Mobile Suit Breakdown Season 1 Episode 1.1: To Live and Die in Space Mobile Suit Gundam Episode 1: Gundam Rises Podcast Transcript Original Publication: September 1, 2018
Intro music plays
THOM: This is Mobile Suit Breakdown, a podcast about Japanese Sci-Fi mega-franchise Mobile Suit Gundam for new fans, old fans, and not-yet fans, where we watch, analyze, and review all forty years of the iconic anime in the order it was made. We research its influences, examine its themes, and discuss how each piece of the Gundam canon fits within the changing context in Japan and the world from 1979 to today.
Record scratch [March 6, 2019 update]
NINA: Greetings listeners. I’m Nina, one of the two hosts of Mobile Suit Breakdown. You’re about to listen to the very first episode of MSB [Mobile Suit Breakdown], which also happens to be the very first podcast episode we ever made. We’re very proud of it, but we were learning to do this as we went along, and there are some issues with the audio during these earliest episodes. If you would prefer to skip ahead a bit, you should know that there’s a steady improvement in audio quality from Episode 1.3 on, and a huge improvement around Episode 1.13, when we invested in better recording equipment. Thanks for checking us out, and we hope you like what you hear. And now, back to talking about Gundam.
Intro music fades back in
THOM: This is Episode 1.1: To Live and Die in Space, and we are your hosts. I’m Thom, life-long giant robot enthusiast.
NINA: And I’m Nina, anime fan, but mecha-anime skeptic.
THOM: So here’s how this is going to work -- In each episode of Mobile Suit Breakdown we’re going to discuss one episode of Gundam, starting with the very first episode of the very first series, Mobile Suit Gundam. Each episode of the podcast will open with a discussion of the episode, reminding you about key story points and discussing any important context or background. After that we’ll take a break to go and watch the episode. If you can, I hope you’ll watch along with us, but if not don’t worry. We’ll include a recap of the events of the episode before talking through our first impressions. At the end, we’ll analyze the episode in more depth, share the results of our research, and give you our final thoughts. If especially interesting things come up, as I’m sure they will (I’m already thinking of the real-life history of the space colony designs, and the cultural roots of the consensus decision-making that’s on display in episode 3), we’ll dig into the question with a very special deep-dive segment. So this format is all brand-new. Feel free to let us know what you think.
THOM: In this episode we set the scene with a brief introduction to the strange and alien world of 1979, talk a little bit about the year ‘79 in Gundam’s Universal Century timeline, and then get into the thick of things as we recap and dissect the events of the first episode of the original Mobile Suit Gundam, “Gundam Rises”. But before we get to any of that we need to talk about what we’re going to call this first show. When it aired it was called Kidō Senshi Gandamu (機動戦士ガンダム), or Mobile Suit Gundam in English, but like Star Trek that name became a part of the brand. So by my count there are now at least twenty-five different shows and movies with “Mobile Suit Gundam” in the name somewhere. We also can’t follow the Star Trek model of calling this one Gundam: The Original Series because back in 2015 they went and made a confusingly titled prequel, Gundam: The Origin. Some fans refer to this one as Gundam ‘79, but that could be confusing when we eventually get to The 08th Mobile Suit Team and start talking about the mobile suit designated “79 Gundam”. [Editor’s Note: Thom is referring here to the RX-79 [G] Gundam Ground Type.] So we’ve decided to call this particular show First Gundam.
NINA: And with that settled we can begin. First Gundam started airing on Nagoya Broadcasting Network in April of 1979 and ran until it was cancelled in January of 1980, just shy of forty years ago. The big-picture story is that about seventy years before the show begins the Earth Federation starts building orbital space colonies called Sides around Earth. Now Side 3, calling itself the Principality of Zeon, has declared its independence and launched a surprise attack on Earth and the Federation resulting in staggering loss of life: half of the total human population killed within just a few short weeks. After eight months of stalemate following the Zeon offensive, the Federation has developed a new weapon in the form of an 18-meter tall battle robot called ‘Gundam’ that might finally give them the edge they need to win the war.
THOM: But the real story? It’s about a spaceship full of refugees from a civilian colony. They’ve been chased from their homes by one side, then conscripted by the other, and Amuro Ray, a fifteen-year-old boy piloting the Gundam to protect his friends as they are all swallowed up by the grand and petty tragedies of war. In a way, this is an old story. The motives on both sides of the colonial uprising are as old as colonies and uprisings. Representation and resentment and exploitation, oppression, ambition, as well as a growing feeling among the space settlers that their new lives, outside the Earthly cradle have made them into a new type of person with new needs, fundamentally different from those who are still trapped by Earth’s gravity. In a way, that makes it a story very much of its moment. 1979 was near the tail-end of a massive wave of anti-colonial uprisings that had fundamentally changed and reshaped the global order in the 20th Century. But, it is also a story about the past, where Zeon and the Federation can dress up like the Axis and the Allies and fight the second World War all over again. Of course, in a way it still really is a story about the future. Not because there are “hyper-mega-beam-cannons” or “space battlecruisers”--those are just regular cannons and regular battlecruisers with future-themed wrapping paper. No, what makes Gundam a story about the future is that it never stops asking where we are going, and where humanity’s destiny really lies--if we can even survive long enough to find out.
NINA: The late ‘70s in our timeline were a good time for looking toward the future. The empires that had managed to survive the second World War reached their final stages of disintegration, the Cold War seemed to be thawing just a bit, women and minorities were fighting for equal rights in the early stages of a cultural shift that would radically reshape societies all over the world. The environment and the Earth’s capacity to support comfortable human life was in jeopardy. There were poisoned air and water crises in Japan, the United States, and throughout the developed world. At the same time that the oil shocks of 1973 grounded the jet planes and stopped the big cars that seemed to signify modernity, early nuclear reactors turned the power of the bomb into the power to light your home. The space race of the 1960s had evolved into an era of inhabited space stations, permanent satellites, and reusable shuttles that made Earth's near-orbit more accessible than ever, even as scientists dreamed of vast space cities. Computers, including the first real personal computers, inspired new ideas about learning and cognition that would soon find expression in Gundam’s ongoing explorations of the fluid, uncertain space that separates us from our technology and the process by which machines become human, and humans become machines. These themes: traveling to and living in space, the existential peril of ecological collapse, the hunt for reliable sources of energy, reimagining human identity, and of course colonies and decolonization, are at the heart of the early entries in the Gundam canon. We’ll talk more, a lot more, about them as they come up on the show.
NINA: During our commentary we are often going to be asking, “What does this story element or artistic choice mean?”, and a reasonable listener could say--
THOM: [like you, a reasonable listener] Why not just ask the author? Tomino is still around.
NINA: [a very cool and knowledgeable podcaster] Good question, Hypothetical Listener!
NINA: There’s a theory from literary criticism called “the death of the author is the birth of the reader”, or simply “the author is dead” that says any analysis of an artistic work should start and end with the piece itself. Books are meant to be read, shows are meant to be watched, music is meant to be listened to, and so on. Whatever sausage-making or intentions went on behind the scenes are irrelevant.
THOM: So this approach totally discounts any knowledge of the author’s identity, their personal history, their own artistic influence, intentions, and perhaps most importantly their own statements about the work. Famously, Rad Bradbury once got into an argument with a whole college classroom about the proper interpretation of his novel, Fahrenheit 451. They said it was about censorship and he said it was about how watching too much TV makes you dumb. So this always gets brought up by smug internet persons who want to score points by dunking on a bunch of presumptuous, know-it-all college kids: “Oh look, they argued with the author himself about his own book”. But here’s the thing about that--practically everyone who reads Fahrenheit 451 identifies censorship as the main theme, and the book itself supports that. The author’s intentions don’t really change what’s in the book. Bradbury tried to write a book about the dangers of mass media but he wrote a masterpiece about censorship. Sorry, Smug Internet People.
NINA: … he said smugly. On the internet.
NINA: While we think “the death of the author” theory has a lot of value, we’re not going to totally discount what we know about the author’s background and intentions. Most importantly, we’re not going to take anything Tomino says at face value. There are a couple of reasons for this, but the big one is that you just can’t trust any author working in a commercial medium like anime to be honest in their public statements. Tomino in particular seems to delight in making cryptic statements about his own work, contradicting himself, and claiming none of it means anything which is just, [exasperated breath] come on, man. So this brings us to our theory of Gundam criticism which we are calling “All Authors Are Liars”--
THOM: Wait, what?
NINA: --I mean, our theory of Gundam criticism, “Schrodinger's Author”. The author is both alive and dead. The author’s background and statements are interesting and important but should be considered skeptically when assessing the work itself.
THOM: Now let’s watch some Gundam. Our recap of “Episode 1: Gundam Rises” begins in 3… 2…
[10:45] Twinkling stars music to RECAP
THOM: The red monoeye of a Zaku burns against the darkness of space. It is the 79th year of the Universal Century, eight months into a cataclysmic war that has already killed half the total human population. It was Zeon that started the war with a lightning attack that smashed the Federation fleet and caused one of the new space colonies to lose orbit and crash to Earth. The Federation has been on the ropes since then, their lumbering warships and antiquated space fighters are no match for Zeon’s new “mobile suits”, 18-meter tall piloted robots called “Zaku”. But all of this is about to change thanks to a secret Federation weapons project and some astronomically bad luck.
THOM: Returning from a raid somewhere in the Earth Sphere, a single Zeon light cruiser, commanded by mysterious masked mobile suit ace Char Aznable, stumbles by complete happenstance upon an experimental Federation warship codenamed “White Base”, on a mission to a partially completed civilian colony, Side 7. There a secret Federation lab has been working tirelessly on a new weapon that just might turn the tide of the war. Char pursues the White Base and sends a squadron of three Zaku to infiltrate the colony and collect intelligence. Civilians living near the Federation facility are ordered to evacuate. Among these is teenage tech genius Amuro Ray, the son of one of the lead Federation engineers. With him are his friends and neighbors, Fraw Bow and Hayato Kobayashi. Federation soldiers watch the Zeon cruiser, and civilians wait in shelters for the All-Clear signal. Char’s infiltrators discover the facility, and confirm what Char suspected: the Federation has developed its own mobile suits.
THOM: Eager to win glory like his commander, one young Zaku pilot attacks without orders, destroying mobile suit prototypes and killing the base’s outmatched defenders with ease. The civilians inside the bunkers begin to panic. Amuro runs outside determined to find his father, but instead finds himself in the midst of battle, dodging stray missiles while soldiers die just meters away from him. Near the spaceport, he finds his father working on one of the mobile suits, codenamed “Gundam”. They’re interrupted by another stray blast, but this one, this one hits a nearby group of civilians trying to flee. Fraw Bow’s mother and grandfather are among them. Overcome by rage and grief, Amuro climbs into the Gundam’s cockpit. The Zaku open fire on him but the Gundam’s armor is too strong -- he shrugs off their attacks. The Zeon pilots try to flee but Amuro won’t let them escape. He cuts two of them down. A reactor is breached. It explodes and tears a hole in the colony. Amuro’s father is too close, and he’s sucked out into the vacuum of space. The last of the Zeon pilots escapes, headed back to Char. The attack is over, but the threat has not yet passed, and Char makes a haunting observation: “No one likes to admit to them, those mistakes we make because of our youth.”
[13:51] Twinkling stars music to TALK BACK
THOM: So we just finished watching the first episode of the first series of Gundam. Nina, what are your first impressions?
NINA: Well can I say, to start, this is a very fun theme song. Highly recommended for karaoke, and they absolutely have it.
THOM: Definitely.
NINA: So Zeon wants independence. They’ve been fighting for eight months, half of humanity is dead--why didn’t the Federation give Zeon their independence? The fact that they’re calling it a war for independence puts our sympathies with Zeon, right?
THOM: Yeah, I think it does. I was actually going to bring up that opening narration, too, as part of talking about the way the series, really from the get go, embraces the ambiguity of the war, the conflict between Zeon and the Federation. The opening narration doesn’t give us any kind of idea of who to blame. There’s no sense [that] one side is good and the other one is bad.
NINA: It’s between these two armies [that] they’ve killed half of humanity, not “Zeon launched a surprise attack and killed half of humanity” or something.
THOM: Right, the opening narration doesn't give us any kind of information about that. It tells us more or less what has happened, but there are a lot of things it doesn't tell us. It doesn’t tell us really why Zeon is fighting, and [it] doesn’t tell us why the Federation has refused to grant them independence, even after eight months of war and billions of deaths. It doesn’t tell us who’s responsible for that colony crashing. Was it an accident? Was it intentional? We don’t know. It’s sort of not important because the story isn't really about that. That’s the setting, but the story is about the characters we’re about to start meeting.
NINA: I thought it was very interesting, in a move that is potentially uncomfortable for a Western audience, and maybe even for a Japanese audience, I don’t know--we’re clearly meant to be sympathetic to the Zeon cause--
THOM: Mm-hmm.
NINA: --but they also look like a--
THOM: Nazis?
NINA: --an analogue for--
THOM: They look like Nazis?
NINA: Yeah, or even like World War 1-era Prussians. It’s sort of a combination.
THOM: Right, they have that, they’re sort of too dressed-up to be Nazis?
NINA: Right.
THOM: Especially the commanders, like Char.
NINA: With all the braid--
THOM: Mm-hmm
NINA: --and all the decorative everything on the uniforms. Well, and the uniforms feel like throwbacks--
THOM: Mm-hmm
NINA: --compared to the Federation. The technology looks like throwbacks. It’s less sharp lined, it’s less modern-looking. The colors are more camo and less bright and shiny. We’ve got some cool pictures that we can post in the show notes, but the design of the Zaku looks like old equipment--
THOM: Mm-hmm
NINA: from, was it World War 2?
THOM: It was yeah, well, sort of--
NINA: [laughs]
THOM: This was--I found a picture of some, what were essentially Japanese marines during the invasion of China, specifically during attacks on Shang-hai, and the equipment that these marines wear during chemical weapons attacks looks almost identical to the Zaku’s sort of helmet and breather apparatus design, and they carried a machine gun that looks pretty similar to the one that the Zaku use, and I don’t know if that was a conscious allusion, but I strongly suspect that it was, and there’s some reasoning for that that I think we’ll explain later when we talk more about the colony drop and when we talk more about the Zaku.
NINA: If this was purely about re-fighting the war I don’t think they would make Zeon sympathetic, there’s something else going on there. Also that they’re a principality, which I assume means they have a prince? Or...
THOM: [Laughing] Fun, fun point there actually! This is a, this is a “weird translation” situation--
NINA: [Makes intrigued, “Tell me more” noises]
THOM: Well, because, as you can imagine, the titles of nobility in English and Japanese don’t quite line up one-to-one, so for whatever reason, the preferred translation is the Principality of Zeon, but their leader is an Archduke.
NINA: Okay
THOM: So it could be called the Archduchy, and one of the novelization translations calls it that, but no one ever adopted the “archduchy” terminology.
NINA: I mean they might just have wanted something that sounded more familiar to English ears?
THOM: Mm-hmm
NINA: We don’t hear about a lot of independent archduchies…
THOM: Yeah--
NINA: Principalities, on the other hand, we still currently have some, so--
THOM: Mm-hmm, very true.
NINA: I don’t think we have a modern parallel for a place declaring its independence from a federation to become a monarchy.
THOM: Well give it time.
NINA: [sighs]
THOM: Though, I do think that sort of thing happened a lot more around the turn of the century, around 1900?
NINA: Oh, that’s fair, like places declaring “We’re not part of your empire, we have our own empire and this is our king.”
THOM: Right. Well, or places that were, you know, in the, say post-Napoleonic era it was very common to abandon a republic in order to become a monarchy.
NINA: Shoutout to another podcast we love, Revolutions. If you’re ever interested in those periods of history.
THOM: Yeah, I’m looking forward to when he finally does the Zeon Revolution.
NINA: [Laughs]
NINA: Amuro strikes me from the beginning as the sort of character who shouldn’t survive all the things that happen to him. He’s so oblivious he hasn’t heard an evacuation siren, he doesn't feed himself, he starts reading [the] Gundam manual while there are explosions and giant robots fighting around him until Fraw Bow distracts him and gets him to move. Doesn’t seem like someone who ought to be able to survive what’s happening?
THOM: I think you’re right about that but everyone who should be doing all of this, everyone who should be piloting the Gundam, everyone who should be flying the White Base, everyone who should be surviving, isn’t. War sort of turns things topsy-turvy. All the regular engineers are dead, all the pilots are dead, the shelters don't protect you, and the first people that Amuro actually sees die, being a couple of Federation officers that he runs into while he's looking for his dad, are killed by friendly fire. If you watch closely, it’s a wire-guided rocket that kills them, and those are only being fired by the Federation--the Zaku don’t have those weapons. [Y’know] friendly fire is a thing that happens but I think it’s extremely significant that that’s one of the first deaths, and the first one that Amuro sees. The animators certainly took the time to make that very clear to the audience.
NINA: The other thing that struck me about that scene, and this is more from a sort of like filmmaking and storyboarding perspective--sidebar, we very much enjoy this series called Every Frame A Painting that is all about filmmaking, and they do an episode about Jackie Chan where he talks about how he shoots fight scenes, and he talks about how to make hits look like they have impact. His beef with a lot of American action is they don’t actually show you the hit, they show you right before and right after, and the way [Jackie Chan] shoots, he shows you the hit several times--and they do that in this scene. I don’t know if you noticed…
THOM: Really?
NINA: ...they showed that same explosion three times. So they show it, they back up a little bit, you see it again, they back up a little bit, you see it again, and it really hammers home, like, “How shocking and destructive!”
THOM: I had not caught that. I certainly felt the impact of that scene. They do a great job of showing us the scale of the Gundam and the Zaku. When Amuro first sees the Zaku firing, it looks like a giant. It looks like a monster, and it's shot in such a way as to look like that. We don’t see it from side on, or from above, we see it from a worm’s eye view, and we see the shell casings--
NINA: --I mean they look like garbage cans flying at him. I think it, well, and you feel that from the Zaku they must almost, like, not even notice people. They’re looking at emplacements and equipment and the people feel insignificant. Another point in this episode that I love is just how bad Amuro is at piloting the Gundam. It’s not somehow natural. He didn't’ hop in the cockpit and somehow he's this amazing pilot immediately, no, he's terrible. His father’s like “What kind of fighting is that!”
[General laughter]
NINA: ...but it doesn’t matter because it’s so strong--
THOM: Mm-hmm
NINA: --the shields are so thick, the weapons are so effective that even though he’s terrible it's still a huge threat.
THOM: In a lot of shows they’ll say, “Wow! It’s so powerful, it's so much more powerful than the other thing!” But in Gundam they really show that to you, and not only do we see the Gundam behaving very powerfully but we see all the pilots amazed by how strong the Gundam is. Even though Amuro is terrible at piloting the Gundam he’s still able to participate in this more elevated kind of warfare that all of the Federation soldiers, with their machine guns and rocket launchers don't stand a chance at.
NINA: I love that he gets into the Gundam with the manual.
THOM: Yes!
NINA: So great.
THOM: [laughing] Yeah, the Gundam and the manual and [...] the way it appears and the way it’s described of course they’re such artifacts of that era, ‘cause one of the first things he says about it is something like, “Whoa, computer operated?”
NINA: Well, and I’m interested to see how the “learning computer” part plays out through the rest of the series, ‘cause Amuro makes note as he’s flipping through the computer, “Oh! It’s a learning computer.” Which, we really haven’t seen what that means yet. Does it mean that in certain ways it’s going to make up for Amuro’s deficiencies, or it’s going to adapt itself to Amuro, or it’s going to adapt based on the combats it’s in? It’s going to become better in certain ways because of the types of mobile suits it’s fighting and the types of missions it’s on? Thom can’t say anything because--
THOM: I decline to comment on the grounds that I already know the answer
NINA: --right, but I am very interested to see what that looks like.
THOM: And of course, this is really cutting-edge science. The idea that computers can learn things was, at this point, science but not, not by very much.
NINA: Barely out of the realm of science-fiction.
THOM: Yes, exactly, and so probably they did not yet know what it meant when they started hypothesizing what a learning computer in a battle robot was going to be able to do.
NINA: One of the things that I’ll go into in more depth later on is how many anime aimed at young people provide children with something that enables them to compete on a level with adults, and--
THOM: Now I’m thinking about Sailor Moon and all of the transformations, the kind of Shazaam-esque temporary growing up.
NINA: Well, or, or even things like Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! where the age of the trainer is actually irrelevant, right?
THOM: Mm-hmm
NINA: Like, it’s all about your pokémon and so if you have good enough pokémon it doesn’t matter how old you are, or how old your opponent is--
THOM: Mm-hmm
NINA: --and the same thing in a Gundam. I mean, everybody talks about Char, and we get the impression that he is very young--
THOM: Yeah.
NINA: --but has been fighting for long enough that he, he talks like an old veteran.
[THOM laughing]
NINA: “The mistakes we made in our youth.” ‘Cause he’s not young anymore, I guess? I don’t know.
THOM: Well that’s a very, that’s a very ambiguous line. I don’t know [if] Char is talking about himself, or his subordinates, or in some way, about Amuro--’cause he can’t possibly know about Amuro at that point, but I think that the artistic intention of that line is to refer to Amuro and the, not quite patricide, but the--
NINA: Blowing a hole in the exterior…
THOM: --blowing a hole in the side of the colony that caused his father to become lost in space.
NINA: The point being that these suits render their age irrelevant. Oh man, do you think we’re supposed to find it terribly ironic when Amuro’s dad is like, “Oh, how old are you, Bright?” And Bright is like, what, 19?
THOM: Yeah.
NINA: And Amuro is supposed to be, what, 15 or 16?
THOM: 15
NINA: And [Amuro’s dad] draws a distinction somehow that Amuro is a child, and “Oh gosh, so horrible, I hear there are children his age fighting as, like, guerrilla fighters” when he’s talking to someone three years older? Four years older?
THOM: Yup.
NINA: I imagine we’re meant to find that ironic.
[NINA laughing]
THOM: I think we must be, I really think we must be. There’s that interview with Tomino that we found where he talks about the role of children in war--in the end we can’t trust anything Tomino says, ever--but he does seem to think that children are always going to be involved in war. He was, I think, 4 or 5 when the war ended?
NINA: So he’d remember it.
THOM: Yes, and his hometown was one of the last ones to be bombed.
NINA: So, he would remember that, he would remember that aftermath. Y’know, once we stopped fighting only in open fields far from populated areas we really ceased to shield civilians from war--
THOM: Mm-hmm
NINA: --in any meaningful way, and in Japan in particular there was this sense of training women, and the elderly, and young people to defend Japan in case of a land invasion. There was a sense that, “We won’t let you enlist in the army, but that doesn’t mean we’re not willing to make you soldiers.”
THOM: So, I think, now that it’s come up, I wonder about the relationship between this first episode, with the attack on the colony, with the civilians sheltering, fleeing, and getting caught up in it all, how that connects to Tomino’s own experience of the war since, as we said, he was 4 or 5 when the war ended. He wasn’t a soldier, by any means, but he did live through part of the war, and these episodes reflect his own personal experiences of it, as much as he can remember. I think perhaps the character who most closely resembles Tomino is actually the very small child--
[NINA laughing]
THOM: who is seen over one person’s shoulder yelling, “You bastards!” after, after the Zaku blows something up.
NINA: Yeah.
THOM: And that character, of course, is going to become one of the three orphans who will be showing up throughout the series aboard the White Base.
NINA: Why “White Base”?
[THOM laughing]
THOM: Well, English words are cool…
[NINA laughing]
THOM: Because it’s not, uhm, I don’t know the Japanese word for “base”, but certainly not shiro-
NINA: Shiro-beisu
THOM: --whatever the Japanese word for base is. No, it’s a White Base. If I had to guess I would say this is a joke, and it is a very bitter joke, because the color schemes for the Gundam and the White Base were both insisted upon by the toy manufacturers.
NINA: Ah.
THOM: Tomino wanted them to be a kind matte-grey, which would be much more effective camouflage in space combat--
NINA: Mm-hmm
THOM: --and in the novels that he wrote, they are. However, the toy manufacturers wanted bright colors that children would like, so they ended up being white, and--
NINA: Primary colors.
THOM: --blue, and red, and yellow, and Tomino apparently hated this.
[NINA laughing]
THOM: I’ve heard he hated the design of the White Base especially.
NINA: It’s not a cool ship…
THOM: It’s not. It’s not, it’s actually not even, it wasn’t even designed for Gundam. It was a reused design from another anime that never quite got off the ground.
NINA: So they already had the molds, and so they wanted to, like, [laughing] just…
THOM: I think there’s a good chance that was the motivation there, yeah.
NINA: Ahhhh.
THOM: So he hated it, and I would not be surprised if the name “White Base” came out of his antipathy towards the design and color scheme of that stupid ship.
NINA: Also that he just didn’t want to give it a cool name. It’s like, “This is stupid--”
THOM: Yeah.
NINA: “--Just gonna call it what it is: White Base”.
THOM: [laughing] Yes.
NINA: My final note on this episode is just how much I love the battle music.
THOM: Oh, it’s so good. The intense jazz?
NINA: Yeah. [laughing] “[Jazz intensifies]”
[THOM and NINA both laughing]
NINA: I wonder a bit about whether or not whoever did the music direction or the composition for this show went on to do any other anime we know and love.
THOM: I don’t know about, say, the music in general, the composition or any of that sort of thing. I do know, ‘cause we looked this up at one point, that the opening was written by Tomino himself, under a pseudonym.
NINA: But did he sing it?
THOM: I don’t think so…
[NINA laughing]
THOM: …unless he has more pseudonyms than we know about!
NINA: Yeah, this was, we did a little bit of research into this. With current anime, it’s very common for openings and closings to be sung by pop stars. It’s made a lot of bands famous, it’s also been just a thing famous bands do, it’s very common--
THOM: Mh-hmm
NINA: --and they tend to change up the music every half-season, or every season. That was not, that doesn’t seem to have been the case at the time [First Gundam was made].
THOM: Yeah.
NINA: Anime was not at a place in society where it had that kind of draw for popular musicians.
THOM: Mh-hmm
NINA: So it wasn’t as if this was, like, a very popular singer people would have known.
THOM: Yeah, I haven’t been able to find really any information about this singer for the original, at all. At least not in English
NINA: When we return, we’ll have some Final Thoughts for you, including the results of our research about the First Gundam composers, and what the Gundam might have looked like if not for the sponsors.
[31:15] Twinkling stars music to RESEARCH 1 - Translation of “Principality” in The Principality of Zeon
THOM: We’ll talk more about the attack on Side 7 and our heroes’ subsequent escape aboard the White Base after the next episode, “Destroy Gundam”, brings this opening arc to its conclusion. For now, here are our other final thoughts after episode 1.
After we watched the episode, I went back and looked at the Japanese that usually gets translated as the “principality” part of the Principality of Zeon, and it turned out to actually be more interesting than I had originally thought. See, the term used in the Japanese is “kōkoku” (公国), with the “koku” (国) part of that coming from the familiar kanji for country, state, nation, etc. So, nothing surprising on that end, but the “kō” (公) kanji comes from a character that was used in China from at least as early as 1000 BCE to designate their highest rank in the peerage system, roughly equivalent to a duke in the European system. So that’s below an emperor of a king, but the highest non-royal noble.
What makes this especially interesting is that, as far as I can tell (and I invite scholars of Japanese history to correct me if I’m wrong about this), but, the only time that I could find when that character was used in Japan to refer to Japanese nobility was during the half-century after the Meiji Restoration, when the Imperial Court took power from the Shogun’s military government, until 1947, when occupied Japan adopted a sweeping new constitution that, among numerous other reforms, eliminated the peerage system entirely. So the term “kōkoku” is very much an artifact out of that brief, disastrous period of aggressive imperialism, and I can only conclude that it’s use to refer to Zeon is intended to invoke that memory.
[33:10] Sweeping music to RESEARCH 2 - Composers Takeo Watanabe & Yuji Matsuyama
NINA: We did a bit of digging about the music. The composition and arrangement are by Takeo Watanabe (渡 辺 岳夫) and Yuji Matsuyama (松山 祐士). Watanabe was the senior of the two and had been one of Matsuyama’s instructors at Nihon University College of Arts, as well as a mentor during his career. He even gave Matsuyama his working name of “Yuji”. The two worked together on numerous anime series, including two previous Tomino projects: Muteki Chōjin Zambot (無敵超人ザンボット) and Muteki Kōjin Daitarn (無敵鋼人 ダイターン), with Watanabe as composer and Matsuyama as arranger.
I wasn’t able to find as much information about Matsuyama. Kidō Senshi Gandamu is the work he’s best known for, and other than the anime he worked on with Watanabe, his only other work in film and TV seems to have been an handful of programs for NHK, Japan’s public broadcasting corporation. Watanabe, on the other hand, seems to have had a very busy career before passing away in 1989 at only 56 years of age. In addition to mentoring Matsuyama, he also taught Joe Hisaishi (久石 譲), who has achieved fame as a composer for two famous directors, Hayao Miyazaki (宮崎 駿) and Beat Takeshi (武北野).
NINA: Watanabe’s own credits are numerous, and include composing for television and film, live action and animation, as well as for the stage, and a handful of credits as a voice actor and singer. He was known for reading scripts very thoroughly before beginning to compose, wanting to have a deep understanding of the material. He would also attend the recordings, giving advice to the singers and performers. That deliberateness is something I’m going to be keeping in mind as we continue watching the series. This wasn’t a matter of including music that was simply trendy or cool, but music that he felt would fit the artistic aims of the program. Some projects of his that you all might be familiar with include: Heidi, Girl of the Alps; the 1973 Lone Wolf & Cub film; the song “Tomei Tengu BGM” on the Lost in Translation soundtrack; and Littl’ Bits, which I’ve never seen, but which inspired one of my uncles to call all of us nieces and nephews Littl’ Bits when we were small.
The theme song, titled “Tobe! Gundamu”, or “Fly! Gundam” was also composed by Watanabe, with lyrics by Tomino himself and sung by Kō Ikeda (池田 鴻). Ikeda was an actor and singer, primarily working with a theatrical company in Tokyo and on television dramas, with only a few recordings and anime themes among his credits. He did, however, sing the theme song for an earlier mecha anime called Groizer X (グロイザーＸ) in 1976. Humorously, this theme had the similar name “Fly! Groizer”. Groizer X also featured one of the very first roles for Toru Furuya (古谷徹), the voice actor for Amuro.
THOM: Groizer X is a fun example of the sort of disposable, commercial, toy-focused mid-70’s super-robot-mecha anime that ultimately produced Gundam, and was then destroyed by it. There’s no standard English transliteration for the name--the Japanese name is in katakana except for the big ole’ “X” slapped on the end, because English letters are cool. So it’s “gu-ro-i-za x”, but it can be written “groizer” or “gloizer”, and there’s an “i” in there that frequently switches for a “y”. Like a lot of these shows Groizer was not really popular in Japan. In fact, it was only ever popular in Brazil, where it was known as O Pirata do Espaço--“The Space Pirate”.
NINA: Total speculation on my part, but it’s possible that Ikeda was hired to perform the Gundam theme because of his work on Groizer, which Furuya would have been very familiar with.
THOM: I mentioned earlier that the design for the White Base was actually salvaged from another, prior show. If you’re curious, that show was Muteki Kōjin Daitarn 3, which Nina mentioned earlier in the show because the same composers worked on it before Gundam. It was known in English as Invincible Steel Man Daitarn 3, was also directed by Tomino, and also aired on Nagoya TV from June 1978 to March 1979. It ran for forty episodes but was not particularly successful in Japan at the time. It did eventually find popularity in Italy during the early 1980’s, and we should probably do some more research on that because Italy was also the very first foreign country to get Gundam. So I’d love to know if there was some early mecha anime community building in Italy at that time. Make sure you don’t confuse Invincible Steel Man Daitarn 3 with Tomino’s prior project from the year before that, Invincible Super Man Zambot 3, which was also unsuccessful, making it to only twenty-three episodes. There wasn’t a 1 or 2 for either Daitarn or Zambot by the way. I guess Tomino just liked the number 3, invincible men, and making unpopular shows.
[37:42] Sweeping music to RESEARCH 3 - Tomino’s desired Gundam and White Base color schemes
THOM: We talked briefly about the darker, more realistic, more military color scheme that Tomino wanted to have on the Gundam and the White Base, and it did eventually make its way into the Gundam canon, more or less. So if you want to see it, you can. Just look up the RX-78-3, that is the sort of, kind of, not really successor to Amuro’s RX-78-2 Gundam Prototype, sometimes called the G3 Gundam, and that one was given the blue and grey color scheme that supposedly Tomino wanted for the Gundam originally. As for the White Base and its Tomino-approved color scheme, that one is a little less clear. Some sources claim that Tomino wanted it to be even darker than the G3 Gundam ended up being, with either a black or very dark grey as the dominant color and then a lighter grey as the secondary color. My personal theory is that the ship called “Gray Phantom”, which originally appears in the 0080 War in the Pocket series, is actually what Tomino originally envisioned for the White Base. If you look at it, that ship looks like a streamlined version of the White Base. It has a grey-on-an-even-darker-grey color scheme and like the G3 Gundam, the in-universe explanation for the Gray Phantom makes it an upgraded and redesigned copy of the White Base. Also, if you look at the cover for the original English-language printing of the second of Tomino’s three novels that follow the story of First Gundam you’ll actually see a drawing of a ship that is supposed to be the White Base but looks exactly like the Gray Phantom... but it has the White Bases colors. That first English-language printing was in 1990, the year after War in the Pocket came out, so it’s possible that Del Rey, the publisher, simply used the more recent art by mistake--but that would be a weird oversight when the rest of the novelization project was so faithful to the original, and was overseen by both Tomino and prominent Japanese-to-English translator Frederik Schodt.
End credits music fades in
THOM: We won’t officially see the Gray Phantom for a while yet, but you can look it up now and just be disappointed every time the real White Base appears. Just like Tomino.
[39:58] NEXT TIME & END CREDITS
NINA: Next week we’ll return with Episode 1.2: “No, She’s Too Strong!”, to see the Red Comet enter the fray for the first time. Plus, Mutually Assured Gundams; acting like captains; Sayla’s got a gun; the Battle of Space Okinawa; and a face the just screams “Mnyeah”... Will you be able to survive?
Music plays
THOM: Make sure you do all the podcast-things! Like, subscribe, share, and pledge your undying devotion to Mobile Suit Breakdown on fine podcast services everywhere, and on YouTube. Follow us on Twitter at @GundamPodcast, check out our website GundamPodcast.com for episodes, show notes, and more, and you can email your questions, comments, and complaints to [email protected]. Or, come shout your Wrong Gundam Opinions to us directly by coming to scenic New York City and yelling that: “Gundam Epyon is actually a good design and it doesn't look at all like it started out as someone’s OC on DeviantArt” ...on any busy street corner. We’ll totally hear you.
Music plays
THOM: The intro song is “WASP” by Misha Dioxin. The closing music is “Long Way Home” by Spinning Ratio. You can find links and more in the show notes. And thank you for listening.
[41:22] Music continues through OUTTAKES
NINA: When I’m talking about half the human population being dead, being like, [Valley Girl accent] “Like, half-the-human-population staggering!”
THOM: Well if you say it like that…
NINA: I could say it in the most deadpan, deep serious voice, but the like at the beginning of it makes it silly.
THOM: [Deepest, Most Serious] Like, half the human population dead…
NINA: [Laughs] Yeah! Exactly. Even when you do it it’s silly.
Music plays
THOM: I like it, I liked that read, now for fun do it like a 1910’s radio announcer.
NINA: [Very Radio] But the real story is about a spaceship full of refugees from a civilian colony, chased from their homes by one side and conscripted by the other. And Amuro Ray, the fifteen-year-old boy who pilots the Gundam to protect them as they are all swallowed up by the grand and petty tragedies of war.
THOM: [Very Dramatic] Oh the humanity!
THOM: Why don’t we do the whole podcast like that?
[Nina laughing]
NINA: It was … not bad, I hope.
THOM: No, it was great.
NINA: I don’t, I don’t do voices, man.
THOM: You did that voice. You do that voice apparently.
Music plays
NINA: Amooroe Ray. Noodle.
THOM: A-muro! Do your best Frau Bow. [Calling] “Amuro!”
NINA: Yeah, but that, that’s actually good. I did it like a frikkin’ “Amooroe”--
THOM: I know. That’s so unlike you.
Music plays
NINA: Doin’ like a six-line long sentence…
THOM: That’s not my fault! That’s the right length for that sentence.
Music plays
NINA: I really should have... [lauging] rehearsed…
Music plays
THOM: Anything else you want to do?
NINA: I don’t think so
[43:20] END