#1. Mobile Suit Gundam

Cultural Phenomenom or a way to sell plastic robot model kits? You decide!

The fact Gundam became the huge franchise it has speaks a lot for that anime fandom that sprang up in the wake of the Yamato Movie. Like Yamato, the first Gundam series, Mobile Suit Gundam found it self being cancelled early, running only 43 episodes rather than the intented 52. It also speaks a lot for the guile of Bandai who received the license to make toys and models of the shows mecha after the original licensors lost faith in the show. The original toys were more like the standard kids robot toys of the time, but Bandai instead introduced their model kits of the shows robots, which proved massively popular. So popular are the models that you get the sense that the direction of a lot of series where series creator Yoshiyuki Tomino is absent from the staff, is dictated by the people designing the kits. The “All-Gundam” series seem particularly guilty of this. The philosophy appears to be “the Gundam type mecha always sell more kits, so lets make all the mecha Gundams!”.

Again this feels like a show where there’s not much to add to the already huge amounts that have been written. For me, growing up in England, it felt like Dragonball, one of those shows you can recognise, and you might have even caught some of if you had holidayed abroad, but weren’t sure you’d ever see it in English.

In fact it was probably even more familiar than Dragonball, as you could often find the model kits in ordinary model shops in the UK, stocked because of the quality of kits rather than the series they represented (you could often find Lupin III car kits too for similar reasons). Also Coldcut’s record label would use Gundam and SD Gundam artwork for sleeve and logo art. Despite the lack of the actual anime, you didn’t have to go far to find Gundams.

When I started going to anime cons you’d hear tales of the kind of price Bandai were asking for it. Mainly via R. Talsorian’s attempts to get a license to make a Gundam RPG (what ever happened to that?). Finally Bandai started to distribute anime in English and the series arrived in the form the three movie compilations of the original series and the then most recent series Gundam Wing and Gundam 08th MS Team. And since then they’ve come thick and fast, though it seems they’re holding fire a bit on the older series now as well as ∀ Gundam. Certainly it’s arguable with the launch of Gundam SEED, a show that is very much a “re-imagining” of the original series (not that the other series that take place in alternate universes weren’t, but SEED more deliberately riffs on plot structure), that there’s little need to try and sell the original and it’s sequels to today’s audience.