Mobile Suit Breakdown: the Gundam Podcast

Show Notes This week, we recap and review Mobile Suit Gundam episode 12, "The Threat of Zeon," discuss our first impressions, and provide commentary and research on: large public funerals and their use in politics, is "rookie syndrome" a thing?, the episode directors and their possible influences (or - were they thinking of Samuel Fuller's film "Shock Corridor"?), and some fun analysis of the newl...

Show Notes Content Warning: Suicide. "What do you mean 'she has lost the will to live?'" This week, we recap and review Mobile Suit Gundam episode 11, "Icelina - Love's Remains," discuss our first impressions, and provide commentary and research on: suicide in Japanese culture, the proper way to get vengeance, meaningful character names, how to roll your Rs, and saying goodbye to the most fabulous...

Show Notes Everything continues to go well for the Zabi family. This week, we recap and review Mobile Suit Gundam episode 10, "Garma's Fate," discuss our first impressions, and provide commentary and research on: Where exactly are we? Are we there yet? How long will it take to get there?, the Seattle "Kingdome," carpet-bombing and incendiaries, the first kamikaze pilots, and episode director Yoshi...

Show Notes In this episode Thom and Nina discuss Mobile Suit Gundam episode 9, "Fly! Gundam!" , desperate times on the White Base, what Bright actually wants, whether or not there's time for philosophy, a famous slap, and an entirely unnecessary full body pan. We research: Just how a person like Amuro might respond to trauma, and what a post-traumatic stress breakdown might look like: ADAA overvie...

Show Notes Is this what all mothers are like? This week, we recap and review Mobile Suit Gundam episode 8, "The Winds of War," discuss our first impressions, and provide commentary and research on: Canadian geography and the town of Saints-Anges, Tomino's influences, Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, The Grand Illusion, and what is furusato and why is it so important in Japanese culture? The only s...

Show Notes Noh drama! A "mother complex!" and Mobile Suit Gundam Episode 7! This week, we recap and review Mobile Suit Gundam episode 7, "The Core Fighter's Escape," discuss our first impressions, and provide commentary and research on: hostage crises and Flight 472, how fighter jets land on aircraft carriers, laser measurement, "fool" and "coward" archetypes in European and Japanese literature an...

Show Notes Ever wonder if Char and Garma were more than just friends? There's more evidence to float that ship than you might think... On the Gundam podcast this week, we watch Mobile Suit Gundam episode 6, "Garma Strikes," discuss our first impressions, and provide commentary and research on: soldier psychology, inspiration for the names of Zeon ships and tech, romance between men in Japanese his...

Show Notes This week, we recap and review Mobile Suit Gundam episode 5, "Re-Entry to Earth," discuss our first impressions, and provide commentary and research on: hot towels, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the history of spaceflight, childhood trauma, Japanese migration, and physics in science fiction! with special guest, Iraj. The East Japan Oshibori Cooperative Association has a brief...

Show Notes On this episode: space-refugees, soldiers as police, cultural changes in the Japanese post-war period, the "granddaddy" of anime, and anime history and aesthetics. To learn more about Japan's response to the Indochina Refugee Crisis, check out these articles: Havens, Thomas R.H. “Japan's Response to the Indochinese Refugee Crisis.” Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science , vol. 18, no...

Show Notes In this episode: Astrography of the Gundamverse in UC79, what keeps the sides in-place?, collective decision-making, introducing the Minovsky particle, and developments in physics of the 1970s prove Clarke's Third Law , that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." A map of Lagrange Points and a map of the UC79 Gundamverse , showing the sides and Luna II....

Show Notes In this episode: Space-Okinawa, society has a short memory, was childhood ever sacred?, nuclear allegory, fancy uniforms, and mutually assured Gundams. You can read more about the Battle of Okinawa in these pages . While estimates of the number of Tekketsu Kinnotai boys (middle-school aged conscripts) vary, we are going with the 1,780 local Okinawan estimate given by their Peace Museum....

Episode Notes In this episode: the 70s in our universe and in the Universal Century, in belum medium , aesthetics musical and visual, and... what's my age again? (what's my age again?) High-level overviews of events of the 1970s, in the world and in Japan . Here is the book cover (center) that Thom mentioned, with an example of Tomino's preferred color-scheme for the White Base. You can find more...

Episode Notes In this episode, we discuss who we are, what this is, and why we're doing it. Read this and future show notes for visual aids like photos, charts, and videos, bibliography and research references, and miscellaneous ephemera related to each episode. Speaking of which... Here is an example of the early Clover models , chunkier and less detailed than the models many of us are familiar w...