After its stupendous first season, Gundam 00 has a lot to live up to in its back half, and we find it more than rises to the challenge with an incredibly smart, exciting, affecting, and entertaining second season, bringing the TV portion of this Gundam experience to a rousing close. Set 4 years after the first season, in a world that increasingly resembles some of Gundam’s most recognizable archetypes, Gundam 00 Season 2 reconfigures and interrogates some of the franchise’s longest-running ideas for the 21st century, not just applying issues of 21st-century geopolitics to its own fiction, but asking where Gundam belongs, and how it must evolve, as the franchise goes forward. With amazing animation, outstanding mobile suit designs and action, tremendous characters, and one of the best voice casts the franchise has ever assembled – including the very surprising return of one of Gundam’s most iconic voice actors – Gundam 00 truly is one of the franchise’s finest hours, and we had even more fun talking about it the second time.

Enjoy, and come back next time for Gundam 00 The Movie: A Wakening of the Trailblazer!

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Gundam moves boldly into the era of HD, widescreen, and 21st century geopolitics with Mobile Suit Gundam 00, an absolutely terrific installment that’s wickedly smart, wildly exciting, and features some of the best characters and world-building of the entire franchise. It’s also the first Gundam series to split itself into seasons, so on today’s episode we’re covering Season 1 – Episodes 1-25 – which work pretty splendidly on their own, as the story of the rise and fall of Celestial Being, a stateless military organization aiming to eradicate war through armed intervention. We discuss the story, world, themes, characters, and so much more, including the incredible production values and remarkable batch of theme songs, for a Gundam show that’s definitely worth the deep dive treatment.

Enjoy, and come back next time for Season 2 of Gundam 00!

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This time, we’re taking a look at a curious oddity in the history of Gundam – Yoshiyuki Tomino’s Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation film trilogy from 2005 and 2006, which saw the Gundam creator returning to the classic sequel series and compiling it into three feature films, just as he had done for the original series in 1981, but now 20 years later, with much shorter run times, and, due to the inevitable passing of time, a much starker difference in new and recycled animation. There’s probably no Gundam series more difficult to condense in to three 90-minute movies than Zeta Gundam, with its enormous cast of characters, heady and challenging themes, and dense, complicated storytelling, but A New Translation is nothing if not a valiant effort, worth examining even if it never quite overcomes the sheer weight of factors working against it. We discuss the pace, the animation, the music, which characters make a strongest impression in this format, and are consistently reminded, at every turn, of just what a masterpiece Zeta Gundam itself truly is.

Enjoy, and come back next time as we move into the HD era of Gundam with Mobile Suit Gundam 00 – Season 1!

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The day of reckoning has arrived – at last, it is time to review perhaps the most controversial show in the Gundam pantheon: Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, the baffling, confounding, infuriating, utterly fascinating sequel to Mobile Suit Gundam SEED. Set two years later with both new and returning characters, Destiny tries to be two different, contradictory shows at once: a challenging sequel questioning the assumptions and characters from the original, a la Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, and a straight-up sequel to SEED – Gundam SEED: Here We Go Again – and in the shuffle, somehow makes us hate the entire returning cast even while it buries and repeatedly does dirty its interesting new characters. The result is one of the most inept sequel stories ever told – but undeniably one of the most compelling to talk about.

Enjoy, and come back next time as Gundam revisits its canonical sequel series with Yoshiyuki Tomino’s Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: A New Translation film trilogy!

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Weekly Suit Gundam continues into the bold new world of the 21st century with Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, the first Gundam of the 2000s and one of the most broadly popular entries in the history of the franchise. It’s also a hell of a series – even if it took one of us a while to start enjoying it! – and builds to one of the best runs of episodes we’ve had the pleasure of discussing so far. It makes for one of our longest and most in-depth episodes, as we break down the characters, music, digital animation, and so much more, including how the series starts by reconstituting the structure of the original Mobile Suit Gundam before exploding into something new, vibrant, and incredibly compelling, both for the time in which it was made and the world in which we’re watching it now. This has long been one of our most requested episodes, and it was a real pleasure to try doing it justice.

Enjoy, and come back next time for our last episode of 2020 with Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny!

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Our OVA-a-thon concludes with one of the most universally beloved and undeniably entertaining series in the Gundampantheon, The 08th MS Team. Taking a ‘boots on the ground’ approach with no newtypes or ace pilots as heroes, the OVA follows a mobile suit team in a Vietnam-esque setting during the One-Year War, and provides some of the best action, animation, and mobile suit designs in the series. We gush over the lush production values and incredible set pieces, discuss the vibrant cast of characters, puzzle over how best to categorize the bewildering 12th episode (and why this should really be considered an 11-episode series), and also touch on the compilation movie Miller’s Report. The 08th MS Team is one of those works it’s impossible for any Gundam fan not to love, and getting to celebrate it at length here is a lot of fun. 

Enjoy, and come back next time as we move forward into the 2000s with Mobile Suit Gundam SEED! 

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After an unplanned two-month hiatus, we’re finally back to continue exploring the wide and wonderful world of Gundam, continuing our OVA-a-thon with Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory, the 1991 OVA chronicling the adventures of Ensign Kou Uraki and his encounter with Zeon loyalist Anavel Gato. It’s a series that provides some of the highest highs but also many of the lowest lows in the entire Gundam franchise, with stupendous animation, great music, a few really strong episodes, and outstanding voice acting, but also some really shaky storytelling and character work and a final episode that may the single worst Gundam half-hour we’ve talked about so far. It makes for one of the best critical discussions about Gundam we’ve had on the podcast, and it’s an episode you won’t want to miss!

Enjoy, and come back next time for our next OVA review with The 08th MS Team!

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Before continuing on to 21st-century Gundam, we’re doubling back for deep dives with the OVA series we’ve mentioned in passing but never reviewed in depth, starting with Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket. Released in six installments in 1989, War in the Pocket marked the first time creator Yoshiyuki Tomino wasn’t involved in a Gundam production, and is widely regarded as one of the franchise’s finest hours, expanding and deepening the series’ themes and perspective by focusing in on the small-scale story of a boy growing up amidst the backdrop of the One-Year War. It is one of the greatest and most powerful anti-war stories ever told, on similar footing as Isao Takahata’s 1988 Grave of the Fireflies, and began a rich tradition of Gundam taking some of its best artistic leaps on home video.

Enjoy, and come back next time for our next OVA review with Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory!

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To close out our anniversary month celebrations, we’ve got a surprise review of a (rightfully) forgotten piece of the Gundam universe: G-Saviour, the live-action Canadian TV movie from 2000 that brought Gundam to live-action for its 20th anniversary, in spectacularly awful fashion. Boasting awful production values, bargain bin acting, a script straight of the Hallmark channel recycling bin, and almost nothing to distinguish itself as part of the larger Gundam franchise, G-Saviour is a morbid curiosity that is, at least, worth some laughs, as we pick apart the mostly nonsensical story, watching and reporting so you don’t have to!

Enjoy, and come back next time for the start of our series of OVA reviews with Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket.

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With one year of Gundam podcasts under our belt, we thought now would be a good time to take a look back at everything we’ve discussed so far. We’ve reviewed 11 Gundam shows or movies to date – Gundam 79, Zeta, ZZ, Char’s Counterattack, Unicorn, F91, Victory, G Gundam, Gundam Wing, After War, and Turn A – and on today’s anniversary celebration episode, we rank the best Songs, Musical Scores, Mobile Suits, and Characters from that pool of 11 works, before making our official Weekly Suit Gundam ranking of everything we reviewed in our first year. It’s a very fun episode, getting into the minutiae with music, mechs, and characters in ways we don’t always have time for in our various reviews, and these are lists we intend to revisit and update as Weekly Suit Gundam continues and we watch, review, and discuss more of this incredible franchise.

Enjoy, and be prepared for a special surprise episode of Weekly Suit Gundam next week on June 30th to finish our anniversary month!

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