You're listening to season seven of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of Sci-fi mega franchise Mobile Suit Gundam, researching its influences, examining its themes, and discussing how each piece of the Gundam canon fits within the changing content. Next, in Japan and the world from 1979 to today.
This is episode seven point ten. Artesia rides again and we are your hosts. I'm Tom. By day a humble Gundam fan. But when the chips are down and my friends are in danger, I become the legendary masked podcaster.
And I'm Nina. And not to get cocky, but we are getting much better at these little translation projects. Unlike last time when we finished this one, I did not grumble. Never again under my breast. Mobile Suit Breakdown is made possible by the support of 706 patrons and subscribers. Thank you all and special thanks to our newest supporters. Stephanie S. Lawrence M. Brennan, john DB. Caleb M. Ku faceless Nicholas E jesus G anthony G riley H. Vash the Average Daniel J-G-P. Larosh emily W sabrina S kurt L. Ben B josie L sean Al ZZ Hopp Gill Kasmara Ahel s Mobile Suit Shakedown Jordan E. Elrick F. Dan S and Thomas J. You keep us genki a quick note that if you've changed your name since you first pledged, we are very happy to include your new name in these opening shoutouts. Send us an email or a patreon message and I'll add your name to upcoming. Thank yous. We've got a couple of special shoutouts this week. Thank you to Anonymous and to Crazy Probe for buying us books from our wish list. Times are hard for independent artists and Msb is no exception. So we have made the difficult decision to try out paid advertising in our episodes. This is just a trial to see how it works and if it seems worthwhile, but we've found some companies and products that are Gundam and fandom related things we think you, as our listeners, will actually be interested in. We understand this will be disappointing for some of you, but please keep an open mind, give them a listen and let us know what you think. Have you ever wondered what you would smell like if you smelled better? Embrace nature by rejecting your natural odors and masking them with other, more natural odors. Produced in one of our state of the art synthetic odor glands. Bask in luxurious cinnamon, gently aromatic jasmine, and the rustic scent of newly moaned Hay annihilate bad odors with new Hazard from the makers of Dangar. Hazard may contain small amounts of phosphine gas, difostine gas, alpha bormoacetate and tree nuts. It is not recommended for use on humans, animals or plants. Hazard say goodbye to body odor forever.
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How sad for us all. Now that you are delighted and disappointed in equal measure, here's the episode so the Elephant in the Room it was a much longer gap between episodes than we initially planned for. First, we got caught up in those holiday Southwest Airlines cancellations and spent a week in a kind of limbo, wondering if we were going to be able to go visit family or not. And then we both came down with nasty cases of COVID It was at least two weeks of being very sick, followed by weeks of persistent fatigue and nagging symptoms. So what was supposed to be a two week long break ballooned into a stressful, unpleasant, and not particularly rejuvenating six weeks. It really threw us off our stride, and it's been difficult getting back into our old routines. But now that we've managed, it feels good to be back. I guess the moral of the story is do what you can to avoid catching COVID It's awful. One more major update. The MSP year four pins have all finally been mailed. Thank you for your patience, and please allow two weeks for your pin to arrive if you live in the United States and one month if you live in another country. If you haven't received your Pin by April 1, 2023 for US. Residents, or April 15, 2023 for everyone else, please reach out so that I can look into it. It's important to me that everyone who's eligible receives their patron rewards. Finally, if you haven't checked out our translation of this week's SD Gundam short, it is available in a public post on our Patreon page and is linked in the show notes.
Before we get into this week's episode of SD Gundam, I want to share an update with you about that mysterious Enigmatic pilot for the Doozybots Show that never was. If you recall, Doozybots was the name for what would have been an SD Gundam based coproduction between Sunrise and some American TV network, with the episodes geared towards an American audience and aired on American TV. There is evidence to indicate it was produced in 1989 and was pitched for a hypothetical 1991 airdate. The pilot is about four minutes long and has been circulating within the Gundam fandom, originally on VHS tapes and then on video sharing websites like YouTube for decades. Now it's well, you can watch it for yourself and make up your own mind. It's not so much worse than a lot of other cartoons that did get picked up and aired back in the dark days of the early 90s, but for whatever reason, nobody was interested in picking it up, and Sunrise quietly forgot about it. Doozybots ended up being the rare situation where the Anglophone Gundam community actually knew something the Japanese fans didn't. Japanese fans wouldn't rediscover Doozybots until 2014, when incredulous comments about the short started popping up on blogs, web forums, Twitter, and other social networks. Comments. Like what? And this is fake, right? And hey, why does the kid who uses a wheelchair get turned into a gun tank? Were Americans really okay with this? Noted director Takamatsu Shinji confirmed that it was real, but disclaimed any personal responsibility for it, and that was about all anyone knew about it for sure. We speculated that it must have been shown around at trade shows for US. Network executives looking to fill out their children's entertainment lineup, and that somebody involved in that process must have recognized good content when they saw it, made a copy of the screener so they could show it to their friends, and then said something like, come on, you've got to see this. It's a weird little corner of the Gundam franchise that has always fascinated me, in part because so little is known about it for sure. Who made it? Who pitched it? To whom? Do other projects like it exist, buried forever? Because they never happened to fall into the hands of someone who cared enough to share them. And that's why I'm so thrilled that I now get to add some new information to the saga of Doozybots. And it starts in 1993 with Tim Eldred, prolific comics artist, illustrator, anime lover, director of animated shows ranging from Dragon Tales to Avengers Assemble, and responsible for the storyboards on dozens more. He also maintains a pretty phenomenal web archive of Space Battleship Yamato materials that I have cited on several occasions for the interviews with folks like Yasuhiko Yoshikazu. In 1993, though, most of that was still in the future. Tim had just moved to La. To join the staff of Malibu Comics. Malibu had a lineup of homegrown characters, but they had gotten into the business of making licensed comics, including some based on Japanese franchises like Captain Harlock or Robotech. With Tim's permission, I'm going to quote his account of what happened next. These licensed titles were doing fairly well, and Malibu was in contact with other licensers to see what was available. For example, they licensed Zillion from someone and also licensed August. I was slated to draw that comic, but it was dropped just before it would have gone into production anyway. As their in house anime expert, I participated in a few Licenser meetings. The one that excited me most was a sit down with the La representative of Sunrise. You can bet I brought a lot of ideas to that table since all my 80s favorites came from Sunrise, and I would have loved to turn any of them into American comics. Regrettably, none of them got through, but the rep did leave us a VHS tape with promos on it most likely cut together for presentation at trade shows. That's where I found the Doozy bots promo. I took it to the very next anime convention I went to that year. I can't remember which one now, and all my friends got copies. That, to the best of my knowledge, is where the virus took root. I apologize to humanity for my actions. And there you have it. After 30 years, we finally have the true story of how Doozybots broke containment and escaped into the world. While its creation remains shrouded in mystery, we can finally put a name and a face to our patient Zero. Tim, thank you for sharing your story with me. And thank you for sharing Doozybots with the world. This week we watched Kiro Senchi esti Gandhamu Paparu no akatsky Dai Yakstanwa Suinamu no Hanayome or esti Gundam dawn of Papal episode 103 bride of Suginam It was initially released on VHS on August 21. Nine one accompanying SD Gundam the Movie musha Knight Command SD Gundam Emergency Scramble, which had previously aired in theaters alongside Gundam Formula 91. As was the case with Musha Knight Command, there is no official publicly available English translation of this short, and to the best of our knowledge, it has also never been translated by any fansubbing group. So as part of our analysis, we've made our own translation of the script, which, as Nina mentioned in the beginning, you can find a link to that translation in the show. Notes it was written and directed by Egami Kyoshi while he was working as chief director on the 1991 City Hunter TV series. Previously, he directed three episodes of Gundam Double Zeta, including episode 28, the One Where Lena Seems to Die, and episode 44, The One Where Emery Ounce dies. For real. Since then, he has mostly worked as an episode director and storyboard artist, including on a bunch of future Gundam shows. Hiroka Masayuki was the animation director character designer for the Brave series of super robot shows and the Dual Master series of card game Battle shows. He had also worked as an animator on Uruse Yatsra Two Beautiful Dreamer and Vampire Hunter D, then as a key animator on Gunbuster and as an animation director on Idol Densetsu Erico. Before landing this job from the voice cast, though, he only appeared long enough to go and die. King Dozel Pantalone was played by Tomita KhorSE. I talked about him a bit more back on episode 7.2, since he played the Musha Gundam in Musha Knight Command, his only other Gundam role. But I've been on a Sherlock Holmes kick lately, so I'm going to take this opportunity to point out that he also voiced Watson on Sherlock Hound. Princess Artesia Som pontolone was played by Matsui Nauko, formerly Ru Luca of Double Zeta, and also Princess FRA in SD Gundam. Gaidan gaz L was voiced by Tatsuta Naoki, the Voice of Jobjan from First Gundam and Gaz R was voiced by Matsumoto Yasinori voice of Night Gundam in St Gundam. Gaidan, the Juag Village Chief was played by Izuka Shozo, who passed away just a few weeks ago on February 15, 2023 at the age of 89. Anina will have more on him later in the episode. Young maiden yacht was played by the ever popular Hayashibara Megumi, aka riplin in Musha Knight Command, la La Sorcerer in SD Gundam Guiden and Chris Mackenzie in War in the Pocket. Since 1989, she has also been the voice of Sanrio mascot character, Kitty Chan, of Hello Kitty fame. And in 2019, it was that role which brought her back into the Gundam Mega franchise for a series of absolutely, definitely, 100% canon promotional shorts in which Kitty Chan receives a distress signal from Haro and then Isa Kaise herself into the universal century. The O was played by Utsumi Kenji, who previously voiced the Command Gundam. Also notable, the drunken Ruffian Gasha was played by Futamata Isay, more notable perhaps for his roles as creepy villain bodyguard Alan Gabriel in Big O and wife Guy Shinchi in Pat Labor. And now the recap.
In the introduction to this long running adventure series, a cloaked villain, distinguished only by their huge size and MonoEye assassinates King Dozel Pantalone, ruler of Papal and father of Princess Artesia Som Pantalone. Neither Artesia nor the Royal Guards Gazelle and Gazar can stop the assassin from escaping, but they manage to wound them in the shoulder, leaving behind a chunk of armor that will be key to their quest for vengeance. It has been some years since her father's death, princess Artesia, now in disguise as the wandering hero queen, mansa with the gazelle, and Gazar as her retainers, wanders the world in search of her father's killer. In this episode, they arrive in the seemingly abandoned town of Suginam. Dusty streets are empty, shops and homes locked and shuttered. The only sound wooden signs creaking in the breeze. But at the far end of the main street, an old man has been bound and left hanging from a wooden gateway. Once the wanderers cut him down, the rest of the village emerges from hiding. As it turns out, the old man is the town mayor, but after expressing his gratitude, he urges Artesia and her companions to leave at once, a chorus repeated by the other townsfolk. Yet the mayor's daughter, Yaks, wants to be hospitable and urges them to stay and rest a while, and ultimately they agree. Over food and drinks, the mayor explains that Suginam is being menaced by a gang of ruffians, and their leader, a giant called the O, has decided he wants Yakt for his bride. On hearing that Leo is twice the height of a normal mobile suit and has a scar on his shoulder, artesia and her companions suspect that this giant might be the assassin who killed her father. Their quiet talk is interrupted when some of the O's thugs attack the village, setting fire to buildings and threatening the villagers until Yukt agrees to go with them. Leaving her retainers to deal with the fire, artesia races after Yukst and the bandits on a borrowed mega rider. After sneaking into the O's mountain hideout, she swaps places with Yucks, allowing the girl to escape while the princess dawns the wedding veil. It isn't long before a member of the O's gang escorts her to the boss's chamber. There she fends off his unwelcome advances while trying to get close enough to compare the bit of armor from the assassin to the O's shoulder wound. Artesia is unmasked in the struggle, but when Theo calls for help, he discovers that Gazelle and Gazar have already dispatched every lackey. The O proves to be a formidable foe, but Artesia is a skilled fighter and manages to defeat him with her whiplike ribbon. She demands to know if he was the assassin, but the O pleads innocence and the wound on his shoulder confirms his story. It does not match the piece of armor cut from the assassin. The Jubilant villagers wish the travelers well as they set off to resume their quest. Yacht in particular seems enchanted by Artesia and, blushing fiercely, offers the princess a flower and her hopes that they will meet again someday. Artesia maintains a strong facade, but her companions can tell that she is now on the verge of tears. The episode closes with her sobbing in despair. Will they ever mind her father's killer?
This is the end of the first era of SD Gundam shorts, starting with the two that accompanied Shah's counterattack. In theaters in March of 1988, Sunrise produced a steady stream of SD content, seven volumes of original SD shorts, as well as four full length episodes of SD Gundam Guidance up until the VHS release of dawn of Papal on August 22, 1991. Only a few months after the fourth and final episode of SD Gundam Guidance went on sale on March 21, nine one after dawn of Papal, there would be nearly two years without any new SD Gundam anime. This period coincided with a precipitous decline in SD gund plus sales, although which caused which, I couldn't say. In 1993, Amino Tetsro, who directed most of the SD Gundam shorts we've discussed, returned with an 80 minutes long SD Gundam movie released in theaters under the name SD Gundam Festival. But Festival feels more like a coda or an epilogue to this era of SD. There was a brief increase in gunpla sales after the movie came out, but it was not enough to revive the franchise. Though it would continue on in manga, video games and other formats, SD Gundam would not return to animation for nearly a decade after. Ever since we started examining this first era of late eighty s and early 90s SD short films, I have been struck by just how overtly they refer to popular media. Of the many of the men who steered these SD productions like lead director Amino Tetsaro, composer Kenji Kawaii, or producer Uchida Kenji were children of the 50s. Others, like assistant director Takamatsu Shinji, character designer Yokoi Koji, or this episode's director Egami Kiyoshi were born in the early 60s. Most of them had limited to no experience working on shows aimed at young kids. When they started on SD Gundam, they must have tapped into their own memories of the shows and movies that had left deep impressions on their own. Childhoods. Shows like Hannah Barbera's Scooby Doo initially aired in 1969. Or Hannah Barbera's Wacky Races in 1968. Or Hannah Barbera's Laugh Olympics in 1977. There are sneaky references to the early 1970s pop idol Amachimari to 1970 Seven's Captain Harlock or 1960 Seven's Lupon III, first adapted for the screen in 1971, as well as to things like Bondi's original 1977 gashapon capsule toy machine. These decade old references are interwoven with more contemporary fare the 1988 Tokyo Olympics, the tourism boom, corruption scandals, Dragon Ball Z. But even in their own time, these shorts must have felt so retro. We've racked our brains and scoured our research materials to identify as many references as we have, but I'm sure that we're missing dozens, hundreds that would have been obvious to a contemporary audience of the right age. More than anything else we've covered, these shorts come with an expiration date. The cultural grounding that you need to get them, to really get them, is not really something that you can recreate. Anybody can watch them, but so much of what they communicate is locked away in a place that we can't reach, and some of those references may now be truly, completely unrecoverable. For example, the dawn of Papal short itself might contain references to a groundbreaking and historically significant costumed hero series, one of legendary actor Sunny Chiba's first roles on TV. It might have inspired part of Sala's outfit and the look of the papal kingdom setting, but I can't say any more than that because that series 1960s messenger of Allah, Allah no Shisha, seems to be mostly lost. The first episode, in which the hero himself does not appear, has survived. It was digitally remastered, and it can be purchased on DVD, and parts of the final episode may also have survived, but the rest of the series is either lost forever or locked away somewhere in toe's vaults. There are a few summaries of the series online. It's set in a fictional Middle Eastern kingdom, and some villains are threatening the crown prince, who is named after one of the show's sponsors and needs to be saved, I'm going to guess repeatedly by the titular messenger of Allah, a masked vigilante hero. Some stills from the series have survived, along with art depicting the character wearing a turban, scarf and mantle that look a bit like Sala's turban cape and Queen Mansa Pauldrons, but that's about all I can say about it. There's nothing in the one surviving and available episode that struck me as particularly relevant. Fortunately, dawn of Papal is stuffed to the gills with similar and easier to grasp homages. We'll talk more about how it draws from each of these as we discuss the episode in depth, but I do want to lay out what I think are the key influences. Sela's character draws heavily from the masked heroes common to Japanese live action, tokusatsu shows, tokusatsu means special effects, and as a genre, it describes an array of effects heavy live action shows like Ultraman, the Japanese version of Spiderman Super Sentai, or its American cousin Power Rangers. 1960s messenger of Allah was an early entry in that genre. The turban that Sailor wears for the first half of the episode could come from messenger of Allah, but it might otherwise have been inspired by a predecessor 1950 eight's Gecko Common or Moonlight Mask, a masked caped and turbined motorcycle riding gunslinging hero who appears in 130 episodes and six movies in the course of just two years. Oh, my gosh, that production schedule phenomenally popular in its time but canceled for various legal concerns, including kids imitating the stunts of the main character and getting severely injured. It was revived repeatedly, adapted into a 39 episode anime in 1972, a 1981 live action movie, and then a 25 episode parody anime in 1999. When she's not wearing the turban, Sala's Queen Mansa disguise gives her mask a distinctly insectoid character, complete with short antenna. In this, I think, she draws explicitly from that most famous of masked heroes, Common Rider. The original Common Rider aired in 1971, and it continues today. Sala even briefly rides around on a Mega Rider Gundam universe equivalent of a motorcycle. The setting for this short, harsh desert landscapes and wandering heroes arriving in a town menaced by ruffians, one that seems deserted at first because its inhabitants are all hiding inside is commonplace in movies set in the American Old West. But to the best of my knowledge and research, that trope's popularity in Westerns comes from its appearance in the seminal 1964 spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars, which is itself a remake of the 1961 Jedi gecki Yo Jimbo, and takes those scenes from Yojimbo. Both movies even feature an old man who lives in the town, explaining the nature of their plight to the wandering hero, then later being bound and suspended by the ruffians, just like the old Juag in Suginam. But in both cases, the hero frees his friend during the climactic final battle, not right at the very start, as happens in Bride of Sugeanam. Both movies also feature arson attacks by the ruffians, but again, the timing is different. So that brings me to the major inspiration for dawn of Papal kaikesu Zubat, a tokusatsu transforming hero show about the wandering, guitar playing cowboy Hayakawa Ken and his superheroic masked vigilante alter ego Zubat. Like Sala, Hayakawa, wanders from place to place, hunting for the man who murdered his best friend. Each episode sees him wander into the middle between some villain's evil plot and a winsome innocent or three who must, in the course of the half hour plot, be menaced by the villain's henchmen before being saved by Hayakawa and or Zubat. As Zubat, his main weapon is a whip very much like Salah's. The climactic scene of the episode usually sees him leaping to the top of some high plinth overlooking the villains, where he poses and tells them his name, much like Sala does after her disguise fails. Then every episode climaxes with Zubat wrapping the whip around the villain's neck and slamming them this way and that until they give him some alibi for why they couldn't possibly have been the one who murdered his friend, exactly as happens at the end of Bride of Sugeanam. Finally, Zubat returns to his wandering, leaving new friends behind as he rides off into the sunset. All of that was already enough to convince me that Kaiketsu Zubat was the main inspiration behind dawn of Papal. But then Nina and I watched the episode hono NONAKA no wataritori the migratory bird in the heart of the flames. In this episode, Hayakawa, dressed in his usual cowboy GetUp, rides into a sleepy rural town on his horse. The town is populated, but everyone runs to hide inside. When Hayakawa arrives at one end of the town, he discovers an old man, the proprietor of the local restaurant and hotel, who has been trussed up and is hanging from a post. Just exactly as Sala found the village elder Juag, hayakawa frees the old man and receives his thanks, but the old man then urges him to leave at once because the town is being menaced by a gang of ruffians, and the villagers are too weak to stand up to them. At this, the villagers emerge from hiding and gather round to gawp at the stranger. The old man takes Hayakawa back to his restaurant, accompanied by his granddaughter, a young girl whose age, temperament, and outfit color scheme all closely resemble the young lady yacht. Over dinner, the old man explains more about their situation that night the ruffians attack, setting fire to the town. Eventually, they carry off the granddaughter, and Hayakawa is forced to race after them to rescue her. I won't spoil how the episode ends, but somebody gets whipslammed until an alibi comes out, and then somebody else rides off into the sunset on an everlasting mission of vengeance. Special thanks, by the way, to the Tokusatsu Brain Trust on the Msb discord server, who helped me on this one, and extra special thanks to Storm and Ruby, who identified Zubat in particular. Finally, though, no SD Gundam short film is complete without an homage to some Hannah Barbera series, and this one is no exception. The premise the heir to a sort of broadly stereotypical Middle Eastern kingdom is forced to go on the run, accompanied by some color coded companions after a Usurper attacks. The palace is a dead match for Hannah Barbera's short lived 1968 series Arabian Knights, and that's knights with a K. Arabian Knights even features one episode, The Reluctant Empress, with a similar unwilling bride plot. A princess and member of the Arabian Knights, Nida, is kidnapped and nearly forced into marriage by a certain petty tyrant who, at least in his color scheme, resembles the O incidentally. Princess Nita was voiced by Sherry Lewis, who you probably know better as the Emmy and Peabody winning ventriloquist comedian behind Lamb Chop. I don't think that's relevant. It's just kind of neat, the best kind of knowledge.
You already addressed a lot of the points of similarity between this short and works that we think inspired it. But there were a couple of things that I wanted to mention that haven't been covered yet. With regard to the influence of Westerns, especially on repeated watch throughs, I found the color palette of this short to be very heavily inspired by the Westerns of the 70s, when you tend to get much more washed out color palettes. Everything is warm toned, but not particularly vivid or colorful. There's more color in this short, but everything is a bit washed out and subdued, and it creates that same kind.
Of visual tone, that feeling of everything being kind of sun bleached and dusty.
And you already mentioned the importance of these village fires in both Yojimbo and Fistful of Dollars, as well as the SD short, while it's not a village fire is also very prominent in that first episode of Kaikesu Zubat, because. The scene where his best friend is murdered. They are both trying to escape a hospital that's been lit on fire by the baddies. There's a ton of smoke and the threat of fire looming.
Fire is such a great narrative tool as long as your hero is sort of within the bounds of what a human can possibly do. No matter how strong and fast and smart and clever they are, fire remains a threat both to them and to those around them. And when a fire happens, you have to escape it. You have to run from it. You have to try to fight the fire, which means that it's a great distraction. And it's always an answer to, like, oh, well, if it was so easy for Gazelle and gazaar to defeat all of these ruffian bandits, why didn't they just beat them in that first battle in the village? And the answer, of course, is that there's a fire going on. There's chaos and danger, and you have to address the fire.
Watching Kaikatsuzubat was really fun for me. I was not expecting to enjoy it, and instead, by the time we had watched an episode, it was like, oh, I get why people are obsessed with Tokazatsu now. I get it. I see. And I particularly love this entirely unselfconscious mashup of American Western tropes with Japan. You have this wandering cowboy in contemporary Japan. The setting of Kaikesu zubat is not old timey. It's not the United States. He is a cowboy, and he is going on this vengeance quest in the Japan of the yet the way that the old man is tied up in both zubato and in the SD short is an old, like, Edo era torture. This is not a way that people would have been dealt with in the Wild West era of the United States. This is a Japanese historical torture. I had also been deeply curious why the o was a chef. They gave him a chef hat and a chef coat, and he fights with a frying pan and fork, a knife. One of Zubato's enemies is the second best in the world at throwing plates with vicious, deadly accuracy, and is a chef.
This is one of the recurring elements of Zubat. Every episode features some kind of themed enemy, some kind of goon, actually. They call them yo Jimbo. They call them bodyguards who has nearly perfected some kind of just random hobby or profession and turned it into an evil martial art. Like, there's an evil stage magician who fights with stage magic. There's the evil chef who fights by throwing plates. I assume that making the O a chef who fights with fork and knife and wears a big frying pan on his back is all part of that same tradition. These kinds of Tokyo satsu shows. I mean, Zubat is from 1977, but they have an enduring popularity. Like, successive generations of Japanese kids have grown up on these. And the basic format, like, things change a little bit. They're not all as good as Kaikesu Zubat, but it is a formula that continues to work and that would be recognizable. And so it's a good choice for this SD short, because kids who go and rent this short and were watching it at home when it came out would still have their own context from their own time, their own masked, transforming, hero shaped hole into which they can thrust this sala character, which is how they're able to make this sort of meta joke about like this is the 103rd episode of a Long Running Show. We don't need to see any of the rest of the show because we've seen shows like this.
That is part of the charm of these kinds of shows, and it's part of why so many kids really like them. You have a sense of the rhythm of it. You kind of know what's going to happen, but you know things will be a little different each time. It's a popular storytelling technique and makes it so that even kids who had never seen Zubato, like you, said, they would be familiar with this kind of story.
It's archetypal, rather than being really specific to these individual characters. What do we know about Hayakawa Ken, besides the fact that he is the best at everything and wanders on a journey of vengeance? What do we need to know?
In a similar kind of mashup, the visual design for this short, at least in terms of the characters and the costumes that they put on them, the clothing and decorative elements, as you already pointed out, pulls from these sort of stereotypical Middle Eastern garments. There's a lot of full sleeved shirts, vests, harem kind of pants, sashes. But then in the village, some of the villagers look like they're in a Western. Some of the villagers appear to be wearing sort of Chinese garments. And so if you had to pick, like, an actual Earth region to put it in, I would probably say West Asia, because that's where you're going to get the most mixing of these different cultures. But also, this is not on Earth, and so who cares?
A lot of the ruffians look like they just walked out of a Kurosawa movie. The gasha who shows up has, like, a jug of sake.
Then the old man has pictures of previous mayors on his wall. One of them looks like Dick Tracy from the comic books, kind of. The others are, I'm sure, also inspired by other famous characters, though I couldn't figure out by whom.
I already said at the beginning that this is like the last of this line of SD shorts, but it also feels like the end point of what SD has been developing into. Like, you think back to the very first SD short that we watched. It was a humorous abridged retelling of the events of first Gundam with a little bit sprinkled in from other parts of the Gundam franchise and then later takes on SD. Have focused on taking the basic characters we know and putting them into weird situations, mixing up the settings, different genres, different premises, but recognizable characters, recognizable dynamics between those characters. It's only been in the last few SD shorts, especially the ones in Mark Five, like Rigazi the Shipper, for instance, where what they've actually started to do is just take the art, take the character designs, but almost nothing else, and then use those to tell their own completely independent stories. Like in this one, we have Sala, the very recognizable Artesia character. They keep her name mostly. She's now Artesia Psalm Pantalone instead of.
Why is their last name Pants? Why?
I mean, that's a joke that Dragon Ball has been doing for a long time with the whole briefs family. Bloomer briefs, panties, briefs. Like, fun wordplay, I guess. But her father is not Xeon Daikun, established father of the Sala character in the canon. It's. Dozel Zabi now Dozel Pantalone. Dozel, who has a daughter, Miniva. They've gotten rid of the Miniva character. Kaswal Shah makes no appearance in the actual double zeta. The queen mansa and the gazelle and gazaar Royal Guard units are fighting each other. They are enemies, so they haven't even bothered to try to preserve these character dynamics at all.
Even beyond that, the fact that some of these characters are humans dressed like mobile suits and some of them are just mobile suits that are alive.
Yeah. Debate rages about whether the yacht is a human dressed like a mobile suit or a mobile suit who has weird human features, I think.
Mobile suit with weird human features? Yeah.
It's been suggested by some Japanese Gundam fans that her mother might have been human and her father a mobile suit.
Wow.
Okay, we're just tossing out theories now. Until they make the other however many hundred episodes of this show, we will never know.
Another example. The gazelle and Ghazar fight with PSI. PSI being sort of thought of as a ninja weapon. At least in the United States, you often see ninja characters fight with them. It's kind of a three pronged fighting fork, I guess. The middle prong is longer.
It's the weapon Raphael uses in the Ninja turtles.
That's a better way of explaining it. Why are they fighting with Sime? Who cares? It looks cool.
Give them back their lances. I love mobile suits with lances. And they have lances in the show. Why did they take away their lances? The other funny thing, we noted this in our translation, but the other funny thing about this is the Gazelle and the Gaza appear to have had their colors swapped, so I don't actually know which one is supposed to be which.
Speaking of the translation process, I would like to talk about that while there were still portions that we couldn't quite make out or we really weren't sure how to translate them. It did feel much easier than the previous one, I think, because in Musha Knight Command, each of those characters had very distinct, very heavy accents, speaking patterns that made them more difficult to understand in the first place. In this short, many of the characters spoke standard Japanese. Most of the time, if they were not speaking standard Japanese, they were speaking Kansai Ben, the accent of the region around Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe, and is very popular in anime. However, one of the sticking points was that there is another quite distinct regional accent that cropped up that we couldn't identify. We thought possibly Ibaraki or some other accent associated with very rural places, but I was not able to really pin it down or figure out how a sentence's meaning was changed by these particular different sentence endings. Which leads me to a special request, which is, if any of you do translation work, whether it's a hobby or professional, if you have resources that you like for referencing and looking up information on other regional dialects from Japan, I've got Kansai Ben well covered. But any good resources, whether they're books or websites or really anything about other regional dialects, please share them. Drop us an email, post a comment somewhere. I can see that this is a knowledge gap of mine that I would like to fill in if I can. On the whole, I liked this SD short a lot. Doing the translation gave me a lot of appreciation for the dialogue. It was quite funny and snappy in places.
It's very well directed, it's very well animated. There's none of the Jankiness that we saw in previous SD shorts, and even.
Before we did all of this, exploration of influences and watching other very enjoyable content so that we could better talk about this short. I liked the short. There is one uncomfortable thing we need to address, though. We're now going to discuss a scene of sexual violence that occurs in this SD short. If you'd rather not hear this discussion, skip ahead eight minutes to the 50 minutes 45 second mark. So it's perhaps me being extremely naive, but I would not have thought that an SD Gundam short, with its chibby mobile suits and its obviously, like, cartoony and silly structure, would have an attempted rape scene that would make me so uncomfortable. Some of you might be like, Wilt, of course it would make you uncomfortable, but I grew up watching things like Pepe le Pew on Looney Tunes, so a certain amount of cartoon, sexual harassment and sexual violence feels very normal to me. That's messed up in its own special way, but this scene is really uncomfortable. Artesia has disguised herself as yucked. The O is very excited for his new bride to have finally joined him. He begins to pursue her around the room and then tosses her onto the bed and gets on top of her. She is trying to figure out how she is going to take the chunk of shoulder that she has from her father's assassin and match it or check it against the wound on The O's shoulder to see if he is the assassin himself. When she's unmasked by the little monkey creature, she gets away very easily. But we do not, until that point, realize that it would have been very easy for her to get away at.
Any time, though the intended audience might have felt differently about it, since part of the formula of these shows is that, yes, the hero is frequently captured. Sometimes they're beat up, but like, we know that they always win in the end and nothing seriously bad happens to them.
That's very true. Also the o is into feet. Confirmed describes her feet as erotic. Yeah, I don't know why that's there but it is. It's only part of her not swazed in clothing I guess, but still.
Well yeah.
Tom is like we are not talking about this, we are not talking about how it's canon that one of these mobile suits has a foot fetish. Just not going there.
Well look, this is actually probably the one place where they really are taking from the original source material because of course The O is Soroko's mobile suit and soroko is a creep.
Yeah, but plenty of people with foot fetishes are not creepy.
I'm not stopped talking about the feet. I'm not talking about the feet, I just mean in general it's true The.
O is a creep just like The O's pilot. The O also I noticed wears big flashy rings on every finger which reminded me actually of the hiakashiki from the art delivery showing it being kind of tacky and kind of associated with nefariousness like no upstanding member of the community walks around wearing that much jewelry.
It creates a contrast between sala and the o. Right, sala, princess of the kingdom who must disguise herself. Artesia. I know, I don't think they actually say Sala at any point.
They don't. It's always Artesia.
So Artesia, a completely separate person from Sala, disguises herself in order to conceal her royalness whereas The O is all flash and display without substance just like his goons who talk big and tough but turn out to actually be complete pushovers. I was also struck because this whole short was made as an accompaniment to Musha knight command and that one also includes an element of sexual menace against the young heroine Riplin. I think the preoccupation with sexual menace directed towards young girls in both of these two early ninety s nineteen ninety one shorts probably reflects changing social cultural attitudes at the time. We're now a couple of years past the peak of the 1980s, quote Lowly Khan boom. We're now a couple of years past the gruesome Otaku murder cases that made such a huge impression on the Japanese public actually to that point, in the process of creating the characters for formula 91 there's an anecdote that Tomino described one of the characters as being an Otaku. And this was within two years after the murders came to light and some people on the staff pushed back. Like, isn't it bad to have a character who's an Otaku? Tomino then says, no, no, he's an Otaku, but he's also like a good, earnest young man. And it's so striking that the people making Gundam think of Otaku at this point as like a really bad thing to be, an unacceptable thing to be.
It's not dissimilar to some of the associations and connotations that Catcher and the Rye developed after several different people said that it influenced them to shoot other people, which I've read the book. I don't know how they got there from that, but after that happens a few times, then suddenly it feels like there is this weird, creepy connection between Catcher in the Rye and murder or attempted murder. And similarly, the term Otaku was always associated with a certain amount of social awkwardness and weird obsessiveness. But that criminality and danger and distastefulness came out of this murder case, and it would be a long time, I think, before that wore off.
You make an excellent point here also because after that association between the Catcher and the Rye and shootings or attempted assassinations developed. There were incidents where someone committed a shooting and then they were found to own a copy of Catcher in the Rye. And it's like, it must have been because of Catcher in the Rye. They just owned the book. It's a popular book. Many people own the book. Likewise, a lot of people have argued that the Otaku murderer just owned a lot of anime, as anyone might. He got characterized as an Otaku who committed those gruesome murders because he was so deranged by anime and manga that he couldn't tell real life from fiction. But maybe he was just a deranged murderer who also liked anime, right?
Even the socially awkward connotations of the term. I'm sure there are just as many Otaku who hold down jobs and have very normal lives who also have their side obsession, hobby, whatever, but we don't talk about them. We only talk about people who are.
Weird, and only if we can other them by putting some sort of label on them.
Right? And I mean weird and sarcasm quotes.
Yeah, nobody listening to this should take any of what we're saying here as us criticizing people who indulge their obsessions. We literally make our living talking about mecha anime on the Internet. So we're pretty far along on the weird obsessions curve ourselves.
And we used to seem normal.
Citation required. We're also, in 1991, just a couple of years before there's going to be a huge explosion of attention centered around Angel Khosai or compensated dating. The term I don't think had been coined yet. Certainly people were not paying quite as much attention to it but it was definitely already happening at this point. And that's anjo Khosai is high school aged girls accepting gifts or money to go on dates with older men which had been going on at least through the then would develop into a whole moral panic and major subject of social debate in the late ninety s. And I think those anxieties are coming through in these SD shorts.
I will say that for it. Unlike Looney Tunes, this attention is not treated as harmless or funny. But Princess Artesia wins in the end, except not really, because she doesn't catch her father's assassin, and she might never catch them. She might journey forever.
Surely she will catch them in the final episode before it gets canceled or in the movie that they make afterwards.
If only.
The real tragedy of this is that this is a good show that I would watch more of. I don't know that I would watch 103 episodes of it to get to this point, but, like, they probably could have made more.
I would watch more of this, but that would also kind of spoil the gag.
And now Nina's profile on voice actor Izuka Shozo among the other big names.
Tom already talked about is one that while his role in this short was small, his presence in the voice acting industry was immense. The actor voice actor dubber and narrator Izuka Shozo, who passed away just last month on February 15, 2023, of acute heart failure. He was 89 years old, and his career had spanned nearly 60 years. His first credits are from the 1960s, and he kept working until just a year or two ago. Born May 23, 1933, near Tokyo, his family moved to his maternal grandparents home in Iwaki Fukushima Prefecture when he was still very young, and he stayed there until he graduated from high school. In his early life, he had no interest in performance art, instead spending his free time practicing judo and baseball. His first performance was in a high school costume parade as the front legs of an elephant, inspired by Hanako the Elephant, a new and extremely popular arrival at Tokyo Uenozu at that time. To his surprise, he enjoyed it, enjoyed the physicality of trying to move like an elephant, waving the trunk, and so on. The upper classmen who played the hind legs later invited Izuka to help him form a drama club, and although his stage debut was a struggle, he only had six or seven lines and still forgot half of them. He kept at it and felt that he improved with every performance. In one interview, he says that what got him started in acting was that he was a sore loser. He couldn't bear to stop doing it after that first bad performance. When the founding member of the theater club graduated, Izuka took over as club president. He began to study theater more seriously. The club won second place in a prefectural theater competition, and he organized a joint performance with a local girls school, since at that time all schools were gender segregated. After high school, he attended Nihon University, studying in the Fine Arts department. His parents weren't exactly excited about it, his mother wanted him to be a journalist, and his father wanted him to attend a different university. Izuka admitted to backing them into a corner. He took Nihon University's entrance exam in secret and purposely failed all of his other entrance exams, making Nihon University the only option. In university, he founded a drama club and performed all over Japan, directed many of the club's productions, and worked part time as an extra in movies and kabuki performances, and after graduation he continued to perform, founding a theater troupe with friends and later getting a job with the Gekidan Wakakusa Theater Company and Talent Agency. He wanted to work on mass media projects, but didn't have the know how or funding to do it himself. He and several friends got jobs at Gekkidan Wakakusa to learn the ropes there. He worked on the TV production side, including as a production manager, and wound up acting by chance. One of the programs that he was production manager on needed an extra on a shoot, and he liked that actors got paid promptly. He was paid at the end of the day for his work on that shoot andizuka wound up in voice acting largely by chance, a matter of which opportunities and roles he was hired for early in his career. He reflected in a 2016 interview that there's no one way to become a voice actor. After Gekkidan Wakakusa. He was represented by Tokyo Haiyu Seikatsukyo DOL Kumiyai or Tokyo Actors Consumers Cooperative Society, also known as Haikyol, before moving to Sigma Seven in 1988, where he remained for the rest of his career. In the 2000s, Izuka was dedicated to training up the next generation of voice acting talent. He became the head lecturer at the Sigma Seven affiliated Voice Actor Training School and taught seminars at Art College Kobe. Several sources mention other occasions when he gave newcomers a bit of on the spot coaching, and it seems that among newcomers and established performers alike, he was well respected and well liked. At the 2022 Tokyo Anime Award Festival. Isuka was presented with their meritorious service in Anime Award. In this SD Gundam short, he voiced the old man, the town mayor, but in the context of Gundam, we first heard him as Rio Jose, and many of his roles were similar gentle giants. But he was most famous for his roles as villains and monsters. In fact, he used to joke that the reason he did volunteer work was to make amends for the countless times he had menaced and conquered the Earth. It's tempting to demonstrate how prolific he was by just listing his roles, but the lists are so long that I can't possibly share them all here. There will be sources in the show notes for those of you who would like to see his full credits. Frankly, even listing his most prominent roles will take a while, but I want to give you a sense of how if you're an anime or Tokusatsu fan, you have absolutely heard his work not once, but over and over again. In bit parts and prominent roles. He was an astroboy Ashtonojo and the original Uruse Yatsura. He voiced heart in Fist of the North Star, inspector Lestrade in Sherlock Hound Android Eight and napa in Dragon Ball z Isuka was in Yu Hakusho, detective Conan Ruroni Kenshin, Yugioh and Pokemon in 2004. In a single year. He was in Monster Paranoia. Agent and samurai champlu. Later in the decade he was in Blackjack Devil May Cry Doriman, Soul Eater Bleach and Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood. More recently, he was in little witch academia and Carolyn Tuesday. And that's just TV anime. Izuka was also Tetsugu in Giant Robo Hans in Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and Martin Proknow in Ms. Igloo add to that the films Royal Space Force Millennium actress and Tokyo Godfathers. He was famously the voice of Dr. Neocortex in the Japanese dub of the Crash Bandicoot video game series and lent his voice talents to a lot of other games in original audio and in Japanese dubs, including Final Fantasy 15, God of War, Three Kingdom Hearts, Birthed by Sleep, and a bunch of Mega Man titles. In Tokusatsu programs, he would often voice multiple characters within a single series and worked on numerous different common Writer and Space Sheriff titles as well as the Tokosatsu, Spiderman and Ultraman X. Most famously, he voiced Hakai Dare in Android Kikaider and if I understood the story correctly, took one of the costume masks from the show as a souvenir when it ended. Among his most famous roles are those in Japanese dubs of foreign films and TV. Several sources mention his performance as Sergeant Bosco albert B. A. Barakas on the A team as one he's particularly known for. He was also in Dubs of Alien, The Exorcist, Ghostbusters One and Two, Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, The Never Ending Story, Predator, Rocky Three, Three Days of the Condor and Monty Python's Flying Circus in which he dubbed over Terry Jones. And now I really want to hear that. Not to mention An American Tale batman The Animated Series lilo and Stitch treasure Planet, up and My Little Pony friendship Is Magic. So thank you. Izukasan we've already enjoyed so much of your work and I'll be sure to keep an eye out for you in the credits in the future. Otcarisamadeshta next time on Episode 8.1 this is not a Place of Honor. We research and discuss Gundam 83 stardust Memory episode One and Gundam jack oh, that's just the Japanese name order. We'd call him Jack gundam.
Welcome to Earth.
Grumpy cat cause a special interest is Gundams. There are two of them. The Fighting Kangaroos secret nukes in military bases. Gee, what could that be about? Kakarot blast from the past Kooky Yomena Yatsu and push it to the limit. The danger is still present in your time, as it was in ours.
Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina in scenic New York City within the ancestral and unseated land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is Wasp by Misha Dioxin. The closing music is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio. The recap music is his last share of the Stars by Dr. Turtle. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the Lenape people and more in the show notes and on our website, Gundampodcast.com. You can get in touch with us on Twitter or Instagram at gundampodcast or by email to hosts@gundampodcast.com, and thank you for listening. With Gundam's international popularity on the rise, there are now more opportunities to share your Wrong Gundam opinions than ever before. So get out there and tell some stranger that the Zeta Gundam has transforming mobile suits, because Tomino himself watched an episode of Hasbro's the Transformers and he liked the transformation so much that he sorry, I've just been informed there is eyewitness testimony that this one actually happened. So no wrong opinions to be found.
We've got a couple of special god I didn't need to get back into form. We've got a couple of special saints blah God.
I didn't finish that sentence and I don't want to include it initially, just based on the title and what little I know about the plot. I really thought Ribbon Night was going to, aka Princess Night was going to be a bigger influence, and after watching a bunch of it, I'm pretty sure there's like none whatsoever got it, except in that the Adventure girl like character type owes a lot to Ribbon Night, but got it. Not in any of the specifics in this case. I don't think it's really common for Gundam fans, and I do this myself probably too much, but it's really common for us to attribute various decisions to the commercial needs, merchandising needs of the sponsors, and to think of works like SD Gundam as perhaps being lesser because of their primarily commercial motivations, which is ridiculous when you think about it, because it's all commercial art. It's all commercial considerations all the way down. That doesn't mean it's not art. That doesn't make it any less valid or valuable, not intrinsically. And I kept thinking about that when I was watching this episode, because the mobile suits that they've chosen to include are really all quite obscure. You get a bunch of double Zeta ones who are not frequently or thoroughly merchandised. They wouldn't make an SD Queen Mansa until 2000, and that was a video game tie in. It had nothing to do with this. Despite having a golden opportunity, there is no gimmick where you. Can remove the helmet and reveal Artesia's face beneath it. As far as I know, there have never been SD gazelle or gazaar kits. Certainly not done up in the style they are in this short. And the various gangster goons who show up are all pretty obscure from, like, mSV and stuff. No one is out there making a Zaku cannon gunpla in Federation colors.
Okay, we're cutting this, but we'll maybe share it with the patron.
I don't know. It's good content. We don't have to get it. And that same torture method of tying someone up and hanging them from a post or from a sign shows up exactly the same way in Yo Jimbo. Yet in A Fistful of Dollars, the Sergio Leone remake of Yo Jimbo, they do not adapt that particular way of tying a person up. Instead, they have the guy strung up by his hands, by his wrists. Part of me wonders if maybe they just didn't have anybody who knew how to do that particular way of tying.
Somebody up, or they sensed that it didn't fit with their setting and so they decided to do something that felt more natural.
Well, yeah, I mean mean, that would make sense, but my explanation is funnier.
Oh, sorry. I ruined the joke.
You spoiled it.
I serious.
When I should have lulled unforgivable.