Show Notes
When footage of the Walking Gundam went viral earlier this week, your loyal podcast hosts received a deluge of questions from friends and family about it. "Did you see this? What is this? Why did they build it? Is this one of those 'Transformers' you podcast about?" We knew what we had to do: it was our responsibility to make a public service announcement explaining Gundam and the Walking Gundam in a short, accessible mini-podcast. So, here's Mobile Suit Breakdown's first Public Service Announcement: What the Heck is a Gundam, and why did they build a giant robot? Our previously-scheduled podcasting will resume next week!
And here's the full transcript:
In mid-September 2020, millions of people around the world saw footage of a 25-ton giant humanoid robot called a “Gundam” moving on a scaffolding in Yokohama Japan. The footage went viral across different social networks and soon wound up on news channels from Australia to the United States. It reached well beyond the sheltered harbor of the Gundam fandom. And many of the millions of people watching that giant Gundam being put through its paces asked themselves, “What the heck is a Gundam? And why did they build a giant robot?”
We’re the hosts of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast about Gundam where we talk through the show’s 41-year history and research the context behind it - from science and history to art, culture, and psychology. Instead of our regularly-scheduled podcast, we’re going to answer those two questions: What’s a Gundam, and why did they build one in Yokohama? And we’re going to do it in under fifteen minutes.
If you’re one of Mobile Suit Breakdown’s regular listeners, then you probably already know the answers to those two questions, but maybe you can send this to your friends and family when they ask you,
“Hey, did you hear about that giant transformer in Japan? They built a real Voltron! What’s up with that???”
The big humanoid machine you’ve seen moving around in all those videos is called the Walking Gundam or the RX-78 F00 Gundam. It’s 18 meters or 60 feet tall and weighs something like 25 tons, and it is a life-sized, 1-to-1 model of The Gundam, a giant humanoid fighting weapon that originally appeared on Japanese television in the 1979 animated series ‘Mobile Suit Gundam’. This one has a slightly updated look for 2020, but it’s meant to evoke that same original machine.
During the 1980s the animation studio responsible for Mobile Suit Gundam started making sequels about different giant robots - some of which were also called ‘Gundams’, and they’ve been making ‘Gundam’ shows, as well as every conceivable kind of spinoff and merchandise, ever since.
A ‘Gundam’ is a particular kind of ‘mobile suit’, which is the name that the franchise uses for giant human-shaped fighting machines. Originally there was just one and it was called The Gundam, but the heroes of the sequels got their own Gundam-type mobile suits, so now we talk about ‘Gundams’ and the ‘Gundam franchise’.
This is actually not the first life-sized ‘Gundam’ statue to be constructed and displayed in Japan! Back in 2009, as part of a celebration of the Gundam franchise’s 30th anniversary, the company that owns Gundam erected a similar 60 foot Gundam in Shiokaze park in the Odaiba part of Tokyo. The Gundam statue was originally only meant to be there for 2 months, but it was such a popular tourist attraction that they left it up until 2017 when it was replaced with a model of a different Gundam from a more recent show. But unlike this new one, the first one just stood around and looked cool, while the second one had some cosmetic external bits that could kind of slide around a bit to expose internal lighting at night. Building one that can move around almost like the machines do in the show is a tremendous engineering achievement!
This new one was built both to celebrate Gundam’s 40th anniversary (in 2019) and to coincide with the Tokyo Olympics in Summer 2020. The Olympics were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but construction on the Walking Gundam continued at a facility in Yokohama called the Gundam Factory!
The Gundam franchise is owned by massive toy-and-media conglomerate Bandai, and until recently it was the company’s most valuable intellectual property. It’s known all over the world, but is most popular in Japan, the rest of the South-East Asia region, and Italy. Gundam experienced a surge of popularity in the United States during the early 2000s when an English-dubbed version of a spinoff television series called Gundam Wing aired on Cartoon Network. However its popularity declined after 2005 and it has been considered a niche interest among American fans of Japanese media ever since.
Besides the shows and movies, the most visible part of the Gundam franchise are the plastic scale models of the mobile suits sold by Bandai. People around the world enjoy building and customizing replicas of their favorite mobile suits in a variety of different scales like 1:100, and 1:144 and with prices that run from a few dollars into the thousands of dollars for special, limited edition kits. These models, called ‘gunpla’ which is a portmanteau combining ‘Gundam’ and ‘plastic model’, are so successful that in 2019 Bandai announced that lifetime sales for the forty year old franchise amounted to more than 500 million kits. Part of the reason Gundam fans love those life-sized replica statues in Japan SO MUCH is because building replicas of Gundams is already a huge part of being a fan of the franchise.
So what’s a Gundam? At the most basic level, it’s the mascot for a hugely successful, 40-year-old science fiction franchise owned by a massive merchandising conglomerate. Then they built a life-sized one to celebrate an important anniversary for the franchise and as a publicity and marketing stunt to sell smaller replicas. There’s also a nationalism aspect because they wanted to show off Japanese engineering prowess in front of the eyes of the whole world during the Olympics. And they built it to move around like a person because that’s what it does in the show AND because they’d already built two less-complex statues and they needed to take this one to the next level.
If that’s all you needed to know, then you’re good to go! Thanks for stopping by and enjoy your newfound knowledge about Gundams of both the walking and the old-fashioned animated kind. The next time you hear someone say, “Wow, can you believe that Japan built a giant transformer? What a waste of money!!” you can say…
But if seeing that giant moving robot really caught your interest and now you’d like to know more about Gundam, what it’s about and why people love it so much, then stick around for…
Mobile Suit Breakdown’s total beginner’s guide to the universes of Gundam
Back in the 1970s, animated television in Japan was mostly made for young kids. Giant humanoid machines broadly called ‘mecha’ were popular with audiences at the time, and toy companies were happy to sponsor mecha tv shows because these shows were made cheaply and even a moderate hit would allow them to sell tons of toys based on the robots.
But at the same time, the studios and creators making animated shows were trying to show that they could tell serious stories for more mature audiences. One of the animation studios trying to establish itself during this era was Nippon Sunrise, which we’ll just call ‘Sunrise’. Sunrise had produced a string of moderately successful giant mecha shows, but they wanted to do something new and different, with a project that would really shake up the industry.
Gundam was that project. Rather than tell a heroic story about giant mecha fighting monsters or aliens, they wanted to tell a serious war story - inspired by the real history of World War II - but it would include giant robots in place of tanks or fighter planes so that the robot-toy-selling-sponsors would have some robot toys to sell.
Gundam, famously, did not take off right away. But once it did, it became a phenomenon and helped to rewrite the rules of the animation industry in Japan. While Gundam was not solely responsible for the sci-fi and mecha crazes of the 80s, or for the emergence of animated TV and movies meant for mature audiences - it WAS a major turning point that proved animated TV aimed at older audiences could be commercially successful and artistically meaningful, and it inspired a host of imitators.
The original Mobile Suit Gundam took place some time in the near future, at a time when around half the human population had left Earth to live in man-made space colonies orbiting our planet, and the whole species is more or less governed by the Earth Federation. Beyond Earth’s orbit there are a handful of mining colonies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter - a mining colony in orbit around Jupiter represents the furthest extent of humankind’s expansion into the solar system. Other than living in space, human life continues much the same as it does today: people still drive cars and play sports, they eat hamburgers, listen to portable music players, mess around with computers, have kids and (as would become a theme for the series) neglect them.
Of course the one big technological change is the introduction of the piloted fighting robots called “mobile suits”. There’s an in-universe justification for them, but we all know that the real reason to include giant human-shaped fighting machines is because giant human-shaped fighting machines are the coolest.
Mobile Suit Gundam is set during a war between the Earth Federation and a group of colonies calling itself the Principality of Zeon. Zeon claims to be fighting for the independence of the people living in space, but the Principality is ruled by tyrannical fascists in the Zabi Family. On the other side, the Earth Federation is more-or-less a democracy, but it resembles nothing so much as one of the old maritime empires like the British, French, or American empires of the 19th and 20th centuries - with all their problems. This conflict, between factions that defy easy categorization as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ will be a running theme in Gundam, and our heroes are the unfortunates trapped in between.
Up until 1993, Gundam shows and movies were all set in the original timeline, called ‘the Universal Century’, that had been established in the original Mobile Suit Gundam. Sequels explored the aftermath of that first war between the Federation and Zeon, as well as the fates of some of the individual characters. Like Star Trek in the United States, new Gundam stories often followed new characters, jumping forward years, decades, or whole generations into the imagined future of the Universal Century.
But starting in 1994, animation studio Sunrise and sponsor-turned-parent-company Bandai decided to take the franchise in a new direction with a series of one-off or short-run alternate universe takes on the basic Gundam formula. So that means new mobile suits (at least one of which is always called a Gundam), space colonies, factions that are many things but certainly not ‘good’, and a younger generation struggling desperately to survive in a hostile world.
You might even have heard of some of these alternate universe Gundam shows that hit it big outside Japan, like Gundam Wing, Gundam Seed, or the relatively recent Iron Blooded Orphans.
So today when we talk about ‘Gundam’ we mean the whole lot of it: the original universal century stories, all the alternate universes, plus comic books, novels, audio dramas, video games, every other media format type of merchandise, and of course staggering quantities of plastic.
If you’re interested in getting into Gundam, we recommend you start with the original 1979 TV series. It’s a classic for a reason! And you should accompany it with Mobile Suit Breakdown Season One, our episode-by-episode companion guide to the show (available at gundampodcast.com and on fine podcast services everywhere). If you’d rather start with a more recent show, you can check out one of the stand-alone alternate universe shows. But you will have to wait a few years before Mobile Suit Breakdown gets there…
As for us, next week we’ll return to our regularly scheduled podcasting when we publish our interview with doctor of developmental psychology Bayley Garbutt about Kamille Bidan. Then on October 17th we’re back to Double Zeta - covering episode 11: Activate! Double Zeta!
Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded, and produced within Lenapehoking, the ancestral and unceded homeland of the Lenape, or Delaware, people. Before European settlers forced them to move west, the Lenape lived in New York City, New Jersey, and portions of New York State, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut. Lenapehoking is still the homeland of the Lenape diaspora, which includes communities living in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario.
You can learn more about Lenapehoking, the Lenape people, and ongoing efforts to honor the relationship between the land and indigenous peoples by visiting the websites of the Delaware Tribe and the Manhattan-based Lenape Center. Listeners in the Americas and Oceania can learn more about the indigenous people of your area at https://native-land.ca/. We would like to thank The Lenape Center for guiding us in creating this living land acknowledgment.
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The intro music is WASP by Misha Dioxin, and the outro is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio, both licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 licenses. The recap music for Season 3 is New York City (instrumental) by spinningmerkaba, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.. All music used in the podcast has been edited to fit the text.
Mobile Suit Breakdown provides critical commentary and is protected by the Fair Use clause of the United States Copyright law. Gundam content is copyright and/or trademark of Sunrise Inc., Bandai, Sotsu Agency, or its original creator. Mobile Suit Breakdown is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Sunrise, Bandai, Sotsu, or any of their subsidiaries, employees, or associates and makes no claim to own Gundam or any of the copyrights or trademarks related to it.
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