Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Isn't Gundam Bigger In America?
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Thread_Alchemist
 Posts: 51 |
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I'm glad that Gundam Unicorn is getting a TV re-skin. The few I have talked to that like Gundam seemed to pan the OVAs simply because they didn't want to pay that much for it.
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Robotech was easy to understand and sell--Either you heard the Robotech title and watched it for the transforming planes/robots (say, there's an idea that might catch on in the 80's...), or you followed the Macross characters on the show, who were distinctive enough to grab you after at least two episodes.
Gundam just seemed to have a big yellow-and-black police line on it saying " == Obsessive Niche-Geeks ONLY == " to keep the mainstream public out. To outsiders, the plot seemed impenetrably war-dense, the drama was too complex, and it was hard to follow one cool design when the model-subculture insisted on creating as many new robot designs as possible. And that was ONE show. (Which already seemed outdated by twenty years by the time the US got its hands on it away from the niche club-importing core fans.) When the "epic battle" began to span literally twenty years of shows, let alone story--many of which involved knowing the canon from the beginning--it made the US Robotech's three "sagas" look downright simple and inviting by comparison. It's like someone watching Peter Jackson's Tolkien movies for the first time, vs. someone struggling to get hooked on Game of Thrones' running sagas because he heard everyone else was: One's easy to start from the beginning, the other's just danged near impossible to start in the middle. Robotech just made you picture those early-80's afternoon kids discovering Voltron and Star Blazers, Gundam just makes you picture Sgt. Keroro obsessively reciting Char's history while building Gunpla models. |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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I think this is the actual core problem with selling Gundam in the states. Gundam is a franchise of giant robots, but most of the shows are built around ham-fistedly POUNDING the message "war is terrible, humanity should never do it". So instead of "exciting" action with giant robots, you get a lot of hemming & hawing about "WTF are we doing?!? and WHY?!?" But not at the "micro" level of "why is this CHARACTER doing it" but more at the craneshot level of "this nation hates that nation, and is run by a bunch of scumbags". Normally, this would mean "the leaders are scumbags, I must remove them with my idealism" (like Code Geass), but instead its often "I must fight to protect my friends, but fighting is wrong and completely unjustifiable, WHAT DO I DO?!?" Often emphasized with a metaphorical (or sometimes LITERAL) nuclear bomb, just to remind how terrible THAT was. |
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Levitz9
 Posts: 1022 Location: Puerto Rico |
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I had understood for a long time that the merchandise was another factor in Gundam's failure, particularly that of G Gundam.
Gundam is a merch-heavy show, given the model kits, and I recall the Gundam kits being all the rage during the early '00s and G Gundam was on. Thing is, with Gundam Wing, you had a handful of kits that did reasonably well (the main Gundams, Zakus, the Talgeese, etc). G Gundam flooded shelves with models nobody wanted (alas, poor Tequila Gundam), warming their spots for years. I had figured (pun not intended) that distributors being very cold on the idea of carrying merch for Gundam was another factor in its failure. |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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I don't think merch was an issue. Merch sells really well now and Gundam still isn't "sucessful". I agree with Justin that going back to original Gundam during the Toonami run wrecked its momentum and stalled the franchise. Although, I don't think it would ever be as big here as in Japan if only because of the difference in experience. (having a nuke dropped on you, vs not) While we can "understand" that with a movie like "Grave of the Fireflies" we don't "feel" that inherently like the original Gundam audience did.
(Also, like "Transformers", "Star Trek" and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles", I think it became a franchise and now carries well with nostalgia, I don't know how any of these series would do if they DEBUTED today (even if updated visually, but just with the original stories/concepts)) Last edited by HeeroTX on Fri Jun 10, 2016 1:13 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Alabaster Spectrum
Posts: 528 |
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A lot of people completely generalize the genre and refuse to watch anything from it unless there's a popular writer like Gen Urobuchi in the case of Aldnoah.Zero signed onto the project to bypass this stubborness. They seem to think it's all just like Michale Bays Transformers with two people in robots shouting all the time and nothing else hence how it was easy for that show to get painted as revolutionary and a deconstruction of the real robot genre despite it just being a mediocre Gundam clone with crappier characters, motivations, simplified politics and pretty boring CGI battles past the first couple of arcs. Anyway because of this self-confirming bias it's just really hard to get people into mecha. Can't ever get into something if you refuse to watch it the second you see the tag and just say something like "I see mecha so I won't watch it because I don't like mecha". Also it doesn't help that a lot of recent mecha TV series have turned out pretty damn bad, another thing I can thank Aniplex for ruining with shows like Guilty Crown, Valvrave, Aldnoah.Zero, Star Driver etc. They have popular as hell people on the staff so those are the ones they watch while they ignore the IMO better ones like Fafner Exodus, Gundam Build Fighters (which got labelled "just a kiddie sports show" which people also seem to feel mean automatically bad) and Knights of Sidonia as well as Gundam The Origin and Thunberbolt. Juries still out for me on IBO but it's been pretty decent so far. Finally as some have pointed out the current Gundam fandom that populates a lot of threads is goddamn intolerable and seems to come solely from 4chan's /m/ board where people just argue constantly as their sole means of discussion and this is supposed to be inviting to potential new fans apparently. It's about as successful at it as the stark raving Key and Fate fans who just drive interested people away with their fixations on matters of watching order, what the best shows are and aren't, what the proper canon is and other little details most people probably just don't care about getting dramatic over. Last edited by Alabaster Spectrum on Fri Jun 10, 2016 1:18 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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Alabaster Spectrum
Posts: 528 |
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This is just typical stubborn Japanese corporate thinking at play and refusing to understand the market they were getting into. Because the original Gundam is the iconic genre defining anime in Japan that is known in the cultural mainstream they figured it must too surely end up being a hit in America so they forced Toonami too air them in a specific order from the original onward before they could start showing the others when initially they wanted to go with the newest one in Seed. Of course this unsurprisingly failed, the show was cancelled before I think it even hit the Jaburo arc and Bandai decided Gundam just wasn't popular and pulled it for years before returning with Seed and Destiny by which point it was already kind of too late to strike while the iron was hot with Gundam Wings success. |
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Desa
 Posts: 285 |
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I never got around to watching the Unicorn OVAs so I'm really enjoying RE:0096 as a whole new experience. The third episode was what got me hooked and now I follow it every week.
I like how it's tied to the same UC universe as Gundam Origins (I call it "the Char-verse" in my head). The recent Origins III was absolutely fantastic and I'll bet even non-Gundam/mecha fans would like it. |
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Kicksville
 Posts: 1182 |
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I think to some degree, "Gundam being one of the hottest things around again" (whatever that means and entails by today's standards) and "fans trying to get into Gundam as it exists already" are sort of separate things. People potentially being turned off by UC shows or whatever doesn't matter if they, say, watch Iron Blooded Orphans and like it a lot, just as people saw Wing and liked it a lot. Like, as far as that goes, it basically just boils down to there being a hit show, or (as I'm sure Sunrise/Bandai want) a string of new hit shows.
Speaking of people trying to get into Gundam as it exists, though, I do think it is weirdly hard to untangle Gundam in this day and age. It is true that there's an almost absurd amount of different versions out there, but like...if someone was trying to get into Gundam and wanted to know the differences between the shows, I don't know where I'd send them. The official Gundam.info is useless for this, the Gundam Wikipedia page is to some degree more accurate than other places but is not really all that obvious and clear to sift through, and the Gundam Wikia is completely terrible (not well organized, and full of dubious, uncited information to boot). I mean...it feels unfairly judgmental to complain about as far as fan efforts go, since with so many different Gundam shows and media, it's not surprising that there's such wildly differing types of fans, and people only have so much time to spell out that much stuff for people...it would be cool if the official sites were better at this, but that (sadly) isn't really surprising. |
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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And this, my friends, is why the franchise will ever languish so long as Gundam 0080 is difficult to legally obtain. Such a show is ever the connoisseurs' nomination for the elusive category of "Gundam-unlike-Gundam that is better than most Gundam-unlike-Gundam". |
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TheMorry
Posts: 659 |
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Is there much diffrents between RE 0096 (TV) and the OVA 0096? Does the TV series have additional scenes in it?
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SilverTalon01
Posts: 2404 |
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Did you actually watch the SEED broadcast? If you did, it shouldn't surprise you that most gundam fans probably didn't stick with it. Gunshots replaced by airlock noises, incredibly awkward green and orange paint put on the guns to make them look like lasers or something. Gundam Wing didn't do that, and it even aired on an afternoon timeslot versus I think like 8 or 9pm on Saturday. The early broadcast did change some dialogue lines, but that is nothing at all like what they did to SEED. 00 I question who even knew it was on television. I never knew it was on Sci-fi until after it was done. Back in the old Toonami days, I checked what CN was doing anime wise because I knew about it. |
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tintor2
 Posts: 1858 |
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According to another forum I visited, there have been no new scenes but the first episodes had additions like tears touching blood. I haven't watched the OVAs though so I decided to follow the tv series |
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CaRoss
 Posts: 457 |
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Gundam has always been that weird franchise for people to get into. While Wing was undoubtedly popular, and Seed hadn't done too badly either, the franchise never really seemed to find a footing among people.
I mean, just among my friends, I have people who wouldn't watch it because they kill too many of the main characters, people who wouldn't watch it because it's too ludicrous from a military perspective (although they adored Heavy Object...), and people who wouldn't watch it because it seemed too much like fujoshi-bait. It's honestly been easier for me to introduce people to Macross and get them into that then it has been for Gundam. So, I can kind of see why it has struggled so much to find a footing here. That said, I really do hope that Sunrise can squeeze out a few more hit series for the franchise that keep it going well enough for longtime fans, like myself, to continually receive new Gundam content. |
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Lemonchest
Posts: 1771 |
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I don't think they're silly enough, tbh. Too often mecha shows are either the equivalent of an adult seeing kids playing cops & robbers in the playground & giving them a long lecture about how violence is bad; or a teenager who still wants to play with their transformer toys but is too self conscious to openly enjoy themselves while doing so. |
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