U'listening. To season ten of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of Sci-Fi mega franchise mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.
Our one.
This is episode 10.1 podcast to the Victory, and we are your hosts. I'm Tom, and I thought about trying to sing that to the tune of stand up to the victory, but you don't want to hear that. You might think you do, but you're wrong.
And I'm Nina, new to Victory Gundam and wondering if the protagonists just keep getting younger.
Where is our show about babies? Piloting Mecca.
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Before we start talking about Victory Gundam's first episode, I want to talk a bit about the pre production, the genesis of the series, the behind the scenes motivations that shaped its form and content, and some of the key figures in its creation.
This narrative draws on a variety of.
Sources, from production design documents and creator.
Interviews to recent Twitter rants by former.
Sunrise employees, and those will all be in the show notes.
But I would be remiss if I.
Failed to specially note the excellent work that Mark Simmons has been doing to translate primary sources and synthesize them into an easy to follow story. If you're interested in what I'm about to say and you want more detail, or if you want to see how key mobile suit and character designs evolved from their initial concepts to the final image, you really owe it to yourself to check out his site, which again in the show notes now, without further.
Ado 90 91 famed Gundam director Tomino Yoshiyuki, aka lyricist Ayogi Rin, aka storyboard artist and screenwriter Yokitani Minoru, was talking to the management at Studio Sunrise about making a new Gundam tv show, a follow up to his latest project, the movie mobile suit Gundam Formula 91, better known to us as f 91, just a few months prior. In March of 1991, F 91 had finally dragged itself into theaters after a legendarily troubled production. It was meant to kick off a whole new era for the Gundam franchise, but the audience reaction was frosty. It was a year when theaters were dominated by anime and science fiction films. Half of Japan's top ten domestic films.
For the year were animated, and the.
Most popular film overall was the american Sci-Fi movie Terminator two. And yet Gundam F 91 grossed a mere ¥520,000,000 at the box office, less than half of what Shah's counterattack had pulled in three years earlier. It probably didn't help that the movie was unfinished. The final version that we watch today includes five minutes of new scenes added after the theatrical run concluded, as well as a significant number of redrawn scenes and re recorded sound and voice work. It was also unfinished in the sense that the story ended without much resolution, just a line of text on screen reading. This is only the beginning. At the time, Tomino and his team hoped to fulfill that promise in a tv sequel series that would pick up where the movie had left off, continuing the stories of Seabok, Cecily, and the other frontier four survivors in their ongoing struggle against the nefarious and genocidal aristocrats of Cosmo Babylonia. But he wasn't exactly feeling confident about it. In 2002, reminiscing about f 90 one's failure, he said that at the time he was sure Gundam was finally dead, but he was still talking to his managers at sunrise about making a sequel, and Ishigaki Jr. A young mecha designer who had stepped up to assist on f 91 after the hospitalization of lead mecha designer Okuara Kunio, was himself already hard at work on exploratory designs for mobile suits that might be included in the anticipated f 92, or whatever it might eventually have been called. They were both surprised when orders came down from on high to abandon f 92 and begin work at once on a wholly new Gundam tv series, the first in six years, and a second attempt to reinvigorate the faltering Gundam brand. The new series would also need to plug a crucial demographic gap that had opened up. SD Gundam had taken off in a huge way among kids in the six to nine year old age group. Within two years, overall sales of SD Gundam merchandise had eclipsed those of socalled real Gundam products in sales volume, and for the four year period from 1989 through 1992, Bondi sold more than twice as many SD kits every single year. Uda Masuo, a producer who later became the managing director of Studio Sunrise, described the studio as horrified by the SD sales figures. SD Gundam, as Ueda explained, was not really theirs in the same way that real Gundam was. But while SD Gundam Mania had brought in a new generation of young fans, Sunrise, Bondi, and the other sponsors were struggling to get them interested in real Gundam. And it definitely did not help that the only recent real Gundam productions, f 91 and the then ongoing ova series 83 Stardust memory were expensive prestige projects meant to appeal to the more mature tastes of high school aged fans and adult otaku. In order to succeed as a commercial project, the new series would need to appeal to older elementary and middle school aged kids, catching them as they outgrew SD Gundam's wacky hijinks, and ideally, transforming them into lifelong Gundam fans. And of course, it would need to move a lot of plastic. It was time to go back to Gundam's roots, selling toys to children. By December 1991, presumably while he was overseeing the finishing touches on the final home video cut of f 91, Tomino had established the basics of the setting and many of the major characters, as well as the title for this next Gundam series, Victory Gundam. With the basic outline of the story set, the first order of business would be to assemble the staff. Tomino's prior Gundam works going back to Zeta had all been made in Sunrise's studio two, managed by producer Uchida Kenji. But Uchida, having witnessed Tomino surpassing himself again and again with his work on original projects like Dunbine or Elgheim, wanted his longtime collaborator to have the chance to make new things. Sending him back to Gundam was just a waste. So Uchida went to the higher ups and told them that he refused to work on another Gundam show. If Tomino was directing it, this did not have the effect he hoped for, but it did mean that Tomino would need to work with a different producer, so victory would now be made in studio three, overseen by Ueda. Masuo Masuo describes the process of how he was chosen to be the producer for victory as follows. During a meeting of Sunrise's executive leadership, including Ueda and two other senior producers, someone raised the question of what they were going to do with Gundam after 83 finished. At the time, the company as a whole was doing well. SD Gundam was booming, the royalties were rolling in, and their work for the toy makers Takara and Tomi was going well. Given the timing of this meeting, I assume that Ueda is talking about Zetai Muteki Raijino for Tomi and brave fighter of legend Dagarn for Takara, despite all of these positive indicators, the question of Gundam's future cast a paw over the meeting. The company president wanted them to focus on making a new tv series. But when he asked the assembled producers who was going to take charge of the project, nobody volunteered. After a short, and I suspect uncomfortable silence, he said, okay, then. It's yours, Ueda. So by the start of 1992, with the director and producer in place and the show's debut still more than a year away, it was time to assemble the principal designers, who would collectively establish the visual identity of the new show. They picked three men to design the show's mecca. The veteran Okawara Kunio, designer of the Zaku and the original Gundam, Ishigaki Jr. A relative newcomer and former assistant to Okawara, who, as I said, had stepped up late in the production of f 91 when his boss was hospitalized and was now working in Sunrise's behind the scenes planning office. And Katoki Hajime, another relatively new face who had made a name for himself with his designs for the 1987 photo novel Gundam Sentinel before landing a job designing mobile suits for 83. The allimportant question which of the three would design the titular victory Gundam was to be decided in a headtohead competition. Each of the three was asked to produce a design which, like the original Gundam, could split into three sections centered around a core fighter. Other than that, the designers were free to interpret the Gundam as they pleased. Kotoki's design, which followed the style of the f 91, maintaining the smaller 15 meters size class and some distinctive elements like the beam shield, ended up winning. He would handle the Gundam and its associated support equipment as a consolation prize. Okawara and Ishigaki were tasked with designing the rest of the Mecca, enemy and allied alike. A few months later, there was a similar competition to select the character designer, but here, Tomino went rogue. The producer, Ueda had dug up some archived concept art from an old cancelled project and showed it to the director as a reference. It turned out to be exactly what Tomino was looking for and the artist responsible, Osaka Hiroshi, got the job. Osaka, who died of cancer in 2007 when he was only 44 years old, was not really a character designer. Before this, he had worked his way up from animator to animation director and had only one character design credit to his name, the 1987 pornographic ova cream Lemon special, Dark. In fact, like Osaka, Katoki and Ishigaki, much of the staff for Victory would turn out to be young and relatively inexperienced in their roles of the show's. Twelve episode directors, eight had less than five years experience in the role, and three made their debut on Victory. The animation directors followed similar lines, with at least two starting out as animators and getting promoted to animation director during the show's run. Nishimori Akira, who wound up storyboarding 18 episodes more than any other artist, only had a single storyboarding credit to his name when he was hired. Writer Godo Kazuhiko got his first writing credit the year before Victory started airing. Oka Akira, who wrote roughly half of the show's episodes, had a bit less than ten years experience as a screenwriter, but that was almost exclusively working on shows for young kids like Doriman, Kyutaro, and Obocamakun. In interviews both at the time and retrospectively, Tomino has said that he wanted to revitalize Gundam by entrusting its future to a new generation of creators, but there are some less flattering explanations for this as well. More established anime professionals with more options may well have been avoiding both Tomino and Gundam at this point. Uweda described the attitude in his studio as heavy, and Tomino likened the experience of making victory to sinking into a swamp. The pressure to generate a hit was intense, and very few people actually seemed excited to work on a new Gundam show. Also, Tomino's reputation as a workaholic perfectionist with a quick temper and a sharp tongue had only grown over the years, and the Gundam franchise itself had now developed a notoriety within the industry for the quantity and difficulty of the work. Ever since Shar's counterattack, every Gundam project had gotten more and more complex to animate more lines, more movement, flashier effects. There was even concern within the studio that they wouldn't be able to find outside companies willing to take on specialist tasks like finishing, which is the final inking and painting of the animation cells before they're photographed. Partly to counter this, partly to avoid direct and unflattering comparisons to f 91 and 83, and partly to appeal to the show's younger target demographic. Tomino and his team decided on a deliberately simplistic aesthetic inspired by the long running World masterpiece theater series. That series, which consisted of anime adaptations of classic western children's stories, had been running for so long that Tomino himself had worked on it during the early part of his career, when he was cutting his teeth as a freelance storyboard artist, he had worked on shows like Heidi, Girl of the Alps, Anne of Green Gables, Dog of Flanders, and Moomin alongside fellow anime legends Miyazaki Hayao and Takata Isao in fact, he worked on it right up until Gundam catapulted him into the spotlight. The last episode Tomino storyboarded for Anne of Green Gables actually aired a month after first Gundam's debut. The other major visual touchstone for the new show would be 1970 Eight's future Boy Conan, the first show directed by Miyazaki and another of Tomino's freelance storyboarding gigs. For the younger animators working on victory, though, it represented something more. Character designer Osaka would later recall that it had been future Boy Conan, with its deceptively simplistic designs and amazing movement, that made him and many of his contemporaries fall in love with animation in the first place. In practice, what this meant for the mecca and character designers of victory was a declaration of war against lines. Every additional line in a design translated directly into more work. For the animators and colorists downstream, any line that could be removed was removed. This emphasis on design simplicity was coupled with a series of labor and cost saving measures. Shading was to be emitted from all scenes except when specifically called for by the chief director himself. Animation was to be limited to eight frames a second, which is called shooting on threes because each frame has to be repeated three times in order to get up to the 24 frames per second of broadcast television. Normally, a show's frame rate varies from cut to cut depending on what is happening, with more intense moments being shot on twos or twelve frames per second, or even drawn at what is called full animation or 24 frames per second. Victory was to have none of that. Even the most exciting, complex and fast paced scenes were to be animated at a mere eight frames a second, and the effects, like explosions, were to be achieved by swapping in painted backgrounds instead of being animated. This was a process that had been used back in the 70s, but by the early 90s had become so antiquated, most of the animators had no idea how to even do it. And Tomino claimed to have forgotten. But even with all this, they struggled to find enough animators to actually make the show in its simplified form. These cost cutting measures were not ordered just for the sake of the animator's wrists. By the point these decisions were being made in 1992, Japan's asset price bubble had fully burst, and the easy money of the late eighty s, which had enabled so many studios to take chances on ambitious projects, was gone. Sunrise may have been doing better than many studios, thanks in large part to the royalties brought in by SD Gundam merchandise, but resources were tight everywhere, and the team was really feeling the pressure to make victory a commercial success. The sponsors, Bondi in particular, wanted to be sure they got the product they were paying for, and they were increasingly willing to interfere in the production in order to get it, even threatening to remove Tomino from the project if he didn't make the changes they wanted. I won't spoil the nature of these dictates, including one that Tomino considered to be such an egregiously bad idea that he kept it secret from the staff until the last possible moment, very probably out of fear that they would revolt and abandon the project once they found out. But we'll talk about them when they show up later in the season, I promise. Tomino, however, was not the only one keeping secrets. By this point. The owners and tiptop management in sunrise were involved in secret negotiations to sell the studio outright to Bondi, their most important sponsor. The exact timeline of the buyout, who knew what when, is a little murky. Negotiations appear to have begun before work began on victory. So sometime in 1991 or before, Ueda and some of the other producers first learned about the deal at some point in 1993, but were not allowed to tell their teams until sometime later. He doesn't remember exactly when some of the other producers, the ones who handled shows sponsored by Bondi's competitors, pushed back. They were rightfully concerned about what the deal would mean for the studio's relationships with its other clients, but their objections came to nothing. Negotiations continued through victory's broadcast run, but Tomino was kept in the dark, possibly right up until the formal transfer of shares was completed on April 1, 994, one week after the end of Victory's tv run. Takamatsu Shinji, who was directing Brave Express Mike gain at the time, said that Tomino was furious over the perceived betrayal and that Q-K-A jino Satsuga kangayeta, he thought about murdering the former management team. This sounds like exaggeration for humorous effect, but it is not the first story I have heard from this period about Tomino threatening to murder a coworker. So, like he probably said it, he might have seriously thought about it. And the worst part of it for him might have been that victory Gundam itself turned out to have been a precondition of the sale. Bondi wanted Gundam back on tv, and Sunrise's managers had obliged. Tomino had just spent a year of his life sinking into a miserable depression, all to unwittingly help his bosses sell the company and the Gundam franchise, a franchise inextricably linked to his name, his artistic career, and his legacy to the very sponsors that he had once called the true enemies of Gundam. But back in the summer of 1992, ignorant of the deeper currents driving decisions within the studio, Tomino and his staff started production. The details of that production are going to be more relevant to us as we progress through the show, but there is a quote from an interview that Tomino gave during the production about his philosophy for the new show, and I'm.
Going to try to keep this in.
Mind throughout the coming year. The english translation of this quote was done by Mark Simmons for his excellent Victory Gundam production history. The truth is, when I began the current Victory Gundam, the first thing on my mind was to make a complete and absolute break with everything about the preceding gundams, up to and including the worldview. That was the idea with which I started out. I know that past fans continue to remember and enjoy different parts of Gundam, but when it comes to making a new Gundam, there are many parts they won't like. Whatever new thing you try, there will be an overwhelming majority of people who don't like it. In that case, I thought it was better to make a complete break in terms of characters and everything else. We have severed ties with the previous Gundam in every sense. Now, after five years and more than 200 episodes podcasting about Gundam, it is inevitable that we are going to interpret victory within the prior Gundam context, and there may be moments where something in victory causes us to reevaluate our impressions of what came before, but we need to remember that Tomino started this project aiming to create something wholly new, coherent, and complete unto itself, breaking free of Gundam's gravity. Most of the crew under him had never worked on Gundam before. Its target audience would not have seen the prior shows. Many hadn't even been born when first Gundam aired. For them, Gundam was comic strips and video games about silly little guys, deep space rock bands, demon haunted samurai weddings, and the Knights of the Roundtable. That context is going to be at least as important to understanding victory as any of the major historical events that directly inspired it.
Now, let's talk about Victory Gundam episode one. Starting with Nina's recap.
The episode's opening narration, set over images of the moon, space colonies at war, and Earth, describes how pollution and deteriorating conditions on Earth drove most of humanity to live in space. So much has changed, but wherever they go, people seem to bring war with them. Will they ever truly let go of Earth and make space their home? Dense woods of evergreen are torn apart by a series of explosions. Birds fleeing as two mobile suits come crashing through the branches. A young boy named Uso in a yellow mobile suit is thoroughly outmatched by his opponent, a masked soldier, Lieutenant chronicle Asher, in a red mobile suit, and after one of his mobile suit's legs is blown off and one arm rendered immobile, Uso is forced to eject the escape pod. Chronicle fires on the pod itself, and USo drops out of it and down through the foliage below, aching but somehow not badly injured. Elsewhere, a small convoy of trucks loaded with mobile suit parts and seemingly crewed by elderly engineers and young refugees, stops briefly. A pilot, Marbette, limps over to the corps fighter, off to look for the missing USo.
Once she has found him, she will.
Rendezvous with the rest of the group at the secret facility that is their destination. But first they have to find it, and they stop in the ruins of a small, recently bombarded city. Not a single building appears untouched, and streets and river both are choked with bodies. Some of the young adults and older teens try to keep the children away from the gruesome scene. Among the corpses is the factory foreman they were set to meet with, and in his jacket pocket the slightly charred map that will show them where to go when they arrive. It has the look of a long abandoned factory in a long abandoned town. Yet down the elevators are vast underground facilities full of gundam parts, and this is just one of many such stockpiles spread throughout the region. Uso is finally able to muster the strength to get up and picks his way along the busted up road. He spots Marbit flying overhead and is able to signal her, but once she lands, it's clear she will not be able to fly them back. Her wounded leg is worse, and she drifts in and out of consciousness. It's a struggle even to fit them both in the cockpit, but with the pilot seat all the way forward for UsO and Marbett seated behind and giving instructions, they are ready for the return journey. Lieutenant Chronicle Asher reports to Commander Griffin and is taunted by her second in command to pray for his loss against what they call the league militaire remnants. Hoping to redeem himself, Asher requests and is granted permission to stay rather than returning immediately to the homeland. That night at the secret Gundam storage, a young girl named Shakti sleeps outside next to the radio, listening for the signal from Marbette's corps fighter. When it wakes her, she turns off her own signal, then waits until she spots the core fighter overhead before turning on the floodlights around the small landing area. The moment the wheels touch down, she clicks the lights off again. Uso gets out, seemingly unbothered by the whole ordeal, though he seems to brace himself when Shakti runs up and stops a few feet short of him.
She seems relieved, happy, angry all at.
Once, and finally flings herself forward and hugs him tight. Marbette is lifted from the cockpit, and everyone returns to their duties. The next morning chronicle launches early. The morning light casts the scenery below into high relief, and the stark shadows keep the league militair's trucks from blending into the forest. Several children, perched on top of one of the trucks and hidden in the trees, are acting as lookouts and warn the rest of the group of chronicles'approach. They hope he'll fly over without noticing them, but no such luck. He begins to bomb the area, targeting places he's seen. The trucks and the lookouts have to make a run for it. Marbette is still too injured to fly, so Uso, springing out of bed at the sound of explosions, takes her place. Some of the other children, zipping around on air bikes and armed with rocket launchers, provide support from the ground, but even so, Uso struggles against the more experienced pilot. Marbette and Catagina coordinate the launch of the hangar and boots. The two other segments that, when combined with the corps fighter, allow it to form the Gundam and count coaches UsO through the docking procedure. In spite of his lack of experience, and perhaps by pure luck, Uso is able to kick the Gundam's leg at Chronicle's mobile suit, destroying its sensors and forcing chronicle to retreat. The threat dealt with. USO lands the Gundam and stands on the open cockpit door, arms outstretched, yelling.
With relief that he's still alive.
Shakti looks up at him, a serious expression on her face, wondering how their lives have changed so much, so fast.
So that was episode one of Victory Gundam. What did you think?
I'm intrigued. I'm very interested to see where they go with this. And I am in fact getting one of the things I wanted, which is that fun mix of callbacks to previous Gundam, but also some hinting at different.
Directions they might be going or different.
Things they might be doing. But even for an episode that does the conceit of in meteor s drop us in the middle of the story, this was a very disjointed episode and not a great example of that narrative trick.
True mess of an episode, even beyond the most obvious stuff that everybody talks about. Just an absolute mess.
I don't know what obvious stuff everybody talks about.
That's right. I'm going to be inaugurating you into this today, but truly it is good to have Tomino back. Like as a viewer it's good to have him back as a podcaster. Phenomenal. Absolutely great to have this guy back, because no one does it. Like Tomino, he is unparalleled in his ability to just like, here's a bunch of stuff, but what does it mean, Mr. Tomino? I don't know. Figure it out, nerd. There's so much here, and because the episode comes together in such a messy way, it's really hard to know which bits are intentional, which bits are accidental. The ways different scenes interact with each other don't always make sense. The visual storytelling, like, the direction of the episode, largely does not support the story it appears to be telling. And, like, is that intentional? I guess we'll find out as we progress through the show and talk about it.
That sense of confusion that you're describing about not being sure if they're making certain visual illusions on purpose or not. For me, started from the intro from the opening sequence. I don't have much to say about the opening and ending songs. I thought they were fine. I liked them okay, but they weren't exceptional. I don't consider them bops. I'm not humming along already.
She'll get there, don't worry.
She just needs to acclimate to it.
But the fact that they show Uso in the introduction holding a branch of cherry blossoms in japanese art, this would more or less be telling us that he's doomed. Like, that he is very likely to die, because the whole thing around cherry blossoms is that they're very beautiful, but they only last for this very brief period of time, and then they're gone. And this is why there was a lot of cherry blossom imagery associated with kind of the mythology of the samurai. This idea that you live this beautiful but short life, you live fast, and you die young at the height of your beauty.
And I think it probably does continue to have that message here. Uso is very young and also a warrior. We've already seen him in the Gundam, so we know he's unlikely to die, but he's really likely to die inside.
There is also that bit towards the end of the introduction where this image of Shakti is made out of stars in the background. So, first of all, she's shown, like, five times in the introduction, and it's like, okay, we get it. He's in love with her. But the star one has a potentially dark interpretation. Like, it could just be, oh, look how beautiful. He even sees her face in the stars. Or it could be like, oh, she's star stuff now. Just like, lala. She is our lala alike.
She's certainly positioned like Lala, both in terms of her ethnicity. Her name, Shakti, suggests indian or south asian, similar to Lala, but also in that she is like the object of yearning for the character. For Uso, at least as expressed through the opening animation.
Though, in the episode, she becomes kind of a mashup of Lala and Frabo. Because she's the childhood friend, she knows him from wherever it is that they're from, they clearly have known each other a long time, and she's the caretaker type. She is the one running around taking care of a baby.
And this makes a really strong contrast. Thinking still about the opening, since you brought it up, a really strong contrast with 83, I think I made a thread about this on whatever Twitter is currently calling itself. And 80 three's opening makes all kinds of visual allusions to prior Gundam openings. It just like, lifts that imagery almost exactly.
But what it doesn't do is it.
Does not express any sense of longing in the main character, except maybe like the longing to fight Gato. But even then, it's like a rage feeling. Whereas previous gundams have had this sense of the main character, like reaching out for somebody. This is especially strong in Zeta, where Camille is like Camille wants every new type girl. Camille is always reaching out. And here, Uso has that yearning, that longing. So it's nice to see that back in the mix. You. When we were watching this, besides the Shakti Lala Frabo connections, you had also identified a bunch of other characters who were like the Matilda of this season, right?
Yeah. Other than the name of the episode, Shiroi Mobijisutsu, which is a thing that xeon soldiers call the Gundam in first.
Gundam, it's really what distinguishes the Gundam from all other mobile suits.
It's the white mobile suit that's a clear callback. And there were a couple of other moments that felt like nods at continuity to previous Gundam. We noted there's this particular sort of, like, speckled watercolory background they use for moments of intense emotion. That's back new type mentioned, so we're maybe going to get some kind of new type something in here.
The earth Federation is still around, but.
Largely, I felt the continuity through this use of kind of character archetypes. And part of that could be story driven. I'm sure part of it is merchandising driven, or even just your marketing department going like, ah, this character was really popular. We need another one like so and so.
Every show needs a shah, so Chronicle.
Is our shah, in some ways, he's kind of a reverse shar. He's covering the lower part of his face, which I think his mask makes him look like a villain out of teenage mutant Ninja Turtles or G. I. Joe.
We were talking a moment ago about the way Shakti seems like a mashup of Lala and Frabo. I think Chronicle is a mashup of Shar and Garma. And this really comes through in the scene where they're on the hovercraft and he puts on the mask, and he's like, this is why I wear a mask on earth, because of all the dust in the air. And the thing about Shar, we love Shar, because Shar is a theater kid. Shar is an overdramatic little freak. Maybe that's too much. Shar is an overdramatic little sicko who wears the mask and says weird stuff like, he's a character in epic poetry and he knows it. And everybody around him looks at him like he's a weirdo, and they tolerate it because he flies mobile suits real good. Chronicle's a snob. Like, Chronicle is like when you see a politician glad handing at a state fair and they're trying so hard not to touch the pores. Chronicle is like the prince who goes to visit his subjects and wears the gloves so nobody touches him.
And this may be totally off base, I have no real rationale for this other than the particular shade of Chronicle's hair, but something about the fluffiness of his bangs and the color of his hair makes me think of the redheaded guy from Legend of the galactic heroes, which I've never seen. I don't know that character's name. I don't know anything about it, except that people become obsessed. The brainworms get real bad when people watch Legend of the galactic heroes. But that was another show that was coming out at this time that was also know it's not outside the realm of possibility that there would be some influence there.
Sure.
I think Marbett is our Matilda, the short haired, rough and tumbled, sort of tomboy ish older sister type who's a fighter and very strong, but also trusts the young guy and supports him.
Kind of looks like Mora, at least in her height and coloring.
We stand the leader of the baddies, who I think they say, what, Fuala? What is her name?
We're going to be doing this so often because this is one of those shows that doesn't have an english dub, and so we're going off of the Japanese, but there's also the English, like, anglicization of the names. Her name in Japanese is Fara. It's spelled in English, fuala.
Fuara.
But it really is Fara. Farah in the Japanese.
Like Farah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Like, the best overwatch character. Yeah.
I have no response to that. Anyway, she's our haman type. She is our pink haired, villainous. Awesome.
Yeah. You immediately see that character and you know what you're in for.
Step on me, Commander Samar.
She's going to have a whip or a riding crop or a baton or some kind of thing she can brandish, like a dominatrix.
Her right hand guy gave me very strong McVeigh vibes, just like a kind of smarmy grand vizier type hanging around in the.
Yeah, yeah, I could see that. They've given him that face where it's like, this is a guy who does not sleep. Right. This is a guy who's totally exhausted by everybody around him.
Dupre.
Dupre. E with the little hat on it.
I'm sure it's not supposed to sound.
Like that again in the Japanese, it's not even Dupre. It's depre. This is like mashima all over again.
This is going to be impossible. It's just going to be bad and ugly, and you all have to deal.
With it, and nothing's official. So you can't get mad at us about it.
They will anyway. You can get mad. Just. I don't want to hear about it.
Keep it to yourself.
Katajina has that aura of being the posh one. Something about her outfit, her long, straight hair that she wears down, and it.
Being blonde, I think, is like a classic part of the ojo sama type.
So from her, I get kind of like Iselina or Bararona, even, perhaps even more Barona, given some of the comments she makes and this kind of hinting that the rest of them don't have anywhere to go, but she could go home. She doesn't really have to be here.
I think her home was in that city that got bombed.
Okay, well, one of the guys does ask her, like, oh, are you going to go home now? Now that the city has already been destroyed? You could go. They're not going to do anything else, probably. And so that sense that she is not part of this fight by necessity, in the same way that all of these young kids are, who are presumably orphans or in some way separated from their parents, communities, et cetera, I guess.
What we're saying here is that since Tomino's stated goal for this show was to make a complete break with prior Gundam, to make completely new characters and a completely new worldview. I don't think he succeeded.
But here's the thing. These initial impressions that I have, this sense of archetype, especially in the case of characters where it largely has to do with their visual design, that could easily be the kind of thing you put in to satisfy your sponsors. Like, oh, look. See you guys pointed out, everybody loved Haman. Here's our haman type. We did that for you. Awesome. Go leave us alone now. And then you could do very different things with the characters throughout the story and how they develop, how their personalities come out. Some of these callbacks could be a bone thrown to the needs of management who we know are watching the show very closely. This came from the very top of the company that they needed another tv Gundam show. There is a lot of pressure on the show itself, and so there is going to be some back and forth between the desire to do something new and the need, the absolute necessity to pacify your bosses.
And also, creators are not infinitely creative. They have their set of tropes and stock characters that they like working with and are comfortable with and are kind of always going to be falling back into the same. You know, how much of this is like, oh, that's an intentional Gundam reference. And how much of this is just like, that's what Tomino is obsessed with. And I think in the sort of larger story sense, there's going to be a lot more of that. Like, oh, this is just what Tomino is always talking about.
That comes out really strongly in the narration at the very beginning of the short. We basically get two at this point, old saws from Gundam. One, that war seems to be almost an instinctive activity for humans. They can't seem to help themselves always having war. And two, that humans just need to give up on Earth. They need to leave Earth and leave Earth alone.
Yeah. The opening narration entangles these different concepts. Like, the Earth has become so polluted that people have to leave it. Okay, people have gone out into space, but wars continue. And then the idea that the continuation of war even after humanity leaves Earth is like our old instincts being sort of reactivated by our discomfort in this new environment. And also the idea that the only way to stop war is for humanity to let go of Earth and embrace living in the space future. And those concepts, in my mind are not naturally entangled like that. I think the impulses that drive people to fight each other are exactly the same in space. As they are on Earth. I don't think there's any link between the planet and that that human.
Well, but we've established before that there's this kind of malthusian, neomalthusian ideology within a lot of Tomino Gundam, which basically says that the Earth is a resource that we have so completely used up or so completely damaged, and especially if we continue to have more and more people on the planet, is this idea of carrying capacity and of a maximum amount of resource that can be extracted from the earth, that the only way the earth will ever recover is if we leave completely, not just some of us, not even just most of us, all of us leave and leave it alone for thousands of years. Like this idea that we need to leave as though we are never coming back. And so I think the reason Tomio entwines these different concepts you're talking about is because he sees people leaving as though that's a temporary solution, leaving with the anticipation of going back possibly in their own lifetimes. And if not in their own lifetimes, then, oh, if I leave now, then my children can go back. This idea that it could just be temporary, this is a momentary discomfort, and then we can go back to the way things were, we can go back to normal, and that ultimately it's all about fighting over this finite resource. And so the only way to stop fighting is to remove the resource from the equation.
Is Tomino saying the only way to stop fighting is for us all to forget the earth and give up on it? Or is he saying humanity is inextricably linked to the earth? We can never forget it, we can never leave it behind. And hoping that war will end because we go into space is stupid because the text supports the former. But if you look at the gundam that we have seen, there is this deep yearning for earth that never seems to go away, never seems to get any lesser. And increasingly the conflicts are over. Possession of the earth as this spiritual and holy thing.
Sorry, I have to make a note that I need to look up an article because it's not about Gundam. It's about a couple of other anime series that were out at the same time, but that in a few anime of this time, there was this fixation on the furusato, this fixation on the home, the ancestral home, the homeland, which feels relevant to the things you're saying.
It sure does. And one can imagine how the bursting of the bubble economy, the collapse of the good times would make people nostalgic, yearn for the old days and yearn for the pastoral countryside, yearn for an escape from the hyper capitalist, competitive world of the cities. There's this idea that if we go into space, resources will be infinite. This is sort of the premise that underlies a lot of Gerard O'Neill's work on space colonies that gave us the O'Neill cylinders. And I think you see it a lot now in discussions of space exploration and the long term future of humanity. And it's true if you're only thinking about material resources like iron or platinum, but the real resources in the future and now are time and labor and in social interactions, prestige.
That position also ignores, as most malthusian neomalusian theories ignore, the fact that with very few exceptions, we already have way more resources than we need for the people that are on the planet. Those resources are inefficiently allocated and frequently wasted in the interest of people trying to derive profits from markets. Because often you get the most profit when you are not making sure everybody gets the thing, when you are, in fact denying many people the thing.
And you went to business school and took classes about how you can make more money by not providing the thing to everybody, right? That's extremely basic business theory.
Yeah, for most products, your ideal price point is not going to be a price point that everybody who wants the good can afford, which, if we're talking about non necessities, whatever, if we're talking about food, I take some issue with that. But yeah, there certainly are some resources that are more finite. Plenty of science fiction and sort of futurist writers have talked about the fact that potable drinking water on our planet could become a resource like that in our lifetimes or within a generation or two.
Many people would say it already has.
But, yeah, I think the big driver of conflict is not purely resources, at.
Least not the kind of resource pressure that would be alleviated by going into space.
And Tomino Gundam has shown some awareness of this. In the past, there have been very obvious examples of how privileged people are insulated from the hardship and deprivation that other people experience, that normal people experience.
I mean, double Zeta in particular, had that whole thing with the resource mine inside three and the miners being oppressed by Xeon. It sucks to be a minor, whether you're in space or on Earth.
A minor or a minor? Yes, a minor, minor.
It sucks to be a minor whether you're in space or southeast Ohio. There's some really funny, really good environmental storytelling in the fact that this is still the universal century. I don't know if they say that in this episode, I don't think they do, but it is still the universal century.
The fact that they mention Earth and then also mention the Earth Federation, it'd be weird if it weren't the universal century and the Earth Federation were still kicking around.
But it's like year 153 of the universal century, which is.
That's not a spoiler.
No, I don't know. But the fact that we have had more than 100 years in this century, this is not really a thing in Japanese. The term they use in Japanese doesn't.
Actually mean, like, century means era, probably, right?
Yeah, exactly. I think it's senkyu uchi senkyu, which just means, like, space age. But in English, you get the impression of the federation as this organization, that when it was founded, when it created the space colonies and started the universal century, it had all this energy, it had all this commitment, it had all this unity. They were able to change the calendar.
For the whole world.
Like, that's huge. You know? Who has the power to change the calendar for the whole world? Nobody. I don't even know if the United nations could do it right now.
Probably not.
At the height of its power, the Catholic Church managed to do it for Europe. So that's incredible. But they didn't change it again at the end of the century. They just let it ride, because now all of that energy has dissipated, and they are just like a completely lethargic, inertia based organization. And that's another point of continuity here, because at one point in the course of this, one of the league military officers says, our goal is to spur the federation forces into action, which, if you think about it, it was also the Aug's goal in double Zeta. It was also Londabelle's goal in shar's counterattack. It was also the frontier fleet's goal in f 91. This is something Tomino is obsessed with. He's obsessed with the lethargy of these big institutions, with the bureaucratic paralysis of.
Government and the difficulties of any smaller, less well resourced, more grassroots movement to deal with any kind of violent situation. Right. Clearly, there is quite a lot of organization happening in league militaire. They never called themselves that. I don't even know if that's properly their name. That's what the baddies are calling them. If they have these stockpiles of mobile suit parts spread out all over the country, there is a level of organization there and of resources there that's pretty impressive, but it's not enough. They're quick to point out we don't have an army, but we are fighting an army. We are fighting a real army. And they understand on some level that they need to interest the earth Federation in their cause, but also that because the Earth Federation is lethargic and self interested and has the decision making structures that we've seen, they're not going to sweep in and save people just because they think it ought to happen, because they think that's the morally good thing to do. That is not how they choose to get involved. They either need to feel like they are at risk, like they are under attack, or could be, or like they have something to gain from getting involved.
And this whole conflict takes place on earth. You think, oh, why wouldn't the Earth Federation get involved if they're attacking the earth? We don't actually know at this point in the show what the earth Federation is, what it governs, where it is.
It might not even be based on Earth anymore for all that it's called. The Earth Federation.
Yeah. There was every indication that Earth, like Earth, has not been a center of power, except in the spiritual sense, for a really long time. Like, even going back to Shah's counterattack, there was no indication that Earth was an industrial or population center. So the Earth Federation may simply be so big that the destruction of a city of one of its cities on Earth doesn't even register. It's got the warhammer 40k imperium problem, where the scale has gotten so big that even, like, tens of thousands of dead earth noids don't even tip the scales.
And as happens in a lot of wars in our own earth's history, it is not unusual for an aggressor to say, okay, well, for XYZ reasons, like, here's our cassus Bellai, here's the reason why this chunk of territory ought to be ours, actually. But once we have that, we'll stop. That's all we want, right?
We look at historical examples of inciting incidents for wars. The sinking of the Lusitania, the destruction of the USS Maine. And, like, these are cited as the cassus belly, as the inciting incidents. But they could easily have been ignored, and it could easily have been some other incident, some earlier or later.
One part of it is how these things affect popular perception. How upset is the public about this thing, and how angrily are they demanding you do something about it?
And how closely does it align with your state's interest in going to war?
Yeah. The perception of our group, of these old engineer guys, at least, is that the baddies, in fact, want to subjugate all of Earth. That is what they think is going on here. Regardless of what's being said. It would be completely in keeping with Gundam for the Earth Federation to not take that threat seriously. To think this, in fact represents like a very minor scuffle over who gets to retain power over a small part of Earth and leave it at that. And as such, that they don't need to get involved.
That was their approach with dealing with Cosmo Babylonia a couple of decades ago. And it seems to have worked out for them because I don't see Cosmo Babylonia anywhere in this story. So far, we've been calling them the baddies. They're definitely not Cosmo Babylonia. Did you catch their name? Did they say it in this episode?
I don't believe they say the name of their faction in this episode. I tried to decipher the flags in the office. Did notice that we get this overhead view of the command center base. Small town, whatever it's meant to be. And there are craters all over. So clearly there have been attempted strikes against it.
Or they occupied it after bombing it. Yeah, like Garma in New York.
But anyway, there are these very elaborate red and gold flags with a big z on the front. And I tried to make out what's written underneath them, but it's kind of hard to read. It looked like Zanikar or something along those lines. I don't know.
It's spelled. We're doing this again. It's spelled like Zanskare. Zanscare. It is pronounced in the japanese Zansukadu. So like Zanskar, which is the name of an actual real world region in India, in the Himalayas, very near Tibet. Zanskar. And they are the Zanskar Teikoku Zanskar empire.
One thing that I was fascinated by in this first episode is what I think the episode tells us about the target audience for the show. The biggest part of this being the age of the protagonists. I'm pretty positive that Uso is younger than any other protagonist Gundam pilot we have had to date.
He is.
The majority of the cast seems to be very young. Of the ones who appear in profile in the intro, I wouldn't think any of them were older than their early twenty s. And most of them. Look, if I had to guess, middle school aged and japanese middle school. It skews up to one year older. But they're young. They are young teens and some of them not even teens yet, which would point to a younger target audience to the extent that they are meant to be self inserts. Or somewhat aspirational. Your target audience is similar age or slightly younger even, which I think is backed up by the focus on showing the three part mobile suit and its transformation and combination sequence multiple times. First of all, they put it in the intro sequence, which often it kind of gets saved as like a cool reveal. But no, this is going in the very intro of the show. They are going to see it right away. They are going to see it every time. It also, parts of it get shown multiple times just in this one episode. So they really want to draw focus on this transforming action and combining action, because this is a prime way to help them sell the toys. And probably not model kits, but like transforming figurines.
Also model kits, though. Definitely model kits. They're so proud of this transformation, and you can tell in the way it's drawn. Especially for me, this comes through when they're doing the legs converting. I think the sequence in the animation is very accurate to how the actual model kit would transform, not to the benefit of the animation. It looks like plastic. There are parts of the hip section that look so flimsy and so fake that it looks like a toy, that.
It doesn't have the heft that we've gotten used to seeing imparted by the way that it's animated.
Yeah, and that it doesn't look like there could be any machinery in there. It doesn't look like a real machine.
Sidebar before I move on completely from talking about the age of the characters for narrative reasons, the age split of our group is extremely dark, sad. So we have very young people and very old people. No, like prime of life adults, people which would generally hint at most of those people being dead in the army and stationed elsewhere or captured, isolated, purged in some way. Those are the scenarios in which you wind up with guerrilla fighters who are all like, gray haired old people and young children because the adults are gone. But as we've addressed previously, the absence of adults also gives kids in fiction more agency. In a lot of fiction, there's this feeling like, well, but if their parents are around, they couldn't do any of this stuff. So we need a reason for their parents not to be there.
Like, there has to be some kind of narrative justification for why the little kid must be the one. Because otherwise we can't suspend our disbelief enough. Like, we need a hook to explain why it's Uso piloting the victory and not Marbette and her leg is injured and there's no one else.
Yeah, we're also reaching some generational transitions. The idea that during the exigencies of war some adults might put a teenager into a war machine felt for older people. Pretty obvious. Like, oh, yeah, totally. They did do that. As society changes, as young people become more of a focus for their parents, like anxieties about the future and there's more sort of control over their time and what they do all day, every day because there's this increasing sense of competition and sort of precariousness. The idea that a young person could just go get in a robot becomes kind of ludicrous. And so you need these additional justifications. You mentioned the animation of the transformation sequence. I think that Gundamhead looks so silly poking out of the top of a fighter jet.
They're so proud of that. They came up with a whole justification for it. I think the justification came first, and then they were like, hey, can we figure out a way to put it in the core fighter? Let's do all this weird, complicated engineering to make it possible to put the Gundam head in the core fighter. And it's so goofy. The justification they came up with is that the Gundam's main computer is in the head and all of the combat data is stored there. And so it needs to be able to eject from the body of the Gundam if the other components are damaged.
Or destroyed so as to preserve the.
Head, which I guess kind of makes sense until you watch literally any Gundam and see heads getting blown off right and left. Like the cockpit where the person is in the chest is the place where you should put the important stuff because that's where the person is who is the important stuff.
You'll get no argument from me unless.
It'S a xiyong situation. I do like the note that the core fighter doesn't have integrated weapons of its own. It just fires the Gundam's vulcans.
That was pretty neat.
That was cool.
Other things that point to a younger target audience are things like the inclusion of two sidekicks, which I think is too many. But we have a haro and a dog.
No, this is the right amount. They can keep each other company. When you get a social animal, you also have to get, like, a buddy. You can't just get one goat. You can't just get a haro.
It's like how they pair golden retrievers with cheetah cubs.
I mean, think about Zeta. Like, Haro kept getting passed to different people because Haro, like, haro needs buddies. Haro needs cronies.
I love the word cronies. So I'm gonna let it go. And then there's this one moment in the episode that feels like a very self aware nod to their effort to retain some of the more serious aspects of Gundam, some of the more upsetting parts of these war stories. And maybe to try and hang on to that older audience, fans who watched the original Gundam back in the day and are now adults, where they enter the town that's been bombed, and it's quite gruesome. There's just corpses everywhere and it's quite obvious that that's what they are. The river is full, their faces. It's rough.
It's real bad. Yeah.
And at one point, Katajina calls out to one of the older teens and is basically like, don't let the kids see this. Although I think she mentions one specific kid, she's not even worried about all the kids. She's worried about a kid. And he's like, I'm not letting any of them see. Yeah, or I'm not letting my siblings see it either. Maybe they don't care about the other kids. They only care about their sibling or cousin or whoever.
But no, it's like, that is your target demo, right?
Don't let the kids who are watching.
This show see this scene that we just drew and showed to them. Yeah, exactly. I thought just the same thing. We're going to talk about that scene again a couple of times. I think we've been at this for a while. We're running out of time. But there's so much to say about this episode. You've missed perhaps the most important element of this episode, which was done in order to court that core demographic of the late elementary through middle school aged kids.
Is it the spider mobile suit in the intro? Because I did like that spider mobile suit. I was so happy to see a non humanoid mobile suit.
Very excited to see that one. No, there's no way you could know this. So it's very unfair of me to be like, this is the most important one and you've missed it.
Tom, capitalizing on his unfair advantages.
Exactly. No, you just watched the fourth episode of Victory Gundam, which is to say, it was supposed to be the fourth one, but the time slot for the show was changed. It's a small change. Saturday at 05:30 p.m. To Friday at five, but that half hour change, and most, I think, crucially, that change from.
A Saturday to a Friday changed the.
Demographic significantly, brought the age down into the range that they were ultimately looking to hit. But when this change was announced, or when this change was decided, the team decided they needed to put the Gundam in the first episode. They thought, these younger kids are not going to have the patience to sit through four episodes before the proper real hero mobile suit shows up.
I don't know if they were right.
Or wrong, but they said, we got to put the Gundam in that first episode. And at this point, they had already animated the first four episodes. And you can't get people to throw out animation that's already been done. It is so expensive. It is so time consuming. It is artistic work. It is the work of the animators. And you can't just discard it.
You can't just start again.
So I think there are probably better ways they could have done this, but what they chose to do was move the fourth episode into the first start in mediace and then have this framing narrative that comes in sort of at the very end and in the next time on with Shakti being like, how.
Did we get here?
That explains a lot because there is a moment in this episode after USo has gotten away from Chronicle and he's injured and is just like laying there trying to recover himself. And he thinks to himself something like, how did I get here? How did this happen? And that is the moment that this classic tv and film set up for. All right, flashback. Now we're going to get the explanation and then there isn't one.
You may find yourself behind the controls of a large mobile suit. You may find yourself asking, how did I get here? It is often alleged that this was a decision made by the sponsors or due to sponsor pressure. It does not seem to be the case. People on staff who have talked about this have said, we made this decision in response to the change in the time slot. The change in the time slot is because basically other sunrise mecha shows had started running in that Saturday 05:30 p.m. Time slot and they were doing great and they were not going to get bumped for this new Gundam show. I think Brave Express might gain was currently running in that spot. The brave series had been in there for a couple of years now and it was doing gangbusters. And this is not a situation where I would expect the staff to lie and fall on their own swords if the sponsors had insisted on this. Because at least for victory, Tomino has no problems whatsoever, blaming the sponsors for things that they ordered him to put in the show. So this is a Tomino decision. And frankly, this episode is like chocolate block full of Tomino decisions. He's playing all the old hits dialogue that doesn't really fit the scene. Everything is a little bit too fast. Monologues to explain things that should have been conveyed to the audience organically. Weird lines where you can't tell if it's a clumsy translation or if it's meant to be an awkward line. And then, of course, absolutely top notch, best in class, unparalleled character animation and these loving depictions of weird local animals. When that snail, when Uso is lying on the ground, like, aching from having fallen through the tree, and they just looks over and there's a snail there that comes out of its shell, it's just like, that's Tomino. He's back.
It also feels like such an art cinema thing to do. Someone is injured and basically can't move and totally alone. And then they look over and they're just seeing nature go about its business around them. And the way in which the snail emerging from the helical shell is kind of like him coming out of that emergency ejection orb. It was.
Yeah, yeah, love that. The bit when Shakti is in her sleeping bag and the alarm is going off and she has to worm squirm her way over to the radio, the walkie talkie, and from inside, unzip the sleeping bag and get out. That kind of stuff is just pure Tomino.
And it's so good.
The fact that we can tell that Marbette is limping before we actually know that she's injured, because the way we see her upper body move, we don't even see her legs. The way we see her upper body kind of, like, jerk along. It's like, oh, she's limping. That's weird. What's going on?
The way the leg is stiff when she has to haul it up into the cockpit of the core fighter.
Other things, like during that opening fight, the way the yellow mobile suit is, like, scooting along the ground because one of its legs has been taken out, I thought that was really well done. The retrieval of the map from this dead body in the bombed town and the outer layer around the map just, like, crumbles to dust and blows away.
I thought that was, like, the guy's shirt or something, or the remains of it.
It may well have been.
The contrast in this episode between the good scenes and the bad scenes is so big, so broad, because the good scenes are so good, even with the relatively simplistic designs, when it looks good, it looks great. I mean, the whole bit from when Shakti wakes up in the sleeping bag until she's, like, guided Uso in and they have their reunion that has all these conflicting emotions. She's so mad at him, but she's so happy to see him again, and he tenses up like she's going to slap him. And then instead she hugs him.
Right? He's clearly preparing to get yelled at, and instead she hugs him. And it does. That scene conveys so much emotional information about her, and somehow, without doing very much, she almost doesn't move. She's just, like, standing there staring at him. And yet we can tell she's angry and relieved and glad to see him. And it's all there.
It's timed perfectly, it's boarded perfectly. Like, every bit of that is good. And it has, I think, my favorite bit of dialogue in the whole episode. When Katajina comes up after that, just.
What kind of kid are you?
I don't know. A normal. Oh, I love that. This I will contrast with what I think is the neder of the episode, which is the first time we see Shakti, Katajina and Marbette. After Uso's exciting, dramatic escape, he's lying on the ground. He sees the snail. We cut to the three of them. It's a long shot, so we can't actually see who's speaking.
We just hear their voices.
We don't recognize their voices because we don't know any of them.
And at first, you can't even really tell that Shakti is carrying a baby because the baby's on her back. And once you know the baby is there, you can see she's wearing, like, a body wrap to hold the baby behind her. But the first time I saw that, when she mentioned diapers, I thought she meant for the dog. I was like, what is she talking about diapers for?
And I thought it was Kata Gina who mentioned the diapers.
Is it? I don't see.
This scene is super unclear. It's shot far away. The resolution is super low. It's hard to tell who's speaking. I think Marbette is speaking when the scene opens, but I'm pretty sure she has stopped speaking by the time the camera is close enough to actually see their mouths. So you have no way of knowing that it was her speaking except by process of illumination. I think it's Katajina who then says, there are diapers in the truck. They call it the cameillon. Cameillon is just French for truck. There's a lot of French in this show. Katajina says the line about, oh, there's diapers in the truck. But that's the kind of line you would say if you were about to leave. Not the kind of line you say to someone who is leaving. So it doesn't make sense. It makes you think she's the one who's going to go looking for Uso.
And when Katajina says this about the.
Diapers, she looks like she's talking to Marbette, not to Shakti, the person who actually needs to know the information about the diapers, but also who should already know it. It's a mess. And then it cuts to, like, a ten second scene of Uso back in the forest, trying to get up and being like, ow, I hurt. And then smash cut into the river of corpses. What is that Uso scene doing? I acknowledge the fact that it could be there for a reason. What is it doing? There's a lot of other bits like that, scenes that don't seem to support the story that they appear to be telling. Like, there's a scene when the cameon and its crew have arrived at the factory and there's a bit amongst the kids of, like, oh, we're out of milk. Oh, I bet they have some milk down in the factory.
This is the setup for a subplot.
About the kids sneaking into the factory.
Where they're not supposed to be, so.
That then they're there for some important moment. Except that doesn't happen. The we're out of milk. Oh, I bet they have some milk in there. Is just, like, forgotten. Doesn't matter.
Two notes about that scene, though. One thing that I like and one thing that I hate, the thing that I like is one of the kids, while they are waiting in the truck, is playing with the wheel. He's, like, playing at driving the truck.
That's so good.
And as a bit of character animation, to really hammer home how young these kids are. Top notch, full marks. A plus. Plus.
So efficient.
That's like three frames repeated and the.
Other characters can talk over it. You can have other stuff happening. He's just there in kind of the midground space, playing it, driving this truck. He's an actual lookout in this episode and gets shot at, but he's also of an age to be like, ha. I'm driving big trucks. This is awesome.
Big wheel.
Big wheel. Go, vroom.
You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large cameo.
How many times can you make that joke in one episode? And then the thing I hate, which is that one of the slightly older teens, Odello, looks 15, I think, and sounds 45. What voice is that?
I really wish you had said that. The way you said it the first time when you said he sounded 30. Because I was going to be like, he is 29 years old. The voice actor, not the character. No, the character is 35.
What?
Rumbarall, are you serious? No, I'm not serious.
You can't joke about this stuff with me. I don't know. And I basically would believe anything you told me about Gundam. It's an exceptional amount of power you have, and you can't abuse it.
I will, though.
Okay, so you heard it here first, folks. If I get anything wrong about Gundam, it is definitely Tom's fault and you should blame him.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It almost feels as though that we are out of milk scene is a vestige of a storyline that was there, because then there is that later scene during the attack. And I love this scene where the factory is being bombed. UsO is out fighting. Everyone is like doing lookout duty or zooming around on hoverbikes firing rockets, except Shakti, who still has to feed the baby because somebody still has to feed the baby. Even in war.
It's also very evocative of. I know we haven't really delved into this yet, but we're going to be talking about some of the wars that were going on at the time that this show was made and just before, and plenty of people sheltering from bombings would have been families, would have been mothers with young children or older siblings with their younger siblings. And maybe you have to shelter all day or all night or for several days.
People still need to eat and the.
Baby still needs their diaper changed. And there are parts of life that have to continue no matter what the external circumstances might be.
And that feels like classic Tomino storytelling. I know that in the course of making this episode, the initial storyboards were done by a guy named Sato Ikuro, who was also the credited episode director. But something like 80% to 90% of the storyboards were revised by Tomino. So this episode went through a lot of revision.
I assume that's part of why it.
Ends up feeling so disjointed. Too many cooks, too many cooks serving too many different masters, needing to do too much, having so much that was already done and not being willing to throw it away, not being willing to really take a hatchet to it and chop this up and maybe chop up.
The other three episodes that they had.
Already made and really compile them into something new.
Commit to kind of reforming the episode instead of just reordering the episode.
And the decision to reorder instead of reformat feels like a very natural one to make in the moment. You're managing your budget, you're managing your time. Everything's running out, everything's running behind. There's all this pressure. It's the easiest, fastest way to achieve the goal you've decided you need to achieve. But the first episode is so important for setting expectations, for getting the audience interested. If I were not a Gundam fan, if we were not committed to Gundam, if I watched this episode, I'm not sure that I would keep watching the show.
I might give it another episode or two because I am curious about what exactly is going on here. But we'll see how I feel after another one or two episodes.
It's true. I say that I would stop, but I've watched some really, really disjointed anime because I thought it was interesting. And this is definitely interesting.
I feel like I could keep talking for another hour, but we're not going to do that to you all. So before we wrap up this conversation, you had wanted to return to that initial scene set in the bombed city.
Where Katajina is talking to some of the old engineers.
I do really want to talk about that. I feel like there is an hour's worth of discussion just packaged into that one line from Katajina where she says, I'm glad that Uighg or Wuig was bombed because the people living in the special quarter were all corrupt. But I think we should save that for future discussion because that feels real fundamental to Katajina's character. And I think keeping that in our minds as we watch her in the future, we'll revisit it. We'll revisit it, and we'll have a lot to say about it.
So we'll come back to Katajina, but I would like to talk very briefly about count. Is he actually a count? Is that just his first name?
No, his title is Count oy Nyung.
Okay, well, I don't know if he is going to continue to be a presence. And I quite enjoyed this contrast between him and Katujina because his response to her comment is, his focus is on the means, not the ends. He turns it around and says, no person should ever do this. It's not actually about who you did it to or why. It's that the act of having killed so many people, of having destroyed so much that nobody should ever do that to anybody. And in a way, kind of sets up this older generation as idealistic and the younger generation as like, more. Not mercenary exactly, but more cold hearted.
I think anyone who has regular contact.
With teenagers will tell you that they.
Are capable of almost infinite cruelty.
But is this meant to be a comment on japanese society? Is there a sense that, oh, your grandparents generation was actually so idealistic, and it's the young people now who have lost that idealism?
Maybe so this is the period in which that older anti war generation, the people who actually lived through World War II, were dying off, and certainly they were losing their power in the public discourse. And as you informed all of us in your history recap, this is also the period in which Japan changes the law in order to allow its defense forces to leave the country once again and engage in peacekeeping in other countries. I actually wanted to finish with a little bit of discussion about the translation. I don't know who did the translation for this or under what circumstances, but I noticed. And my Japanese is not, like, fantastic, but I noticed quite a few places where the translation felt clumsy or inaccurate. Like, there's a bit where when Uso is firing the Vulcans in the corps fighter and he runs out of ammo, in the english translation, he says, I've run out of ammo. Well, maybe so. The line doesn't really fit the way he says it. And what he says in Japanese at the end there is. I'm pretty sure he says moshiranai, which is like, ah, jeez. Oh, whatever. Like, very different from. Well, maybe so.
I noticed it most in the opening narration, probably because there's not a whole lot else going on. And so I could pay more attention to what was being said in Japanese and what was written in the subtitles. Just some awkward phrasing. The meaning seems more or less accurate, but phrased in a way that you really wouldn't phrase it in English. It feels a bit stilted or unnatural.
Yeah. There's a line when Marbette gets into.
The corps fighter to go look for.
Uso, one of the old men is like, even if this is just for my own peace of mind, please be careful. And she says, peace of mind can be its own diversion.
Yeah.
What is that supposed to mean? How is that in any way interacting with what was just said to her?
Does he say, please be careful or, like, don't overdo it or don't push yourself too hard? I feel like we are phrasing it in various english phrases. That would sound natural there, but I think what's actually in the subtitles is different.
Well, maybe so. The one that stuck in my head the most. And this is mostly because I just. If you listened to our prior season, I spent a lot of time dealing with nicknames for the original Gundam. When Chronicle first sees the fully transformed and completed victory Gundam, first he says, shiroi mobizu Sutsu. Title of the episode, a white mobile suit. Then he has a realization moment, and he goes, Shiroi Yatsu, that white guy that I hate. Shiroi Yatsu, as you probably remember, is the term that xeon soldiers used for the Gundam. In first Gundam, it means yatsu just means, like, guy, that guy, but generally.
Has, like, a disrespectful connotation, like, referring to somebody in that way, especially in.
That tone of voice, right? It does not mean monster, which is how it's translated in this episode. That is a real stretch of a translation to go from yotsu to monster.
I kind of get that they were trying to hint at the mobile suit having a reputation. They're hinting at this reputed mobile suit that is so strong and dangerous.
It's a very tricky bit of translation that they have to do here, because it is working on two levels. That chronicle is recognizing a Gundam and some memory in his head from Universal Century History 101 in college or something is like a white mobile suit. Oh, the white mobile suit.
Oh, I just assumed it had already come out in this particular fight. Battle. War. Oh, maybe we know we're being dropped in the middle and we're going to backtrack. I assumed that they had maybe fought it already, or someone he knew had fought it. We know that one of his compatriots got killed in battle already.
I guess that's true.
Well, assuming that he hasn't seen it before, he's recognizing it from history. The audience should be recognizing it from prior Gundam shows. And so, by using the term Shiro yatsu, the same term that was used back in first Gundam, they're drawing that connection both for the characters and for the audience. And I don't know how you would do that in English, because back in first Gundam, I don't think there was.
Any particular term that was used for.
The Gundam so regularly that it became a meme for the audience and stuff. Like Shiroi Akuma, the white devil, or the white shooting star. Like, those came later, so they wouldn't.
Have the same effect.
I think maybe you could do it with, like, oh, a white mobile suit. Gasp. The white mobile suit. Maybe that would work. But to call it the white monster just doesn't it. It rubs me the wrong way as a translation decision.
Translation is a really difficult thing to do, and I hope we never seem like we're being too hard or nitpicky on people. I have a lot of respect for what translators do. We've attempted it a few times, and it is one of the hardest things I've had to do for this podcast. But also, it really does affect our ability to enjoy the work. And from the perspective of people who have done a bit of translation, we can look at the text and say, that's not how I would have done that.
And it is always possible that this is a translation decision that came from the very top. It could entirely be possible that the scriptwriter wanted it to be this way, that the director wanted it to be this way.
Like there are editorial decisions being made that are outside of the translator's hands.
Absolutely. And we don't know. All we can do is watch the episode and try to understand what they're saying. And when something sticks out at us, when something seems wrong, to talk about it on here and try to tease apart what is actually going on there, ultimately, it is up to every individual viewer to decide what does and doesn't work, and to decide for themselves what the work means for them.
Gosh, that's not even just about translation.
Next time on episode 10.2 the Prince and the Pauper, we research and discuss episode two of Victory Gundam and welcome to Earth.
This is judo like behavior.
How green was my.
Um, actually, Nina, the yellow jacket is a kind of wasp.
An incident so stupid it could really happen. Nepo baby seatbelts. We should tell Dr. Shar. Even Haro gets a seatbelt. Manuel could have solved so many problems in this episode.
Unfortunately for USo, Manuel has returned to his natural environment.
The war Thunder forums bowel liquefying terror is exhausting. Ew, a dog of the name Flanders. What is Haro doing?
Its best.
And you know your day has gone awry when you find yourself losing a fistfight to a child. Please listen to it.
Mobile suit breakdown is written, recorded, and produced by us, Tom and Nina, in.
Scenic New York City, within the ancestral and unceded land of the lenape people.
And made possible by listeners like you.
The opening track is Wasp by Misha Dioxen. The closing music is long way home by spinning ratio.
The recap music is slow by Lloyd Rogers. 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. If you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email hosts@gundampodcast.com or look for links to our social media accounts on our website. And if you would like to support the show, please share us with your friends. Leave a nice review wherever you listen.
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Your wrong opinions are welcome.
And that's a good thing because none of you are free from sin.
For example, fancy Wookie thinks the opening theme should have been sit down to the victory with a chorus about putting.
Your feet up and having a cup.
Of tea and a biscuit, which does sound like it would feel rather nice.
Personally, though, I have one of those motorized desks so I can alternate between sitting down and standing up to the victory, which is much healthier.
Doing vocal warm ups for a few days. I can feel the difference when I don't. And it's not nice.
It's like that. How many 6th graders could you fight? Prompt turns out for chronicle Asher, the answer is zero. We are recording. I'm pointing at the button that is red and the counter that is going up. I am doing the japanese train conductor thing.
Although you said the button was red.
It was. I don't know what happened.
Okay.
I honestly have no idea.
But just to make sure we don't.
Make other mistakes, like not pressing the button, which is what I did the.
Second time, remember, I'm touching my headset. My headset is on my head. My microphone is positioned in front of me.
You should do a whole checklist. It could become part of our warm up.
We could sing it well and have a little dance. There would be gestures. The curtains are closed. The door is closed.
I am looking directly at the microphone. I'm actually looking slightly offline of the microphone because that's better.
Yes, indeed.
As we've been doing the warm up, I was like, I feel like I actually talk pretty close to the top of my natural register for my voice. I don't know why I do that, and I don't know if that's good for my voice or not.
It changes, though.
The more tired you are, the lower it gets.
I mean, maybe this is why you do it. I think when it slips into the very low end of the register and it gets very gravely, it's like a.
Less pleasant voice to listen to for.
Extended periods of time.
I think that makes sense. Yeah.
And maybe there's like an intermediary, like a sweet spot. Yeah.
I do feel like there's a sweet spot that I'm not very good at hitting very often because I feel like maybe people at home don't know this because they're not inside my head. But I do feel like the higher end of the register, where I'm usually talking for the podcast, feels a little artificial to me. And it is. I am consciously, professionally speaking into a microphone.
Right. So it is artificial, whereas for me.
It'S when I drop it into radio voice register when I'm talking here.
That's so sexy.
But it's also very. I have to make special effort to talk down here. It takes a lot of extra work to talk down here compared to my normal speaking voice.
Yeah, I think on my end there may also be an aspect of mirroring.
Like, my voice is high.
Your voice is high. So I pitch mine a little bit higher to sound a little bit more like you to fit in a little bit better, just sort of subconsciously. I don't know.
Does that make me the alpha?
No.
I. Okay, sure. Whatever you say, buddy.