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Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Tournament Fighting G-Gundam Style
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TranceLimit174
 Posts: 958 |
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G Gundam is best Gundam.
That is all. |
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 4382 Location: New York |
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This boxset decorates my desk at home for a reason. I love this show. It is unrepentantly insane (the joke is always that the LA Gundam movie should be a G movie just because of how bonkers it is) but that’s part of what makes it so endearing, that and the surprisingly well done human drama and connections underneath all the shouting and fighting.
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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G gundam is just great, of all the gundam show its the only one that realize how silly it is and just run with it. It's also the closest thing to a mech show that's "actually about the mech", and those mech are gloriously silly.
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thekingsdinner
 Posts: 1072 Location: Geertruidenberg, Netherlands |
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 515 |
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I kinda bristle at that, mecha-fan that I am. The characters in G Gundam are goofy stereotypes, but they're still very genuine. There's a very tender moment later in the series where Chibodee recounts his childhood and how his mother would sing him to sleep before she died. Later on, one of the girls in his harem tried to reach out to him by singing the same song his mother did--it just so happens to be, like, The Star Spangled Banner or something patriotic like that, I haven't seen the episode in a bit. It's goofy, yeah, but it still speaks to how these are people that still believe in things and love things. You ask me what a mecha "about the mecha" looks like, I'll say "Pacific Rim" every time because they couldn't be bothered to put any care into their cast. They're not characters, they're human-shaped figures that angst at each other, they taste like styrofoam. They cared enough about Chibodee Crocket to make him a memorable goof and make sure you knew he earned his place as a Gundam Fighter. |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4441 |
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This show still makes me smile. A lot of it is silly, but played totally straight. Sure, there are stereotypes there, but it layers them on so thick that it's pretty obvious it wasn't meant to be insulting. And yeah, it's definitely still political, just in a way that is very different from the UC Gundams. Even watching it in high school, I could appreciate how the basic premise was nations deciding they could no longer coincide to the point where a tournament that pitted martial and technical prowess against each other was preferable to outright war, with a heaping portion of haves and the have nots.
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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When I say "about the mech" I don't mean "has bad character" I mean that a good portion of the show is dedicated to the mech and they don't feel like background to the character. The character moment in G gundam are blissfully brief and don't detract too much from the the silly robot punching each others, unlike most other gundam show. |
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TranceLimit174
Posts: 958 |
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Fun Fact: this is unique to the dub. |
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Zhou-BR
Posts: 1425 |
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I really wanted to like G Gundam because I usually love tournament fighting anime and silly, hot-blooded retro characters, but this one disappointed me for a simple reason: the rules of the tournament make no sense. If there's a bracket, they never show it to us, and if it's a round-robin system, they never show us how many points each fighter has. They just decide who fights whom with no rhyme or reason, which made it hard for me to get excited about upcoming fights.
As for the visual side, while the character designs by Kazuhiko Shimamoto and the late Hiroshi Osaka look great and the animation is decently fluid for a '90s TV show, I was bothered by how in most frames the characters and the mecha are drawn with zero shading, which made the show look cheaper than it probably was. One thing I appreciated about G Gundam is that you can tell Imagawa is a fan of Masami Kurumada's work and wanted to pay homage to it. He even gave major roles to Koichi Hashimoto and Hideyuki Hori, the only main seiyuu from Saint Seiya who had never played major roles in a Gundam show before (Tohru Furuya, Keiko Han and Hirotaka Suzuoki respectively played Amuro, Lalah and Bright in the original one, while Ryo Horikawa played Kou Uraki in Stardust Memory). |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2559 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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Technically, there are rules, but they are rather basic. The 1st Round is essentially nothing but exhibition bouts, and any Gundam Fighters who get the head of their Gundam destroyed are instantly eliminated, as per the rules. The Gundam Fight itself doesn't really matter until the second half of the show, which is when eliminations start counting, & while this isn't made obvious until way later than what's covered here, we eventually find out that Wong, the man in charge of the entire Gundam Fight, doesn't give a crap about the rules anyway. He reinstates Gundam Fighters for the 2nd Round who were legally eliminated in the 1st Round, and after trying to mess with Domon throughout the second half just throws the rules away & makes the final match a giant battle royal. As G Gundam itself indicates, the Gundam Fight is really nothing more than posturing between the different colony nations under the guise of fighting honorable bouts, though the winning nation being the boss is upheld, something that's pushed more in the second half of the series. |
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Generations
 Posts: 204 |
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G-Gundam is one of the few anime in the world that instantly make me go into a room where people happen to be talking about it, throw some flower petals into the sky from my hands to make my entrance dramatic, and shout 'DID SOMEONE SAY G-GUNDAM?'
It has a very goofy setting, but it never stops having a lot of heart. The characters will appear stock but have very real and very relatable moments, and even the ones that appear hard to like at first (like Domon himself for example) will not fail to be a favourite by the end of the show. And what an ending it was, at that! G-Gundam probably has one of my absolutely favouritest endings in any anime. All plot points are closed, all characters are given appropriate moments, the best attack in anime history happens, and they make spoiler[a giant effing heart in outer space]. It's amazing. G-Gundam is also how I introduced a friend to giant mecha anime. To this day, I'll randomly shout to him "THE SCHOOL OF THE UNDEFEATED OF THE EAST!" Good stuff. |
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fuuma_monou
 Posts: 1820 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
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My favorite Gundam TV series is Zeta. My second favorite is G, but I probably spent more on the Ultra Edition Blu-ray for G than I ever did on DVDs and Blu-rays for Zeta. Should probably get around to watching G's English dub. Watched the Tagalog dub back in the nineties. Vincent Gutierrez ruled as Domon (he also plays Zoro in the One Piece dub). IIRC it aired on GMA after they finished showing Wing (whose dub is amazingly terrible from what I recall). |
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Xavon
Posts: 368 Location: Minnesota |
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My favorite Gundam series. I own two production cels of Allenbee.
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Jeff Bauersfeld
Posts: 109 |
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Same. That it doesn't take place in the UC timeline was a huge blessing for me. |
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dmanatunga
Posts: 54 |
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I have yet to see anything to top the existence of Fuunsaiki. |
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