The Empire Strikes Back of anime?
Sep. 7th, 2006 05:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerMany anime fans of the "mecha" (or giant robot) persuasion have long proclaimed themselves very impressed with the mid-1980s series Zeta Gundam, the first sequel to the first anime series to present giant robots as only somewhat grandiose weapons of war rather than mere mechanical superheroes. To me, though, there can seem to be a certain undercurrent to some of that message board praise... not quite voiced suggestions that Zeta Gundam, gritty and complex, surpasses the original space opera Mobile Suit Gundam and then puts all the other sequels that have followed in that sprawling and more than a little complicated franchise to shame. There even seem occasional hints that it's never been matched by any other anime series that followed... and something about all of that reminds me of the more fervent and exclusionary backers of The Empire Strikes Back. (The fact that Gundam's eponymous Mobile Suits (or giant robots) wield lightsabre-like weapons might have something to do with this too, though.)
Preferring myself to view The Empire Strikes Back as just one part of a larger whole, that praise left me just a little leery. I was still interested in seeing Zeta Gundam for myself, though, and when the show was licensed and finally released in North America, I put in an order for the box set it was first released as. Just as that order shipped, though, a maelstrom of fan anger surged up through the message boards over inadequacies in the release. People were far from pleased that this supreme accomplishment could be made available to them in a compromised form, and this threw the company that had released it, Bandai Entertainment, into the doghouse of fan opinion. It still hasn't made it out. More depressingly for me, some people threw around disparaging comments about George Lucas, as they tend to do whenever some slight change occurs in an anime series as it makes it across the Pacific. (For that matter, there are sometimes direct comparisons made between Gundam's creator Yoshiyuki Tomino and George Lucas... but they seem tilted to be far from flattering to either man.)
All of this made me reluctant to open the box set when I got it, but at last I did, and I watched all of the series... to be left with the nagging feeling that to me Zeta Gundam was... all right, but not the greatest thing I had ever seen, and not even the Gundam series I had been most impressed by. Some, I suppose, might be swift to blame that on the flawed presentation... but I was convinced it was the content itself that had left me that way.
Having more positive opinions of certain things than some people insisted on expressing was bad enough, and this left me very ambiguous... but, at last, my resolve grew anew. Maybe I just hadn't given Zeta Gundam a chance. I'd certainly stretched it out over six months, watching its episodes in between four other anime series I'd been trying to follow at the same time, and perhaps this had meant I'd missed things. I resolved to start on the first day of the new year and watch one episode of Zeta Gundam a day. In a month and a half, I'd be finished, and hopefully with new and improved insights...
It took me eight months to see the whole thing this time.
I started off with enough determination, dipping back into my box set. It was true that the opening and closing songs had been taken out and replaced by background music from the series, which people had made a scandal of in part because they hadn't been told beforehand in time to cancel their preorders. (The usual theory why is that the songs were composed by Neil Sedaka, and this made them too expensive to license, although there are plenty of other disparaging explanations tossed around.) Even so, I was intent on perservering. It was easy enough to just skip the opening and closing credits each time, and I even toyed with the thought that they reminded me a little of the opening credits of Robotech. It was intriguing in some ways to contemplate that the series which had held my interest for a full decade had been airing on the other side of the Pacific at almost the same time as Zeta Gundam. Some might dismiss this as "sour grapes," but I'd also found video clips of the actual original openings and closing before I'd seen the rest of the series. Even back then, the first song didn't seem to be the greatest thing I'd ever heard. (The second opening song was better, but the sequence it was matched to perhaps didn't appeal as much as the first to me.)
What I was grappling with more was, once again, the plot itself. Zeta Gundam turns the victorious government the protagonists of the original series had fought for into a tyrannical state opposed by rebels called the AEUG, and this would seem to be interesting... but the much-vaunted elite soldiers of the state, the Titans, seemed to me from the start to be little more than self-serving thugs who at one point beat the stuffing out of somebody just offering to help them. In the first few episodes, as the AEUG steals all of their advanced Gundam Mobile Suits and otherwise run rings around them, the Titans just seem like incompetent thugs. They were left with giant robots modeled on those of the antagonists from the original series, and when the protagonists of the original series show up in small roles, all of them are on the side of the rebels. Something about all of it seemed to turn the show into "white hats" versus "black hats," and this loss of the moral ambiguity I had taken note of and been intrigued by in previous Gundam and other anime series all the way back to Robotech itself still left me a little cold.
Still, as I got more than a dozen episodes into the series, the plot was picking up as the AEUG tried to attack a Titan stronghold on the Earth, only to have to flee buried atomic bombs that left the heroes looking for a way back into space... and then I noticed message board reports that the single discs Zeta Gundam was now being sold as had improved subtitles on them, added for some unidentified reason. The sloppy translation of the box set had aggravated a lot of people; even with my still next to nonexistent knowledge of Japanese, I could tell there were oddities to it... and there was a sale coming up on an online anime store I had started buying from. It would still cost a bit, but I could afford it... and so, with a self-justification little more complicated than "Why not?", I placed a "double dip" order for the replacement discs and stopped watching the ones from the box set.
It took the new discs a while to arrive, and I spent part of that time rewatching the shorter anime series RahXephon. (The second time around I understood all the secrets explained only bit by bit through the series, and didn't feel as detached from most of the characters, but for some reason I found myself a little more alienated from its protagonist than before near the end.) When I started Zeta Gundam from the beginning again at the start of April, I could tell the subtitles were indeed improved. When somebody shouted someone else's name, the subtitles used the name and not "Wait!" or something similar; and when somebody said "mark two," the subtitles used "Mk. II." It was a small thing, but it kept me going... to where the heroes got back into space, and I started thinking once again that the rebels on their untroubled ship, responding to each Titan attack in turn, were in an ambiguous state halfway between guerilla fighters and the military arm of a declared political struggle, and yet not quite as interesting as either possiblity. The series was, though, starting to introduce more of its "transformable Mobile Suits," although those giant robots tended to turn into nothing more complicated than vague plane-like things (one turns into something more or less like a giant brick)... and then the fifth disc of the series froze up between episodes in my DVD player, and couldn't be persuaded to skip to half of an episode. Taking it out and looking at it revealed a visible flaw in the playing surface.
The online store was supposed to have good customer service, though, so I wrote off asking to exchange the disc, and they let me do it. While waiting for the replacement to be mailed back to me, I managed to watch all of a completely different Gundam series, Gundam Wing. (In its case, various sarcastic reviews and my own memories of seeing some of it in its TV broadcast had left me ready to view it as nothing more than "camp," with absurd characters and battles... but as I made my way through it, the constant reversals and reconfigurations in the plot began to appeal to me. Of course, its characters and battles were still more or less absurd.) At last, at the beginning of July, I had my replacement disc, and started on Zeta Gundam again, from the middle this time. In its case, individual battles could be tense and exciting, but the lasting ramifications of them to the larger story could often seem obscure. Beyond the character interaction that followed it, the unsuccessful attack on Earth might as well not have happened. In one episode, the Titans capture a lunar city... and in the very next, the AEUG chases them out. Somewhat later, the Titans make a powerful ally in part because the rebel negotiator can't control his temper... and a few episodes later, after no real sign that they've been hard-pressed because of it, the rebels wheedle the ally onto their side. For all of that, though, I was convinced every so often that there were indeed subtle references to previous events that I had missed before, and contemplated that maybe I was still being too harsh on Zeta Gundam. I was approaching the final episodes in any case, and starting to watch two a day to get to the final battle... and then the last disc froze up during not one but two episodes. Again, I noticed a visible pit in the playing surface.
Some message board discussions had insisted that Bandai Entertainment was having real problems with quality control, and I was starting to wonder about agreeing with them. Even so, I might still have the outside chance of exchanging the final disc... and the online store let me mail it back as well. At last, late in August, I had the final disc. By now, I was battling the constant fear that this one might prove defective as well, but I did manage to watch the last episodes, where the AEUG manages to grab control of a giant, fleet-destroying laser cannon and then have to go to greater lengths to keep hold of it. Much of the old praise of Zeta Gundam had carried an approving undercurrent that the series wasn't shy about killing off its characters. To me, though, most of it had concentrated on killing off the major Titans... at times for tragic effect, and at the start in such a way as to make me worried for some of the heroes but still leaving them more or less intact. It wasn't until the final episodes that the major heroes start falling... if at times in peculiar ways. One of them gets distracted and flies right into an asteroid, and another one bails out of her wrecked Gundam just as the adversary she's bested to tragic fashion explodes and nails her in the chest with shrapnel. I can understand that war can take lives without warning and without dignity... but sometimes it just seemed excessive.
Perhaps I was simply having expectations that Zeta Gundam would somehow transcend everything else run up against reality. There still seemed to me to be as much melodrama and speechifying about war and tragedy and the people at blame as any other Gundam series. This time, though, I was at least expecting something one summary had led me astray on before... when the young lead of Zeta Gundam defeats the last villian standing (who, to me, always seemed more smug and pointlessly enigmatic yet less impressive than most other people seem to think), the battle's psychic overtones hinted at in the final episodes leave him a mere simpleton rather than a vegetable. The first time around, the slight difference had somehow been a final depressing touch to my mood. No matter how I saw all of that tragedy, though, Zeta Gundam still seemed to leave loose ends hanging for the followup.
Had my opinions changed? Perhaps a little; I did have a better sense of connection between events. I could still wonder, though, if there had been enough drive and development for me over the fifty episodes. The other Gundam series I had counted as more impressive before still seemed to stay that way. Am I still saddened by this? Again, perhaps a little, but I'm growing more comfortable with my own opinions, positive and negative. With discs I now know (through much agony and waiting) to work, would I try the whole experiment again? Once more... perhaps. Still, I've even noticed a few other people on anime message boards express their own ambiguities about Zeta Gundam. For now, I'm all right with, for once, disagreeing with people by having reactions less enthusiastic than theirs.
Preferring myself to view The Empire Strikes Back as just one part of a larger whole, that praise left me just a little leery. I was still interested in seeing Zeta Gundam for myself, though, and when the show was licensed and finally released in North America, I put in an order for the box set it was first released as. Just as that order shipped, though, a maelstrom of fan anger surged up through the message boards over inadequacies in the release. People were far from pleased that this supreme accomplishment could be made available to them in a compromised form, and this threw the company that had released it, Bandai Entertainment, into the doghouse of fan opinion. It still hasn't made it out. More depressingly for me, some people threw around disparaging comments about George Lucas, as they tend to do whenever some slight change occurs in an anime series as it makes it across the Pacific. (For that matter, there are sometimes direct comparisons made between Gundam's creator Yoshiyuki Tomino and George Lucas... but they seem tilted to be far from flattering to either man.)
All of this made me reluctant to open the box set when I got it, but at last I did, and I watched all of the series... to be left with the nagging feeling that to me Zeta Gundam was... all right, but not the greatest thing I had ever seen, and not even the Gundam series I had been most impressed by. Some, I suppose, might be swift to blame that on the flawed presentation... but I was convinced it was the content itself that had left me that way.
Having more positive opinions of certain things than some people insisted on expressing was bad enough, and this left me very ambiguous... but, at last, my resolve grew anew. Maybe I just hadn't given Zeta Gundam a chance. I'd certainly stretched it out over six months, watching its episodes in between four other anime series I'd been trying to follow at the same time, and perhaps this had meant I'd missed things. I resolved to start on the first day of the new year and watch one episode of Zeta Gundam a day. In a month and a half, I'd be finished, and hopefully with new and improved insights...
It took me eight months to see the whole thing this time.
I started off with enough determination, dipping back into my box set. It was true that the opening and closing songs had been taken out and replaced by background music from the series, which people had made a scandal of in part because they hadn't been told beforehand in time to cancel their preorders. (The usual theory why is that the songs were composed by Neil Sedaka, and this made them too expensive to license, although there are plenty of other disparaging explanations tossed around.) Even so, I was intent on perservering. It was easy enough to just skip the opening and closing credits each time, and I even toyed with the thought that they reminded me a little of the opening credits of Robotech. It was intriguing in some ways to contemplate that the series which had held my interest for a full decade had been airing on the other side of the Pacific at almost the same time as Zeta Gundam. Some might dismiss this as "sour grapes," but I'd also found video clips of the actual original openings and closing before I'd seen the rest of the series. Even back then, the first song didn't seem to be the greatest thing I'd ever heard. (The second opening song was better, but the sequence it was matched to perhaps didn't appeal as much as the first to me.)
What I was grappling with more was, once again, the plot itself. Zeta Gundam turns the victorious government the protagonists of the original series had fought for into a tyrannical state opposed by rebels called the AEUG, and this would seem to be interesting... but the much-vaunted elite soldiers of the state, the Titans, seemed to me from the start to be little more than self-serving thugs who at one point beat the stuffing out of somebody just offering to help them. In the first few episodes, as the AEUG steals all of their advanced Gundam Mobile Suits and otherwise run rings around them, the Titans just seem like incompetent thugs. They were left with giant robots modeled on those of the antagonists from the original series, and when the protagonists of the original series show up in small roles, all of them are on the side of the rebels. Something about all of it seemed to turn the show into "white hats" versus "black hats," and this loss of the moral ambiguity I had taken note of and been intrigued by in previous Gundam and other anime series all the way back to Robotech itself still left me a little cold.
Still, as I got more than a dozen episodes into the series, the plot was picking up as the AEUG tried to attack a Titan stronghold on the Earth, only to have to flee buried atomic bombs that left the heroes looking for a way back into space... and then I noticed message board reports that the single discs Zeta Gundam was now being sold as had improved subtitles on them, added for some unidentified reason. The sloppy translation of the box set had aggravated a lot of people; even with my still next to nonexistent knowledge of Japanese, I could tell there were oddities to it... and there was a sale coming up on an online anime store I had started buying from. It would still cost a bit, but I could afford it... and so, with a self-justification little more complicated than "Why not?", I placed a "double dip" order for the replacement discs and stopped watching the ones from the box set.
It took the new discs a while to arrive, and I spent part of that time rewatching the shorter anime series RahXephon. (The second time around I understood all the secrets explained only bit by bit through the series, and didn't feel as detached from most of the characters, but for some reason I found myself a little more alienated from its protagonist than before near the end.) When I started Zeta Gundam from the beginning again at the start of April, I could tell the subtitles were indeed improved. When somebody shouted someone else's name, the subtitles used the name and not "Wait!" or something similar; and when somebody said "mark two," the subtitles used "Mk. II." It was a small thing, but it kept me going... to where the heroes got back into space, and I started thinking once again that the rebels on their untroubled ship, responding to each Titan attack in turn, were in an ambiguous state halfway between guerilla fighters and the military arm of a declared political struggle, and yet not quite as interesting as either possiblity. The series was, though, starting to introduce more of its "transformable Mobile Suits," although those giant robots tended to turn into nothing more complicated than vague plane-like things (one turns into something more or less like a giant brick)... and then the fifth disc of the series froze up between episodes in my DVD player, and couldn't be persuaded to skip to half of an episode. Taking it out and looking at it revealed a visible flaw in the playing surface.
The online store was supposed to have good customer service, though, so I wrote off asking to exchange the disc, and they let me do it. While waiting for the replacement to be mailed back to me, I managed to watch all of a completely different Gundam series, Gundam Wing. (In its case, various sarcastic reviews and my own memories of seeing some of it in its TV broadcast had left me ready to view it as nothing more than "camp," with absurd characters and battles... but as I made my way through it, the constant reversals and reconfigurations in the plot began to appeal to me. Of course, its characters and battles were still more or less absurd.) At last, at the beginning of July, I had my replacement disc, and started on Zeta Gundam again, from the middle this time. In its case, individual battles could be tense and exciting, but the lasting ramifications of them to the larger story could often seem obscure. Beyond the character interaction that followed it, the unsuccessful attack on Earth might as well not have happened. In one episode, the Titans capture a lunar city... and in the very next, the AEUG chases them out. Somewhat later, the Titans make a powerful ally in part because the rebel negotiator can't control his temper... and a few episodes later, after no real sign that they've been hard-pressed because of it, the rebels wheedle the ally onto their side. For all of that, though, I was convinced every so often that there were indeed subtle references to previous events that I had missed before, and contemplated that maybe I was still being too harsh on Zeta Gundam. I was approaching the final episodes in any case, and starting to watch two a day to get to the final battle... and then the last disc froze up during not one but two episodes. Again, I noticed a visible pit in the playing surface.
Some message board discussions had insisted that Bandai Entertainment was having real problems with quality control, and I was starting to wonder about agreeing with them. Even so, I might still have the outside chance of exchanging the final disc... and the online store let me mail it back as well. At last, late in August, I had the final disc. By now, I was battling the constant fear that this one might prove defective as well, but I did manage to watch the last episodes, where the AEUG manages to grab control of a giant, fleet-destroying laser cannon and then have to go to greater lengths to keep hold of it. Much of the old praise of Zeta Gundam had carried an approving undercurrent that the series wasn't shy about killing off its characters. To me, though, most of it had concentrated on killing off the major Titans... at times for tragic effect, and at the start in such a way as to make me worried for some of the heroes but still leaving them more or less intact. It wasn't until the final episodes that the major heroes start falling... if at times in peculiar ways. One of them gets distracted and flies right into an asteroid, and another one bails out of her wrecked Gundam just as the adversary she's bested to tragic fashion explodes and nails her in the chest with shrapnel. I can understand that war can take lives without warning and without dignity... but sometimes it just seemed excessive.
Perhaps I was simply having expectations that Zeta Gundam would somehow transcend everything else run up against reality. There still seemed to me to be as much melodrama and speechifying about war and tragedy and the people at blame as any other Gundam series. This time, though, I was at least expecting something one summary had led me astray on before... when the young lead of Zeta Gundam defeats the last villian standing (who, to me, always seemed more smug and pointlessly enigmatic yet less impressive than most other people seem to think), the battle's psychic overtones hinted at in the final episodes leave him a mere simpleton rather than a vegetable. The first time around, the slight difference had somehow been a final depressing touch to my mood. No matter how I saw all of that tragedy, though, Zeta Gundam still seemed to leave loose ends hanging for the followup.
Had my opinions changed? Perhaps a little; I did have a better sense of connection between events. I could still wonder, though, if there had been enough drive and development for me over the fifty episodes. The other Gundam series I had counted as more impressive before still seemed to stay that way. Am I still saddened by this? Again, perhaps a little, but I'm growing more comfortable with my own opinions, positive and negative. With discs I now know (through much agony and waiting) to work, would I try the whole experiment again? Once more... perhaps. Still, I've even noticed a few other people on anime message boards express their own ambiguities about Zeta Gundam. For now, I'm all right with, for once, disagreeing with people by having reactions less enthusiastic than theirs.