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lighteffexor · 1 year

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Watching Gundam ‘79, and this is how I feel during the OP.

#Gundam #Gundam '79 #Gundam 79 #mobile suit gundam #RX-75 Guntank #RX-75 Guntank my beloved

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thevulpinehero1 · 9 months

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GWatch -- Mobile Suit Gundam 0079 Ep 1

Since Armoured Core came out and everyone's in a mecha mood, I figured I would talk about an entirely different mecha series instead. The plan is to watch one episode a day, talk about it, and include one (or more) screenshots to facilitate enhanced rambling. I want to start with the original series since I've watched it before, see if I can get through it all, and then maybe move onto some other Gundams if I have the spirit.

Beware! Spoilers for a 40 year old anime inbound, as well as possible misreporting since I probably am not going to fact check too well. Gundam nerds may feel free to correct me and dispense wisdom where appropriate. Also, I'm just going to go with whatever name spelling is on the subtitles I have at the time. Sorry, not sorry.

The first thing I have to talk about is the theme song, which honestly gives me emotions. Nowadays, we all have this image of Gundam as basically the show that invented the real robot subgenre, but you would absolutely never get that impression from the theme song or OP. Honestly, go find it and listen to it -- it's actually amazing how widely it misses the tone of the series, with lyrics like "Bring to bear the rage of justice!" and "If you are still burning with furious rage, you must fight the towering foe!" It sounds much, much more like a Super Robot theme song for like Daitarn 3 or Raideen or something, than something you would see associated with a classic "war is hell" series like Gundam.

And this was probably completely intentional. I remember hearing that even as far back as its initial run, the series had to fight the sponsors/toymakers in order to carve out its own identity, and part of that was projecting a surface level impression of a more palatable Super Robot style show. (Some things never change, I guess...)

To me, it adds a lot to the charm, because the singer is obviously going in and doing their best, singing an ode to a giant metal hero of justice who doesn't really exist outside of the fertile imagination of an advertising/toy exec who has been thoroughly mislead. I love that. I just want to go and tell them, hey, I appreciate you, you are singing your heart out on this theme song for an entirely different and imaginary series than the one they've actually made, and you're killing it. You are fighting the good fight, and you may be one of the reasons the series even got off the ground in the first place because you were part of this obfuscation.

This is Amuro Ray. His shadow looms large over every Gundam protagonist that will follow him; many of them either use him as a blueprint for their personality, or are meant as a study in contrast to it. He kills a lot of people. He eats a lot of sandwiches. There are long and intricate scenes of Amuro eating sandwiches, and they are among my favourite scenes in the whole series, and, in fact, any Gundam show I've ever watched. I'm not kidding.

I picked this screenshot not just because it shows a stone-cold, unrepentant sandwich-murderer in his natural habitat, but because it also showcases another thing I love about the show: the goofy animation. This was not a show with a huge budget. There is something weird or goofy happening in every episode, almost every scene, and the first episode -- traditionally one of the best funded in most series -- is no exception. Amuro eats like a turtle. Hayato's hand is an amorphous, misshapen blob. I think it honestly adds to the charm; the series is scuffed, and probably knows it's scuffed, but it's doing its best to tell a story in spite of that.

For now, Amuro is not the pilot of legend. He sits around the house doing science in his underwear, his neighbours don't like him enough to tell him about an actual military evacuation that he's supposed to be undertaking, and without the aid of his childhood friend Fraw Bow (who he mostly summarily ignores), he wouldn't bother to evacuate at all and would likely die at home. He's a scrunkly kind of dude. Maybe even a scrunklemeister. Your boy probably smells like a scratch and sniff card if you rubbed off all the panels and tried snorting them all at once.

The show is surprisingly quick at characterising him, too. Within a minute or two, we know all the above, plus that he seems to have a certain amount of tension with his father, who his neighbours blame for bringing the military to their peaceful colony. His father, Tem Ray, loves him at least enough to put a picture of him on his desk, and makes vaguely prophetic statements about how kids as young as Amuro are already joining the war as guerrilla fighters. Foreshadowing hit different in the eighties.

One scene I didn't actually remember, but really should have in retrospect, is the part where Amuro confronts his father ("Do you care more about Mobile Suits than humans?" is the absolute first thing Amuro says to him), and the death of Fraw Bow's mother and grandfather, both of which expose a more sensitive core to the scrunklebeast within. It's very convenient/poetic (delete as appropriate) that Fraw Bow was herself very nearly caught in the explosion that killed the crowd her family was in, and only survived because she separated from them in order to check on Amuro.

I was also kinda surprised to relearn that Amuro doesn't really 'fall in' to the cockpit; he very deliberately gets in, having happened to read the manual earlier, in an effort to either protect the remaining civilians or take revenge for the ones who've just fallen (the context doesn't really make it clear which one, but he rushes to the cockpit soon after Fraw Bow sees her family die and is making her escape).

One thing that's really interesting in the metacontext of the series is that although Amuro ends up being one of the best pilots (he's a legend in mecha anime for a reason), he kinda starts out as one of the worst. Many Gundam protags are either experienced, have some level of training, or have other reasons why they're hot shit right out of the box; Amuro really does not know what he's doing, and is carried entirely by the fact that the Gundam itself is dizzyingly durable for the time period. It also comes with a learning computer (which I bet sounded very advanced in the time the anime was made, but kinda brings certain chatbots to mind in the present day) to ease the piloting burden while he learns how to use the dang thing. Not only that, but he goes up against a lot of mobbers who aren't that much better than he is and can't do much against his much better machine.

(A really interesting experiment is to contrast Kira from SeeD, which follows a lot of the original Gundam's major story beats quite closely for the first part of the series and is almost a spiritual remake in some parts. Kira almost has the opposite end of the equation going on -- a very good pilot from day one, he has the misfortune of having five other named dudes who are close to his level and have machines that are arguably better than his in a vacuum, and he fights them pretty regularly.)

Anyway, through more luck than skill, Amuro manages to get through his first Mobile Suit battle in Side 7, but Bright is already looking to utilise him as labour, and Char is advancing on the colony. That's the first episode, more tomorrow. (I don't intend these to be exhaustive or talk about every little, but I wanted to go a bit more in depth for the first ep, and I don't want to restrict myself from veering off on tangents because those are fun.)

#mobile suit gundam #gundam '79 #anime blogging #idk #felt like a fun thing to do #there's a whole other conversation about Gundam's meta eternal recurrence #and whether it's a play on war never changing #or just laziness for reusing the same plot all the time #probably a bit of both #it's very FromSoft come to think of it #there's your armoured core 6 segue right there #screenshots #Gwatch

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pilgrimshadow · 1 year

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My first repaint

#gundam #trans flag #trans pride #gundam '79 #mobile suit gundam

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toastedseavegetable · 4 months

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two (3) way crash

#mobile suit gundam #amuro ray #char aznable #lalah sune #this is about how I view the end of gundam 79 #so here's char and amuro crashing their jeep and plymouth barracuda into one another

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gallant-char · 10 months

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yeah ive hurt people. what ever who hasnt

#gallant char #gundam 79 #gundam origin #the red comet #char aznable #chars counterattack

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soufre-de-paris · 1 year

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the original gundam is really good, y'all

#gundam 79

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nunofdoloresdei · 10 months

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Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket (1989) End Credit images 'cause I couldn't find a collection anywhere else :v

#Gundam #mobile suit gundam #mobile suit gundam 79 #mobile suit gundam 0079 #Mobile suit gundam 0080 #mobile suit gundam 80 #war in the pocket #mobile suit gundam war in the pocket #gundam 80 #gundam 90 #gundam 0080 #gundam 0079 #anime

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dailyfigures · 9 months

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Lalah Sune ; Mobile Suit Gundam ☆ MegaHouse

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lstr-master-of-unlocking · 1 year

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#char aznable #gundam #mobile suit gundam #gundam 79 #mobile suit gundam 79

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shmuffalo · 10 months

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#gundam #gm sniper ii #gm cannon #rgm-79 #fanart #mecha

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ericmicael · 9 months

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The first tomato in Gundam being eaten by the protagonist.

The last tomato in Gundam being eaten by the protagonist's future wife.

#mobile suit gundam #gundam 79 #amuro ray #gundam witch from mercury #miorine rembran #sulemio #suletta mercury #tomatoes

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world-of-lang · 7 months

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most unwell guy you've ever had the misfortune of meeting:

#lang watches gundam #mobile suit gundam #gundam 79

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thevulpinehero1 · 9 months

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Gwatch: Mobile Suit Gundam '79 Ep 3

Time for episode three. Warning, spoilers within!

The Gundam and its two little brothers

In the first half of this episode, we're treated to some slower scenes as the cast settle into their new positions on the ship, giving rations to the rescued civilians and generally taking care of business. Fraw Bow confirms that Amuro is indeed smelly and brings him fresh clothes, Amuro lets Bright live rent-free inside his head, and Sayla Mass talks smack to Bright because she apparently just talks smack to everybody. We are introduced to some worrying news: Bright, acting captain of the spaceship that goes through space and is currently in space at this moment in time, has never been in space before. Great. Wonderful. Bodes well for the future.

We are introduced to an interesting concept, though: when she learns that Bright grew up on Earth, Sayla sarcastically(?) calls him 'one of the elite'. A running theme of almost every Gundam series is a conflict between people living on Earth and people living in space colonies, but the reason tends to differ between series, and I get mixed up between them. Maybe she's hinting at the idea that folks on Earth are surrounded by Earth's bounty of natural resources, and thus are more affluent -- or the idea that being spaceborn (or a 'spacenoid' as it's sometimes called in the series) is a social stigma of some kind.

While it's not necessarily related, I'm somewhat reminded of Becky Chamber's Wayfarer series, taking place in the far future; humankind, weakest in position among the civilised races of space, were forced to abandon Earth en masse and have adapted by becoming an ultra economical species who spend their entire lives in spaceships, religiously recycling and letting no resource go to waste, even eating bugs that other sentients turn their noses up at. I do kind of like the idea of a future humanity who've learned their lesson.

Meanwhile, Char has requested reinforcements, but is dismayed to only get two Zakus instead of the three he asked for. Here we learn that Zeon is no longer overflowing with resources, and it too has been taxed by the war effort; while the Earth Federation has been and will be on the back foot for the time being, Zeon's powers are not unlimited. Even the ship delivering Char's supplies is so old he's surprised to see it still in service.

We can also infer that, despite his fearsome skills as a mobile suit operator, Char's reputation in Zeon might not be that great -- the man delivering them, Gadem, immediately jokes that he must have screwed up. Char's uncertain position in Zeon's political environment will be, let's say, a running theme.

After Mirai (in a surprising moment of bloodthirst) suggests they attack pre-emptively while Char is supplying, the White Base holds a vote. Most are in favour, but Bright tellingly waits until Amuro casts his vote in support before calling it. Of course, Amuro is the only real fighting force they have, so the vote is an essentially meaningless show of democracy if he says no; if they kill or confine him to force obedience, they have no pilot and the show cannot go on.

Thanks to Amuro teaching Ryu (trained soldier, core fighter pilot) not to attack when the sun is in his eyes and maybe position so that the enemy has to do that instead, they manage to land a few good shots on the supply ship. But it's not long before the Red Comet comes out to play.

Char Aznable, about to deliver an ass-kicking

Amuro still has absolutely no shot of beating Char in a fair fight, and gets solidly whupped. He runs out of ammo for his bazooka and even attempts the famed bazooka yeet for the very first time (one of my favourite SRW30 animations, incidentally), but to no avail; Char, having realised that the Zaku's weapons aren't really doing much, resorts to just smacking the shit out of the Gundam with punches and kicks. It's been pointed out before that this is absolutely the correct play; even if he can't damage the machine, the knocks and g-forces will eventually take out the pilot, who is currently by far the weakest link in the suit. However, the White Base's advance on the valuable supplies means he has to prioritise supporting his own mothership instead of going for the kill.

Meanwhile, the inexperience of the White Base's crew starts to show; Hayato doesn't even know how to pass a message to the bridge, Ryu can't be contacted because he forgot to turn on his comms, and that means they can't fire the main cannons at the enemy without hitting him. Even Bright gets in on the panicking action as the battle goes on. But Kai and Hayato launch in the Guntank, a shiny new toy that they both sort of know how to use.

The Guntank's first outing is a success and the supply ship is downed, but the Zakus have already been evacuated. Gadem, the supply ship captain, tries to 1v1 the Gundam in revenge; while he is indeed a superior pilot to Amuro and gets in a powerful shoulder tackle when Amuro attacks too quickly, the Gundam ultimately just tanks him, just like it's tanked everything so far. Amuro is forced to withdraw, with no weapons and no chance of handling Char; the Red Comet decides to prioritize salvaging what supplies he can, musing about his enemy. He's already sussed out that he's being beaten by the enemy weapons, and the soldiers piloting them fight like amatuers.

After some more headbutting with Bright, the episode ends as the White Base pulls closer to Luna II. But just because they're near an allied base doesn't mean Char isn't out to get them, and tensions are already beginning to heighten within the crew.

#Gwatch #anime blogging #mobile suit gundam #Gundam '79 #Even though Amuro sometimes has a functioning brain #he's still a total jobber at this point #Char's sitting there wondering wtf they're playing at

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ryunumber · 1 month

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Does the RX-78-2 Gundam have a Ryu number?

Piloted mechs cannot have Ryu Numbers.

Amuro Ray, however, has a Ryu Number of 2.

#amuro ray #gundam #mobile suit gundam #gundam 0079 #gundam 79 #ryu number

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gallant-char · 9 months

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Is it true u can't drive

this is a lie made up by the gay ass earth. the red comet needs no drivers liscence i simply know how to do it on my own. i crash and speed because i want to

#char aznable #gallant char #gundam origin #chars counterattack #gundam 79 #gundam #the red comet

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cultofthewyrm · 10 months

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by Olympia Sweetman

#mobile suit gundam #08th ms team #mecha #RX-79[G] Gundam Ground Type

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