Painted_Outlaw
The new Tendou Souji
Oh god.. I forgot about that CM.
Calm yourself, no need to get angry over something like this.
[Anime] is gundam a kids show?
- Thread starter Kamen rider sol
- Start date
Oh god.. I forgot about that CM.
Calm yourself, no need to get angry over something like this.
Kamen rider sol
Member
wel as one guy said
gundam targets 14+ so its more of a teen show and not a kid show.
gundam targets 14+ so its more of a teen show and not a kid show.
Hurricane Polymar
Member
The original Gundam tv series (1979) and Zeta Gundam (1985) didn't look all that kiddy to me. Lots of people died in them, especially Zeta. Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ (1986) was a lot more comedic and has a very tongue-in-cheek opening theme, "Anime Ja Nai."
Lynxara
Nice post!!
Okay. The first thing to understand about the Gundam franchise is that it's multi-tiered. That is, the target audience for various parts in various mediums will vary. Right now I'm just going to talk about the animated productions, as the various sidestory manga and video games are their own kettle of fish entirely.
Gundam has also, historically, shifted its target audience several times. As a result, it's really hard to say there's one single audience all of Gundam is for. There are years at a time where Bandai doesn't seem to know who it's for. All that can be said is that different parts of the franchise are meant for various groups. Let's walk through Gundam history to see how things change over time:
Gundam 79: The stated target audience was children, the same as every other Super Robot show. However, kids overwhelmingly chose to tune into Battle Fever J, which was on in a competing time slot. The people who did tune into Gundam were teenagers and twenty-somethings, the first generation of "anime maniacs" who'd be called otaku in later years. Later waves of Gundam merchandise, like the model kits, novels, and film adaptations, were meant for this audience. As Gundam fans tuned into the series, reruns began to enjoy higher ratings as general audiences got curious about this Gundam thing. Gundam-obsessed fans were extremely faithful and helped make the property a success despite its cancellation. Gundam otaku are typically called Gunota, and I'll be returning to that term a lot.
Zeta Gundam: This is probably the only Gundam TV series made specifically with Gunota, teenage and early twenty-something fans, primarily in mind. Sunrise also hopes to make it a big mainstream hit and have an ancillary line of children's merchandise. The real impetus for the show, though, was to feed Bandai's model kit lines with new designs. Zeta Gundam at the time was viewed as something of a flop. Mainstream audiences didn't see much appeal in the show, and not all of the original Gunota found it to their liking, either. But a lot of kids tuned in due to the lines of kids' merch, and especially for older kids who could get into the model releases, Zeta made a huge impact. Ten years later, its fans would be no less devoted than the original Gunota. But while we're in 1988, Sunrise took all the kids who tuned in for Zeta as cause to make...
ZZ Gundam: At this point, Sunrise begins marketing Gundam more heavily toward children, and putting less effort into courting the Gunota. To help feed the older fans, a movie project, Char's Counterattack, was in the works. While Gunota in large part detested ZZ Gundam, kids loved its flashy animation and colorful cast even more than the Zeta characters. The mecha designs also went straight for kid appeal, with chunkier designs festooned with guns, and model kits announcing totally absurd power levels. The next four TV shows after ZZ will also be meant for children first, Gunota second, and for the most part will follow ZZ's ethos of cartoonier characters and ridiculously high power levels. There'll be some bumps on the road, though.
Char's Counterattack: A film meant largely for fans of the original Mobile Suit Gundam, who largely felt disappointed by Zeta and ZZ's focus upon other characters. CCA put the focus squarely back on Amuro and Char, and old fan-favorite plotlines. It had a certain amount of mainstream success due to the animation quality, and a lot of kids showed up because side-projects like the SD Gundam line and ZZ Gundam were making Gundam into a trendy children's brand.
Gundam F91: At this point, Sunrise tries to capitalize on ZZ's success while answering fan complaints about ZZ "not being Gundam" with a TV show outside the Gundam franchise called Dragonar. After the success of CCA and not really wanting to give Tomino the full budget for a TV series again after Zeta's under-performance, Tomino's latest TV pitch was cut down into the Gundam F91 film. Had the film been more successful, a TV series might've materialized, but F91 wasn't any sort of huge hit. More of a modest success, you might say. Neither Gunota nor kids found it very appealing. So Sunrise re-evaluated their strategies for release, and split the franchise again.
At this point we're in the 90s and Bandai has just purchased Sunrise. Tomino grudgingly goes to work on Victory Gundam, a series Bandai wants made to be the flagship of a new merchandise line. Tomino is told to make the show for children, leading to some fanciful designs (like giant motorcycles and robots in hamster wheels) and the show's 11-year-old protagonist. Tomino, ever-perverse, fulfills the letter of Bandai's demands while also making perhaps his grimmest, most depressing Gundam series. So in theory, Victory is a kids' show, but actually kids didn't really buy into it as much as Bandai wanted. Most of Victory's fans now are folks in the typical Gunota age range who enjoy the dichotomous elements of the work.
At the same time, the Gundam OVA projects begin: Gundam 0080, Gundam 0083, and eventually The 08th MS Team. The OVAs were all aimed squarely both at Gunota and broader otaku audiences. Each OVA series was built around the gimmick of a then-major anime creator, usually someone already famous in their own right, doing a Gundam sidestory in the UC universe. Each release was supported with a high-quality model kit lined aimed squarely at Gunota. These series were all huge hits at the time, some of them easily overshadowing the TV shows being made during this period. Unfortunately, their success contributed toward a view during the end of the 90s that Gundam was an "aging" brand meant for older people, ready to have its place usurped by newcomers like Evangelion.
Meanwhile, on TV screens, Bandai decides to force Gundam to abandon the UC continuity and its emphasis on sci-fi and politics, and begin the alt Gundams: G, Wing, and X. The various alt Gundams each used a wildly different setting and aesthetic, but they were all meant to help get children interested in Gundam. (With Wing, tons of fujoshi also turned in, making a major crossover success with the otaku demographic.) The alts carry forward a lot of the "kid appeal" traits of ZZ Gundam: more colorful characters, vastly inflated power levels, and a bigger emphasis on flashy battles in every episode. These shows do well,even "black sheep" Gundam X, but the kids' animation block they aired in is pulled by the network before X finishes its run. X is moved into a morning slot, but immediately languishes and dies due to low ratings there. While the G and Wing model kit lines are popular, Gunota turn their noses up at the X line. For the first time in two decades, it's starting to look like the Gundam franchise might be losing steam.
Turn-A Gundam: To celebrate Gundam's 20th anniversary, Sunrise finally let Gundam creator Tomino just make a TV show he wanted to make. The result was a show that Gunota adored, otaku mocked, and that children just found incomprehensible. Turn-A Gundam was produced on a much higher budget than usual, with designs by Syd Mead. Despite this, Tomino went out of his way to make sure that Turn-A was as unfriendly to merchandising as possible, while celebrating what he still liked about Gundam and Gundam fans. Despite the underperformance, Sunrise doggedly stuck to promoting Turn-A. By this point, the 90s OVA projects are mostly done. It's almost like Sunrise wants to do one last thing for the Gunota before...
Gundam SEED: ... the studio abandons them four years later. Gundam SEED marks the beginning of the "kids and bubblegum pop" era of Gundam. The show was squarely aimed at elementary and middle school students despite containing violence and themes that hearkened back to shows like Zeta Gundam. The presentation was unquestionably youthful, with an emphasis on beautiful people having extreme emotions, absurdly flashy battles, and plotting that was so forthrightly simple-minded it was often complete nonsense. Nobody cared about this last part. Gundam SEED became an outrageously huge hit, overshadowing the success of everything except the original. Gunota frown on the show's vapidity, and Turn-A not being allowed to end Gundam, but it's not until the rushed, poorly-planned Gundam SEED Destiny sequel that UC Gunota turn on the burgeoning SEED franchise. It's too late to matter, though. With its flood of merchandise and gobs of sidestories (including animated ones), SEED managed to be popular enough to create its own generation of Gunota, who have really come into their own in the past few years.
Gundam 00: An attempt to duplicate the massive mainstream success of Gundam SEED, 00 had difficulty connecting with children and was mainly followed by the otaku demographic (likely following the director, Seiji Mizushima). Make no mistake, Gundam 00 was a top anime and extremely successful by normal standards. Unfortunately, it was succeeding SEED, which was an order of magnitude more successful, and forced to compete with the sudden, unexpected success of Code Geass (which really was popular enough to hit the mainstream). Gundam 00 gets a film to wrap up its storyline after its original production, split into two "seasons," ends. But overall, 00 was trapped in SEED's shadow, looking less successful simply because it couldn't inspire the same fannish devotion to sidestories and MSV.
At this point, Sunrise splits the franchise again, but this time with dire consequences. To cater to the older fans who have doggedly stayed with the brand, Sunrise revives the UC timeline and issues an animated version of the popular Gundam Unicorn light novel sidestory. The UC project is aimed not just at older fans, but at extremely old fans-- people who have been with Gundam since the very beginning. Its release schedule is painfully slow, but UC's demographic has the patience for it. The concepts and characters go on to be wildly popular. A warm-up for Unicorn, compilation movies based on Zeta Gundam, also does well despite featuring an ungainly mix of new animation and old animation. The entirety of Unicorn looks like the new animation from the Zeta films. Unicorn is so successful it manages to float the entire Gundam line despite the abject failure of...
Gundam AGE: This was an attempt to make a "main" Gundam series entry that was targeted at kids more aggressively than any prior TV show. At the time, Level-5 and Akihiro Hino enjoyed great success with the Danball Senki franchise, a line of model kits, video games, and TV shows essentially based on Hino's nostalgia for collecting the model kits that accompanied the original Gundam series. Danball Senki had grown to such absurdly high levels of popularity that its kits were outselling Gundam's own kits. It's not clear who approached who, but eventually Sunrise cuts a deal for Level-5 to collaborate on a Gundam line that would also include a Level-5 game and new, kid-friendly kits. Gundam AGE goes on to be a horrifying disaster. Ratings are miserable, with virtually no children tuning in and virtually none of the first waves of AGE kits selling at full price. The video game, which Hino promised would sell 1 million units, doesn't crack 50,000 units. Mainstream anime fans and Gunota of all stripes band together to spew venom at the show, which is shoddily-made and poorly-written to an extreme never seen before in the franchise.
And that brings us up to now, where Gundam is having another of its periodic identity crises. Will it be a youth franchise chasing kids, or an otaku franchise that panders to older Gunota? Or will it pander to the younger Gundam SEED-inspired Gunota with stuff like SEED HD and Gundam SEED Destiny HD? Right now, Sunrise is effectively trying to do all three of things things. In addition to SEED's HD remasters and accompanying kit lines, Sunrise is also focusing on courting kids with Gundam Build Fighters, and still serving the older fans with the Unicorn project. The next confirmed Gundam project will be an adaptation of Gundam co-creator Yasuhiko Yasunori's Gundam The Origin manga. Whether this will be presented as another bid for mainstream success, or handled more as a prestige project for devoted Gunota and otaku, remains to be seen. There's also rumors of a Gundam SEED movie on the horizon after the HD remasters are complete. Will Gundam, so long split between kids and older fans, eventually get split three ways? And if so, can the brand survive it? Only time will tell.
Gundam has also, historically, shifted its target audience several times. As a result, it's really hard to say there's one single audience all of Gundam is for. There are years at a time where Bandai doesn't seem to know who it's for. All that can be said is that different parts of the franchise are meant for various groups. Let's walk through Gundam history to see how things change over time:
Gundam 79: The stated target audience was children, the same as every other Super Robot show. However, kids overwhelmingly chose to tune into Battle Fever J, which was on in a competing time slot. The people who did tune into Gundam were teenagers and twenty-somethings, the first generation of "anime maniacs" who'd be called otaku in later years. Later waves of Gundam merchandise, like the model kits, novels, and film adaptations, were meant for this audience. As Gundam fans tuned into the series, reruns began to enjoy higher ratings as general audiences got curious about this Gundam thing. Gundam-obsessed fans were extremely faithful and helped make the property a success despite its cancellation. Gundam otaku are typically called Gunota, and I'll be returning to that term a lot.
Zeta Gundam: This is probably the only Gundam TV series made specifically with Gunota, teenage and early twenty-something fans, primarily in mind. Sunrise also hopes to make it a big mainstream hit and have an ancillary line of children's merchandise. The real impetus for the show, though, was to feed Bandai's model kit lines with new designs. Zeta Gundam at the time was viewed as something of a flop. Mainstream audiences didn't see much appeal in the show, and not all of the original Gunota found it to their liking, either. But a lot of kids tuned in due to the lines of kids' merch, and especially for older kids who could get into the model releases, Zeta made a huge impact. Ten years later, its fans would be no less devoted than the original Gunota. But while we're in 1988, Sunrise took all the kids who tuned in for Zeta as cause to make...
ZZ Gundam: At this point, Sunrise begins marketing Gundam more heavily toward children, and putting less effort into courting the Gunota. To help feed the older fans, a movie project, Char's Counterattack, was in the works. While Gunota in large part detested ZZ Gundam, kids loved its flashy animation and colorful cast even more than the Zeta characters. The mecha designs also went straight for kid appeal, with chunkier designs festooned with guns, and model kits announcing totally absurd power levels. The next four TV shows after ZZ will also be meant for children first, Gunota second, and for the most part will follow ZZ's ethos of cartoonier characters and ridiculously high power levels. There'll be some bumps on the road, though.
Char's Counterattack: A film meant largely for fans of the original Mobile Suit Gundam, who largely felt disappointed by Zeta and ZZ's focus upon other characters. CCA put the focus squarely back on Amuro and Char, and old fan-favorite plotlines. It had a certain amount of mainstream success due to the animation quality, and a lot of kids showed up because side-projects like the SD Gundam line and ZZ Gundam were making Gundam into a trendy children's brand.
Gundam F91: At this point, Sunrise tries to capitalize on ZZ's success while answering fan complaints about ZZ "not being Gundam" with a TV show outside the Gundam franchise called Dragonar. After the success of CCA and not really wanting to give Tomino the full budget for a TV series again after Zeta's under-performance, Tomino's latest TV pitch was cut down into the Gundam F91 film. Had the film been more successful, a TV series might've materialized, but F91 wasn't any sort of huge hit. More of a modest success, you might say. Neither Gunota nor kids found it very appealing. So Sunrise re-evaluated their strategies for release, and split the franchise again.
At this point we're in the 90s and Bandai has just purchased Sunrise. Tomino grudgingly goes to work on Victory Gundam, a series Bandai wants made to be the flagship of a new merchandise line. Tomino is told to make the show for children, leading to some fanciful designs (like giant motorcycles and robots in hamster wheels) and the show's 11-year-old protagonist. Tomino, ever-perverse, fulfills the letter of Bandai's demands while also making perhaps his grimmest, most depressing Gundam series. So in theory, Victory is a kids' show, but actually kids didn't really buy into it as much as Bandai wanted. Most of Victory's fans now are folks in the typical Gunota age range who enjoy the dichotomous elements of the work.
At the same time, the Gundam OVA projects begin: Gundam 0080, Gundam 0083, and eventually The 08th MS Team. The OVAs were all aimed squarely both at Gunota and broader otaku audiences. Each OVA series was built around the gimmick of a then-major anime creator, usually someone already famous in their own right, doing a Gundam sidestory in the UC universe. Each release was supported with a high-quality model kit lined aimed squarely at Gunota. These series were all huge hits at the time, some of them easily overshadowing the TV shows being made during this period. Unfortunately, their success contributed toward a view during the end of the 90s that Gundam was an "aging" brand meant for older people, ready to have its place usurped by newcomers like Evangelion.
Meanwhile, on TV screens, Bandai decides to force Gundam to abandon the UC continuity and its emphasis on sci-fi and politics, and begin the alt Gundams: G, Wing, and X. The various alt Gundams each used a wildly different setting and aesthetic, but they were all meant to help get children interested in Gundam. (With Wing, tons of fujoshi also turned in, making a major crossover success with the otaku demographic.) The alts carry forward a lot of the "kid appeal" traits of ZZ Gundam: more colorful characters, vastly inflated power levels, and a bigger emphasis on flashy battles in every episode. These shows do well,even "black sheep" Gundam X, but the kids' animation block they aired in is pulled by the network before X finishes its run. X is moved into a morning slot, but immediately languishes and dies due to low ratings there. While the G and Wing model kit lines are popular, Gunota turn their noses up at the X line. For the first time in two decades, it's starting to look like the Gundam franchise might be losing steam.
Turn-A Gundam: To celebrate Gundam's 20th anniversary, Sunrise finally let Gundam creator Tomino just make a TV show he wanted to make. The result was a show that Gunota adored, otaku mocked, and that children just found incomprehensible. Turn-A Gundam was produced on a much higher budget than usual, with designs by Syd Mead. Despite this, Tomino went out of his way to make sure that Turn-A was as unfriendly to merchandising as possible, while celebrating what he still liked about Gundam and Gundam fans. Despite the underperformance, Sunrise doggedly stuck to promoting Turn-A. By this point, the 90s OVA projects are mostly done. It's almost like Sunrise wants to do one last thing for the Gunota before...
Gundam SEED: ... the studio abandons them four years later. Gundam SEED marks the beginning of the "kids and bubblegum pop" era of Gundam. The show was squarely aimed at elementary and middle school students despite containing violence and themes that hearkened back to shows like Zeta Gundam. The presentation was unquestionably youthful, with an emphasis on beautiful people having extreme emotions, absurdly flashy battles, and plotting that was so forthrightly simple-minded it was often complete nonsense. Nobody cared about this last part. Gundam SEED became an outrageously huge hit, overshadowing the success of everything except the original. Gunota frown on the show's vapidity, and Turn-A not being allowed to end Gundam, but it's not until the rushed, poorly-planned Gundam SEED Destiny sequel that UC Gunota turn on the burgeoning SEED franchise. It's too late to matter, though. With its flood of merchandise and gobs of sidestories (including animated ones), SEED managed to be popular enough to create its own generation of Gunota, who have really come into their own in the past few years.
Gundam 00: An attempt to duplicate the massive mainstream success of Gundam SEED, 00 had difficulty connecting with children and was mainly followed by the otaku demographic (likely following the director, Seiji Mizushima). Make no mistake, Gundam 00 was a top anime and extremely successful by normal standards. Unfortunately, it was succeeding SEED, which was an order of magnitude more successful, and forced to compete with the sudden, unexpected success of Code Geass (which really was popular enough to hit the mainstream). Gundam 00 gets a film to wrap up its storyline after its original production, split into two "seasons," ends. But overall, 00 was trapped in SEED's shadow, looking less successful simply because it couldn't inspire the same fannish devotion to sidestories and MSV.
At this point, Sunrise splits the franchise again, but this time with dire consequences. To cater to the older fans who have doggedly stayed with the brand, Sunrise revives the UC timeline and issues an animated version of the popular Gundam Unicorn light novel sidestory. The UC project is aimed not just at older fans, but at extremely old fans-- people who have been with Gundam since the very beginning. Its release schedule is painfully slow, but UC's demographic has the patience for it. The concepts and characters go on to be wildly popular. A warm-up for Unicorn, compilation movies based on Zeta Gundam, also does well despite featuring an ungainly mix of new animation and old animation. The entirety of Unicorn looks like the new animation from the Zeta films. Unicorn is so successful it manages to float the entire Gundam line despite the abject failure of...
Gundam AGE: This was an attempt to make a "main" Gundam series entry that was targeted at kids more aggressively than any prior TV show. At the time, Level-5 and Akihiro Hino enjoyed great success with the Danball Senki franchise, a line of model kits, video games, and TV shows essentially based on Hino's nostalgia for collecting the model kits that accompanied the original Gundam series. Danball Senki had grown to such absurdly high levels of popularity that its kits were outselling Gundam's own kits. It's not clear who approached who, but eventually Sunrise cuts a deal for Level-5 to collaborate on a Gundam line that would also include a Level-5 game and new, kid-friendly kits. Gundam AGE goes on to be a horrifying disaster. Ratings are miserable, with virtually no children tuning in and virtually none of the first waves of AGE kits selling at full price. The video game, which Hino promised would sell 1 million units, doesn't crack 50,000 units. Mainstream anime fans and Gunota of all stripes band together to spew venom at the show, which is shoddily-made and poorly-written to an extreme never seen before in the franchise.
And that brings us up to now, where Gundam is having another of its periodic identity crises. Will it be a youth franchise chasing kids, or an otaku franchise that panders to older Gunota? Or will it pander to the younger Gundam SEED-inspired Gunota with stuff like SEED HD and Gundam SEED Destiny HD? Right now, Sunrise is effectively trying to do all three of things things. In addition to SEED's HD remasters and accompanying kit lines, Sunrise is also focusing on courting kids with Gundam Build Fighters, and still serving the older fans with the Unicorn project. The next confirmed Gundam project will be an adaptation of Gundam co-creator Yasuhiko Yasunori's Gundam The Origin manga. Whether this will be presented as another bid for mainstream success, or handled more as a prestige project for devoted Gunota and otaku, remains to be seen. There's also rumors of a Gundam SEED movie on the horizon after the HD remasters are complete. Will Gundam, so long split between kids and older fans, eventually get split three ways? And if so, can the brand survive it? Only time will tell.
K
Kamen Rider IXA
Guest
That's nice, but why can't they animate Crossbone and Astrey?
Lynxara
Nice post!!
Man, don't quote my whole crazy text wall just to one-line!
Astray was animated. It received two animated shorts, which I think got extended versions later. This was mostly to hype up the Astray kits and make sure the characters had "anime-style" designs, a "theme song," and voice actors who could be used in Gundam games and SRW. I don't expect Sunrise to ever do more with the idea of animating Astray. From the start, Astray was meant to be a manga companion to Gundam SEED that detailed the adventures of the various MSV pilots. Animating a project that just to shill existing MSV designs that have already sold pretty well doesn't make any business sense.
Crossbone's case is less straightforward. The original manga came out in the late 90s, so if it was going to be animated, no later than the early 2000s was the time for it to happen. This is when Crossbone starts showing up in SRW and Gundam games. It seems to me that Sunrise could've chosen to animate it, but consciously decided not do it for whatever reason, and now the moment has passed. I wonder if, at the time, Sunrise just didn't like the idea of having any animated projects that didn't fall under the SEED brand. I would also wonder if Sunrise and Bandai didn't want to invest a ton of money into animating what is, ultimately, the sequel to a movie that just didn't do very well. If terms of catering to the UC Gunota, which is how a Crossbone project would be perceived, projects like the Zeta Trilogy and Unicorn probably looked like safer bets.
One final thing I'd say is that, generally, Sunrise is really shy about animating Gundam stories that have already been told in other mediums. Manga sidestories in particular tend not to stand much chance of being animated, which is why units from really popular manga like Sentinel and Blue Destiny are reduced to popping up as cameos in Build Fighters. Sunrise seems to prefer to develop original concepts and designs for animated works, perhaps thinking doing so makes more business sense. There are only a handful of exceptions to this policy, and they're all extremely recent.
Astray was animated. It received two animated shorts, which I think got extended versions later. This was mostly to hype up the Astray kits and make sure the characters had "anime-style" designs, a "theme song," and voice actors who could be used in Gundam games and SRW. I don't expect Sunrise to ever do more with the idea of animating Astray. From the start, Astray was meant to be a manga companion to Gundam SEED that detailed the adventures of the various MSV pilots. Animating a project that just to shill existing MSV designs that have already sold pretty well doesn't make any business sense.
Crossbone's case is less straightforward. The original manga came out in the late 90s, so if it was going to be animated, no later than the early 2000s was the time for it to happen. This is when Crossbone starts showing up in SRW and Gundam games. It seems to me that Sunrise could've chosen to animate it, but consciously decided not do it for whatever reason, and now the moment has passed. I wonder if, at the time, Sunrise just didn't like the idea of having any animated projects that didn't fall under the SEED brand. I would also wonder if Sunrise and Bandai didn't want to invest a ton of money into animating what is, ultimately, the sequel to a movie that just didn't do very well. If terms of catering to the UC Gunota, which is how a Crossbone project would be perceived, projects like the Zeta Trilogy and Unicorn probably looked like safer bets.
One final thing I'd say is that, generally, Sunrise is really shy about animating Gundam stories that have already been told in other mediums. Manga sidestories in particular tend not to stand much chance of being animated, which is why units from really popular manga like Sentinel and Blue Destiny are reduced to popping up as cameos in Build Fighters. Sunrise seems to prefer to develop original concepts and designs for animated works, perhaps thinking doing so makes more business sense. There are only a handful of exceptions to this policy, and they're all extremely recent.
Lynxara
Nice post!!
I'm not sure how Wing did with kids in Japan. It certainly wasn't a failure, but I couldn't say if it was a hit or just did middling well. The main thing I know about Wing is that was really, really popular with otaku and especially with fujoshi.
It also has a weird ratings curve-- the early episodes have miserable numbers, and they slowly climb as the series moves toward its end. Maybe that's part of why the plot didn't make a whole lot of sense? About three times as many people saw the end of Gundam Wing than saw the beginning. In cases like that, you often have early plot threads getting quietly abandoned in favor of whatever's getting popular.
It also has a weird ratings curve-- the early episodes have miserable numbers, and they slowly climb as the series moves toward its end. Maybe that's part of why the plot didn't make a whole lot of sense? About three times as many people saw the end of Gundam Wing than saw the beginning. In cases like that, you often have early plot threads getting quietly abandoned in favor of whatever's getting popular.
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