gundam

My Anime News Network review of Gundam UC Episode 1

I've been feeling a bit better these past few weeks, so I have more motivation and ideas for videos. In this part of the review, I wanted to get a little more philosophical about the anime I'm covering, even if it is a colorful and silly series like G Gundam which doesn't exactly lean on sophisticated thinking and understanding. Sometimes even the dumbest and simplest things can jog the brain. And I wanted to be a little more creative about how I covered this.

Of course, I also had to acknowledge that I actually have the Devil Gundam in Penguinopolis' lower levels. It's used to protect the colossal city-fortress with its self-repairing nanomachines.

I'm back, people! I usually take January off, but I happened to need February off, too, because of mental health issues. It's one of the reasons I'm tackling my very real existential crisis in the opening bit of this video and probably throughout this season. But most importantly, I'm back to reviewing anime, and wanting to cheer myself up, I picked G Gundam, because it's a deliriously fun show by that master craftsman Yasuhiro Imagawa (who you may remember is one of my favorite anime directors).

There's not a whole lot of commentary I can provide for this one... mostly because it IS commentary on other commentaries. It's turtles all the way down. And this won't be the only favorites list this year, either. You can say I've gotten lazy, but I've been working nonstop on the 200th video (so far it's over 40 minutes long).

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SPOILER-FREE SYNOPSIS: It's Universal Century 105, 12 years after Char's Rebellion. The Federation continues to devour resources on the Earth, but are opposed by a group called Mafty that assassinates Federation leaders. Their leader is Mafty Navue Erin, who unbeknownst to most is really Hathaway Noa, the son of Federal Forces hero Bright Noa. After him is the Federal Force's Circe unit, led by Kenneth Sleg, a determined and tenacious officer dedicated to stomping out Mafty and its influence. Hathway must find a way to cloak his activities as he seeks to change the world.

I owe Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team for getting me into the Universal Century era of Gundam. If it weren't for it, I would never have got into watching the original series, or Zeta, or Char's Counterattack. I'd have stuck with the AUs like Wing or G forever. And while there's nothing necessarily wrong with the AUs (well, some of them), the Universal Century is the biggest tent at the Gundam circus. There are Gundam titles I like more than this OVA, but it's still one of my favorites.

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Alright, let me get this out of the way. The marketing surrounding this kit is pure bullshit. Take everything you’ve heard about this being the ‘next evolution of Perfect Grade kits’ and toss it out the window. What it really is a nice PG RX-78-2 2.0 release. It’s will built, well designed, and very accessible for folks who haven’t built a Perfect Grade kit yet.

I’m also going to get a bit of a tl;dr at the top of this article which I’ll detail out in a bit…

Welcome to the results page for the Great Gunpla Census of 2020! This is a follow up to a census, of a similair title, from back in 2018. The 2018 census was a big success with a lot of interest and positive feedback. There was also a good amount of constructive feedback that I brought into this year's survey. This time around there were more questions pertaining to the Gundam franchise in general for all the folks who're into Gundam but not necessarily Gunpla. 

Here's a quick build report on my MS IGLOO/Zeon inspired PL-01 tank from Takom. The PL-01 is a prototype Polish light tank with a very distinctive stealth (as much as a tank can be stealthy) design. This is my first tank in a long while, and first kit from Takom.

For the most part Takom’s PL-01 kit is pretty straight forward and easy to put together. There are a few issues though starting with a ton of visible seam lines. I did my best to hide all of them by welding and sanding which was, for the most part, successful. The most obvious seam is on the front, which isn’t glue on my build, because I wanted to paint the top and bottom parts independently. To go back and glue would have screwed up the paint quite a bit and I was just lazy enough to not care. 

About a six years ago I had the idea to put together a piece discussing the Gundam franchise’s many timelines and many, many complexities. Little did I know that I was opening a can of worms. Welcome to that can of worms.

The Gundam franchise is a confusing assortment of TV series, manga, games, novelizations, and even audio dramas. These are broken across many different universes, and within those universes, similar and sometimes contradictory stories. What I’ve tried to do below is take as much of the franchise’s numerous installments I could muster and lay them out graphically. Before we get to that there are a couple of core concepts we need to cover.