Forum - View topicZeta Gundam Appreciation Thread
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Jim Norton
 Posts: 4 Location: The Jersey Shore |
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I consider myself a casual fan of all animation, especially anime, but ever since I went away to college I haven't been able to follow the medium like I used to and up until recently I haven't bought an anime DVD since maybe 2002/2003. I am a big fan of 80s/90s anime and I really haven't gotten into any recent series.(I guess my newest favorite series would be Cowboy Bebop or Trigun). I made a great discovery on my latest trip to Best Buy, the entire set of Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, being a huge fan of the series and the Universal Century shows I picked it up immediately. I downright love this show and in my opinion is one of the great series of all time, animated or live-action. I am a sucker for 80s style anime and Zeta is so refreshing compared to the storytelling and visual styles of newer shows, it actually feels like fluid animation, compared to the new style pan and scan adobe photoshop feeling shows. This show is one of the best, if not THE best examples of the war/space opera genre, great stuff.
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coffee
 Posts: 170 Location: Florida |
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By entire set, do you mean you found the special edition at Best Buy? I had to order mine online because my best buy only had singles 1 and 4, and well..I wanted all those extras too.
Have you heard about Bandai bringing over the Zeta Gundam movie sometime this year? I'm eager to see that. |
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Jim Norton
Posts: 4 Location: The Jersey Shore |
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Nope, they had singles 1 through 5, one copy of each too, very lucky. And yeah I heard about the movie license, I cant wait. |
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Gage
Posts: 480 Location: United States |
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You know, why not just make this topic based on 80s and 90s anime relating to this passion you've got instead of just one thing. It sort of makes everything interesting.
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Randall Miyashiro
 Posts: 2451 Location: A block away from Golden Gate Park |
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Zeta was one of the first shows that I followed every week as it was being released. It was on the covers of Animage, B-Club, The Anime, Model Graphics, Animedia, and Newtype regularly. I remember getting the newest film comics compilation as they were coming out. I have almost a who shelf deticated to various Gundam books of which about half are from Zeta. Although I never drank the Zeta Safe Guard drink, I ate so many Morinaga Chooball's in the hopes of getting a complete set of mini figures. Although I watched anime regularly before Zeta this is the show that turned me into a full fledged otaku. I've also bought this series more times in various formats than any other series. I actually started collecting the individual laser discs before a friend sold me the LD box sets.
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ivorymoose
 Posts: 240 |
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This thread is useful for people like me. When I first saw a Gundam on TV in the early 80s, I was scared of it.
 I was a little girl at that time and I was upset they replaced the Ultraman slot with that thing. I hated that thing, I could not follow the story. Today, I like Gundam. I would love to find out more about Char's past. However, if this means revisiting 80s, I don't want to dig up old memories. I don't have the courage to watch Zeta Gundam but I've heard from people like yourselves in this thread that it is really great. I can't decide if I should watch the old titles. I am not a die hard Gundam lover but .....I never forgot the first time I looked into the eyes of a Gundam even when that experience was not good.
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ParaParaJMo
 Posts: 336 Location: Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan |
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Well, Zeta Gundam was sort of not recieved well in Japan. People were complaining about the deaths and Tomino's wife thought the series was too depressing. The result was the first half of Double Zeta.
I'm glad Tomino brought back the series via a trilogy but you shouldn't fix what wasn't broken to begin with. I don't like how they mixed old and new animation, and I was upset over the changing of Four Murasame's seiyuu. But this series does features my favorite mobile suit of all time, the Hyaku-shiki. |
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Nagisa
Moderator
 Posts: 6128 Location: Atlanta-ish, Jawjuh |
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False. Couldn't be any more false, even. Zeta Gundam was an immense success, and seamlessly continued the ridiculous wave of success that first started with Mobile Suit Gundam's second TV airing and the movie trilogy in the early 1980s. Even today, it remains quite possibly the second most popular Gundam series around, right behind the original.
Gundam ZZ was due to Tomino's infamous mood swings. He himself felt Zeta was "too depressing" after he completed it, and felt people needed cheering up after seeing it (whether they really did or not is questionable, though I doubt it seeing how rabid people were, and still are, over it). As a result, he decided to play up a more comedic angle with Gundam ZZ up until the point that Sunrise greenlit the production of Char's Counterattack, at which point he suddenly switched gears and began making ZZ much more serious in tone.
Zeta Gundam wasn't necessarily broken, but there was plenty of room for improvement. Rosamia Badam's character in the original series was terrible, and only served to drag the series down. Her appearance ultimately amounted to a filler arc that happened too close to the end of the series for comfort. And Tomino honestly could use some more practice in writing compelling character dialogue (something he ultimately would improve on somewhat, as seen in Turn-A Gundam some twenty-four years later). He can write great settings and great stories, but moving the characters through those stories gets awkward at times, with some pretty stilted and clumsy dialogue. Granted, Mobile Suit Gundam and Zeta Gundam fared far better than most of Tomino's other 1980s works, and also fared better than some of his later Gundam efforts (Victory Gundam...yikes), but they were still far from perfect, and could've used some notable improvements. Unfortunately, aside from smoothing out the plot and ridding it of some filler portions like the above example, said improvements weren't to be found in the movie trilogy. |
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Randall Miyashiro
Posts: 2451 Location: A block away from Golden Gate Park |
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Zeta has the highest viewership ratings at 6.39% (many of the 90s Gundam series got between 2-3%) of any Gundam series to date. This even surpasses the 6.1% that Gundam Seed got. The original series was the show that got only mediocre 4.58% and didn't gain a huge cult following until a couple of years later with the proliferation of Bandai MSV line and the trilogy. As I mentioned inj the above post Zeta had more merchandise and has more books than any other Gundam series besides First Gundam. I do however also love the 100 Shiki. The MG 100 Shiki kit is gorgeous, then again I'm a sucker for the coating kits since I don't paint my MG kits. While not as possible as the Strike or the 2.0 kits it's proportions are top notch. |
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The Human Spider
Posts: 334 |
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I just recently finished making the MG Nemo; excellent kit--those MGs just keep getting better and better. As a fan of GUNDAM's grunt mecha the thing I like about the earlier Gundam series is that they seemed to pay more attention to the design of grunt mecha(ZETA had some particularly good designs in the Hi-Zack and Galbaldy B.) Starting around the time of G GUNDAM the grunt mecha designs seemed more like throwaways, though there's still some good ones like SEED and DESTINY's GuAIZ and GuAIZ R. |
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Randall Miyashiro
Posts: 2451 Location: A block away from Golden Gate Park |
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I love how Zeta incorporated Okawara, Fujita, Nagano, and Kobayashi as MS designers. There is that Okawara tradition look to the MS based off of First Gundam. Fujita added the transforming look with such classics as the Messala and Gaplant. Nagano has the Hambrabi and Quebeley that look like they are from Five Star. Kobayashi has his signature The O and Baund Doc. Whenever I watch something like Dragon's Heaven or Samurai 7 I'm reminded of Kobayashi's Zeta designs. Too many of the recent Gundam series fail to have as much variety in their designs, and half of the MS these days are Gundams.
Does anyone here collect the MSIA Advance or High Complete Pro toys? Most of my collection is from the MG kit line, but I've almost completed my 0087-0093 collection. I have a handful of Hajime's Fix toys and found them of varying quality for their steep price. The ones that I have both versions of are not nearly as possible as their larger cousins and the Z-Plus cost significantly more than the MG version. I'm really skeptic about the non-scale MSIA advance toys since the standard MSIA seem rather poorly made. I'm a bit more interested in the 1/200 HCM pros since the Geara Doga and Jagd Doga kits look really nice and the Char's Counterattack MG kits are currently limited to 3 (soon to be 4) kits. |
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Anime World
 Posts: 41 |
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Got this as my high school graduation gift!
[That freaking huge image was unnecessary. -N] THIS IS ONLY AVAILIBLE AT: RIGHTSTUF.COM! IT COSTS $79.99! Should've waited for the price to go down! I paid $178.98! |
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The Human Spider
Posts: 334 |
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[quote="Randall Miyashiro"]
Yes, I agree; it seems like there's Gundams, and then everything else. I miss the powerful non-gundam MS like the Quebeley and The O you mentioned.
Do you mean the SEED Advanced MSIA? If so, then they are crap. For the ones with removable armor, the armor's always falling off, and the joints for all of them are loose and break easily. And no beam sabers. They're the only major Gundam action figure line that I'd recommend everyone to stay away from. If you mean the Extended MSIA, they're pretty much regular MSIA with better, full, paint jobs and slightly more poseability. They're supposed to be a little bigger than regular MSIA, but the size difference isn't really noticeable--they're similar enough that weapons for the Zaku 2.0(the 90mm machine gun and the long Zaku machine gun) were recycled for the Extended version. Since you seem disappointed with regular MSIAs I don't think you'll like these much better, but if you're basing your opinion on the earlier MSIAs(from up to about 2002) they've improved a whole lot since then. As for the HCM Pros, they're like little(for size comparison they come up to about the middle of the chest compared to their MSIA counterparts, about the top of the skirt armor for HGUCs and slightly higher than the kness for MGs), pre-made HG Gunplas, but slightlly more detailed and posable, with some of them having extra gimmicks like removable armor, working pistons, and moveable mono-eyes. Some assembly is needed for the weapons. The major problem I have with these is the joints wear down easily, especially the knees and the ball joints for the legs which can wear down and pop out easily(this is also a problem I have with several MSIA leg ball-joints.) The wrist ball-joints also wear down very easily, especially if you change the hands a lot(many of the HCM pros have their weapons molded onto their hands.)
I have the Geara Doga, it's one of the better HCM Pros, but mine has the aforementioned leg joint problems. One nice gimmick it has is some extra storage racks on the backpack for its rifle and sturm fausts, but it unfortunately only comes with one set of weapons so you can't have it "fully-loaded". the side skirt armor also can open up and hold the e-pack but it only comes with one e-pack. The Sazabi is also quite good, better than the first MSIA version. |
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Tony K.
 SubscriberModerator  Posts: 12095 Location: Frisco, TX |
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You can get it here for under $60. I paid double that... Damn dubtitles... |
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penguintruth
 Posts: 8634 Location: Penguinopolis |
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I love Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam! The dark, rich atmosphere, the super-serious (though at times melodramatic) tone, the complexities, the interesting character concepts (if a bit clunky in their executions), and the great action make it one of my favorite anime series.
I felt that the movies didn't do it justice for several reasons. The short length, the uncomfortable contrast between the old and new animation, and the happy ending that only served Tomino's ego all made it a slap in the face for a Zeta Gundam fan like me. I also wish that Bandai hadn't decieved its fans by acting like the Special Edition boxset was the only way to obtain the series, then release a boxset with deficiant subtitles ("dubtitles"), only to release seperate individual volumes later with fixed subtitles. There's no exchange program, either - I checked with Bandai. So now I have to replace the SE discs with the regular ones. The only thing "special" about the Special Edition is that the subtitles are terrible.
I firmly disagree. Rosamia is a reflection of Four Murasame. Kamille does his best to try to save her, even taking her as a "sister" out of his interest in her and cyber-newtypes, but ultimately has to put her down himself. Breaking his vow to not let the tragedy of Four repeat itself is what makes it all the more tragic.The arc itself wasn't "filler" - Zeta Gundam didn't have any filler, unlike the salt-searching and the refugee nonesense of the original series. It all fit in the puzzle pretty well to me. |
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