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.