Wednesday, October 5, 2016

T5W#60-Top 5 Things I like about my Least Favorite Gundam Series (or movies)


As much as I love Mobile Suit Gundam, even I cant ignore that sometimes…some aspects of certain series are bad…and sometimes, whole series are just BAD!!!! Ahem, I’ll take it back a notch.  With that in mind, a recent watch of a certain series made me realize something: Unlike Star Trek Nemesis (which is an unforgivable Star Trek film much less a film in general), when it comes to bad Gundam shows, I can think of at least one thing from each I actually enjoyed about it.  So the T5W is a bit random this week, but it’s Gundam and it’s kind of my thing.  So here are five things I like about bad Gundam series (or movies)

 

#5-The God Gundam (Mobile Fighter G Gundam)
I’m in a bit of a minority here.  I know a lot of people who like G Gundam, a lot.  Me?  I never could appreciate it.  Mostly I thought Domon was an annoying character who never saw he had an incredibly hot chick right next to him when all he wanted to do was punch people.  The Street Fighter aspect was kind of neat but I never really cared for many of the Gundams.  There was one though that I thought was incredible…the titular G Gundam, or God Gundam, or Burning Gundam for you American Dub Fans.  This was a Gundam made for a samurai warrior.  Swords, those blades in the back, this Gundam stood above it’s competition in the Gundam Fight.  Wouldn’t say it’s a God of a mech (that still goes to the Gundam Unicorn and Gundam 00 Raiser) but the God Gundam is definitely in my Top 10 Best Gundams of All Time list.

 

#4-The Fall of Junius Seven (Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Destiny)
Before it became my least favorite Gundam ever (until Gundam Build Fighters Try came along), there was some promise in Gundam Seed Destiny.  But the biggest, and best, moment of the series came so early, it almost makes sense the rest of the story couldn’t live up to it.  Dropping the site of a catastrophe that started the prior war between the Earth Federation and ZAFT onto the Earth was a huge event.  It upped the stakes bigger than they’d ever been and set the stage for a bigger, bloodier war that anything we ever saw in Gundam Seed…and then the rest of the series happen and it’s still 50 episodes of watch time in my life I want back.

 

#3-The Animation (Mobile Suit Gundam F91)
Gundam F91 is big.  It’s actually too big.  It’s overstuffed with plot threads that go nowhere or are just forgotten after a bit.  All characters change at the drop of a dime.  It was supposed to be 50 episodes and got cut to 14 crunched into a 2 hour feature…a bad one at that.  But one thing I will actually praise this movie for…it’s beautiful.  In my review a couple years back I said, and I still stand by this, that the feature film budget made the animation look better than Char’s Counterattack (and that was one of Gundam’s finest looking entries).  The first half hour especially shows a lot of promise.  It’s a shame that all of this great effort in the art department gets lost in all the mountain of complaints this movie gets (and ive said my fair share about it as well).

 

#2-Fumina Hoshino (Gundam Build Fighters Try)
When I was in high school, I would probably have said that seeing a girl who is into Gundam was an impossible thing.  If High School was anything like the world of Gundam Build Fighters, life would have been a helluva lot more fun.  Fumina is probably the best thing about this God awful show.  She’s cute, optimistic and the closest to a true successor to Sei Iori as this show ever got (and seriously F*** the announcer who said Yuuma was Sei’s successor, that guy can go…ugh I wonder if kids ever read this, should I be watching my angry outbursts).  It’s a shame that Fumina got lost in the shuffle of throwing the story on Sekai’s boring Narutoness or Yuuma whininess.  These two guys had no idea how good that had it with this beautiful Gundam Fighter in their lives.

 

#1-The Theme Songs (Gundam Build Fighters Try and Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Destiny)
You know how sometimes a show has some merit just because of it’s music?  Well I learned that the first time watching Gundam Seed Destiny.  Many chide this era of Gundam for it’s emphasis on J Pop music, I think that the opening and closing themes were great.  Nami Tamaki’s Reason and TM Revolution’s Ignite are two of the best combo ending/opening themes of any Anime ever.  This same enjoyment carries over to my other least favorite Gundam entry.  Back On’s Cerulean was a good way to kick off the return to the Build Fighters world…before I realized how much the world sucked without Sei and Reiji.  The other subsequent opening and two closing themes were cool too.  Actually, hearing Back On’s theme for Gundam Build Fighters Try-Island Wars is what prompted me to come up with this Top 5 list…do I owe Build Fighters Try a thank you...Nope.

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