YAMATO also failed to appeal to a wider audience upon first showing, but saw a vast increase in popularity after the airing of reruns and major motion pictures. Its extremely realistic depictions of a future world probably appeared dull in comparison to colorful Super Robot series. One might say that no one watches science fiction to be reminded of the real world’s drudgery—except when it reveals things about ourselves that might seem trite or obvious when set in the ordinary world. This is where shows like YAMATO and step in. The tradition of every Gundam series is to examine both the individual and political ramifications of military combat. This requires an expanded world view, complete with multiple opponents, various vantage points, and a reluctance to deem any one character or organization the force of “absolute” evil. “Back in 1979, a typical giant robot did not require too many details in its worldbuilding,” writes anime critic Ryusuke Hikawa in A Matured Gundam Saga. “It was quite sufficient to have military bases and civilian areas for each side that turned into battlefields. In contrast, First Gundam submitted that people necessarily belonged to abstract immensities, to society and the world, and that macroscopic entities called states perpetrated the calamity of war, within which clashes between robots occurred as a conflict of arms.” This brings us to another major theme of GUNDAM: the cost of battle. In every series, collateral damage wrings pathos out of soldiers, causes politicians to change their tactics, and in some cases, directly affects the direction of the plot. Although it may seem obvious, characters die in GUNDAM, often brutally. “Plain death, beyond good and evil, right and wrong, as inevitable phenomena in war, is ubiquitously depicted and sets the tone of the story,” Hikawa writes. And this The cast of (1985). principle applies to death on both large and small scales. In First GUNDAM, the the Gundams are used as instruments of a GUNDAM’s detailed and complex Principality of Zeon obliterates entire quadrennial tournament to determine the world view eventually made people sit colonies during war and even drops empty ruler of the colony sphere; NEW MOBILE up and take notice, though it took several colony cylinders onto the surface of the REPORT GUNDAM WING, an alternate years (the original series was canceled Earth itself, killing huge amounts of the universe series in which the colonies create prematurely after 43 episodes). When the population at a time. In ZETA, the main their own Gundams as symbols of revolution; television episodes were recut and reedited character Kamille watches his mother get SEED, a into a series of movies and released in sucked into space and die—an event that struggle between genetically enhanced 1981, they did very well, and set the causes another Lieutenant to defect to the “Coordinators” and traditional humans called stage for the many sequels and spinoffs. opposite side. In WING, the single death of “Naturals”; and many, many more. In a similar case, SPACE BATTLESHIP the pilot Quatre’s father destroys his own

50 FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND • sep/oct 2013