Giant Gundam Thread (yes, it's redundant)

[Hercus3528]

:laugh:

for 00 s2, I can't remember most of it but I did finish it and its not bad at all...its totally worth the watch

 

[Lynxara]

00 is a production that made me pretty angry because what made it onto TV was so obviously, painfully dumbed down by external forces (the TV producers, the Gundam Group, Bandai, take your pick). Sure, SEED was pretty stupid? But that production team clearly just wanted to make a dumb, affable show.

00 at some point in its lifespan was clearly going to be Foundation with giant robots. That's a fantastic idea for updating the basic Gundam paradigm, but at some later point some asshole clearly told the 00 team to just recycle popular ideas from Zeta and SEED, damn the consequences.

So 00 as produced is so stupid that it really is stuck in the same league as a brainless series like Gundam Wing, when I cannot believe for a second that any principal 00 creator wanted to be responsible for that. The guys who made 00 wanted to make a good, challenging Gundam series and goddamn weren't allowed.

The most galling thing about this is that the watering-down was completely to 00's detriment. Kira Yamato was more popular than basically all of the 00 characters throughout 00's run on the Gundam Ace polls and I believe also the Newtype polls. Setsuna never even managed to be more popular than Tieria!

Instead of letting Mizushima's team make an awesome crazy gritty series with long-term impact, we've got a show so bland that people are already forgetting what happened in it! A show that wrapped up less than two years ago was somehow rendered just that forgettable. Unbelievable.

 

[Midori Ken]

At this point, I'm just waiting for the next full Gundam series and hoping it's good, but there is no way I can influence it.

If I pay for it, they'll make more ****, if I don't shell out money, they'll just think nobody is interested in the franchise anymore...this is ever so vexing...

 

[garfield15]

Well, you can always just watch Unicorn.

 

[Painted_Outlaw]

And I ended up waiting so long that even Sci-Fi finished airing 00 before I even thought about it again.

You really shouldn't have used Sci-fi's airing of season 2 to watch it, the number of time cuts was ridiculous. If anything, Shinsen's subs would've sufficed. :sweat:

 

[Sage Shinigami]

00 is a production that made me pretty angry because what made it onto TV was so obviously, painfully dumbed down by external forces (the TV producers, the Gundam Group, Bandai, take your pick). Sure, SEED was pretty stupid? But that production team clearly just wanted to make a dumb, affable show.

00 at some point in its lifespan was clearly going to be Foundation with giant robots. That's a fantastic idea for updating the basic Gundam paradigm, but at some later point some asshole clearly told the 00 team to just recycle popular ideas from Zeta and SEED, damn the consequences.

So 00 as produced is so stupid that it really is stuck in the same league as a brainless series like Gundam Wing, when I cannot believe for a second that any principal 00 creator wanted to be responsible for that. The guys who made 00 wanted to make a good, challenging Gundam series and goddamn weren't allowed.

The most galling thing about this is that the watering-down was completely to 00's detriment. Kira Yamato was more popular than basically all of the 00 characters throughout 00's run on the Gundam Ace polls and I believe also the Newtype polls. Setsuna never even managed to be more popular than Tieria!

Instead of letting Mizushima's team make an awesome crazy gritty series with long-term impact, we've got a show so bland that people are already forgetting what happened in it! A show that wrapped up less than two years ago was somehow rendered just that forgettable. Unbelievable.

This pre-supposes that said "crazy gritty" series would have long-term impact. Keep in mind the current benchmark for good mecha anime is Code Geass, which went off the rails after episode 19 and was not really as good as 00 S1 anyway.

What I'm saying is, most people have terrible taste, and just want to see exaggerated characters that are awful people do awful things to other people who are awful for different reasons.

(Wait...am I talking about Death Note now?)

Well, you can always just watch Unicorn.

Imagine that. A quality production from the Gundam universe you could actually enjoy, out again?

You really shouldn't have used Sci-fi's airing of season 2 to watch it, the number of time cuts was ridiculous. If anything, Shinsen's subs would've sufficed. :sweat:

Reading is fundamental....seriously, go back and read the post.

 

[Dark Kabuto]

Gundam Unicorn was actually quite good from what I saw of it. I'm really looking foreword to the 2nd part. November can't come soon enough.

 

[Lynxara]

Well, you can always just watch Unicorn.

Yes I can! Twice a year for the next three years. :laugh:

I'm just disappointed when a show that could've been good isn't. I get angry about GSD the same way. Had that show been produced without interference it would've been The Wave as a mecha anime and that's a brilliant concept for a Gundam series, especially one cast from the Zeta mold.

Keep in mind the current benchmark for good mecha anime is Code Geass, which went off the rails after episode 19 and was not really as good as 00 S1 anyway.

I dunno. Code Geass before the episode 19 shark-jump is some brilliant deconstruction of Sunrise's Gundam formula from a top-notch director. The show really begins to falls apart when it starts acting like the audience should like Lelouch, rather than treating him like a charismatic monster hiding beneath a veneer of nobility and self-righteousness.

Geass R2 is largely an embarrassment, though I'm hard-pressed to say whether it's worse than 00 S2. Geass R2 at least stuck to what was clearly the originally intended ending of the Geass franchise, despite what was probably enormous internal pressure to do a wussier and more commercial ending. 00 S2's ending is just hilarious because the show's core rivalry ends up being so tepid.

What made audiences (especially Japanese ones) interested in Geass to begin with is that it's really just a Gundam retelling that casts a Char Aznable-type as the main character, written in the vein of Tomino's Char. Early on Lelouch is completely unidealized and acts with a wonderfully human selfishness that's clearly going to grow into his tragic flaw. You'd think this would be such an obvious way to revitalize the Gundam formula and yet nobody had done it before.

00 S1 is a bunch of good ideas that spend roughly four times as long getting anywhere as is desirable, let alone strictly necessary. I think I timed it and in the first 13 episodes of 00 S1 there's roughly 60 minutes of footage with long-term plot relevance. Almost everything else is either padding or building up plot threads that will eventually be dropped. (Or that cool but sadly irrelevant episode about Allelujah's backstory.)

In terms of mechanical animation and combat choreography, there's no contest. Geass is unquestionably the superior show. The Knightmare Frames are far better-animated and better-realized as mechanical design concepts. The 00 Gundams don't make any sense even from a soft-SF POV and in some cases were very poorly thought-out from a choreography point of view (i.e., original Dynames, who spent most fight scenes thrillingly not moving).

00 has a lot of shiny particle effects animation from the D.I.D., but turn off the (utterly bitching) 00 OST sometime and just watch the way the robots move in the combat sequences. Just the robots. You'll see a few frames of mechanical animation about once every thirty seconds and a lot of the other "movement" consists of still shots and drags.

While the original 00 designs were gorgeous (if pretty archetypal), the super-high line count clearly made moving them effectively on a TV budget far too much for the production to afford. Despite being consigned to a late-night timeslot with a far lesser budget, Geass managed to pack in a lot more true mechanical animation and some utterly brilliant combat choreography that gave its machines a real feeling of weight and mass.

 

[Sage Shinigami]

I dunno. Code Geass before the episode 19 shark-jump is some brilliant deconstruction of Sunrise's Gundam formula from a top-notch director. The show really begins to falls apart when it starts acting like the audience should like Lelouch, rather than treating him like a charismatic monster hiding beneath a veneer of nobility and self-righteousness.

So...like...from episode 2? Could be my perception, but I never saw Lelouch as the Light Yagami everyone believed he was.

Geass R2 is largely an embarrassment, though I'm hard-pressed to say whether it's worse than 00 S2. Geass R2 at least stuck to what was clearly the originally intended ending of the Geass franchise, despite what was probably enormous internal pressure to do a wussier and more commercial ending. 00 S2's ending is just hilarious because the show's core rivalry ends up being so tepid.

That what we got was close to the original ending makes me deeply sad. The entire "switch sides" thing close to the end only served to completely alienate me and make me not care about EITHER group. After Schneizel got the Black Knights to turn on Lelouch, and Suzaku the Traitor joined Lelouch, I only watched because there was only five or so episodes left. I apply the Time Sink factor at that point. Still...ugh.

What made audiences (especially Japanese ones) interested in Geass to begin with is that it's really just a Gundam retelling that casts a Char Aznable-type as the main character, written in the vein of Tomino's Char. Early on Lelouch is completely unidealized and acts with a wonderfully human selfishness that's clearly going to grow into his tragic flaw. You'd think this would be such an obvious way to revitalize the Gundam formula and yet nobody had done it before.

I never really looked at it that way. Character types never occurred to me, though I guess those work as well as anything else. To me Lelouch felt like a hero that employed villainous tactics to achieve his goals while Suzaku used heroic tactics and actions but was actually the villain. That's what made the characters interesting to me, and I watched to see whether Lelouch would tip over on either side fully and to find out if Suzaku would stop being stupid or get offed.

00 S1 is a bunch of good ideas that spend roughly four times as long getting anywhere as is desirable, let alone strictly necessary. I think I timed it and in the first 13 episodes of 00 S1 there's roughly 60 minutes of footage with long-term plot relevance. Almost everything else is either padding or building up plot threads that will eventually be dropped. (Or that cool but sadly irrelevant episode about Allelujah's backstory.)

In terms of mechanical animation and combat choreography, there's no contest. Geass is unquestionably the superior show. The Knightmare Frames are far better-animated and better-realized as mechanical design concepts. The 00 Gundams don't make any sense even from a soft-SF POV and in some cases were very poorly thought-out from a choreography point of view (i.e., original Dynames, who spent most fight scenes thrillingly not moving).

00 has a lot of shiny particle effects animation from the D.I.D., but turn off the (utterly bitching) 00 OST sometime and just watch the way the robots move in the combat sequences. Just the robots. You'll see a few frames of mechanical animation about once every thirty seconds and a lot of the other "movement" consists of still shots and drags.

While the original 00 designs were gorgeous (if pretty archetypal), the super-high line count clearly made moving them effectively on a TV budget far too much for the production to afford. Despite being consigned to a late-night timeslot with a far lesser budget, Geass managed to pack in a lot more true mechanical animation and some utterly brilliant combat choreography that gave its machines a real feeling of weight and mass.

I never really put this much thought into either show while watching. I guess that's 'cause I never think about mecha series for actual H2H so much as blowing each other up.

Either way, I'm most concerned that 00 picks up a crapload of plotpoints and never gets around to resolving the stuff from S1. (Like Geass R2 did.)

Is anyone else hoping Unicorn causes a return to Universal Century, by the way?

 

[Kamen Rider Reject]

Speaking of Gundam TV shows, does anyone else think that the Crossbone Gundam manga series would make a viable TV show?
I think at least an OVA would be possible. Or several, to cover the original 6 volume manga, and the 3 volume Steel Seven sequel, with some Skullheart tossed in with small flashbacks or something.

Click for image