams is very similar to what we might imagine For a VR game. Movie lover that Imagawa was, he would probably have seen how mocap was used in film and tv. And even if in spite of its popularity, he wasn't aware of Virtua Fighter, remember that he received a top down directive from Bandai to emulate popular fighting games. Now if only the current Gundam arcade
games had motion capture controls, think about how dominant you would be with your martial arts ability.
Yeah. Imagine if you got into one of those Gundam pods, but instead of a cockpit, it was a little like fight chamber.
Yeah. Just throwing punches and kicks.
I was thinking about, first of all, I was thinking about how an acoustic system might work. But then I was thinking about the magnetic one you were talking about.
About.
And even though the Gundam fightsuits are not wired because of the way they like, there's like an electrical interchange between them and the. The cockpit.
The crackles.
And they like, they receive feedback as well. Right. When the Gundam gets hurt, there's haptic feedback to the pilot. They experience pain as well. It strikes me that it would be easier to do that with the magnetic system. Certainly they're monitoring the movements in real time. It could just be that the. The computers of the future century are fast enough that they can process optical data right away. But I think it's more likely that they're operating on some kind of magnetic or martial arts key particle based system, the acoustic system.
The sensors were tiny speakers that would emit an audio pulse and then receivers would process like how long it took that pulse to get to the various different receivers to position that joint within the capture area.
Presumably each different monitoring point is emitting like a slightly different frequency or something.
I didn't write that down.
I don't know if they.
It's more fun for me to imagine how it might have worked than to actually learn how it works.
Sure.
And you can easily imagine how difficult it would be to prevent like, interference from echoes.
Interference even from the performer's own breathing.
Or if they happen to cough or say something or stomp loudly.
Next week on MSB, episode 11 point point one four the darkness rises, we'll research and discuss g Gundam episode 14 and Rain's martial art is Gun Silver Alert.
Sparkle.
Sparkle. Rain can feel the cosmos. Ooh, it's been a long while since we could use this one. Curse your sudden but inevitable inevitable betrayal. Update the sign. It's been zero days since Rain was last kidnapped. Take my hand and we shall rule
the Earth sphere as master and disciple.
A new challenger appears. And another. And another. And another. You gotta know when to hold them. Know when to fold him. Know when to walk away. Know when to shuffle. Master Asia's blasting off again and you can't fight now.
It's the end of the episode. Ready, Go.
Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, related, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina in scenic New York City within the ancestral and unseated land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is Wasp by Misha Dayoxin. The closing music is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio. And the recap music is window by 1000 hands. 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 on our website gundam podcast.com youm can get in touch with us by email@hostsundompodcast.com if you'd like to support the show, please tell your friends about us. Leave us a nice review. Wherever you listen to podcasts or if you'd like to support us financially, you can do so@gundampodcast.com Patreon or look for other ways to support the show at Gundam. Most of all, thank you for listening. Are you ready to Come down to Neo New York and throw hands over your Gundam opinions. No, you lack conviction.
Oh, or maybe you just haven't heard
an opinion worth fighting about. So how about this one from lrrose, who points out that it was deeply irresponsible of Master Asia to waste time with a footrace. Who, when he should have been there to help Domon and Raine fight off that black horned Gundam.
That's not the song.
I. I love that you enjoyed it. I love that you are maybe going to keep watching it with me.
If you keep watching it, I'll keep watching it with you.
Yeah, that's super fun. Note to self, when is next F1 race?
I'm well on record as hating cars, but I find myself enjoying F1 racing because in my brain they're not cars, they're Mecca.
And if tom thinking about them as racing mechs means that we can enjoy this together, I am all for it.
I watched F1 a lot growing up.
My dad and his brothers, my uncles were really into racing of all kinds, but especially F1.
And so I grew up, up Daddy's
girl watching it with my dad. And we got to go to a couple of live races when we lived
overseas, which I think in general it's
more like comfortable and nice watching at home. But it is really neat to get
to see the tracks and the cars up close.
Now, do these vehicles have the right number of legs? No, obviously not.
The legs are just for show, man.
But anyway, you can't tell me you wouldn't watch them if they had like death army legs.
Okay, yes.
If every one of the cars had four little death army legs and it could like run along.
Well what then they could just like, like it depends if they can deploy the legs wide enough, they don't have to pass around. They could pass over, imagine.
Well, and they could go into hover mode to go over obstacles.
Okay. But point being, I used to be in F1. I haven't watched in a really long time time mainly because when I moved to New York City I like Since I moved to New York City I have never had cable tv so ability to watch sports that are on cable somewhat limited and didn't have any like friends who were into it to watch with. But I, I rather enjoy following a sport. It doesn't need to be main a mainstream sport or whatever but I, I find it fun. So I've been thinking about choosing a sport to follow again and it may
end up being F1.
It.