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 11.19, Dragons in the Mist.
I'm Tom, a longtime Gundam fan, and after this episode I have some questions about the way the mobile Trace system calibrates the level of haptic feedback for injuries.
What does it feel like when your mobile fighter gets shot by dozens of little bullets? Is ripping off your own arm as painful as actually ripping off your own arm would be?
And I'm Nina, new to G Gundam, and there's nothing in the rulebook that says a child can't be your country's Gundam fighter. As an ad-free independent podcast, Mobile Suit Breakdown relies on those subscribers with the heroic habit of paying us money. Thank you all, and special thanks to the newest patrons: Katie D., Kurt, and Dan H. You keep us genki.
This week we're covering G Gundam episode 19, Gekito Dragon Gundamu Tai Boruto Gundam. Or, Fierce Battle: Dragon Gundam vs. Bolt Gundam, originally broadcast on August 26th, 1994. The return of the Bolt Gundam and its accompanying complement of guards, mechanics, and assorted hangers-on means the return of Argo Golsky's stern handler, Nastasha Zabigov. Please pay no attention to the part of the talkback coming up after this where I accidentally mislead Nina into thinking that her name is Natasha. Nastasha was played by Yoko Mari. By this point, Yoko was a 20-year industry veteran, with roles in a number of mecha productions, including Tomino's Zabungle, in which she played Elchi Cargo, and Aura Battler Dunbine as Musi Po. She had only recently broken into the Gundam franchise, playing training ship captain Lealy in Formula 91, but the target audience of G Gundam would be more likely to recognize her from her work on Doraemon, where she played the mother of classmate/antagonist Honnekaa Suneo, a role she held until the series was revamped in 2005. Now, the play-by-play. From Shibuya to Guiana, and from Earth to the stars, this is Punch House, your source for up-to-the-minute news and analysis on the 13th Gundam Fight. My guest tonight is, as always, the only person who knows as much about the Gundam fight as I do: me! Now listen up! The whole Gundam world is wondering, what's gone wrong with Neo Japan? Domon Kashuu, current King of Hearts and personal protégé of previous fight winner, the undefeated of the East, Master Asia, came into this fight with unbelievable hype, and he immediately put the world on notice with a first-round decimation of Neo Italian fighter Mikel O'Chariot, in the Neros Gundam. But Kashu has struggled with inconsistency ever since, notching impressive wins against big names like Gentle Chapman and top prospects like El Pescador Chico Rodriguez, but walking away with nothing to show after facing the Maxter, Dragon, Rose, and Bolt Gundams. What's gone wrong? Is it strategy? Is it a technical issue with the Shining Gundam? Was the hype just too much for such an untested fighter? Or were these simply bad matchups? What do you think, me? Everyone knows that the most important factor in Gundam fighter performance comes down to the synergy between the man and the machine. Quashu's not the biggest guy, he's not the fastest, he's not the flashiest. He's a solid all-rounder, a Swiss Army knife kind of guy who gets by on outworking his opponents and taking advantage of their weaknesses. He's rarely out of his element, but that's because he doesn't have an element, and he lacks the toolkit to finish fights. That's where the Shining Finger and the Shining Gundam's Super Mode come in. They give him the one-shot kill power you need if you're gonna hang with the big dogs. That's why it's been so troubling to see the Super Mode fail time and again when he needs it most. Now, emotion-based Super Modes have been allowed ever since the 5th Gundam fight in FC24, when Neo France's Ferdinand Loire won it all with his Ennui-powered Mode Super. But anger-powered Super Modes like Neo Japan's have have always been rare precisely because they're so unreliable. You just cannot call up that kind of fury at will. Now back to you, me.
Thanks, me.
Quashu and his pit crew bodyguard, doctor, strategist, engineer, driver, and Gundam fight alternate Rain Mikumura have decamped for the Guiana Highlands where they're hoping to put the pieces back together. But if he was looking for a little peace and quiet in this Edenic jungle paradise, he is sure to be disappointed. The Gundam fight waits for no man, and neither do the Gundam fighters of Neo China and Neo Russia, who have descended on the Highlands for a knockdown, drag-out smash-'em-up battle. The Neo-Russian team has been struggling since abandoning their controversial prison trap strategy. Rumor has it that team leader Nastasha Zabigov is coming into this match under serious pressure from Neo-Moscow to get Golski back into contention, and it looks like she sees the struggling Neo-Japanese as easy prey. Unfortunately for the 3-time Warden of the Year winner, it looks like Neo-China's Sai Saichi came to the same conclusion about her team. Domon might not be the biggest or the fastest, but that is exactly what this matchup between Dragon and Bolt promised. Now this fight almost didn't happen, with Golski initially exercising his right to decline the fight. A few spurts of Dragonfire directed at the Neo-Russian camp changed his tune, and the battle was on. And what a battle. I have never seen 2 fighters so obviously mismatched on paper fight each other to a draw. with the Dragon Gundam completely exhausted and the Bolt tearing off its own arm to escape disaster. Just incredible stuff, a match for the ages. And if that wasn't enough, before either fighter could catch his breath, they were beset by a Death Army swarm dressed up to look like the Dragon Gundam. The two were only able to survive because first Neo Japan and then Neo Germany jumped in to fight off the attack, with Quashu overcoming some serious mechanical issues in his Shining Gundam in the process. And of course, so-called fans immediately hopped onto G Gundam app to complain about the refereeing, arguing that the King of Hearts should have been penalized for interfering in an ongoing Gundam fight. What do you think about that, Mii? Look, people are saying that surprise attacks by groups of undead cyborg mobile suits wearing cute little costumes are just part of the Gundam fight landscape this year, and that every fighter needs to be prepared to deal with them. And that's true. I am not gonna argue with that. But the fierce battle of Dragon vs. Bolt Gundam had obviously already come to a draw before the others got involved. The referees made the right call here, and anyone who says otherwise, like those idiots on Double Take, is just a salty Quashu hater. I couldn't have said it better myself. Now get out there and keep fighting the good fight. This has been Punch House.
Predictably, and in fact exactly as you predicted, now that Team Chibidi has departed, Argo and Saisaichi have clocked in for their shift at the narrative factory.
Is Argo the only one of these guys who isn't traumatized? He's already so traumatized from being a prisoner, it couldn't get any worse?
He's, he's big and stoic, and so he doesn't have feelings, or at least he doesn't emote. He doesn't show us his feelings.
He smiles when he talks about his fight with Domon.
Just after saying that he has not felt the pleasure of battle against anybody else before Domon.
Except for when he was a pirate. He enjoyed battle when he was a pirate, a free agent, independent.
When he was fighting for himself. Now that he's fighting for Russia, Now that he's fighting merely so that he doesn't get exploded and so that his space pirate crew don't get also exploded, presumably, there's no joy in it for him. It's just a job. He just has to show up at the violence factory. The narrative factory and the violence factory are right next to each other.
Argo is there, but it's really Sai Saishi's episode.
You commented that Argo doesn't display any of the outward signs of trauma, and This is because he's there as a foil to Saichi, not for his own narrative development. Though maybe that's just because the show doesn't really know what to do with Argo.
There are some brief interesting moments, or some, some groundwork that it feels like they're laying here, though. In particular, that his handler— Nastasha, right?
I think just Natasha.
Okay. Uh, is trying to convince her superiors that the Devil Gundam is a major threat and that they need to take it seriously. But they are on her case for not being active enough in the Gundam fight. So we know that, you know, among all these different teams, she does take the threat of the Devil Gundam seriously, but she has this pressure coming in from her superiors. It also really seems like she is afraid she is losing control of Argo. And she is. He seems considerably less cowed than he did initially, and even then he wasn't very cowed. He did, you know, help Domon escape.
Yeah, I was going to say, I'm not sure I can perceive any difference in his level of cow between then and now. Perhaps she is merely coming to understand how little control over him she actually has.
Clearly bothered by it.
Well, before he fought Domon, he had nothing in his life except this, this duty he had taken on for himself to protect his crew. But after fighting Domon and discovering the pleasure and joy of battle against a strong opponent, now he has something he wants. And that means that sometimes he's going to act in contravention of her orders.
They're also clearly trying to portray him as a sort of gentle giant type. That moment where he's touching these tiny, delicate wildflowers in the jungle. He appreciates the beauty of nature.
There's no reason an enormous 300-pound bear of a man can't appreciate the beauty of nature.
He also is here to give a little additional credibility to everything that Schwartz is saying, 'cause Schwartz is obviously a weirdo. But here is Argo saying a lot of the same things in different ways, or, like, adding nuance to many of Schwartz's arguments. arguments. When he— when Argo talks about the kinds of fights in which he experienced the joy and freedom of fighting, when he won't fight Saesaishi because he can tell the kid is unwell, is not himself, is not at peak ability, and so it wouldn't be one of those good, freeing, joyous fights.
Part of the reason I think the show struggles to know what to do with Argo is that he is in a very different place from all the other fighters. His life is already over. He had a career as a space pirate, it ended, he's in jail. The Gundam fight is just like a temporary thing for him. When it's over, presumably he goes back to jail. Whereas Chibiti and George and Sae Saishi and Domon, they're all in the middle, in the prime of their life, really mostly just like starting their careers.
Yeah.
So Argo is positioned as the older, wiser figure, more like a Schwarz type. Though notably, his handler's relationship to the government strongly resembles what was going on with Domon earlier in the show. He wants to find the Devil Gundam. Rain is running interference for him with the, the higher-ups who want him to participate in the Gundam fight. And Sae Saishi's whole deal in this episode, that he, because of the experience of facing off against the Devil Gundam, he's become afraid of fighting, afraid of the Gundam fight, unwilling to continue his training as he ought to, unwilling to participate in the fight. That's very similar to what's going on with Chibiti, somewhat similar to what Domon is doing. There isn't, like, a ton of variation, I guess, in the way these characters are being portrayed.
The one thing that stood out to me about the portrayal of Sai Saichi and the things that happen to him in this episode is it really focuses on his age and on the idea of childishness. He's the youngest of these fighters by a pretty wide margin. Him skipping out on training, trying to spy on naked ladies in the jungle, um, then it's—
Flipping Rain's skirt up on Kristy Pierce.
then expecting Raine to, like, bandage him up after he gets hurt. And he is in this very awkward place where sometimes they want him to behave like a well-behaved child, and sometimes they want him to behave like an adult. And those are often mutually exclusive.
Yeah.
You know, Raine chides him for running off by himself and, like, well, of course you're going to get hurt if you run off by yourself, small child. But then when he You know, whinges when she's cleaning his wounds and bandaging him. It's like, oh, grow up.
Though I like to think she's taking revenge in that moment for the embarrassment she suffered earlier.
Yeah, absolutely.
Taking the opportunity to humiliate him a little bit with her words and maybe apply those bandages a bit roughly.
Honestly, the way everybody treats that whole incident makes it feel like they're treating him as a child, because if a man had done that to Rhaen, Domon's reaction would have been very different, and Reine's reaction would have been very different.
Right.
He acts— I mean, it's a classic teenager thing. He acts with the impunity of a child, but because he's now a teenager, the things that he's doing are more harmful than a child would do.
Domon also teases him and says, oh, I guess your kung fu is not up to fighting someone as strong as Argo.
He says, Kenpo, as it's rendered in the subtitles—
He does.
Kenpo is just the Japanese way of saying kung fu. Actually, to be properly precise about this, kung fu or gong fu just means a skill, but we use it in English when we ought to be saying Quan Fa, which means like fist method.
Kenpo or kenpo is just the Japanese reading of the characters in Quan Fa, and it's used in Japan for Chinese or Chinese-derived martial arts.
I thought that was an odd decision by the translator to leave it as Kenpo.
They might not have known. And then we have these sort of 2 competing views of Sai Sai Ji from before, where he must have trained very hard his whole life to get to the point where he is Neo China's chosen kundum fighter now. And yet when we first meet him, he's sort of like escaped his handlers and is in the wind. He's still a goofy kid.
Mm-hmm.
And he would just as soon be, you know, cooking fancy meals for himself to eat as training. And yet at the same time, he's constantly being told— he's very aware that they expect him to shoulder the responsibility of, like, saving the Shaolin Temple.
Well, he's at an age when all the limitless possibilities of life are open in front of him and in which his identity is very fluid. Part of the point of the episode is about teaching Domon that he needs to learn to be committed to this project, to the Gundam fight, to hunting down the Devil Gundam and all that, like really truly committed with his whole being. And part of the way they show that is with Sae Saichi, who is not committed to anything.
Mm-hmm.
He is constantly moving between Child and adult, fighter and rapscallion, fighter and cook. His identity is in flux the whole time. I was thinking about this actually, again, with the paired scenes of him flipping Rayn's skirt up and then spying on Natasha while she's bathing. Because the former scene, when he jumps into frame, attacks Rayn, and then jumps away again, like, it's sexual harassment, Right. But it's not erotic. Saeshaishi does not appear to be deriving any kind of, like, pleasure from seeing Reine like this. The point of it is to embarrass and humiliate her.
Right. He wants to mess with her.
That's what he gets out of it. Whereas when he's then peeping on Natasha later, like, that is erotic for him. And at first I was struggling to reconcile the 2 scenes, and then I realized it's because his identity is in flux. Sometimes he's a child and sometimes he's an adult.
Well, and Domon is Aniki. Domon is his big brother, proverbially. And he probably thinks of Rein in some ways as being Domon's. And so it would be so disrespectful to Domon for him to actually, like, peep at Rein.
But not to expose her, right?
Right.
Because I'm just a little child boy.
I'm a little imp. Well, that was part of what really struck me in that scene, that Domon doesn't make any move to try to punish Sae Saiji for having done this.
Right.
He's too embarrassed himself of having seen— like, he's all hot and bothered.
Yeah. Well, and Reine is angry.
As well she should be.
But also that— not just that Domon is very embarrassed— he is, he's beet red— but uncomfortable. And as much as I disagree with it, I think there's this attitude of, like, Boys will be boys and it's harmless and this is a thing young boys do.
Certainly in anime they do. For me, what was the most infuriating part of the scene actually is when the 2 monks show up immediately afterwards. Uh, they're clearly unhappy about Sai Saichi's behavior, but they don't apologize to Reine or really take the affront to her dignity seriously at all. All they do is complain about what this means for the fate of their temple.
Mm-hmm.
It makes her offended dignity into a prop for their, like, real concerns.
Well, right. It's, it's symbolic of their protégé's childishness, not, like, its own incident that should be addressed.
These monks suck. These guys are terrible. Sai Saichi is right to run away from them.
Another way in which Argo forms a foil for Sai Saichi, and another symbol of Sai Saichi's childishness here, is When he gets angry about being teased and challenges Argo, he calls him a coward for refusing several times. And Argo doesn't care, because what does he care if some traumatized kid calls him a coward? Like, that cannot hurt him.
He knows he's not a coward. Though to some degree, this is probably the privilege of a very large man.
Mm. You have less to prove. But also of being more emotionally mature, older.
And that's what the show wants us to see in him. On paper, Argo and Saezaeshi make a great combination, great foils for each other. The big guy and the little guy, the stoic and the prankster.
The youngest and the oldest.
The one whose life is over and the kid whose whole future is ahead of him. Frenetic whirlwind dervish and no wasted movements.
And both of them— Argo not so much anymore, but he went to jail to save his pirate crew, right? Like, they had groups of people, or have groups of people depending on them.
They also have overbearing minders. And they are both subordinated to totalizing institutions. Like, a monastery is a kind of prison, and a prison is a kind of monastery. The regulated way they have to live their lives.
The rules and restrictions imposed by That kind of life.
Neither one of them is really free to leave. Um, in the case of the monks, it's because of their oaths that they have made, because of their commitment to the project of restoring the monastery. In Argo's case, it's partly because he's imprisoned, partly because of the bomb on his chest, but mostly because he volunteered to be there to help his crew. And throughout history, monasteries have frequently been used as prisons.
Or exiles, or— yeah.
Especially in, like, medieval societies that don't have the same highly developed carceral systems that we have now. If you wanted to get rid of somebody, like a deposed former monarch, you sent them off to a monastery.
For much of Japanese history, it was also how former monarchs would basically indicate that they weren't going to try to interfere with politics after they stepped down. They could still interfere, and many of them still did, but symbolically, they were retiring from the world when they did this. And so the reins of power could be passed to someone else. You mentioned the frenetic energy versus no wasted movement. This is one of the things that Schwarzbryder— he leaves off watching everything from a distance like a creep to butt in, just appear out of nowhere in the middle of the jungle.
Like a weirdo.
during Argo and Saisaichi's fight to comment on this.
He's a creep. He's a weirdo. What is he doing here?
He does not belong here. Uh, we have probably talked about this before, but from our own martial arts training, I was always in awe of this coach we had who we would have to spar with him as we got more advanced. And he was always exactly where he needed to be when he needed to be there. And you almost couldn't tell how he'd done it. It happened so fast and seemingly out of nowhere. Sometimes it felt like he was floating. It was wild. He was very good. And there are certainly very talented fighters who are frenetic and move a lot. But often the sign of a truly great fighter is that there is no wasted movement, and hence no wasted energy.
Although it is kind of funny in context in this episode, Schwarz is wrong. He thinks that Argo has the significant advantage over, uh, Saishi and that Sai Saishi is going to get exhausted by all of his bouncing around. And it's true that he does get exhausted, but after essentially defeating Argo. Forcing Argo to tear his own arm off just to escape the, the trap he's in. They're both too exhausted to continue fighting.
Right, it's essentially a draw.
The problem is that Sai Saishi is like 14 years old, he weighs 105 pounds, and he has ADHD. He's gonna spend the next hour bouncing around, he's gonna get out of the Gundam fight, he's gonna go for a run, he's gonna eat 12 bowls of rice, and then he's gonna play Super Smash Bros. until 4 AM. He is an Energizer Bunny. And when you're Argo's size, you can't afford to waste any movements.
Yeah, it's a bit like if you compare flyweight or some of the lighter weight boxers to the heavyweights. Just look at how much they move. It's vastly different. One comment of Schwartz's after this fight that I was a bit confused by— I don't know, we'll see where the show goes with this, but From the beginning of the episode, we see that Doumon is frustrated with his own lack of progress. He feels like he's been training really hard. He's sword fighting waterfalls and—
He's put his shirt back on after last week's adventures in shirtlessness in the jungle.
It's true.
Do you think he got a sunburn? So now he has to wear his sun shirt?
Or bug bites.
If he took it off, it'd just be like an unsightly mess of Splotches from all the rashes he's gotten.
Um, from Reine's perspective at least, he is training very seriously and very hard. She almost, uh, talks about it as though he's inspiring her. Like, the things that she's gonna have to do to fix up the Shining Gundam and make it operate better are going to be very difficult and time-consuming, but look at how hard Domon is working. So of course she's willing to put in that time and make that effort. But he's not getting any better with that rusty, terrible sword, so...
Maybe he needs a teacher.
Well, at the end, Schwartz makes yet another comment about how the only thing that makes fighters improve, or the best thing to make fighters improve, is strong opponents. So is what happened— he tells Domon Domon needs to train more to defeat the Devil Gundam. Domon says, all right, I'm gonna go back to my old stomping grounds and I'm gonna train in isolation. I'm gonna do a training camp. And I'm gonna get better. And Schwartz rolls up like, no, I didn't mean this, you dummy. You need to be fighting people. You need to fight more. And humans. Human fighters, not waterfalls. You big dumb idiot. Yeah, the way many of them talk about fighting in this episode is as though the fighting itself is a kind of therapy for these guys.
Uh-huh.
And part of that is this, like, oh, you have to face your fears. In a way, what they describe as the essence of being a good fighter is just mindfulness. That true and total focus on what you're doing right now. Because if you are truly and completely focused, with your entire mind and all your senses, on the fight you're in, you can't be remembering old fights, old losses, old fears. There's no room for that because you are totally in the now.
Right.
The fact that that is the ultimate message of the episode, the lesson which must be imparted to Domon, then tells us something about his character up to this point. That Domon has not been focused. That Domon has not really been committed to the, the Gundam fight and not really committed to taking down the Devil Gundam. That there's always been some part of him that is distracted, that is held back.
Well, he's always thinking about His brother's betrayal or the— his mother's death. He's, you know, in the early part of the Gundam fight, it was all about finding Kyoji. Once he'd found Kyoji, that was like a constant thing hanging over him.
He can't cut the tree with the sword because in that moment, he's not cutting the tree with the sword. He's just seeing it as a test to determine whether or not he's ready to cut the Devil Gundam with the Shining Finger.
Right, he's fighting the Devil Gundam still, or he's fighting Schwarz Brüder, or he's doing something else.
They pull off a neat trick in this episode, and it only works because we saw Chibiti traumatized so obviously in the prior one. When Sae Saishi is, like, swinging through the woods and he hears the distinctive sound of a Death Army eyeball, like, activate, and he's like, oh, I'm just hearing things, I'm just seeing things, and he keeps swinging along. We're inclined in that moment to think, yeah, he's just having a flashback, he's just remembering his traumatizing experience. But then they're actually there. The Death Army really has invaded the Guiana Islands.
The fact that the Death Army went to the trouble of making a bunch of fake Dragon Gundams And sending them here and having them attack Neo-Russia speaks to Master Asia and potentially the Devil Gundam and Kyoji recognizing that the possible alliance of these Gundam fighters is a threat to them. They are trying to sow discord.
Are there other Death Army mobile suits disguising themselves as other mobile fighters causing similar chaos? around the world, I think is really charming. The Death Army are so into cosplay. They were doing the Master Gundam before, and now they're doing the Dragon Gundam. I want to see a Death Army version of every mobile fighter in this show.
I suspect that next episode you will get part of that wish.
I, I certainly hope so. I haven't watched the next time on, and I don't remember from when I watched this series however many decades ago, but I suspect we're going to see George Dusand in the next episode.
That would make sense. I would be surprised if we didn't see George Dusand in the next episode. Is George going to come to the Guiana Highlands?
Oh, for sure.
We're gonna do one more Guiana Highlands episode?
I suspect more than one.
Oh, okay.
I thought it was a nicely drawn episode. I thought it was a really interesting fight, at least by the standards of G Gundam, where the fights tend to be kind of short and perfunctory. And I thought a lot of the storyboarding was really good. A couple of times they do like reflections in Natasha's glasses. It's a cool effect. They do some great posing, a lot of like Saishi jumping into the air and hitting a cool pose in front of the moon.
Yeah, people silhouetted against the night sky. In the earliest scene of Domon training, the sun is rising directly behind him, which looks quite like between the cliffs.
Yeah, there were a couple of times when they did like a close-in on a character's face, but it only occupies one half of the screen, and the other half of the screen shows something cool happening in the background. A good-looking episode. Though I thought it was odd they used those painted freeze frames where the art suddenly changes from cel animation to a single painting.
Which usually they only use at the very end.
Right! If you see one, it's usually only at the very end of the episode. This time there were at least 3 that I counted. Uh, Domon slashing the waterfall, Sae Saishi's vision of monsters chasing him, which— that was interesting, wasn't it? When he has his, like, Devil Gundam flashback, he's imagining a pack of wolves with red eyes and giant bats, like horror movie monsters.
It reminded me of when there were all the rats Under Shibuya. Hmm.
And then they do at least one other. I think it's Saesaiji running away from the camp to go and challenge Argo. I've heard these called Dezakis, after the animator Dezaki Osamu, who used them quite frequently.
Well, we should probably—I'll touch on it here and then revisit in the research. But Tom did some poking around, and people have asked Imagawa why this sequence is. set in the Guiana Highlands. And he gives a less detailed answer than we might like, but in essence, the animators told him, we need to not be in new locations every single week. We need you to keep the story in one place for an extended period of time. And then he did Shibuya, and he's like, okay, you know, I gave you Shibuya. And they're like, yeah, but Shibuya is too detailed. You need to give us, like, a desert or a dense forest or a jungle. Basically something that would be easier to do the backgrounds for. Uh, Imagawa tantalizingly says without explaining it that to him, when he hears jungle, the Guiana Highlands is what he thinks of. Not the Amazon, not any jungles in Southeast Asia, uh, or, or southern Japan or China. Uh, he thinks of The Guiana Highlands.
What movie did you watch, Imagawa? What movie is set in the Guiana Highlands? Tell me! The people need to know. It had never occurred to me before, but I wonder if the art department, the people who paint the backgrounds, are also the ones who paint those freeze frames. It's a different skill set from an animator. Obviously there's some overlap and you could do both, but if you need paintings done, Maybe you give it to the painting department. Also, love the character detail that even when she strips down to go swim in the, in the lake, Natasha still brings her gun with her.
Of course. Honestly, when you mentioned good poses in this episode, her pose when she realizes he's there and she sort of like pulls one arm across her chest to cover herself while holding her gun pointed in the direction of the noise, I thought that was a really great pose.
Yeah.
She's so mean. I love her.
And this may sound harsh, but I think she should be allowed to kill Saesaeshi. Just a little bit, not all the way to death. Just some light killing. For justice. For rain.
As we touched on in the talkback, Imagawa has been asked, why set this part of the story in the Guiana Highlands? And his answer provided just enough information to raise more questions. After all, if the background artists wanted a jungle, there are jungles all over the world. Why are the Guiana Highlands the platonic ideal of jungle for Imagawa? The Guiana Highlands themselves spans 6 countries and territories— Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, and Brazil— and are defined as the area bordered by the Amazon, Orinoco, and Negro Rivers. Famous for its tepui— table-like mountains that are a kind of mesa or plateau— its waterfalls, and its remoteness, the region is one of the most biodiverse in the world and receives upwards of 4,000 millimeters of rain per year. That's over 13 feet. Within the highlands are more than half a dozen protected areas— national parks, nature preserves, and so on— and 2 UNESCO World Heritage Sites: Central Suriname Nature Reserve and Canaima National Park in Venezuela. And it contains all of that because the region is approximately 30,000 square kilometers. That is just slightly larger than Armenia and slightly smaller than Belgium. Given their prominence in every one of these episodes so far, I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about 3 of the Guiana Highlands' most famous waterfalls. First up, Kaieteur Falls in Guyana, called Kwik Tuuk by the local Patamona people, is one of the most powerful single-drop waterfalls in the world, with an average flow rate of 663 cubic meters per second, or 23,400 cubic feet per second. It is about 4.5 times the height of Niagara Falls and twice the height of Mossy Oa-Tunya, or Victoria Falls. Kukanan Falls, which begins at the top of Kukanan Tepui in Venezuela, is the second-tallest free-leaping waterfall in the world. With a single drop of 2,211 feet or 674 meters, and its overall height makes it the 11th highest waterfall in the world. And finally, the most famous of them all: Correpa Cupay Vená, also known as Churun Vená or Churun Merú, and popularly known as Angel Falls. Located within Venezuela's Canaima National Park, it originates at the top of the Auyun Tepui. Where, to quote the waterfall sickos at the World Waterfall Database, the falls funnel into a sinkhole at the edge of the mountain and burst forth from the side of the cliff about 30 to 40 meters below the rim, plunging a sheer 807 meters, or 2,648 feet, into the massive canyon below and forming the tallest uninterrupted waterfall on Earth. The drop is so far that despite the large volume of water which can be present, By the time the river reaches the floor of the canyon, it has vaporized into a huge column of fine mist. However, I should mention that the World Waterfall Database takes issue with the widely quoted height of the falls—979 meters—noting several problems with how this measurement was taken. Their estimate of the falls, at 807 meters, makes it the tallest uninterrupted waterfall But not the tallest waterfall, period. Turns out there is a lot of nuance to how waterfalls are measured and ranked. Numerous blog posts and travel websites I consulted described the Guiana Highlands as a place of great natural beauty, but more significantly, one of mystery and adventure. A place that even now contains pockets of wilderness never visited by humans. This characterization mostly comes out of the European experience of the region. The Guiana Highlands were first seen by Europeans in the late 1500s, fairly early in the colonization of the Americas. Wikipedia notes that Sir Walter Raleigh described Roraima-Tepui as an immeasurable crystal mountain gushing countless waterfalls. Yet the dense jungle and difficult terrain meant that the first expedition to Roraima wasn't until 1838, and the first summit of the tepui by Europeans wasn't until 1884. Although that expedition did encounter the local Pemón people, they still believed the top of the cliff to be previously unknown to humans. Throughout the 1800s, academics, explorers, and adventurers journeyed to the Guiana Highlands, many of them publishing accounts and travelogues afterwards that contributed to the region's reputation. And the thing is, although it's clear that some amount of racism and Eurocentrism undergird the Guiana Highlands' reputation as a place untouched by humans, full of mystery and possibility, that reputation isn't completely wrong. Even much more recent expeditions to the Highlands— say, within the last 50 years or so— routinely discover heretofore undocumented species of flora and fauna. And to take things back to Angel Falls for a moment, had you wondered about the name? It's not named for biblical angels, but for a man, Jimmy Angel, the first outsider to document the falls. Most sources credit him as the first non-Native person to see the falls, although World Waterfall Database— again, being difficult— claims that honor actually belongs to Venezuelan explorer Ernesto Sánchez La Cruz. but that Sánchez La Cruz did not publicize his 1912 find. How did they hear about it then? I don't know. Angel was an American bush pilot and a bit of an adventurer who was flying over the Guiana Highlands in 1933 doing aerial scouting for possible mining sites when he first spotted the falls. However, he and his find became famous in 1937 when, on a return trip to the area, He attempted to land on top of the tepui, but the landing gear of his plane broke through the seemingly solid surface and became mired in mud. He and his 3 companions— his wife Marie and 2 Venezuelans, Gustavo Heny and Miguel Ángel Delgado— had to hike their way out, an 11-day trek. The plane stayed up there until 1970, when the Venezuelan military used helicopters to remove it, and it was reassembled for display at the Maracay Aviation Museum. The incident garnered considerable local and international attention, reminiscent as it was of a bygone age of romance and adventure. Plus, of tantalizing relevance to G Gundam, local Pemon elders told documentary filmmaker Isabel Barton that Churun Canyon, where Angel Falls are located, was a place that only shamans ever entered, and then exclusively to perform rituals after battles or altercations. in order to purge themselves from lingering negative energy. On a 1949 expedition, Ruth Robertson worked with local Pemon guides on an attempt to measure the height of the falls, and several of them refused to enter the canyon because of the spirits that lived there. Those willing to enter, quote, wore red paint on their faces to hide them and keep them safe from the spirits, and insisted that Robertson do the same. All of which is fascinating, but still doesn't explain why Imagawa chose the Guiana Highlands. How familiar would he have been with these aspects of the region's history, after all? Given what we know about the man, influence from a piece of media seemed much more likely. The Japanese Wikipedia page for the Highlands has a helpful list of works set there, including Brave Fighter of the Sun: Fibird, Ultraman Powered, Mobile Fighter G Gundam, Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin, Gundam Reconguista in G, and Pokémon. The Guiana Highlands also have their own Pixiv page, which adds Star Twinkle Precure the Movie: These Feeling Within the Song of Stars. But perhaps some of you have noticed the problem. Only one of these predates G Gundam: Brave Fighter of the Sun, Firebird. And that one only slightly, premiering in February of 1991. Rather than Imagawa being influenced by this series, it seems more likely that various early '90s works that chose the Highlands as a setting were all influenced by some other earlier work. Which brings us to the novel The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Published in 1912, this sci-fi adventure story recounts an expedition to a remote plateau in the Amazon, where the characters discover that dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures still roam the earth. Doyle cast the novel in the mode of the popular 19th-century boys' adventure story genre and told his editor, quote, my ambition is to do for the boys' book what Sherlock Holmes did for the detective story. At the same time, he wanted the book to appeal to adults, and in the opening epigraph writes, I have wrought my simple plan. If I give one hour of joy to the boy who's half a man, or the man who's half a boy. Yes, the novel is set in the Amazon, and yes, Doyle's close personal friend Percy Harrison Fawcett had made an expedition to the Huanchaca Plateau in Bolivia. But later academic analysis of an annotated edition of the novel suggests that he was also influenced by the many late 1800s accounts of exploration of the Guiana Highlands. The influence of these many primary accounts is reflected in the fairly accurate descriptions of the area's geography, flora, climate, and so on, even though Doyle had never been there. The Lost World was so popular and influential that Lost World became the name for a whole subgenre of science fiction, even though it wasn't the first work in that vein. It's been translated into many other languages and has never been out of print. Most relevant to the question of Imagawa's likely influences, The Lost World has been widely adapted, into TV shows, radio serials, and films. It is one of these films that stands out as the likeliest candidate: the 1960 adaptation directed, produced, and co-written by Irwin Allen. The cast includes Claude Rains, who made his American film debut in the sci-fi classic The Invisible Man and is known for his roles in The Adventures of Robin Hood, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Casablanca, and Lawrence of Arabia. David Hedison, who played the titular character in The Fly and went on to portray CIA agent Felix Leiter in the Bond films Live and Let Die and Licence to Kill. Fernando Lamas, who rose to fame during the Golden Age of Argentine cinema, was known in the United States for his Latin lover roles in the 1950s and went on to have numerous guest roles on TV as well as stints directing. Jill St. John, who would later be the Bond girl Tiffany Case in Diamonds Are Forever and also appeared in popular TV shows like Batman, the original live-action one, The Love Boat, and Magnum, P.I. And Michael Rennie, best known for his role as Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Still. One of his co-stars, Claude Rains. And of interest to us and to longtime listeners, Rennie did some of the narration for the 1951 film The Desert Fox, The Story of Rommel. The Japanese dub casts— there were 2 dubs produced, one by TBS and one by Fuji TV— were similarly star-studded and included Nagai Ichiro, who voiced over 60 different Gundam characters, among them Degwin Zabi. Now, Imagawa was born in 1961, one year after Alan's The Lost World premiered. And the film itself was a critical flop. And opinions have not softened or been reevaluated over time. So why exactly do I think it's the likeliest influence? Reason the first: director Irwin Allen and his other film and TV projects. Nicknamed the Master of Disaster for his work in the disaster genre, he started his career as a journalist and radio producer in the late 1930s before moving into film producing. His directorial debut, The Sea Around Us, won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1952 and was a huge commercial success. Made mostly with stock footage, profits from the film were over $2 million.
In 1952!
But that's all background. Before doing this research, I didn't know Irwin Allen's name. But I had heard of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Five Weeks in a Balloon, Towering Inferno, and— drum roll, please— Lost in Space! Yes, all of these were created by Irwin Allen, though he didn't write and direct them all. And he had several other popular science fiction series in the 1960s: The Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants. I can hear the thought forming. Okay, but that's TV in the United States. What makes you think Imagawa saw them? And I thank you for the question because it brings me to point the second. To quote an old Leanna Goody that's getting a sequel soon: moichandising! Shoutout to the Irwin Allen News Network website, a fan-run site that collects information about Allen's work, including behind-the-scenes photographs, foreign movie posters, and information about merch, which was very helpful this week. I mentioned before that The Lost World had 2 different Japanese dubs, both from TV stations, so we know it was shown on TV. But I didn't find ratings information that would tell me anything about its popularity. What I did find was a veritable catalog of Japan-exclusive merch for Irwin Allen's TV shows, most of it dating from the mid-to-late '60s when Imagawa would have been elementary school age. Collectible trading cards, model kits, including one that might be a resin garage kit, notebooks, bookmarks, stickers, dolls, manga, vinyl records, wind-up toys, stamps, and many of these would have been the kind of thing young children bought at candy shops with their pocket money. Yet another intriguing tidbit: Lost in Space, which in Japan was called Uchi Kazoku Robinson. Or Space Family Robinson, à la Swiss Family Robinson, was broadcast on TV every Friday, and the association with its time slot was so strong that the show's robot, which is unnamed in the original version of the show, was called Friday in Japan. So, Imagawa might have been influenced by Arthur Conan Doyle's book, or by the 1920s film adaptation. But it seems as though Irwin Allen's work was heavily marketed to and popular with children during Imagawa's childhood. And while Imagawa's tastes may run the gamut, Allen's reputation for camp, spectacle, effects, especially within the sci-fi genre, really seems like something Imagawa would be into. I've convinced myself, and hopefully most of you. But as always, if any of you have more definitive sources on this topic, I hope you will drop us a line. And I will end with a final fun fact. That technique where a camera is rocked back and forth while the cast rush from side to side on set, simulating a ship being jostled? According to the book A Sci-Fi Movie Lexicon Volume 2, that technique is called the Irwin Allen Rock and Roll.
Incidentally, since it came up in the course of your research, The Brave of Sun Fiburd, or Brave Fighter of Sun Fiburd, both both titles have been used at different times, is the origin of the meme of the guy looking at a butterfly and saying, is this a pigeon?
Next week on MSB episode 11.20, His Man Raymond, we'll research and discuss G Gundam episode 20 and the Islands are getting crowded. Listen here, you young whippersnapper. What is going on with someone's teeth? Wile E. Coyote. A cure for the male loneliness epidemic. You have meddled in my life for the last time. Rocks fall, nobody dies. Diversity means an old man can be moe too. A true friend will save you from yourself. And— okay, but he was evil before he embraced the devil's spaghetti, right? Ready? Go!
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 Dioxin, 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, Gundampodcast.com. You can get in touch with us by email at hosts@gundampodcast.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 at Gundampodcast.com/patreon.
Or look for other ways to support the show at Gundampodcast.com/support. 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? Well, that's because you lack conviction. Or maybe you just haven't heard an opinion worth fighting over yet. How about this one from Church? Who thinks that the sports Gundam show needs more sports and less Gundam? You'd better be ready to fight carrying opinions like that around. Did you want to do anything in particular to warm up?
Oh, oh, just something. I don't know. I hadn't really thought of anything. Sure. It's so good. Oh no, we've discovered that we are the prime demographic for Sleep Number beds.
I didn't used to be.
No, well, exactly. Young us thought it all seemed very silly. Little did we know.
Well, I wouldn't even have said— maybe I would have, I don't know, I was a punk— but I don't think I would have said that it was silly. It just wasn't for me.
I'm surprised that that one isn't in Opinions to Fight Over?
Uh, because it's obviously correct. Listen to the disappearances of Lydia Fontaine at lydiadisappears.com.