Sam.

Hello friends.

Since this hiatus is likely to take longer than usual, we thought we'd pop in and give you a little update on what we're up to.

We may do these periodically throughout the hiatus just to keep you in the.

Loop so that you know we're still here.

And we are still in fact working on Mobile Suit Breakdown.

So Nina, what have you been working on this past month?

As most of you know, our cat Tigress passed away in June, which hit me a lot harder than I was expecting.

I had never had a pet pass away before.

I had a pet as a kid, but it was a hedgehog and I had to re home her.

When we moved to a place where hedgehogs are not legal to keep as pets, it was pretty brutal.

My productivity definitely took a hit.

We're getting back into the swing of things, it feels like after that period, but as a consequence, some of what I've been doing has been catching up on things that fell by the wayside towards the end of the season between all the grief feelings, and also working on the disappearances of Lydia Fontaine Audio Drama Tom wrote so things like bookkeeping, planning the pin promotion for this year.

Which is admittedly the pin promotion from last year, they do exist.

The pins are real.

They exist.

Thankfully we made them before all of the tariff chaos that will probably come up later in this upd.

Yeah, one of the other things I've been working on is planning a revamp for the Patreon because this year is our seventh podversary and a lot has changed since we first launched the Patreon, both with the podcast itself and the sheer number of paid subscribers we have, but also in the world and in what it takes to get merch made and ship it out to various parts of the world.

Long story short, there are gonna be some changes and we will talk about those in more detail later this month.

Also getting back into the swing of writing more public blog posts, Patreon posts, trying to get into the habit of doing even just very short posts on a more frequent basis.

And then in terms of prep for the upcoming season, you and I have started watching Aura Battler Dunbine.

This is stage one of getting to know our new chief director, Imagawa Yasuhiro, which includes watching some of his early work, including Aura Battler Dunbine, where Imagawa debuted as an episode director, and where he reportedly also first made his name in the industry at all timeshow for Tomi no Names, Shot Weapon, Keen Kiss, Burn, Burning Marvel, Frozen, and it's really fun going back to earlier Tomino works after seeing him in the early 90s doldrums.

I especially enjoy the apparent influence of American animation in some of the character designs and in some of the sort of fantasy elements.

The combination of sci fi and fantasy feels very different obviously from the more real world sci fi of the Gundam universe in a way that's refreshing and fun.

One of the bits of prep for this season that was Lost when I lost a file last year was a list of movies that at various points Imagawa has said strongly influenced his work on G Gundam.

It's a ton of movies ranging from totally campy B movie stuff to extremely like a highbrow, high concept foreign films.

While we are not going to try to watch all of these films before we start covering the show in terms of prep, some of them are kind of hard to find.

And so seeing what's available for streaming and where what can we buy a Blu Ray or a DVD of what might we have to like import or see if we can find through a library or other resource.

And the other sadly bit of preparatory work that I lost in that same file was I had started working up an outline to talk about the toy industry and the anime industry in the early 90s, which I did not wind up covering during Victory Gundam, but would like to cover either as a bonus research piece in between seasons or in our early coverage of G Gundam, which should be easier to do because since G Gundam begins almost as soon as Victory Gundam ends, there is not going to be much to cover in my what was going on in the world research piece that I, you know, always do at the beginning of a season.

It'll just be things that happened while Victory Gundam was airing.

Mm, which I imagine will be relatively brief.

I'm looking forward to that research piece about the toy industry, though.

Everything I've heard about this era suggests it was in a period of real crisis.

The demographics were shifting.

There were just not as many kids as there used to be because of the declining birth rate.

The end of the bubble economy meant there was less money to spend on high value toys and video games had arrived and were absolutely eating traditional toys lunch.

Yet at the same time, previously toys had really been limited to like birthdays and Christmas or similar holidays.

There were a very limited number of occasions on which a child received toys and that possibly starting in the 80s, maybe even a little earlier, you start to see more toys just for the fun of it.

Toys because they exist and are cool, or as a reward for doing well in school or essentially that Toys were being purchased much more often and that individual children simply had more toys.

There was a big increase in consumerism around products for children.

And then on the anime industry side, I was mostly interested in whether computer technology in animation was starting to have bigger impacts on, you know, normal broadcast shows.

Yeah, this is a major transition point for Gundam and for the industry as a whole.

The switch from Tomino to Imagawa is a generational change.

Imagawa was born around the same time that Tomino started working in anime.

It truly is a passing of the torch.

As Nina alluded to.

A lot of the prep work is going to involve watching films that Imagawa has cited as influential, either to him personally or to G Gundam specifically, and watching a bunch of his other work.

So besides Aura battler Dunbine, I'm looking to see if we can watch at least some of Mr.

Ajiko, which was a cooking competition show, and also Imagawa's debut as chief director.

I'm also going to be reading the notoriously terrible Escaflowne manga.

And yes, I know there are multiple Escaflowne manga, and none of them are particularly well regarded, but the really bad one, because it's based on the original outline of the show back when it was going to launch in 1994, and when Imagawa was going to be the chief director, he was pulled off of it to work on G Gundam.

Was he involved in the manga, though?

No, but it's his.

It's the outline of the show that he would have made.

That's a bit of a stretch.

I think you just want an excuse to read the terrible Escaflowne manga.

Don't put me on blast in front of the listeners.

Has Tom mentioned that Escaflowne is one of his favorite shows of all time?

I don't think so.

I usually keep it on the down low.

Not just favorite anime.

One of his favorite shows of all time.

I don't think I've mentioned that before.

And yeah, I'm also working a bit on the disappearances of Lydia Fontaine, which it's all written and it's all recorded.

It's currently in the hands of the editors and I have very little to do with that.

But there is bonus content for the Kickstarter backers for me to prepare.

So I'm working on that.

And I'm outlining a, you know, potential.

Maybe season two.

It could possibly happen.

Be cool if it did.

And if it did, I'm ready.

We will, of course, be sure to let you all know when those episodes become publicly available.

They will be ready earlier for Kickstarter.

Supporters, and we did say before we went on hiatus that we would be continuing some of our research projects from Victory, and that is still true.

I am working away on continuing the Yugoslavia research.

I'm hoping to have another episode of that ready to come out sometime this month.

I also have a couple of topics, one of which I've already pulled resources for, and so I ought to just sit down and make myself finish it.

It'll just take me a day or two.

But I also have a couple of research projects in the mix.

We appreciate all of your patience and should have some other updates and some of those research projects and other information available soon.

And if you're a Patreon backer, you can meet us over there for another edition of UN Gundam in which we talk about all of the non mobile suit breakdown things we've been doing recently.

Take care and stay.

Genki Sam.