Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 1980
Jan. 18th, 2023 07:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerHaving not watched the first episode of Mobile Suit Gundam in this constrained sampling of anime through the years, I was still intent in taking in something Yoshiyuki Tomino had worked on. A Blu-Ray set I hadn’t opened until now was ready to hand; I hadn’t opened it because I had watched “fansubs” of Space Runaway Ideon some time ago, long enough ago that I compared its “dysfunctional survivors on the run” story to the then-recent “reboot” of Battlestar Galactica. I’d also sampled its first episode during my 2010 tour, but while I do have a few other anime series from 1980 available to be watched as I said I did want to stop in on a “Tomino series.”
Ideon opens with a quick invocation of intergalactic travel as compared to Gundam’s “Earth-moon space.” (I am stuck remembering some disdainful sniffing on the “Robotech Mailing List” many years ago at the novel meant to wrap up the series invoking travel to the Andromeda Galaxy, but while I’m aware the distances between galaxies are millions of times greater than the distances between stars in a galaxy and even “speedy interstellar travel” said to take some time would mean taking much, much more time to cross intergalactic voids, having already handwaved one velocity requiring science beyond science might as well permit handwaving another in emptier space.) The unfolding chaos of Ideon’s first episode and the standing up of a giant robot (formed from three great big red trucks docking together), though, did bring the opening of that just-previous series to mind. I have to admit I took some note of the assorted small mistakes that added into the shooting starting (and there’s a lightsabre of sorts involved, too), stuck as I am with the uncomfortable feeling of not quite managing to have escaped the sense of missing the explanation in the generally now quite acclaimed Turn A Gundam as to why the apparently “reasonable” characters in that decades-later Tomino series hadn’t managed to defuse their war. There’s also a dash of eyebrow-raising at some sexism on display even if some other female characters are at least presented differently. At times it’s safer to just consider the now peculiar and piquant mechanical design of this series, even if an old thought of mine about the Ideon “looking like a knockoff Transformer” has faded a bit with more awareness of mecha from its time, including recognizing some of the now-disintegrated knockoff Transformers of my own youth had been cadged from Xabungle, still another and only slightly later Tomino series.
Ideon opens with a quick invocation of intergalactic travel as compared to Gundam’s “Earth-moon space.” (I am stuck remembering some disdainful sniffing on the “Robotech Mailing List” many years ago at the novel meant to wrap up the series invoking travel to the Andromeda Galaxy, but while I’m aware the distances between galaxies are millions of times greater than the distances between stars in a galaxy and even “speedy interstellar travel” said to take some time would mean taking much, much more time to cross intergalactic voids, having already handwaved one velocity requiring science beyond science might as well permit handwaving another in emptier space.) The unfolding chaos of Ideon’s first episode and the standing up of a giant robot (formed from three great big red trucks docking together), though, did bring the opening of that just-previous series to mind. I have to admit I took some note of the assorted small mistakes that added into the shooting starting (and there’s a lightsabre of sorts involved, too), stuck as I am with the uncomfortable feeling of not quite managing to have escaped the sense of missing the explanation in the generally now quite acclaimed Turn A Gundam as to why the apparently “reasonable” characters in that decades-later Tomino series hadn’t managed to defuse their war. There’s also a dash of eyebrow-raising at some sexism on display even if some other female characters are at least presented differently. At times it’s safer to just consider the now peculiar and piquant mechanical design of this series, even if an old thought of mine about the Ideon “looking like a knockoff Transformer” has faded a bit with more awareness of mecha from its time, including recognizing some of the now-disintegrated knockoff Transformers of my own youth had been cadged from Xabungle, still another and only slightly later Tomino series.