You're listening to season 11 of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of sci fi mega franchise Mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.

This is episode 11.1, Combat Neo Italian Style.

I'm Tom, a longtime Gundam fan and the former pilot of the Neo Ohio Buckeye Gundam, currently in exile.

And I'm Nina, new to G Gundam and wondering whether since it's Mobile Fighter rather than Mobile Suit, we need a temporary name change.

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This week we're covering g Gundam Episode 1, Gundam fight kaishi Chikyuni Ochita Gandamu or the Gundam Fight Begins.

The Gundam that Fell to Earth.

And now the play by play, Ladies.

Gentlemen, Genki Harrows, honored guests, listeners at home, and Gundam fans orbiting the world.

This is the moment you've been waiting for even now, Count, shimmering objects are hurtling towards this filthy, disgusting planet.

Don't be deceived, folks.

Though they may look like a garden of beautiful flowers, these objects are in fact, mobile fighters.

And in just a few minutes, the preliminary rounds of the 13th Gundam fight will begin right here in the crumbling and historic Roman Colosseum between Neo Italy's G fighter, Michelo Chariot in the narrow scundom, and Domon Kashu, the King of Hearts martial arts champion of the colonies, Neo Japan's shining Gundam.

Though the fight has yet to begin, the King of Hearts is already racking up the property damage after dropping his Gundam pod directly onto the Spanish Steps.

Seems like he thought using retro fire would be enough to bring it down safely.

But this is one site that won't be attracting many tourists anytime soon.

At the moment, no one knows where Domon is, but with both the police and the Mafia looking for him, it's only a matter of time until the fighting starts.

Starts.

I just hope no adorable orphaned children get caught in the crossfire.

While we're waiting, let's review the tape.

Chariot is known for his unbeatable silver leg kicking techniques.

They say he can kick a bullet out of the air and fire ki.

Blasts from his feet.

Incredible.

Just incredible.

As for Domon, I'm sorry.

I'm now being told that the King of Hearts has just been released from police custody.

He's out folks.

And he is rapidly approaching this location, accompanied by his completely platonic mechanic doctor advisor bodyguard Rein Mikamura.

Ain't she a beaut folks?

I'm talking, of course, about the neros Gundam.

Standing 16.2 meters tall and weighing in at an impressive 15.3 metric tons, it can.

Oh no.

There's an adorable orphan girl tied up and dangling from one of its fingers.

What fresh horror is this?

Is that even allowed?

Lets go to the judges for a ruling.

And yes, yes, they're saying the fight can go ahead.

There is nothing in the regulations prohibiting the use of hostages, even children.

And I'm now being told that if she survives, our producers will give that little girl A free official 13th Gundam fight T shirt.

The stakes have never been higher.

There's Domon Kashu entering the arena and.

My God.

The police have opened fire and the Mafia are firing back.

The rope has been severed and she's.

She's safe.

The child is safe.

Domon has caught the Urchin and about a dozen bullets between his fingers.

This is the incredible power of martial arts.

Kids, you are going to want to try this at home now.

Here comes Domon's Mobile Fighter, the shining Gundam.

And there it is.

The Gundam fight signal has been officially confirmed.

And the 13th Gundam fight is on.

The Neros Gundam is starting strong with barrages of beams and bullets.

It's got guns in its face, guns in its shoulder, and guns in its silver legs.

The city of Rome is really taking a pounding.

But Chariot just can't break through the shining Gundam's defenses.

Oh, what a fight.

What a battle.

Now Domon is moving into close range.

And yes, there's something strange happening with his arm.

The hand is beginning to glow.

No, it's shining.

It's some kind of shining.

Attack with the fingers.

He's going straight for the head.

Oh, he is really fingering that Gundam.

And it's all over.

The head is gone and the narrows Gundam has been defeated.

Neo Italy is out of the 13th Gundam fight.

What a show.

What a display of sportsmanship.

Our condolences to the victims and their families.

Now that he's just an ordinary man, Mikolo is being led away in chains by the local police.

You can tell they've been itching to get their hands on him.

As for the wandering champion, who can say where he'll go next?

But wherever he goes and whoever he fights, he'll do it with a full belly.

Thanks to our sponsor, Alfredo Galbaldi's Authentic Neo Italian Style Pizzeria.

Real Gundam fighters eat at Galbaldi's.

Tom, I have a feeling we're not in the UC anymore.

Wan Wan Wanwan.

That's what Toto says, right?

Yeah, probably.

Arf.

Bow wow.

Welcome to the new world.

Welcome to the Future century.

Is that really what it's called?

Yeah.

FC Future Century.

Future Century.

Future Century.

Love to live in the future.

I would make the joke about we live in the future, but where are the flying cars?

But they're right there.

They got flying cars?

Yeah, they do.

Tom, for everyone watching along, we should probably let them know which version of Mobile Fighter G Gundam we are watching.

Sure.

We are watching the G Gundam Blu Rays that were, I want to say recently, but by now it's probably been like 8 years.

Released by Rightstuff RIP.

Right Stuff.

RIP.

Goodbye to a real one.

There was a remastering of G Gundam which took place in 2017.

2018.

Somewhere in there.

So the show was remastered.

It looks great.

It looks really, really good.

That's the version we're watching.

We are at the moment watching in Japanese.

But I promise you, I understand the importance of the G Gundam dub to many of you and we will, at some point this season, watch some episodes of the dub.

I think you all just killed Tom.

The prospect of watching the dub has killed him stone dead.

Shigoto.

Shigoto.

For work I can do.

Seems apt to begin at the beginning with the new intro.

It's very clear how different this is all going to be just from the intro.

You mean the opening song, right?

Well, the opening song, but also the intro animation.

The wrestling ring around the Earth, plus the various brief martial arts sequences make it feel like we're gonna get a whole show of mobile suit martial arts.

That's the whole.

We're doing King of Fighters.

We're doing.

Oh, you are so much closer to the truth than you probably realize.

Yeah.

The ring around the Earth, which, when it appears in the open, you might be forgiven for thinking, oh, surely that's a metaphor that expresses how the Earth has become a zone of combat.

No, the ring around the Earth is literally real.

They have a bunch of space stations orbiting the planet that form a beam ring.

When the Gundam fight finally kicks off.

These mobile suits, which I love that all of them are Gundams.

Suddenly.

If you call every mobile suit a Gundam.

You are correct.

For this series, every mobile suit is a Gundam.

Apparently.

Nina.

What?

I hate to do this to you.

Oh, is that not true?

They're not mobile suits.

They're not mobile suits.

Okay?

They're only Gundams.

Are you ready to learn the new terminology?

Mobile Fighter.

Mobile Fighters.

Okay.

The Mobile Fighters.

All the Mobile Fighters are Gundams.

So for once, that one friend of yours who calls every thing that is shaped like a mobile suit a Gundam is correct.

I hate to do this to you.

They're not.

They won't all be.

Oh, all right.

No spoilers.

But in this first episode, they are.

You've got that right.

We meet the shining Gundam, Japan's entry in the Gundam fight, piloted by none other than Domon Kashuu, whose name we.

Don'T get until halfway through the episode.

Two thirds through the episode, and we.

Learn that he is the martial arts champion of the colonies.

Hang on.

We're talking about the intro.

Man, I thought we were talking about Domon Kashu and his Gundam.

His Shining Gundam.

Shining Gundam with its shining finger.

The control scheme is entirely different from what we've seen before.

My immediate impression was of early Mocap, which is to say motion capture.

Especially because there appear to be little antennae on the suit.

Yep.

And the other Gundam, the Neros Gundam.

The Italian Gundam, or Neo Italian, I should say.

It's very important to distinguish Italy from Neo Italy.

Well, that goes for all the countries.

It's very important that we distinguish the terrestrial, old fashioned Earth version of each country from its Neo future equivalent.

Even though they occupy exactly the same territory and are culturally the same.

No, no.

The Neo ones are in space.

Those are the colonies.

Oh, yeah.

They just rule the sections of Earth.

Aha.

Because when they're introducing those countries in the intro narration, not the intro sequence of the show, but the narration of the show, they show us those places on Earth as they say those names, because the.

The colonists are returning to the ancestral homelands to destroy them.

They did say that the falling objects return home to Earth.

Mm.

So from this intro, we can actually get a sense for what Imagawa and his team consider to be the essential components of Gundam.

We're in a new timeline.

The people making the show have changed quite dramatically.

The show itself is very different from what we were watching.

I'm gonna use a little bit of artistic license and say last week, so what is Gundam?

Well, Gundam is a destroyed, polluted Earth.

Gundam that once prided itself on its beauty.

Gundam is space colonies.

Gundam is hot blooded action.

And that face, that Gundam face, that's where it all began.

That beautiful face.

The other things that stood out to me in the intro were there's a very specific kind of drama implied by a few of the scenes.

In particular, the ones of Domon, just like walking by himself through the desert and the one of him sitting under a tree, a drop of dew poised on a sword.

Dew Or a tear?

Well, in Japanese art, dew is tears.

If you hear a reference to dew in a poem or a song, it's synonymous with tears.

Anyway, this imagery, the lone Wanderer, exists across a lot of different genre fiction.

It comes up in martial arts, it comes up in westerns, it comes up in the samurai epic.

But he is our lone wanderer.

It is very important that we know right off the bat, Domon is our lone wanderer.

Well, we know from comments the director has made that the Swordsman franchise of wuxia movies was very important in the inspiration of this show.

And those are based on a novel called the Smiling Proud Wanderer.

Not that Domon is smiling very much, except at the end when he.

Sorry, I'm skipping hard.

At the end again, when he gets his pizza.

Also, having watched two of the Swordsman movies, the eponymous swordsman is rarely alone.

True, I get a much more Clint Eastwood western vibe from Domon in this intro.

But Domon isn't alone either.

Not really.

He's got Rayn with him, sort of.

It kind of feels like he does his own thing and Raine simply insists on following him around.

A classic dynamic for this kind of show.

Another way in which he exemplifies this kind of character, he barely speaks.

He has so few lines.

And most of them are, have you seen this man?

He speaks with his fists and his fists speak volumes.

Not the opening, but the very first shot of this episode, and therefore the very first shot of the entire series for me, really set the tone because it's obviously stolen from Star Wars.

Like the shot of the Gundam pod being launched towards Earth is identical to the shot of the escape pod leaving the Tantive IV at the beginning of A New Hope.

I'm going to be generous and call all such references homages because as we have come to learn, Imagawa the director is something of a film nut.

Loves movies.

Highbrow, low brow, campy, arty, everything in between.

Just loves cinema.

We are fortunate in our watching and analysis of this show that in addition to loving movies, he loves to talk about his work.

And he's apparently very candid about his influences.

When G Gundam was originally released in the US on dvd, it came with an interview or a series of interviews that were done with him where he just really goes into depths about the specific influences for all of these episodes and what movies he was watching, what movies he was thinking about when he was working on them.

It's not comprehensive.

He doesn't mention Star wars, but we know an enormous amount about his media diet.

And as Nina says, it was tremendously varied.

The episode title is almost certainly a reference to the Bowie movie the man who Fell to Earth.

Our plan as we watch this show is to as much as possible watch a movie or listen to an album or experience whatever other media Imagawa has indicated was influential for the corresponding episode setting or episode action.

We've already watched a few reading interviews with Imagawa.

The impression I've gotten is that he talks about art, and primarily he's talking about film and music the way Tomino talks about history and philosophy.

So if our experience of going through Tomino Gundam was a process of learning and researching history and philosophy and talking about those elements with Imagawa, a lot more of it is going to be about art.

Imagawa is a different kind of director.

He has had a very different set of life experiences.

He did not live through the war.

He sees the world through a TV screen.

They do, however, slip a recent Gundam reference very early in the episode.

In seeing the destruction wrought by the landing of the shining Gundam.

Who should we see but Flanders?

The dog from Victory.

Gundam.

Flanders exists in all timelines.

Flanders is a multiversal anomaly like that.

No harrow though.

Not a single harrow in the entire episode.

That's not very Genki.

Haru has become one with the Gundam.

The voice that is monitoring the pilot's vital signs and all the systems.

That's basically what Haro did.

Haro has simply become one with the Gundam.

Apparently.

At one point in the process of preparing the plan for what would eventually become G Gundam, Imagawa wanted to have the Gundam talk to its pilot.

Like Kit from Knight Rider.

And Bandai got spooked because Imagawa wanted it to be a woman's voice.

And they thought the young boys they were trying to pitch the show to would be turned off by that.

The Gundam can't be a woman.

Never mind that the Gundam has had a woman's voice since first Gundam.

The only time when the Gundam ever talked to its pilot.

It's like these sponsors don't even know the show that they're paying for.

The Mobile Fighters might not talk to them, but they do have some voice operated controls.

Both Michelo and Domon at various points issue voice commands to their Gundams that the Gundams respond to.

That plus Raine's special tech compact and the fact that the Gundams can be remotely activated.

All of this feels very much like influence from Sentai shows.

No way.

Obviously Rain is a Magical Girl.

No.

Domon is the Magical Girl.

Domon gets the transformation sequence.

But Raine has a compact that shoots out a bubblegum pink shell that can block bullets.

Tell me that's not Magical Girl behavior.

It's Magical Girl.

But it also is very Sentai to be like I have this magic magic.

I have this super techy device.

And I'm sure its bubblegum pink shielding is only one of many cool things it can do.

We shall see.

Yeah.

The transformation sequence is pure Magical Girl show.

With the exception that Domon appears to be in a lot of pain for most of it.

But we get the tastefully redacted nudity.

It's not redacted.

He's just a Ken doll under there.

The change of outfits, twinkly lights and special music and close ups on various parts of the body.

Now clad in skin tight latex.

I hope you liked it because we're gonna be seeing it a lot.

And we learned that Miquelo has been wearing it under his outfit.

His much more like early 90s or late 80s punk outfit.

His whole gang.

His whole story arc.

That's very Fist of the North Star.

If we're talking about influences being worn obviously on the sleeves.

Even the bit where the kids are like, going through all the jewels and money that's been left behind by the people very sensibly fleeing the radius of the impending Gundam fight.

And they have that bit about like, the money is totally worthless.

I love that line because it tells us a lot about the world they live in.

Currencies are basically worthless on Earth, presumably because of the disruption caused by the Gundam fights.

And like de investment in Earth because most of human activity is now happening out in the colonies.

Yeah, we super cannot say that Earth is uninhabited because we see like Rome is thick with people.

It's in a state of serious decay.

But there are tons and tons of people living down here.

But that line about, oh, the money is worthless, like that's right there in the first two pages of Fist of the North Star.

I also got a bit of Streets of Fire from that one.

The wild outfits, wild hair, tattoos, spikes on everything.

Well, it's worth noting right here.

When Imagawa was talking about how his team decided to depict Rome, obviously they did not have the resources to go and do location scouting all around the world.

Somebody gave them a whole bunch of like, tourist guidebooks with photos.

But Imagawa was not satisfied with these because he felt like the.

The photographs being used did not adequately reflect the viewpoint of an actual person actually in Rome.

And for these purposes, he preferred to watch movies, movies that were set in Rome.

And he felt that the eye of the movie camera more accurately reflected what an actual person would see of the city.

He was supposed to base his depiction of Rome on Federico Fellini's Roma, but hadn't actually seen the film, and so instead based it on the Fellini film Ginger and Fred, which is also set in Rome and which we watched this morning because we're professionals like that.

On the tourist guidebook side of things, we hit a bunch of the highlights.

The shining Gundam lands at the Spanish Steps.

The gang fight is right next to the Trevi Fountain.

Domon throws several gang members into it.

They say if you throw a goon into the Trevi Fountain, you'll come back to fight in Rome again someday.

The bridge that they cross on the way to the hotel appears to be the bridge leading up to the Castelo San Angelo.

And the fight between the two G fighters takes place at the Colosseum.

You had to know that was gonna happen.

You can't have a fight in Rome between what are effectively two gladiators and not put it in the Colosseum.

The Neros even has a head shaped like one of those plumed helmets.

Nero's here.

I think they're doing a pun.

It's both Nero the Emperor and Nero, like, black.

It's the black Gundam.

But what's funny about him basing any of it on Ginger and Fred is that most of the action of Ginger and Fred, 1, takes place inside buildings and 2 is sort of on the outskirts of Rome.

It's not in Rome proper.

They spend very little time in Rome, and it's mostly at the train station and then driving away.

Given what we do see of Rome, all the tourist attractions and the fact that the movie Imagawa was actually referencing doesn't really show much of Rome.

I think we can assume that at this point they were still using those tourist guidebooks and had not yet switched over primarily to film as a method.

But you know what?

Ginger and Fred does have a biker gang.

A biker gang?

A biker gang that shows up in the middle of the movie for no particular reason and drives around a little bit.

Obviously they're on their way to that club, that club in the middle of, like, an empty dirt lot on the outskirts of Rome.

I can't know yet if this will be true.

This is purely based off of some of the movies on the list that we have that we're going to watch, some of which I've seen, most of which I have not, and watching Ginger and Fred and the obvious campiness of the premise for this show.

But Ginger and Fred really seems to exemplify what I think will be Imagawa's style, which is like a constant contrast between the high and the low, the elegant and the sordid, the beautiful and the dirty.

Moments that are moving and moments that are sleazy.

Spectacle.

Chaos.

Spectacle.

Carnival.

A riot of colors.

Yeah, it's a very colorful show.

Not so much in the backgrounds, more in the characters.

Because we are meant to see Earth as kind of having gone to seed.

And it does depict Rome as dirty, polluted, falling apart, decaying.

Though presumably helped along by the repeated Gundam fights in its vicinity.

All the kids mention that their mothers were killed in the last Gundam fight.

Which would have been four years ago, probably, if anyone has done the math.

If anyone has listened carefully to the narration and picked up that the Gundam fight has been going on for 60 years and that this is the 13th Gundam fight, you might do the math and go, hang on, that's not 60 divided by four.

And there is a complicated explanation for exactly how the Timeline works out, but the real takeaway from it is, don't worry about it.

They wanted the number 13 because it's unlucky, and they picked the number 60 because it seemed like a good amount of time.

It allows them to include people in the show who remember what life was like before the Gundam fights.

Like Italian Columbo here, who also gives.

Us most of our backstory and explaining how this works and why it's happening.

Thank you, sir.

I love the moment where he sits the little girl down and is like, listen, kid, it's time you learned the facts of life about the world we live in.

You ever play Street Fighter?

You know how in the background there are all those people, like, cheering and watching the fight?

Yeah, that's us, kid.

And let me tell you, it's not as fun as it looks.

I will say there are certain aspects of what's happening that confused me greatly.

Like initially, Michelo's desire to steal a G Fighter, I thought meant that he didn't have one of his own.

And then the cops arresting Domon, like, admit you're a G Fighter, but they know who the Italian G Fighter is.

Are they just trying to find whoever the not Italian G Fighter is?

They don't want no foreigners.

And if the cop wants to kill the G Fighter people, why didn't he kill Domon when he had him in custody?

Because Domon had a passport that said he was a tourist, so he couldn't possibly be the G Fighter.

Ah, but he ripped that up, right?

Now he has no protection.

I love the implication that this is like a fake passport for Domon, and Domon's real passport would say something like combat instead of tourist.

Also, the intro narration mentions that the shining Gundam veers off course to land in Rome, so was it not supposed to land here?

Does it land wherever Domon is?

But Domon wasn't supposed to be here.

As I interpreted the opening narration, the four named mobile fighters other than the shining Gundam, all land in their respective, like, nations of origin.

Neo France goes to France.

Neo Russia goes to Russia.

Neo China goes to China.

So presumably the shining Gundam should have landed in Japan.

I think the implication is that they've all.

They've all landed before the official, like, start date of the fight.

And so they're all supposed to be hanging out in their national territories waiting for the fight to actually start.

But Domon, in classic fashion, is not really here for the fight.

Domon is sort of awol.

I get the impression Domon really isn't supposed to be Here.

At least not now.

Exactly.

He's here looking for the guy in the photograph.

I was able to pause the show at one point and read the back of the photograph.

Oh, I was going to ask if you had done that.

And what is written on the back of the photograph is just a list of countries.

It's.

Hang on, I wrote it down.

Neo Italia, Neo America, Neo France, Neo China.

Significantly, not Chugoku, the word that is usually used in modern Japanese to say China, but China written in katakana.

I have a theory about this that we will get to in a few episodes time.

But you are going to be amazed to learn the countries that Domon is going to travel to in the next few episodes.

I'm sure I will.

It will be so surprising.

Please try to act shocked.

And I have some speculation about the text.

I don't know if you want to hear it or want me to save it.

Go ahead.

There have been people historically who proposed that as part of the Japanese language's modernization, they should stop using kanji altogether.

And so it's possible that this is an imagined future where that happened.

Or it's just meant to seem even more futuristic, like, oh, we don't use those old school names.

We use new, modern names.

Could be.

Could be.

There is some wonky language stuff, right?

Like, why does the sign at the police station say police in English rather than in Italian?

Why does he shove Domon's face into a pizza that is very much an American pizza, not the kind of pizza you would actually get in Italy.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that no one on the staff spoke Italian and that no one on the staff had had a pizza in Italy.

Although, come to mention it, this is getting ahead of ourselves a little bit.

But in all of those background interviews.

No, maybe I shouldn't say it.

Maybe I should save this for later.

Oh, it's gonna be so good when I finally reveal it.

It's gonna blow this whole case wide open.

Mm, mm, mm.

Yep.

My man really knows how to wear a cape.

And not only a cape, but a long headband and a very fetching face scar.

He spends the whole episode aura farming so that he can power up at the end.

That's probably important for their Ki attacks, because apparently these people have Ki attacks when they're not in their mobile fighters.

Gosh, this is gonna take me forever.

This is gonna be like when you spend the first month or two of the year writing the wrong year date.

When you write down dates, I'm Gonna keep calling them mobile suits for a while before I get into the habit of mobile fighter.

Mobile fighter.

But we first see this with Michaelo throwing a kick that drives somebody backward.

But it's clear that this is not unique to him.

Domon has similar abilities.

Well you see, it's actually all explained by science.

What they are doing is manipulating martial arts Ki particles.

Did you not learn how to fire Ki blasts and block bullets with your kicks?

Did we not get to that stage with you?

Sadly, no.

I think that might have been only for third dans and up.

Oh no.

You know what it is?

I learned that when I was practicing taekwondo.

That wasn't a karate thing.

Sorry.

In karate we just learned how to catch bullets between our fingers.

I didn't get that one either.

You really shortchanged me.

What kind of teacher are you?

Domon appears to have a tattoo that can disappear and reappear at will.

So that's cool.

I wouldn't mind something like that.

His sick King of Hearts tattoo.

Yeah.

King of heart 4711.

Which along with him catching a bunch of bullets between his fingers.

He looks a bit like Gambit about to do card tricks.

Like a little bit.

It's those fingerless gloves and the way.

That he's holding the bullets between his fingers.

The pose looks like something you'd see somebody holding cards in that pose to do card tricks.

But anyway, suddenly everybody knows who he is.

The martial arts champion of the colonies.

And is very afraid.

Boss.

All we've got is dozens of guys with automatic weapons and a giant Gundam.

We're powerless against a martial arts champion.

It's really nice to see a show that finally gives martial artists the respect they deserve.

We get a brief shot of a satellite that is clearly monitoring things on Earth for.

I'm gonna say broadcast.

Because surely everyone is watching.

Why wouldn't you?

But I love that the colonies themselves look like some of the kind of new type dreamscape spaces from first Gundam.

Which is to say flat on top or like flat ish with Earth like terrain.

Whether it's mountains or a bunch of pyramids or cities or ocean.

Or it's just a flying island.

And then the underneath is sort of craggy rock.

But there are lights on it that imply that there are people also who live and work in that underside of the colony as well.

Totally ridiculous.

Hilarious.

I love it.

Did they show us.

I know we saw one with like pyramids in the background.

Did they show us Neo Japan this time?

I don't think so.

I didn't see Anything that was recognizably Japan.

Okay, I think we'll see some more of the colonies soon.

I'm excited for you to see them.

At one point, Rayn, whose name we don't get until almost the very end of the episode, by the way, in most of my notes, she's described as a gal.

Asks out loud, how could he activate his Gundam before the fight started?

Which made me wonder, is this like a rules or etiquette kind of thing?

Or is it not supposed to be physically possible to boot up your G fighter before the fight has technically begun?

Good question.

Don't worry about it.

Okay, got it.

Mention has been made of a fight committee.

Domon is sadly a rules lawyer type guy who will recite the rules to you while he is kicking your butt.

What could be more humiliating?

I do love the bit where he's like, there's nothing in the regulations that says you can't kidnap orphans.

Which actually, funny story, they were going to put that in the rules.

But there was this one guy on the rules committee who was really insistent that Gundam fighters should be allowed to kidnap as many orphans as they feel necessary.

He had these sunglasses and this cool red jumpsuit.

I think he said his name was Quinto Benus.

I do have to wonder though, in that last fight.

Well, one.

What does this cop think he's going to do going up to the Narrow Scundam with a rifle?

What is the plan here, man?

Don't worry about it.

When you give a guy a gun, he wants to shoot it, and they gave him a very big gun.

What good that is supposed to do in this situation, I cannot imagine.

But anyway, why is his partner dressed like a stereotypical Hollywood film director?

The two of them are plain clothes.

I guess maybe he's based off of a different famous TV detective since the The Italian detective has a very Columbo look about him, as you pointed out.

But I feel like the first episode is too early to unveil your ultimate technique.

Surely you should save the ultimate technique for at least a little ways into the show.

Yeah, I mean, probably this is the most ultimate technique that he's ever gonna display.

Like this is.

I bet this is it.

It's just gonna be the Shining Finger for the next 49 episodes.

What a letdown.

I'm really sorry.

Did you notice that after the fight, Michaelo's hair has gone almost white?

It has gone from its very bright red to a very pale pink.

He's been shattered, devastated as a man.

By this defeat by the Shining Finger.

Attack.

And the loss apparently disqualifies him as a G fighter.

He's out of the tournament.

Italy will need a new G fighter, and it means they can finally arrest him.

I don't think Italy gets a new one.

I think Italy is out of the tournament.

It's a single elimination kind of deal.

Out of this tournament.

But presumably if there's another one in a few years, he's not still their G fighter because he lost this one.

Well, he might still be the best Italian G fighter.

You go into the Gundam fight with the martial artists you have, not the martial artists you wish you had.

God, dudes just love grabbing each other by the hands and then pushing as hard as they can to demonstrate their strength.

I have been in a fair number of fights, well, sparring matches.

I've been in a few fights in a fair number of sparring matches in a variety of different martial arts.

And I have never once locked hands with an opponent like that and just pushed to demonstrate which one of us was the stronger.

I don't think that's a real thing that happens.

But have you ever done the thing where you start with a nice handshake or sort of companionable grip and then start squeezing harder and harder to see who has the stronger grip strength and the better ability to withstand pain?

Of course, I've done the thing where you start with a handshake and then you both start squeezing harder and harder until you demonstrate which one of you has a stronger grip strength.

Okay, so it's not dissimilar.

There were a couple things about the animation that I really liked.

The scene where Michelo makes his first attack on Domon with the hand coming through the wall.

And then from everyone's position at the bottom of the stairs, the camera shows us a sort of pan upwards and we see the narrow scundom looming through the skylight.

So cool.

Great composition.

They also did some really clever stuff with the fight in front of the Trevi Fountain, where at the beginning of the scene, there's really lovely frenetic animation.

I recognized a technique that I first saw explained in a piece by a YouTube essayist.

Every frame a painting, basically about how you can make hits feel harder by, like, zooming in on the hit itself or showing it a couple of times from slightly different angles or distances.

And then in the later part of the fight, they use stills with sort of action, comics style backgrounds and pans across those stills to again show us the hits against this whole gang of enemies.

Great music too.

Yeah.

The composer for this season is new to Gundam, I believe, and at this point in his career has not done too much.

But he's going to go on to be the composer for the Sakura wars franchise, which is all about the music.

And for One Piece.

Oh ho ho.

I know you haven't watched One Piece, but it's very impressive.

It's a great accomplishment.

I hear good things about it, and it's a very prominent series, so clearly it's a good job to have.

Though I never really hear people talking about the music.

One Piece fans in the audience sound off.

Is the music good?

Some people would argue that you shouldn't notice the music too much.

I'm not necessarily one of them.

But that is a style of creating musical scores for shows and movies.

Don't worry, I basically never do.

I found Domon's attitude of like, I don't really care about these kids, I'm just here to fight, kind of refreshing.

But he says that I know secretly, deep down, he's a good guy, but he does also lob that child with very little regard for her safety.

But he doesn't let her fall to her death.

No, not that I want him to do that.

And he protects her from all those bullets.

He's a type, right?

Everyone we get is gonna be types.

I have this feeling.

We've got our requisite group of three orphans.

We've got our cackling maniacal villain.

We've got our grizzled cop who is sick of all this.

Speaking of the tough, wandering young warrior who secretly has a squishy heart of gold, do you know what Domon's voice actor is going to do after this?

No.

He's going to play a little role called Von Fanel in the Vision of Escafalone TV show.

Aha.

Well, well, well.

Oh, what did you make of the Gundam appearing out of, like a flower bud?

Initially, the shape reminded me of a peach.

There are these little, like, Momotaro from the story Momotaro Toys, where there's a peach shape that opens up and there's a little baby boy inside.

I was going to ask you to give us a brief description of the Momotaro story, but I think peach that has little boy inside is probably adequate.

Well, it's.

It's one of those stories that crop up across a lot of different folklore where there's an old couple who have never had a child, and it's like the one thing that they feel would make their life complete.

And so they pray to the gods for a child, and in their case they receive the Momotaro, who is like super strong and super smart from the minute he emerges from the peach kind of thing.

And I believe Momotaro always stays small.

Is that right?

Like Thumbelina.

You've exceeded my knowledge of the story, I'm afraid.

All right.

Anyway, I may have that wrong, but once it opens up, though, it looks much more like a lotus opening up.

And like depictions of floating lotus platforms in Buddhist art and Buddhist influenced art.

We made a joke to each other in our first watch through about it being like a Bodhisattva.

Yeah, it seems really like meaningful and loaded with religious symbolism.

And it was inspired by a commercial for frozen noodles that Imagawa saw and really liked, in which a woman opens the freezer and there's an enka singer who emerges from the freezer singing, and she looks like she's coming out of a flower of ice.

Well, there you go.

Did I track down the commercial in question?

You bet I did.

It'll be in the show.

Notes.

Speaking of religious symbolism, now that we've talked a bit more about this first episode, I want to return to the intro sequence.

Because the very last image of the intro sequence has a wrecked mobile suit that appears to almost have wings.

And it appears to sort of be hovering protectively over the earth.

However, given the bitterness on Earth about these tournaments, the fact that the mobile suit is wrecked perhaps implies that mobile suits.

Gah.

Mobile fighters.

Mobile fighters.

Mobile fighters were supposed to protect the Earth, and that protection has not materialized.

That has not been effective, perhaps.

But I don't see what that has to do with frozen noodles or angels.

Maybe I just haven't read the interview yet where Imagawa says, oh yeah, the.

The angelic wrecked mobile fighter looming over the Earth.

That was inspired by a commercial I saw for Onigiri washing liquid tooth whitening strips.

Cigarettes.

I think this is the first time that someone actively smoking has been shown in Gundam TV anime.

I know it happens in 0080, but that was direct to video.

I don't think anyone ever smokes in any of the Tomino shows.

And this one's for kids.

Wasn't the 90s a magical time?

One thing I wonder.

Having seen Nerimagawa mentioned multiple Fellini movies and having watched, I've actually missed a bunch of the most famous Fellini movies, but I've seen a few.

And we just watched Ginger and Fred.

A lot of Fellini's movies are very sexy.

It's very much about eye candy and about looking at prominent attractive attributes, mostly of women.

But also of men.

There's that whole sequence in Ginger and Fred where there's just a bunch of muscle men standing in frame flexing their pecs.

They're not the point of the shot.

The characters are also in frame, having a completely unrelated conversation.

But it's just like bare man flesh twitching, bouncing, bouncing around, oiled up, tanned, bronzed.

Tom mentioned that we will need to watch the Rocky Horror Picture Show, a.

Movie that Imagawa describes as having been immensely influential in his life.

Some of the scenes in the swordsman movies and even some of the scenes in Once Upon a Time in China play off a kind of like sexy comedy, sexy drama thing.

So I do wonder, how much eye candy are we going to get in this Gundam.

Well, I told you, you're gonna see that transformation sequence like once an episode at least.

Well, yes, okay.

Obviously we're going to see Domon in the skin tight latex every episode.

Interesting choice of body parts.

I feel like they do the close up on his butt, which not that surprising.

But then the next close up is on his calf and foot.

They're really into calves.

I guess I'm gonna cut you off.

Before you go too far down this rabbit hole.

Anyway, I wonder whether we're going to see a certain amount of fan service in this series or if the fan service is going to be strictly of the mechanical variety.

Only time will tell.

It is November 1993.

Victory Gundam is on TV and the planning team at Sunrise is hard at work preparing the next entry in the legendary franchise, scheduled to start in April in the same time slot on the TV Asahi network.

Securing that timeslot had been a struggle.

It is crucial that Sunrise hold it.

Every animation studio lives or dies on its ability to consistently get its programs onto the crowded broadcast airwaves.

But there is a problem.

Victory, the first Gundam TV show and the first by Chief Director Tomino Yoshiyuki in six years, is floundering.

The ratings are bad, and the toys made by main sponsor Bandai are aren't selling.

Bandai blames the animation studio.

The story is not appealing to the younger children who tend to watch TV during this time slot.

The mobile suits deployed in the show are not well suited to what they call Shohinka commercialization or commodification.

Probably they blame Tomino specifically, and TV Asahi is not particularly pleased either.

A change will need to be made.

Bandai is just a few months shy of completing their clandestine buyout of the animation studio.

The employees have not been told yet, but at the highest levels, the sponsor come owner to be has the clout to force its way.

Tomino's astonishing decade long reign as principal creative decision maker for one of the most valuable franchises in the world is finished and the toymakers will see to it that the next Gundam is made properly to their specifications.

The timeline for how this happened is somewhat confused.

I've done my best to reconstruct the sequence of events based on fragmentary accounts from half a dozen members of the production staff and Bandai insiders, but those accounts are not always consistent and most of them were not written until decades after the events in question.

Here's what we know for sure.

When the summer of 1993 began, 32 year old sunrise producer Minami Masahiko had just finished up his first TV series, Ami no Tetsuro's Sports Mecha Competition show Iron Leaguer.

Minami had been assistant producer on Gundam 0083 and had debuted as full producer just a few years ago on the 90s era SD Gundam shorts that we covered in seasons seven and nine.

Director Imagawa Yasuhiro, also 32, was then working on the lavishly animated OVA series Giant Robo.

It would eventually receive a glowing reception from American anime fans, securing Imagawa's reputation as a director overseas.

But in 1993 it was barely making enough money to keep the lights on.

The production schedule slowed down to try to stretch the budget as much as possible, so he had some time on his hands at the moment.

In the summer of 1993, both men were attached to the pre production of a little show called the Best Television Anime Ever made, the Vision of Escaflowne.

Minami was the producer in charge of the team, and Imagawa had been picked to be its director.

In fact, it was Imagawa who came up with the name Escaflowne.

At some point that summer, Sunrise began planning a new Gundam show to succeed Victory Gundam in the same time slot.

When it finished its run at the end of March 1994, this was standard practice for the studio.

Getting a time slot is hard, but keeping one is usually much easier.

You just need to make a new thing that is sufficiently like the old thing to keep the sponsors and the TV station happy.

If you listened to our episodes on the way the Japanese ad industry worked in the 90s and its relationship to the TV and anime industries, you probably remember that Tomino's career was essentially defined by the relentless succession of giant robot cartoons he directed, which aired one after another in the same 5:30pm Saturday broadcast slot on Nagoya TV from 1977 to 1980 and from 1982 to 1987, we know a few details about the new Gundam show they were planning.

The plot would have revolved around confrontations between the inhabitants of Earth and ex Martian colonists trying to return to the mother planet.

If there are any Gundam fans in the audience.

Any Gundam fans listening today.

Okay, so you may notice that the outline I'm describing sounds kind of similar to another show that would be made years later.

That's right.

I'm talking about the plot of Alt Noah 0.

Planning progressed normally up through at least October.

Mecha designer Ishigaki Jr recently posted an old design for a mass produced mobile suit dated October 5, 1993, which he says was for an internal competition to pick the designer for Victory's Ato Bangumi or successor program.

We've seen this kind of competition before.

We know there was one for the design of the new Gundam in Char's Counterattack, and the one that ultimately produced the Victory Gundam is especially well documented in English thanks to recent work by Gundam fan archivists like Mark Simmons of Ultimate Mark and BJ at Zeonic Scans.

Okawara Kunio, the veteran mecha designer responsible for First Gundam and about a million other things, was picked to do the mobile suit designs for the hero side, while Kotoki Hajime and Izubuchi Yutaka would handle the enemy mechs.

The Latter tapped a 27 year old colleague, Yamane Kimitoshi, to fill the tertiary mecha design the vehicles.

Bucci had been impressed with the vehicle designs he did for Bubblegum Crisis a few years before.

Kawamoto Toshihiro would design the characters.

He had previously handled Gundam 0083s and had just finished working on the second Super Dimension Century Orgus show based on Ishigaki's sketch, which might be the only direct documentary evidence from this period to see the light of day thus far.

It seems that at this point, the program was going to be called Rainbow Gundam.

In December, Imagawa and producer Minami were summoned to Bandai's offices for a meeting with senior Managing Director of the toy Division Murakami Katsushi, sometimes called the father of Chogoken for his role in developing that influential product line.

They were allowed to present their plans for the new show, which they were now calling Polkarino Gundam, including designs of new mobile suits.

But in a 2016 Animeju interview, Imagawa described the meeting like at the point when I'd tentatively constructed a plot for the first half with such and such kind of theme, and such and such kind of story and gotten as far as the script for the first episode, I was summoned to Bandai.

They told me the next Gundam will be like this and showed me a lineup of Gundam faces wearing various national costumes, such as Gundams in Napoleonic and Russian hats.

They said Gundams from all the world's nations fight to decide which is the best one.

Please make a work like that.

The Pulcherino Gundam plan vanished right then, and the G Gundam plan began.

One source, which summarized a talk Imagawa gave at Georgia State University in 2002, makes it sound like the new design ideas being pushed on him had been drawn up by the Bandai executive himself.

Here is where things begin to get confusing.

We know that Minami and Imagawa were in charge of the project when it was cancelled in December, but we don't know when they were moved from Escaflowne to Gundam.

Kawaguchi Katsumi, a Bandai employee at the time, says that Bandai made the decision to completely change the project plan in November, but we don't know whether that decision was communicated to Sunrise before the December meeting.

It is not clear whether Tomino was ever formally attached to the project.

Imagawa talks about a decision being made to replace the legendary director due to the franchise's poor performance and and another staff member recalls Tomino participating in the early planning stages, but whether he chose to leave or was kicked to the curb remains a mystery.

Minami recalls being given a mandate to make a new kind of Gundam show, but we don't know if that was the plan for Rainbow from the get go, or if Minami was sent in to make changes to an existing plan after Bandai lost confidence in Is possible that the new Polkarino title was just one part of a last minute effort to revamp the project to fit the sponsor's new direction in November, but it might also have just been part of the normal course of development.

If there was a major effort to revamp the project, bringing Imagawa on could have been part of that.

According to Nakayama Kotaro, a planning director at Sunrise who worked on the cancelled show, the decision had already been made to abandon the Universal Century before Imagawa was selected to serve as the director, so he probably was not involved at the very earliest stages.

Based on the date on Ishigaki's design sketch for Rainbow Gundam, we can assume that the name was not changed until either October or November.

The new name Pulcherino, shared by the show and its protagonist came directly from Imagawa.

As he tells it, he had misremembered the name of the protagonist in the 1956 Italian film the Railroad man, imagining it to be Pulcherino.

According to Imagawa, the details and story of the plan for the new show resembled the Railroad Man a little, and since he loved the movie, he thought he would borrow the name.

In actual fact, the character in the Railroad man is named Andrea Marcocchi, and no one, least of all Imagawa himself, can say where he came up with Pulcarino.

It is ironic, by the way, that this ill fated project is mostly known to Gundam fans as Pulcherino or Polka Gundam, a name which it, if I'm right, bore for no more than a month, only about a fifth of its brief lifespan.

But we can be pretty confident it actually was called Pulcurino because basically everybody who remembers it calls it that now.

The fact Imagawa seems to have changed the name of the show and presumably the name of the protagonist in the same month Bandai decided that major changes needed to be made to the next Gundam show is suggestive.

Episodes 32, 35 of Victory Gundam aired in November, and episode 36 would have been in the final stages of preparation.

It is possible the executives saw that episode in a pre release form before making the decision to correct the Franchise's course.

Episode 36 is the one where USO has to carry his mother's severed head.

There may have been a feeling in the room that this was not going to maximize shareholder value.

It's fun to picture a Bandai executive watching that episode, snatching his phone off of his desk and barking get me Sunrise.

But it might not have been so dramatic.

The decision might have been made after just looking at a spreadsheet with a number that gets smaller and smaller with each new Gundam show.

There has also been some debate about who decided to entrust the new Gundam to Imagawa as producer.

Choosing the director would normally be Minami's job and and indeed he does claim to have picked Imagawa.

But in his book Ternay no the Healing of Ternay, departing Gundam director Tomino claims it was he who recommended Imagawa for the job.

He describes a conversation he had with the head of Sunrise, Yamaura Eiji, during Victory's production.

In his telling, Yamaura asked his advice about who should direct the upcoming show, and it was Tomino himself who identified the energetic young Imagawa as the man to rescue Gundam, and even suggested making a work that completely ignored Gundam's accumulated history.

Tomino places this conversation around the midpoint of V's production, probably in the summer when plans for what never quite became Polcherino Gundam were first being laid down, it is possible that the conversation Tomino describes did happen, and that Minami selected Imagawa after considering Tomino's advice.

It's also possible that the conversation happened and Tomino was simply ignored.

It could be that Imagawa was already being considered at the time, and the conversation Tomino remembers was more about getting his blessing for the new guy than it was about earnestly seeking his advice.

But there's another odd wrinkle to Tomino's version of events.

In his recounting of the conversation, he personally suggested that the new show be made in a pro wrestling style.

Everyone involved in Polcarino Gundam agrees that before the big change up, it was a war story in line with its predecessors, nothing like pro wrestling.

So if Tomino made this suggestion when he says he did, then it was ignored, only to be forced onto the production months later by a different party who had come up with a similar idea entirely independently and for different reasons.

That seems a little too convenient, but stranger things have happened.

In any event, Imagawa was a good choice to shake up the Gundam formula.

An up and coming director with a Bankable Kids anime under his belt in the cooking competition show, Mr.

Ajiko, and serious mecha animation chops from the Giant Robo Ova.

He is sometimes described as a protege of Tomino's, including by people inside Sunrise who ought to know.

I've never seen any solid evidence of an intentional mentorship kind of relationship.

But Imagawa did get his start under Tomino's watch, directing episodes of Aura Battler Dunbine, and perhaps that made Tomino's departure easier to swallow.

For the rest of the team, it would be about the only part of the transition that was easy.

Bandai's requirements for the new show were specific, according to both Imagawa and Nakayama in the Sunrise Planning Office, Bandai was impressed by the booming popularity of arcade fighting games at the time.

Nakayama notes Street Fighter II first released in 1991, Fatal Fury 2 first released in 1992, and re released as a special edition in 93, and Samurai New as of 93 as particular inspirations.

The common theme of all three is colorful.

Representatives of different nationalities travel the world fighting martial arts battles to determine which is the strongest.

And that is exactly what Bandai make an anime where Gundams from various countries fight each other.

Supposedly they even said, imagine a regulated street fighting competition.

From comments made by Imagawa later, it sounds like the sponsors even went as far as ordering the beam rope boxing ring that orbits the planet during the Gundam fight.

And they produced most of the designs for the different Gundams themselves.

On top of all of that, it had to be aimed at children, and that meant the hero must win at the end of every episode.

But because Bandai wanted a big cast of recurring Gundams to sell as toys and models, Imagawa's team was not allowed to actually destroy any of the most marketable machines.

In other words, Domon had to win, but his rivals could never fully lose.

Supposedly, Imagawa warned Bandai that all of these national stereotype Gundam designs could be offensive, but the sponsors shrugged off his concerns.

Just add Nioh to every country, they said, and make them space colonies.

Then no one can get mad about it.

I say supposedly because this particular anecdote does come from Imagawa himself, and he had probably heard complaints about the depictions of other countries and might have wanted to distance himself from those decisions.

But on the other hand, this sounds entirely plausible.

And when you consider the amount of power Bandai was wielding at this stage, we can assume they would have nixed any elements that they considered offensive.

After the December meeting, when his Polkarino plan was unceremoniously rejected, Imagawa returned to Sunrise in a daze.

How was he going to break the news to his team that all of their hard work had gone directly into the circular file?

They were proud to be making shows that were more than mere cynical vehicles to sell toys.

How would they react when they learned that the sponsors had seized control of the production and demanded a cynical vehicle to sell toys?

Badly, it turns out the relatively inexperienced director struggled to keep morale up.

And it didn't help that he himself thought the new direction of the project was, you know, terrible.

There were departures.

Okawara stayed on.

He has a reputation as a toy first sponsor, first mecha designer, after all.

But Izubuchi quit the project.

Kawamoto was replaced as character designer by Osaka Hiroshi of Victory Gundam, though he would continue to contribute to G as an animator.

Considering the short notice, Minami also called in one of his old college classmates, the manga artist Shimamoto Kazuhiko, to provide design ideas.

At the time, he was working on the Super Famicom RPG Live A Live.

The story would be under the purview of Gobu Fuyunori, AKA Suzuki Yoshitake, a Sunrise mainstay who we last encountered writing the scripts for the first four episodes of 0083.

The background art, an especially important and especially difficult job, given that the new show was to be set in A wholly new location every week was entrusted to Higashi Junichi.

He had started his career as art director on Zeta.

Gundam contributed to Char's counterattack, and like Gobu, had recently worked on 0083.

He had also worked with Minami on Ironleaguer.

Responsibility for the music went to Tanaka Kohei.

As I mentioned in the talkback, he'd never worked on Gundam before, but had already proven himself on the Gunbuster and Patlabor OVAs and on TV shows like Brave X Kaiser.

After this, he's going to do the music for pretty much the whole Sakura wars franchise.

Overman, King Gaynor, and One Piece, among others.

It was a good team, lots of up and coming pros, most of whom would go on to become stars and industry legends.

But it was already December.

Everything they had done over the past six months on Rainbow Pulcherino had to be thrown out.

We have estimated in the past that the production cycle for an episode of TV anime at this time, from ideation to finished product, took roughly three months, and that was almost exactly the amount of time left before Victory finished its scheduled run.

Frantically, Imagawa and his team whipped up a new plan that addressed all the sponsors requirements and return to Bandai for approval.

But this too was rejected and a new set of requirements were added.

There was no more time to plan.

They would just have to start making the new show and figure out what it would be about.

As they went, Shimamoto the Mangaka camped out at the office, working around the clock on his character sketches.

Okawara had to redraw the main Gundam design over and over.

The Shining Gundam alone required something like 10 rounds of revisions before it satisfied Bandai, but if they all pulled together, and if everything went exactly perfectly right, they might just make it in time.

They didn't.

April 1st rolled around with no episode ready to go to air.

Something like this had happened before on Double Zeta.

Remember the Prelude episode with a narrator relating the history of the Universal century over clips from prior Gundam shows, while Quatro makes Shinta and Koum guess the identities of different mobile suits based on their silhouettes?

Once again, Sunrise would produce a stopgap prologue episode to fill the air.

In fact, they had to make three prologue episodes, and the first episode of G didn't air until April 22nd.

Ultimately, the show would run for 49 episodes.

In all likelihood, Sunrise had received a standard four core 52 episode series order, and the show's final runtime is what was left.

After three weeks of increasingly nervous stalling, we didn't want to make you sit through three weeks of podcasts in which we exhaustively broke down the contents of those prologue episodes.

I mean, I did, but Nina said it was a terrible idea and that our listeners would hunt me for sport on the streets of New York.

But we did watch them.

And next week, after the TalkBack for episode two, Nina will report back on what they reveal about Gee's production and what the waiting fans would have known about the new show when it began.

I was so close with King of Fighters.

You were so close.

Next time, on episode 11.2, Battles over Broadway, we research and discuss Chi Gundam Episode two and Dirty Filthy Planetses.

Welcome to the once quiet city of New York, the least decrepit version of New York to appear in Gundam the Neo American Dream, a ticker tape parade.

You cheated not only the game, but yourself.

Saraba.

It's called Ebbett's Field.

Shut up.

The enemy of americans and japanese alike, the us government and chibori kuroketo.

Nice guy.

Ready?

Go.

Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina in scenic New York City within the ancestral and unceded land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you.

The opening track is Wasp by Mischa Dayaksen, the closing music is A Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio, and the recap music is window by 1000 hands.

You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the Lenape people, and more in the show notes on our website gundampodcast.com if you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email hostsundampodcast.com or look for links to our social media accounts on our website.

And if you would like to support the show, please share us with your friends.

Leave a nice review wherever you listen to podcasts or support us financially@gundumpodcast.com Patreon.

You can find links and more ways to help out@gundumpodcast.com support thank you for listening.

Are you ready to come down to Neo New York and throw hands over your gun?

Gundam Opinions no, you lack conviction.

Or maybe you just haven't heard an.

Opinion worth fighting over yet.

How about this one?

He does his best to seem cool and brooding, but Domon Kashu can never escape the fact that he's named for a cartoon character for ickle babies.

That one's true, actually.

Like you can feel the resonance move up, right?

Rather than when you're doing it properly.

You can still feel Everything vibrate through.

And when you're doing it improperly, you can.

You can feel it like locked down.

Yeah.

And I.

I don't get it right every time, but I feel the difference.

That's a different thing.

It's appropriate for this episode, though.

More or less.

Yes, it is.

We'll talk about that.

Tom's had me in storage for six months.

We are on board.

The light is red.

The light is red.

That means go.

You have the episode name this time.

I do.

You have your.

I'm Tom, blah, blah, blah.

I do.

I'm so prepared today.

All right.

Okay.

So you can be like, loud.

Cuz it doesn't work if you're not.

Like, if you don't go for it.

Yeah, I'm.

I'm changing my script so it's called the Play by Play in my script.

Now.

Ladies, I got a gesticulate.

It doesn't work.

Do we need to move that so that it's not in your way?

Probably just put it down on the top of the DVD cases or something.

There you go.

Now you have room to swing your arms.

You're listening to season 11 of.

I had to.

I have to do it.

You're listening to season 11 of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of sci fi mega franchise mobile suitcase Gundam from 1979 to today.

Then can you give me one that's very, like, warm and soft?

You're listening.

That's somehow harder to do.

User bell sound effect.

I was going to say we have to use the boxing bell sound effect.

Channeling channel.

One of the Buffer brothers.

One of the Buffer brothers.

Oh, he is really fingering that Gundam.

You cannot say that.

What?

But it's in the script.

What happened to trying to keep it pg?

This is pg.

Sam.