The Empire Strikes Back of anime?

Many 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.
( The ecstasy and agony of Zeta Gundam. Numerous spoilers for those who care... )