Hello again. Here we are at the beginning of a new season, just you, me, and Nina back together to chat about mobile suit Victory Gundam.
If you are just now joining us for the first time, welcome. This is mobile suit breakdown, a discussion, analysis, and research podcast about the legendary Sci-Fi anime franchise mobile Zoo Gundam. We are in the process of covering it from the first series in 1979 through to the present day, watching everything in the order it was originally released. We talk about the show itself and the personalities and drama behind the scenes. We try to confirm or refute longstanding rumors in the fandom and argue over our more unorthodox interpretations. We've even translated some obscure and never before localized episodes into English to aid in our analysis, but we're most interested in the connections between Gundam's story and the real world references, inspirations, and influences.
I approach all of this from the perspective of a longtime fan revisiting a beloved series, while Nina started the project with almost no prior exposure to Gundam. We've been doing this full time for five years now, so it doesn't really feel appropriate to call her new to Gundam anymore, but she's still relatively unspoiled and can approach each show with new eyes. Our subject for the next year or so will be the 1993 television anime Mobile Suit Victory. Gundam Victory ran from April 2, 1993 until March 25 on Fridays at 05:00 p.m. On TV Asahi. It was the first full length tv anime for the Gundam franchise in six years, and for us here at mobile suit breakdown, our first in six seasons. I didn't plan it that way, but let's all agree to pretend that I did. Victory also marks the return of Gundam's original chief director, Tomino Yoshiuki. If this were an essay with text that you could read instead of a podcast, I would do that thing where I call him Gundam's infamous chief director, but then I would put the in part of infamous in parentheses so that you would all know that he's a contentious figure, and his artistic legacy, especially during this period, is hotly debated.
Tomino has been a central figure in the mythology of Gundam's creation ever since he directed the first series, and there's a tendency to treat him as the single author responsible for every artistic decision in every show he oversaw, and if you hang around in the fandom long enough, you're sure to see people blaming or praising him for aspects of shows he never touched, and probably hasn't even seen his work on victory, its effect on him, and his comments about it in retrospect are all key parts of the Tomino mythology. The show was a major turning point for his career and for the Gundam franchise as a whole.
And like its director, Victory is contentious in the broader english language Gundam fandom for a long time. Really, going back as far as I can personally remember, the online fandom consensus has been strongly negative. In part, this might have been because it was difficult to watch. Originally released on VHS and Laserdisc in Japan at roughly the same time as the original broadcast, it was not rereleased on dvd until 2004, and its first official english release only came out in 2016. Since 2016, Victory has enjoyed something of a renaissance. It's nowhere close to widely beloved, but the turnaround in the way people talk about the show has been really dramatic. I'm not saying that there were fans in the old days who just automatically trashed a show that they had never watched because they wanted to have something to say about it and had once read some other presumably better informed fan also trashing it. I'm just saying that I saw that exact same phenomenon happen with other frequently hated and difficult to obtain shows like Double Zeta and Gundam X when they got official english language releases in the back half of the 2010s.
Later in the episode, I'm going to talk us through the major world events that occurred in the years leading up to the show's release to help set the scene as we try to put ourselves in the shoes of Victory's creators and intended 1993 audience. Then next week, we'll start to discuss Victory properly by covering its first episode, the white mobile suit or Shiroi Mobij.
Let me cut in before I get a dozen messages about this. Yes, I know about the release order. Shenanigans. Yes, I'm sure we're going to talk about them in good time.
Shenanigans, eh?
No spoilers?
Apparently mentioning shenanigans isn't a spoiler. Only explaining them would be as the.
Adjudicator of what constitutes a spoiler. Yes.
Anyway, that podcast episode, the as yet untitled 10.1, will be accompanied by a behind the scenes account of Victory Gundam's preproduction from Tom. Before we get to that, we ought to chat a bit about what we're expecting in this coming season of Gundam podcasting.
My own experience of Victory Gundam is, I think, pretty common, in that I have heard multiple other people recount the exact same experience to me, and it's that when I first got access to Gundam, I got access to basically all of it that was available all at once, and this was well before 2016. So let's just say, to be generous, some of what I was watching might have been legitimate. And I binged through basically all the universal centuries shows and ovas and movies, plus a couple of the ones that come later in the span of like three or four months. And by the time I got to victory, I was watching them roughly in order. I was just so burned out on the whole thing that my eyes and my brain just glazed over for most of this show, it left very little impression on me.
That doesn't feel super promising.
Well, I don't really think it's Victory's fault. I was just watching way too much, way too fast. I was not taking the time to properly absorb it at a much more reasonable rate of like one episode a week.
Tom really doesn't ever binge shows anymore. You might, in a pinch, get him to watch two whole episodes of something at a crack, but true binging? Never. And I honestly wish he would. Sometimes it would make it much easier for us to watch some of the anime that we are practically drowning in.
It was a long time ago, Nina. It was almost 20 years ago. I was a different man. All of that is to say that while I've seen victory and I remember some events, some characters, some mobile suits, but how it all fits together, or what any of it meant or what I thought about it, if I even thought anything about it, except, wow, cool robot, I don't know. So I'm excited to watch it again and maybe this time form some opinions, good or bad. Now, you haven't seen it. You've been avoiding any information about it as best you can. Have you learned anything? Do you know anything about victory?
What I do know is very tangential. I know you think the yugoslav wars were influential in its story. I know that the chairman or president of Sunrise at the time thought it was very important that they do another full length tv anime, that this was essential to the continued business strategy and health of the Gundam brand and of the company as a whole. I have heard in the fandom discussions that Tomino may have had some kind of breakdown while working on this show or gone through like a major depressive episode kind of thing. And I know that at least one of our listeners thinks I'll hate it. There has been some discussion on Twitter.
Well, that's all very ominous, I suppose.
I have also seen the COVID you made, so I have seen two of the characters and long, long ago, as a piece of bonus content, we did run through all of the Gundam in our collection and have me make predictions about the shows based on their dvd and blu ray box art.
And here's what you said back then.
Looks like a younger protagonist. We have Haro again. We have a little girl who looks like Lala 2.0, younger, darker skinned, but wearing the same color of yellow outfit that is almost exactly the same shape. It's cinched in at the waist, so it's a little less of a formless gown, but it's still a long sleeved shirt and skirt combie with little slipper shoes. Yeah, the Lala alike, the younger protagonist. And the final thing that really strikes me on this one is, and I'm noticing it in the haro and in the mobile suit, and I don't know if it's true in the show itself, but the colors are much more subdued. It's a less vibrant blue, a less vibrant yellow, a less vibrant red, which I don't know if they're trying to go more realistic. Like, are they trying from a more realism vibe and so toning down the colors that kind of make it feel like a kid's toy? But then if you flip over onto the other side, I guess the blue is still fairly subdued, but the red is back to being a very bright red. And some other characters visible. Yeah, lots of younger kids. It does make me wonder if after this much gundam, people were no longer shocked by teen soldiers, so they needed to make the kids even younger to make it sufficiently shocking. Hey, there are two different gundams here. One of them has blue knees and sort of like a big yellow v across its chest and shooting back into, like, thrusters or something off of its shoulders. One has a red chest and no blue knees.
What would you speculate about this show based on the covers?
I don't know. They don't give you much to go on. There's a shot that looks an awful lot like a european city, like Paris on the back of one of these, so maybe more of it happens on Earth, but we've also seen plenty of the colonies have created replicas of parts of Earth, so that doesn't mean anything, but we might be more, like, bound in a geographic space and less out in space. The ether.
And in terms of the overall tone.
Of the series, this is going to sound strange, but perhaps less dark. Even though the protagonists are younger, the covers look very sort of, like, happy for a Gundam series.
Is there anything that you're especially hoping we'll get to see this coming year?
The more I think about this question, the harder it is to answer. I keep coming up with frankly contradictory hopes about the show. I hope it feels a bit like some of the early UC Gundam has that ensemble cast vibe of a first Gundam, or I guess double Zeta also did a good job of its ensemble. I think both of them sort of did better than Zeta in that regard, but with a mix of comedy and tragedy, with a lot of character development and depth to who these people are. I'm looking forward to seeing how the character and mobile suit design has developed. I'm looking forward to seeing if the animation has changed. But ultimately, even if I made a list of exact things that I wanted and they checked every box, what matters is execution. You could have a great story idea, and if it's badly written, it's not going to be an enjoyable show. You can have beautiful designs, but if you don't have consistency or if they're poorly animated, then it's sort of like, well, why bother with an anime? You might as well have made an art book. So I guess what it comes down to is I hope I like it or hate it enough that it's funny.
Personally, I'm hoping for like one to two dozen new mobile suits, each with a name harder to remember than the last.
Ooh, my favorite part. You know, every time you tease me about this, I take one step closer to just calling them all gundams. Water Gundam, pointy Gundam, Red Gundam, Blue Gundam.
It's a pretty good bit. I think it would be a better bit if it weren't Gundam if you called every mobile suit a Kapool or Gelgoog.
Because Gelgoog is fun to say.
Gelgoog is fun to say. Or large haro.
Gosh, look at all these giant harrows.
Look at all these blobby guys.
Look at all these pointy, blobby guys. Why are they so pointy?
I know what you're really hoping for. You're really hoping for a 52 episode Picirienta Poresu series.
Nah, Picirienta Poresu was charming in its brevity. I do not think it had enough story to sustain ongoing viewing.
Well, with that, I think we should hear that history update.
My last classic history update. Which is to say, my last attempt to take world events across a period of time, distill them down to what seems most interesting, influential, or important, and then somehow mention them all without it just feeling like a list was way back in season seven. So if you would like to refresh yourself on the late 1980s into the beginning of the 1990s, check out episode 7.2, dragon Ball G. Because of the.
Way the production schedules for these different shows and movies lined up. This history update will cover basically the exact period of time during which victory was in pre production, meaning this is all the stuff that was happening while the creators of the show were planning it out.
To be specific, this means that as we head into victory gundam and try to get a sense of the zeitgeist in Japan and the world during and just before the show's creation, I will be looking at the period from the release of f 91 on March 16, 1991 until the first episode of victory aired on April 2, 1993. Just over two years. Beginning with politics and economics around the world, there was an ongoing crisis involving international pressure on Iraq to disarm postgulf war. Iraq had accepted the terms of UN Security Council resolution six eight seven, which, in addition to calling for the destruction or removal of all of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons, also banned ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 iraqi soldiers, blocked official inspectors only to allow those inspectors access some weeks later, fueling suspicion that they had simply moved or destroyed evidence of noncompliance. Joint forces from the United States, Great Britain, and France conducted airstrikes against iraqi surface to air missile sites. And this back and forth that never quite broke into a new war continued throughout this period. There was civil war in Algeria and Afghanistan. Us military and UN peacekeeping forces were in Somalia. In South Korea, after student protester gang Kyung day was beaten to death by police, mass protests and riots in Seoul forced the resignation of the acting prime minister, and multiple pro democracy student activists immolated themselves in protest against President no TeU's regime in Los Angeles, California. In the United States, the acquittal of four police officers on trial for the beating of Rodney King leads to six days of riots and the deployment of more than 10,000 responders from the California National Guard, the US military, and several federal law enforcement agencies. The trial and subsequent riots brought attention to issues of police brutality and racial tension. In La, the Mount Pinatubo volcano erupted in the Philippines, killing hundreds of people and causing global cooling of nearly half a degree celsius. The Ethiopian Civil War, Mauritania, Senegal border War and cambodian Vietnamese war came to an end, as did the twelve year salvadoran civil War with the signing of the Chapultopec Peace Accords in 1992 and the ten year lebanese hostage crisis ended with the release of the last two hostages. Also in 1992, the indian government undertook liberalization of the country's economy. Mexico, the United States, and Canada finalized the North American Free Trade Agreement commonly known as NAFTA, and Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay signed the Treaty of Asuncion, establishing the south american trade bloc Merco Sur. With the signing of the Mastricht Treaty in February of 1992, the European Union was founded. In these couple of years, North Korea, South Korea, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Marshall Islands, and Micronesia joined the United nations, although the negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa wouldn't conclude until November of 1993. In 1991, enough of the system had been dismantled that the UN lifted economic sanctions against the country. Czechoslovakia separated into the Czech Republic and Slovakia after years of unrest and conflict between its constituent republics and the central government, and a series of revolutions and declarations of sovereignty by those republics. In late 1991, the leaders of three founding members, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, declared that the Soviet Union no longer existed. Eight more republics joined this declaration soon after, and by the end of the year Gorbachev had resigned and the soviet parliament had voted to end itself. Less than two months later, in early February of 1992, US President George H. W. Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin formally declared the end of the Cold War, and this whole period was marked by deescalation between the two countries and their allies or blocs, including the signing of a second strategic arms reduction treaty. I'm sure some of you are wondering why I haven't yet brought up the yugoslav wars. As I mentioned in the introduction, Tom is of the opinion that the yugoslav wars had a particularly strong influence on victory gundam, and so we'll get their own separate research piece or pieces during the season. For now, I'll summarize by quoting the Wikipedia page because I really like how the writer or writers phrased it. Quote the yugoslav wars were a series of separate but related ethnic conflicts, wars of independence, and insurgencies that took place in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1991 to 2001 that both led up to and resulted from the breakup of Yugoslavia in mid 1991. In science and technology, the Internet was still largely confined to research institutions, but in August of 1991, CERN announced the first ever website info CERN Ch, and.
It was all downhill from there.
That same month, Linus Torvalds first posted to a Usenet news group about Linux, the new operating system kernel he had developed. The Space shuttle Atlantis, studied gamma rays, and Columbia carried Space lab into orbit. NASA's Galileo became the first probe to visit an asteroid, and Space shuttle endeavor meant as a replacement for challenger made its maiden flight. In music, arts, and culture, some highlights include the release of the Nirvana album Never mind and the increasing popularity of alternative rock and grunge music, as well as hip hop and rap music, becoming much more mainstream in us popular music. An album by NWA peaked at number one on the Billboard 200. Freddie Mercury, lead singer of the band Queen, died of AIDS induced pneumonia on November 20, 491. And on October 3, 1992, singer songwriter Sinead O'Connor famously protested the Catholic Church's complicity in child sex abuse within the church by performing a cover of the Bob Marley song War, modified so the lyrics addressed child abuse, then tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II, all on live tv during her guest spot on the show Saturday Night Live, which was hugely, hugely controversial. And she wasn't worried about her career, but is considered by a bunch of people to have basically shot her career in the proverbial foot.
I think it's probably safe to say that this act more or less ended her career as a mass market like pop music star, but she didn't want to be that.
It feels odd to be talking about her now when she died so recently, and people have been talking a lot about her legacy, and I think people view her in a much kinder light now than they did at this time.
Although I definitely saw a lot of people bringing this event up again to complain about it, to say she shouldn't have done that, that was a huge mistake. That was so disrespectful. All the things people always say whenever any artist uses their platform to make a strong public criticism of a powerful figure.
The Huntington Library in San Marino, California, made its entire collection of photographs of the Dead Sea scrolls available for public viewing for the first time. The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered from 1946 to 1956, are a collection of ancient jewish manuscripts dating from the third century BCE to the first century CE. And in addition to being some of the oldest surviving manuscripts of entire books that were later included in biblical canons, they also provided insights into religious thought at that time, the emergence of Christianity, development of language. There had been partial viewings before, but only scholars had been given access to full copies. Per a 1991 LA Times article by Russell Chandler, quote, the Huntington collection contains about 3000 negatives of photographs taken of the original scrolls in complete and fragment form. Scholars in charge of the official Scrolls translation project assert that the Huntington has no authority to release the photos and possesses them illegally. This may sound very niche, but at least in the United States, the scrolls had kind of a public, almost pop cultural moment. There was considerable amount of interest, fascination. There were a bunch of books written for laypeople about the scrolls. I was quite young at this time, but I remember seeing the books around. I remember hearing about this on the news. It was of interest to the general.
Public, and even a cursory look at Tomino's work and his comments in interviews and the like pretty clearly demonstrates that he is interested in ancient societies, ancient religions, ancient religions of the Middle east and Judaism specifically. So this is absolutely the kind of thing that he would have been interested in, in sports.
Michael Schumacher made his Formula One debut in August of 1991. Pakistan beat England to win the Cricket World cup for the first time ever. And 1992 marked the last time that the Summer and Winter Olympics occurred. In the same year, the Summer Olympics held in Barcelona saw the first unified german team since 1964, while the dissolution of the Soviet Union meant that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania sent their own teams for the first time in many decades, while a dozen other former members of the USSR formed the unified team and competed together. The separation of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia into parts meant that this was the Olympic debut for the countries of Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzkovina. UN sanctions against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which consisted of present day Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo, meant that it could not send a representative team, though some of their athletes chose to participate as independent Olympic participants after having been banned for many years due to apartheid. South Africa was allowed back after a, quote, hotly contested women's 10,000 meters race. The gold medalist ethiopian runner Darartu Tulu, a black woman, and the silver medalist south african runner Ilana Mayer, a white woman, in a show of friendship, solidarity or mutual respect, ran a victory lap together, hand in hand. This feels cheesy saying it out loud. It felt cheesy writing it on paper. But when I imagine it, when I picture it in my head, I can see how moving it would be. Apartheid wasn't even completely dismantled at this point. Negotiations were still contentious. There had been plenty of other high profile incidences of racial tension, racial violence, and if there's one thing the Olympics is really good at, it's at grand displays of humanism. This is also the Olympics of the dream team for U. S. Men's Olympic basketball, the first Olympiad in which professional basketball players from the United States were allowed to compete. Previously, professional basketball players from Europe and South America were permitted in the games, but not us pros. The US team was usually college athletes, and japanese athlete Iwasaki Kyoko took gold in the women's 200 meters breaststroke at the ripe old age of 14 years, six days becoming the youngest gold medalist swimmer, woman or man in Olympic history, a record I believe she still holds today, which makes a decent segue into talking about Japan specifically during these two years. The prime minister for most of this period was Miyazawa Kiichi, who by the time he retired sometime after this, would have been a member of the Diet for more than 50 years. He had been minister of finance under Prime Minister Takeshita Noboru, but had resigned when he'd been implicated in the recruit scandal of the late 1980s, which we've discussed before, but basically amounted to insider trading by members of the diet. During his tenure, the LDP retained control of the diet, but only in coalition and only by a slim margin. He's remembered for being the first japanese leader to acknowledge that their military had coerced women into sexual slavery before and during World War II, the so called comfort women, for which he formally apologized while in South Korea in 1992, his government also passed a law that allowed Japan to send its self defense forces overseas for peacekeeping missions, which they did during the Gulf War and would continue to do subsequently. Not an accomplishment per se, but Miyazawa was also famously vomited upon by US President George H. W. Bush during a state dinner. I can imagine how much all the political pundits would have read into this, too, like it would have been such a big deal at the time. And now it's just a weird thing that happened. Emperor Akihito made a first imperial visit to China. And just before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev made the first ever visit of a soviet leader to Japan, a visit which failed to resolve the long standing dispute between Russia and Japan over the Kurel islands.
Surely that long standing dispute has been settled now, right? It's been so long.
The Miyazawa government also introduced a number of financial reforms in an effort to counter the economic slowdown that kicked off the 90s. This is another topic I'll be glossing over this week in favor of a longer and more indepth research piece later. The bursting of Japan's asset price bubble, which I described in the last history segment, kicked off a period of economic stagnation commonly referred to now as the lost decade or even lost decades. And the specific economics of that had widespread effects on japanese society, including its art and pop culture. So look forward to that one in two weeks or so. Other significant events include a few notable deaths. Honda Soichiro, founder of Honda Motor Company, who, quote, oversaw its expansion from a wooden shack manufacturing bicycle motors to a multinational automobile and motorcycle manufacturer. Abe Shintaro LDP politician, foreign minister, and father of Abe Shinzo Honda Ishiro, the massively influential filmmaker most famous as one of the originators of the kaiju film genre and director and co writer of Godzilla and voice actor Kane Moto Shingo, who in addition to voicing Kozun Graham in Mobile Suit Gundam movie two, also had roles in Gachaman, Gegege, Nokitaro, Fist of the North Star, Astroboy, Doraimon, Maisonikoku, and Lupon II. This is a period in which the sheer amount of anime being produced was increasing rapidly, and which saw the release of many popular and influential titles, to name a few. It seems as though there were two to three Dragon Ball Z movies every year. There were multiple uruse Yatsura titles across feature films and ovas. There was Nadia's Secret of Blue Water and its video game the reboot of Ran Mahaf, which had first aired and was canceled in 1989. Season two of the OVA Legend of the Galactic Heroes, City Hunter 91, Super Dimensional Fortress, Macross two dear brother, a second Minky Momo tv anime Crayon Shinshan, Sailor Moon Yu Yu Hakusho, and the first two parts of the OVA giant robo. The 1991 Takahata Isao film only Yesterday was a surprise hit and the highest grossing japanese film in Japan for that year. It was beat in the box office by Terminator two, Home Alone, Pretty Woman, and Total Recall, in that order. And I have to share a fun bit of trivia about the 1992 Miyazaki Hayao film Porco Roso. Originally, the project was planned as a short adaptation of Miyazaki's manga the Age of the Flying Boat, which would be available as in flight entertainment on Japan Airlines. As the project grew into a feature length film, the airline remained a major investor. So Porco Rosso was shown as an in flight film before it was released in theaters. Which begs the question, were there superfans at this point who bought a plane ticket and took a trip just so that they could see Porco Rosso on the plane before it was released in theaters.
There is no doubt in my mind that people did that.
1992 saw the advent of an enduringly popular video game character, none other than Kirby, and April 1993 marked the release of Kurosawa Akira's last film, Madadayo, which I would loosely translate as not yet the end of an era. Who yes, it's a lot. In the words of meme account, horse underscore ebooks. Everything happens so much. These years really feel like a period of flux, of transition. The end of the Cold War, which dominated international politics for so long, the beginnings of the Internet age, the end of Japan's bubble economy and its associated air of prosperity and decadence. Will it be an inflection point for Gundam two? I suppose that's what we'll find out next time on the as yet unnamed episode 10.1. We research and discuss the first episode asterisk of Victory Gundam, and hopefully come up with a clever new tagline. Until then, stay Genki folksuit 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. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the Lenape people, and more in the show notes, and on our website, gundampodcast.com. If you'd like to get in touch, you can email hosts@gundampodcast.com or look for links to our social media accounts on our website. And if you'd like to support the show, please share us with your friends. Leave a nice review wherever you listen to podcasts or support us financially@gundampodcast.com. Patreon, you can find links and more ways to help out@gundampodcast.com. Support thank you for listening. We are recording probably it turns out the light, the light is not a reliable indicator right now. Prior exposure. Sean Connery for a moment, I remember almost nothing about it and I have no opinions.
I think we should confirm that this recorded before I do that.
Good call. This was an era in which people were still using travel agents, right? So I'm just imagining somebody, an otaku, calling up their travel agent and saying, I need you to book me on the cheapest two hour long Japan Airlines flight. Those are my only requirements.
I don't care where we go, I'm turning right around and coming back.
If I were running Japan Airlines, I would just have a plane sit on the Runway and play the movie like for 2 hours. Just a very small, uncomfortable theater with terrible screens. It is the opposite of IMAX. I'm in.
We in. You in. I think some of that's going in the outtakes.
I guess the screens would all be right.
Not going to dignify that.