Mobile Suit Gundam, Volumes1 — 2. © Bandai Entertainment. All rights reserved.

Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team, Volumes 1 - 2. © Bandai Entertainment. All rights reserved.

Mobile Suit Gundam. V.1, The Battle Begins! V.2, The Red Comet. V.3, The Threat of Zeon. V.4, Desert of Despair. V.5, Ambush! V.6, The Black Tri-Star. V.7, Back to Space. V.8, The Battle of Solomon. V.9, New Type. V.10, Lalah's Fate.
TV series (43 episodes), 1979-1980. Director: Yoshiyuki Tomino. Price & format: video & DVD English language, V.1-2 & 10, 5 episodes/125 minutes, V.3-9, 4 episodes/100 minutes, video $14.98/DVD $24.98 each. Distributor: Bandai Entertainment.

Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team. V.1 - 4.
OAV series (12 episodes), 1996-1999. Directors: Takeyuki Kanda, Umanosuke Iida. Price & format: V.1-4, 3 episodes 75 minutes, video English language $19.98 each; DVD bilingual $24.98 each. Distributor: Bandai Entertainment.

There are several TV anime series that have been massively influential. Mobile Suit Gundam is without doubt one of them. It revitalized the exhausted "giant robot" genre by taking it from a juvenile fantasy scenario and putting it into a more realistic military-action science-fiction setting. Instead of the mighty robot and its righteous adolescent pilot-companion performing as a simplistic superhero team fighting evil villains, the robot became an advanced battle vehicle, one of many in an air/space force fighting in a futuristic war; and the action focuses upon the human interest story of the young pilot. Macross/Robotech, VOTOMS, Patlabor, Evangelion -- every giant robot anime series during the past twenty years that has achieved any popularity has followed the new formula created by Gundam in 1979.

The influential Mobile Suit Gundam. © Bandai Entertainment. All rights reserved.

Gundam has become an industry in its own right, catapulting its producer, Sunrise Inc., into the ranks of Japan's major animation studios. The original Mobile Suit Gundam was 43 episodes, broadcast from April 7, 1979 - January 26, 1980. These were condensed into three theatrical features. The sequels started gushing out in the mid-1980s, with new TV series, theatrical features and direct to video series; not to mention the live-action TV movie, the video games, the Japanese amusement park attractions, etc., etc. Zeta Gundam, Gundam-ZZ, Gundam Victory, G-Gundam ... anime fans have been both amused and frustrated by America's first taste of the franchise being the 1995 Gundam Wing, one of the more recent variants.

Mobile Suit Gundam was created by director Yoshiyuki Tomino, who has admitted that he wanted to film Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers but Sunrise couldn't afford the TV rights. So he wrote his own version, focusing upon realistic warfare using plausible advanced military technology but turning the alien-creature menace into human adversaries. The action begins six months into a war in "Universal Century 0079" (around 2200 A.D.) between an Earth world government and Zeon, an artificial orbital space colony that has declared independence but is really trying to establish a dictatorship over all humanity. 15-year-old Amuro Ray, a civilian on another orbital colony being evacuated to Earth, is drafted into using his scientist father's Gundam battle-suit prototype to keep the evacuees alive as they are harried by Zeon's fighters. The complex military soap opera follows Amuro's relationship with his estranged family, his civilian buddies and new military companions (including budding romantic fumblings), and his increasingly personal rivalry with Zeon's "Red Baron"-like ace pilot Char Aznable (with glimpses of Char's own secret war against his superiors); as he grows during the last half of "the One-Year War" from a naive schoolboy to an experienced and bitter combat veteran. Gundam featured a large but charismatic cast (designed by fan-favorite character designer Yoshikazu Yasuhiko), believable emotions and dialogue, gripping political and battle situations, and a rare hard-science sci-fi plot that blended technology (the space battle hardware) and biology (hints that Amuro and Char were superior "Newtype" humans due to being raised outside of Earth's biosphere).