Best Gundam TV series?

[Japanfan4ever]

Man, you guys are taking this franchise way too seriously :sweat: Just write a "Gundam for Dummies" book, why don't ya?

 

[Lynxara]

I would, but Mark Simmons already did!

 

[Sage Shinigami]

Man, you guys are taking this franchise way too seriously :sweat: Just write a "Gundam for Dummies" book, why don't ya?

No, this is what fanboys (I won't say any names) think they're doing when they start "discussing" a show but instead just bitch: an intelligent analyzation, and its appreciated. What would you prefer?

I find "defective" characters like Jerid really fascinating to watch, especially when written in Tomino's shows. Jerid spends the entire series vaguely aware of his personal defects and desperately in search of some person-- well, woman, it is a Tomino show-- who can help him become a better person.

His great failing is that, to him, better means stronger. He cannot conceive of a future for himself that includes anything better or more meaningful than killing Kamille. His every effort is tragically doomed by his shortsightedness, despite the constant support of women who see the good in him.

I get the sense from Zeta that Jerid could've saved himself at any time by not obsessing over his need to defeat Kamille and valuing something, anything other than being a badass in a Mobile Suit. He wasn't capable of that.

See, that's what made him hilarious to me. That and he KEPT SURVIVING. Seriously, him living as long as he did should be a giant spoiler because I expected him to vanish in the teens, destroyed by Kamille back with the RX-178.

What sets Gundam apart from other mecha franchises is that there's a deliberately tragic, wistful air about it. This is not a world where a bright-eyed young man and his giant robot friend will make a difference; it's too much like ours.

When you say that, it pushes me to want to hate the Gundam franchise. >_<

Kamille bothers me because the character has no innate tragedy whatsoever. His parents' deaths are ludicrous and too-convenient, forcing him to... you know, hang around with Quattro and get a hot chicks and powerful Mobile Suits? Kamille just devolves into standard power fantasy too quickly.

Zeta tries to tack on tragedy for Kamille at the end with the stupid brain-rape thing, but that scene makes no sense and just sets up embarrassing sequences later on in ZZ. The original Zeta ending should've had the guts to kill him. Failing that, the movie ending is at least more coherent.

...Power-fantasy? I'm clearly recalling the series incorrectly. The deaths ARE admittedly convenient, but even before that he was from a home with two parents that were too caught up in their own BS to care about him.

He's given a giant robot and becomes an ace pilot. Living the life, right? Except half the crew dislikes and/or is envious of this snot-nosed brat that's a superior pilot to them. He's constantly subjected to all sorts of abuse from everyone from Emma (who shouldn't even have a rank, given she's a traitor from the other side, but does) the inferior pilot, to the AEUG's financier. (Who beats Kamille into unconsciousness.) Despite his parents dying and basically everyone acknowleding this, they all tell him they don't have time for him to piss and moan about it (healthy mourning? No! Bottle it up! The anger will make you a better pilot!). At one point Emma even mocks him for seeming as if he wants sympathy. (I rewatched it with a friend who'd recently lost both his parents and it was seriously hard to ask him to watch more with me after that.)

[hide]His girlfriend is insane and killed before he can get her to change. The girl he kinda sees as a mother figure, Emma, spends a third of her time talking down to him, the other third smacking him, and the last third being a generally ineffective pilot. Oh, and the one girl--other than Fa--he has a crush on, and the only one I'd define as a "hot chick" (possibly spoiled on these 2000 anime girls, I confess)--betrays him and the AEUG to work for the other side.[/hide]

Now, Jerid? That dude reeks of tragedy. He is completely an Oldtype in every way, the prisoner of the limited worldview that his society has forced on him. He's so immature that he'll never understand how to be a real adult. That's a far more distinctively Gundam sort of character to me.

Really? I think the trend with Gundam characters is kids forced to grow up due to the trials of war. That he never grows up is what makes him stand out.

So, take Gundam SEED. The director is an unabashed fan of Super Robots who idolizes Tadao Nagahama and regards Gundam as mere merchandise-friendly formula (if a fun one). SEED's an interesting watch, its production problems aside, but it's also a heartless and cowardly series at points.

SEED is Shakespeare's sound and fury that signifies nothing. It's a tale told by something worse than an idiot, by a fanboy with nothing of consequence to say. SEED just wants to be liked, desperately, to a degree that is almost embarrassing. It was a show made for marketing executives, not people.

Saying that, though, you realize it was wildly successful, so sadly, all they need is to create series like that to bring in stupid amounts of money.

Evangelion was made for a cable TV network only one-third of Japan actually received, leaving GAINAX free to do as they pleased with it. The first season of Code Geass verges on brilliance, probably in large part because it aired in a late-night timeslot nobody was supposed to be watching.

Evangelion kept its teeth because Anno learned from Tomino's mistakes and never permitted a "Zeta" for Evangelion, at least not on TV. Code Geass lost its teeth completely when Sunrise insisted on making it a mainstream show in a mainstream timeslot.

Really? I would argue Code Geass lost any chance at true brilliance with

Spoiler

Euphemia's death

. Not so much the death, just the utter stupidity with which it was handled. So yes, I'll agree that the first...18 episodes are absolutely amazing, but after 19 it grows worse each episode with only brief flashes of brilliance.

Modern mecha shows aren't generic, but they tend to be badly flawed. Mitsuo Fukuda and Seiji Mizushima never had even a fraction of the freedom Takahashi and Tomino enjoyed at their peak. More non-creative people attempt to micromanage TV mecha shows than ever before, always to the show's detriment.

That is how we end up in the shameful situation where it's 2010 and nobody's yet made a better mecha show than VOTOMS. It's not that creative people are any less brilliant. It's that no budgetary bean-counter or marketing asshole is willing to permit substantial originality anymore.

Well, I can't argue with that. The money people are allowed far too much creative input. But when you say it like that, there's really no chance of another series like that surfacing again. Even a Geass series would suffer due to how popular it eventually becomes.

 

[FlashNeko]

I've heard VOTOMS is excellent, but every time someone brings it up its in tangent with that pesky term "realism", which stomps out sparks of interest I have.

Let me put it this way....

The first story arc of VOTOMS takes place on a planet where it rains acid that looks like blood, the main character's best friends are a bunch of wacky comic relief junk dealers/thieves and his girlfriend is a genetically altered super soldier who needs to take showers in blue energy.

VOTOMS is only "realistic" in the sense of how the setting treats the titular mecha as disposable war machines instead of being central to the plot.

Incidentally...I once heard someone argue that Macross was super robot. I really can't decide if I should laugh my arse off at that, or whether its actually somewhat true, since one of the principle tenets (supposedly) is a lack of alien beings.

There's plenty of Real Robot series with aliens. Really, the traditional way that Real and Super are separated are by how the robots are utilized in the world setting and their power levels to the other mecha around them.

Though Gundam has always blurred these lines to a degree (you could make a good argument that the original Gundam is more a Super Robot than a Real), and this especially holds true in modern times when you have ridiculously overpowered stuff like 00 Gundam and Strike Freedom.

And also, Macross Frontier. That was a great modern mecha too. At the very least, I didn't hate it like I did Seven....Oh god, did I hate Seven...

Macross Frontier is actually kinda soulless compared to both the original and Macross 7, IMO. The director has gone on record saying that the only reason he made the show was to troll the mecha fandom with certain plot points.

 

[Sage Shinigami]

There's plenty of Real Robot series with aliens. Really, the traditional way that Real and Super are separated are by how the robots are utilized in the world setting and their power levels to the other mecha around them.

Though Gundam has always blurred these lines to a degree (you could make a good argument that the original Gundam is more a Super Robot than a Real), and this especially holds true in modern times when you have ridiculously overpowered stuff like 00 Gundam and Strike Freedom.

Yeah, how the robots are used is important, but power levels don't really have that much to do with it. I stress this because, anytime someone fires a laser more than twice in a mecha anime, some "hardcore" real robot fan pops up and tells everyone this isn't really a real robot series due to beam spam. >_<

Edit: And, no, you can't. The original Gundam invented the concept OF Real Robot, regardless of what Zeta would go on to do and regardless of how far other series took the idea later on.

Macross Frontier is actually kinda soulless compared to both the original and Macross 7, IMO. The director has gone on record saying that the only reason he made the show was to troll the mecha fandom with certain plot points.

Setting aside you calling Macross Frontier soulless for...just a second...(ohhh...so much to say on this subject)...where did the director say, anything like that?

 

[garfield15]

What sets Gundam apart from other mecha franchises is that there's a deliberately tragic, wistful air about it. This is not a world where a bright-eyed young man and his giant robot friend will make a difference; it's too much like ours.

Tell that to Setsuna in the final episodes.

(LOL I KAN TRANS-AM BURST AND REVIVE PEOPLE NAO! though to be fair, they had alluded that way earlier in the series)

Man, you guys are taking this franchise way too seriously :sweat: Just write a "Gundam for Dummies" book, why don't ya?

It's really no different from how we take Kamen Rider or Ultraman or Godzilla franchises too seriously.

Heck, I guarantee you if I make a "Best Digimon series thread" you will probably get like twice the amount of responses in it.

In my opinion Gundam Seed Destiny was way better than Gundam Seed.

....

Were...were we watching the same show?

 

[FlashNeko]

Edit: And, no, you can't. The original Gundam invented the concept OF Real Robot, regardless of what Zeta would go on to do and regardless of how far other series took the idea later on.

Gundam unarguably has a lot of elements that would later be used to flesh out the Real Robot sub-genre. However, you can still point to how the Gundam itself is used over the course of the original TV series that isn't really all that different from the various Super Robots that were on TV around the same time.

The movie trilogy removed a lot of these elements (the MOTW style Mobile Armors, the G-Armor and some of Gundam's more Super Robot-like action sequences) but they still do exist. So if someone wanted to make a case like this, they would not exactly be without evidence.

Setting aside you calling Macross Frontier soulless for...just a second...(ohhh...so much to say on this subject)...where did the director say, anything like that?

All I could see when I tried to watch Frontier was how everything just seemed ripped off from the original Macross and Macross 7 but without anything that really had the impact of the originals or gave its own spin on it. The only thing it really seemed to bring to the table on its own was an improvement in CGI mecha being integrated with the cell animation.

And from what I've heard from reliable sources is that, in an interview shortly after the last episode, Kawamori was reported to have said that the non-ending and the "Pineapple Jello" incident were meant to be rips on the fans who were posting online about how the series should go.

Given Kawamori's rather... eccentric displays in anime in the last few years, I'd believe it.

 

[FlashNeko]

Tell that to Setsuna in the final episodes.

(LOL I KAN TRANS-AM BURST AND REVIVE PEOPLE NAO! though to be fair, they had alluded that way earlier in the series)

This is part of the reason why 00 tends to not be considered a good Gundam show.

 

[garfield15]

I know that any Gundam fan worth his salt has seen this but, it's appropiate for the thread.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc4TH0w91bM[/ame]

And I just want to say how much I appreciate that Strike Freedom is not in this at all.

(I wonder what it would be like if we got a full OVA of this....?)

 

[Sage Shinigami]

Gundam unarguably has a lot of elements that would later be used to flesh out the Real Robot sub-genre. However, you can still point to how the Gundam itself is used over the course of the original TV series that isn't really all that different from the various Super Robots that were on TV around the same time.

The movie trilogy removed a lot of these elements (the MOTW style Mobile Armors, the G-Armor and some of Gundam's more Super Robot-like action sequences) but they still do exist. So if someone wanted to make a case like this, they would not exactly be without evidence.

Eh, they had to hook in the people somehow, and even then it was kind of a failure--Gundam was so different from what'd been done before people initially hated it and that's why it only ran 43 episodes.

All I could see when I tried to watch Frontier was how everything just seemed ripped off from the original Macross and Macross 7 but without anything that really had the impact of the originals or gave its own spin on it. The only thing it really seemed to bring to the table on its own was an improvement in CGI mecha being integrated with the cell animation.

...Kay. I mean, I could rattle off things that are completely different from the original Macross (starting with...since when did Minmei have a rival like Ranka, which is a focal point of this story's plot), but you probably "remember them differently", so somehow those keystrokes would go to waste.

That said, Macross Frontier was the best mecha anime to come out of 07-08, over and above Gundam 00 and Code Geass. (No idea about Kurogane Linebarrels though. Never got to see it.)

And from what I've heard from reliable sources is that, in an interview shortly after the last episode, Kawamori was reported to have said that the non-ending and the "Pineapple Jello" incident were meant to be rips on the fans who were posting online about how the series should go.

Given Kawamori's rather... eccentric displays in anime in the last few years, I'd believe it.

LOL, that's entirely different from saying the genesis of the series was the director wanting to **** with an existence fanbase.

BTW..."reliable sources"? Yeah, concerning Macross Frontier, a great deal of those are kinda worthless. Not in relation to what you're saying, which could be true, but...just in general. If isn't a direct interview, don't trust it. I did some searching on the subject in question and there's a lot of false information out there. Stuff like Sheryl being meant to be a minor character and so on.