Forum - View topicG Gundam! Why is there only one of these?
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Gon*Gon
 Posts: 679 |
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I guess I'll start with this. I expletive love G Gundam. Not just because it's a good show in it's own merits, not just because it taught me my first two english words(guess what they are), but because it's the ONLY Gundam series I can wholeheartedly admit liking almost every bit of.
Whereas other Gundams had stuff I like, it also has plenty of stuff that I didn't like. Be it overly political, too pretentious, too kill-them-all-y at the last minute, Durandal didn't succeed, too much easily predicted tragic moments, or just outright boring. G Gundam makes a distinction of making me like a Gundam series from beginning till end. G Gundam felt unique. So Gon*Gon's question is............ 1) Why was G Gundam so different from the other series? Were the creators on drugs? Was it a special time for the Gundam franchise? Was it intended to be the final Gundam series so they thought they'd go with a blast? *2) Why aren't they making any Gundam series like G Gundam any longer? Was G Gundam really unpopular? Did it flop? Did the creators hate what they created and vowed to never make one again? 3) Why do people call this series racist? Because it featured a Gundam for every country being inferior to Shining and God Gundam? ....if you only answer one of these, try to make it #2...and #1. Kinda bummed out that they never made any Gundam series like G Gundam ever since. What was significant about that series at the time and why isn't there any more Gundams like it? To me, G Gundam was the Bioshock in the sea generic realistic military FPSes. I wish the subbed version of this anime wasn't so hard to find. The official english version suuuuccked. Last edited by Gon*Gon on Sun Oct 23, 2011 3:22 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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naninanino
 Posts: 680 |
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Because Gundam isn't a super robot series. What other answer do you need?
If you want to watch more super robot shows, there are plenty to choose from (incidentally, they're more of the generic kind due to their sheer amount, not the other way around). |
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Gon*Gon
Posts: 679 |
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That makes G Gundam even more an anomaly. Why did they suddenly make a (awesome) super robot series all the sudden?
Why did they only make one and never anything like it again? |
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Generic #757858
 Posts: 1354 |
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The answer to your first question is simple: Yasuhiro Imagawa. A well known super robot afficionado/crackpot/GOD who was hired to direct a simple Gundam fighting series meant to take advantage of the 2D fighter boom and boost model sales. He basically hijacked the series and made it his own.
If you want to see more of stuff like this, you should check out Shin Mazinger and Giant Robo. |
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shadow13
 Posts: 111 |
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I never heard that G Gundam was considered racist. But some of original gundam names where stereotyping countries. such as the Scud Gundam (changed to Desert Gundam) referencing Scud missiles in the Middle east. And the fact that when Neo Russia's pilot was introduced it involved a Gulag, a legacy of the Soviet Union. And since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the anime premiered in 1994 it could paint Russia in an unfavorable image.
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Kruszer
 Posts: 7983 Location: Minnesota, USA |
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It was an experiment of sorts I guess and the fact that there's only one Gundam series like it probably means it failed. G Gundam was alright, but it wasn't my favorite Gundam series.
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penguintruth
 Posts: 8461 Location: Penguinopolis |
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G Gundam isn't racist, but it does play up stereotypes, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek, silly manner. I have a feeling that Imagawa intentionally included a lot of the ridiculous elements just to say to the viewers "Don't take it all so seriously." Compared to some other Gundam entries, G Gundam seems very self-aware.
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Gon*Gon
Posts: 679 |
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Ah...so it was trying to market with the popularity of fighting games. Unfortunately, I have little to no interest in stuff like Mazinger and Getter Robo. Something about them just didn't appeal to me. I think it's because they're too "retro" if you get what I mean. That's the same reason why I couldn't finish Mobile Suit Gundam(I acknowledge it for starting the whole giant robot thing...but that's about it)
Aw. I wish it did better so there'd be more Gundam series like this one. This explains why there's no other Gundam like this though.
This is why I like anime. How come western animations never play up stereotypes like they used to anymore? |
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naninanino
Posts: 680 |
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You do know the newest versions are newer than G Gundam?
Wrong. It started the real robot thing.
Stop whining about Gundam not being something that it isn't supposed to be and go watch some real super robot shows. |
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Gon*Gon
Posts: 679 |
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That's why I surrounded the word retro with "___"'s I know the newest ones are newer than G, but it still feels really "old" for some reason.
No diff. Besides... I question the realism of human shaped robots flying around in outer space fighting each other with beam swords. |
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naninanino
Posts: 680 |
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Stop being asinine. You know damn well what it means and there have been tons of topics about it already. Thankfully it is not a question of opinion. Besides, how does G Gundam not look retro to you? It has a very 90's vibe in it. Don't want Mazinger of Getter Robo, watch something like GaoGaiGar or Gurren Lagann if you haven't already. The whole idea of Gundam shows being super robot shows is completely backwards as that is what it originally deviated and thus defined itself from. |
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Generic #757858
Posts: 1354 |
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Have to agree with naninano here. Even though I love Super Robots and Imagawa, that's not what I want to see in my Gandamu. There's plenty of great Super Robot shows out there that already got that covered. IMHO 08th MS Team is what all Gundam shows should strive to be like.
As for beam sabers and whatnot being unrealistic, well of course they are. Real robot doesn't necessarily mean realistic, it's more just a shorthand for the tropes and stuff like politics, military conflicts etc. that are common to the subgenre. The very concept of giant humanoid robots as effective weapons of war is unrealistic, so if you want realism you pretty much inevitably end up with no robots at all. Rather than realism, I think that the key thing in real robot series is that the robots should function believably and logically within the context of the series. /slightly offtopic ranting |
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zaphdash
 Posts: 620 Location: Brooklyn |
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I'm not really sure on what basis you'd say G Gundam "failed." It's been nearly eighteen years since it premiered -- in that time, how many more alternate universes have followed it? And how many times has Sunrise returned to the tried and true UC well? You're right that G Gundam was an "experiment of sorts," but the real experiment wasn't its foray into the super robot subgenre, it was in breaking completely with the established UC continuity. In that respect, there's not "only one Gundam series like it," there are in fact six distinct universes, plus the original UC timeline, plus however you choose to categorize Turn A. G Gundam was the trailblazer that kicked that all off. It's true that G Gundam was only a one off series, but that's all it was actually meant to be anyway. Of the original crop of alternate universes, only Gundam Wing spawned a sequel, and that was only a three episode OVA (two "sequels" if you count the Operation Meteor OVA, I guess). Of all the alternate universes, Gundam SEED is the only one to receive a television series sequel, and that's because SEED was at the time explicitly intended to reboot the franchise with a new universe to expand the way UC had been expanded over the previous 23 years. And we see where that's at now, two new alternate universes later. G and Wing were the highest-rated Gundam series of the 90s (compared to Victory and Turn A, which produced middling results, and X, which actually was a failure in the truest sense of the word, getting the ax after only 39 episodes), but it was just never envisioned that G would spin off its own franchise the way the original Gundam actually did and SEED was meant to. It's important to remember that in the mid-90s, four consecutive Gundam shows ran in the same timeslot -- Victory began in 1993 and led immediately into G, which led immediately into Wing (everybody probably already knows this by now, but Wing Gundam is even visible during G's climactic final battle; production on that show was well under way long before G even finished its run, as it would have to be for episode 49 of G to be followed a week later by episode 1 of Wing), and then Wing led directly into X. It was only after X was canceled that there was a couple years' break before Turn A, and then another couple years before SEED. Could Sunrise have mined the G universe further if it wanted to? Yeah, absolutely it could have. But they had even more success with Wing, so they returned to that universe with Endless Waltz instead. By that point G was already several years old and a few universes ago. Plus naninanino is probably not completely off base in pointing out that Gundam isn't a super robot series; although I say G wasn't a failure, it also goes without saying that it wasn't exactly the most popular Gundam series of all time either, so it's not necessarily a formula Sunrise would or should feel compelled to try again. And Generic's characterization of the show as basically having been hijacked by Imagawa is completely accurate: Imagawa is the one who grafted the entire Devil Gundam storyline onto what was supposed to be just a straight tournament anime. Bearing that in mind, Sunrise may have wisely realized that it got lucky and caught lightning in a bottle with G; the next guy they bring in to make a super robot version of Gundam may not do nearly so well. There are a lot of reasons G was ultimately an evolutionary dead end for the franchise, but it's not really because it was a "failure."
Bingo. "Real robots" are not actually real robots, but where super robots run basically on magic or whatever, there is "science" behind mobile suits -- the fact that it's not real world science is beside the point. The important thing here is that, essentially, "Minovsky physics" could more or less be real if the Minovsky particle actually existed. The UC world operates on the assumption that this particle does exist, and from that flows a whole scientific discipline that provides for beam weaponry and mobile suits and so on. The Minovsky particle is basically the MacGuffin that makes the rest of the world plausible. Of course, even "real robot" shows blur the lines quite a bit -- Newtypes in Gundam, the magical properties of music in Macross, etc. It can get muddled at the boundaries, but there is a clear distinction between what each specific subgenre stands for. |
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Charred Knight
 Posts: 3085 |
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Why did Gundam create a super robot show? It's because V Gundam was a failure, and Bandai decided to try to create a new style to increase sales of merchandise and ratings. For whatever reason they decided to take this new direction in an extreme manner by creating a gundam series based around a worldwide Gundam tournament. Yasuhiro Imagawa came in after this was decided (Imagawa intended to create a Universal Century series called Polcarino no Gundam).
http://aeug.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html An example of the craziness that was G Gundam's background was when they told Yasuhiro Imagawa to stop moving around and stop at one place despite the fact that they wanted to have a world wide tournament in the first place. As for whether or not it succeeded or not, G Gundam's ratings where higher than V Gundam, and this heavily influenced how the rest of Gundam was made, Gundam's designs became more varied, and they created more Gundams. The ratings for G Gundam was in the middle, and it's certainly a well remembered Gundam series as several references are made to it like in Code Geass (Kallen was clearly inspired by Domon), and Anime Tenchou's Meito Anizawa is literally just Domon Kasshu running an anime store. |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2545 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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Actually, Imgawa's use of stereotyping was more of a blatant homage to Masami Kurumada's Ring ni Kakero manga, which Imagawa admitted he was a fan of as a kid and was heavily influenced by it when doing G Gundam; for example, Chibodee Crocket is a giant RnK homage in and of himself. Now whether Kurumada's use of sterotyping back in the late-70s/early-80s for RnK was done for serious reasons, being self-aware, or simply for an easy way to develop characters is another thing entirely... As G Gundam itself, I like how among Gundam's it still all by itself. It was created to be purposely different from the Gundam's that pre-dated it, and they probably won't create another one quite like it. |
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