Saalon Muyo

Two-Mix had a song featured in both the Gundam Wing television series and the OAV, Endless Waltz. “White Reflection” was their Endless Waltz song, and its music video rules the earth, even if it looks like it belongs to Macross Plus and not Gundam. Witness.

My policy on Netflix has been to get out one older film and one newer film at a time. That’ll keep me from feeling like anything I’m watching is becoming work, and also lets me catch the occasional bad movie that I nonetheless want to see.  It’s been working so far.

Fast Times At Ridgemont High

I’ve never been a fan of 80′s teen comedies, but Fast Times was its own thing.  Clever and funny, it avoided the kind of stereotypes I’ve come to expect from teen comedies while managing to pull off the best stoner archetype I’ve ever seen.  Classic.

Say Anything

Fast Times came before the John Hughes teen movie tsunami, where Say Anything followed it.  This wasn’t as great as Fast Times, but was still a pretty good movie.  Did anyone else get the vibe that Grosse Pointe Blank was a kinda sorta thematic follow-up to Say Anything? Like, if Lloyd Dobler actually ran away at prom, became a hitman, then returned home to Diane for their high school reunion, the movie wouldn’t be much different than Grosse Pointe Blank did. Also the movies share most of the same cast.

Where Eagles Dare

I saw this in anticipation of Inglourious Basterds, to get myself in the mood for a WWII era men on a mission movie.  I didn’t know what to expect from it, other than that it had Clint Eastwood in it and that there was Nazi killing.  It was a far more fun, twisty spy/action flick than anticipated.  It might not be a full-on classic, but it kicked some butt at the right times and had some really well paced action at the end.  Richard Burton’s a bit of a ponce, though.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

I have some hardcore, not fit for children love of Woody Allen.  I get frustrated when conversations boil down to people saying “I don’t think he’s funny,” as if the only thing that Allen has going for him is comedy.  I mean, yeah, I think he’s really funny, but that’s only half of what draws me to him.  He’s also a phenomenal director, one of the best at creating natural scenes of dialogue and using not just on-screen but off-screen space as well.  Crimes was one of his more serious pieces.  Not bereft of comedy, but he was certainly edging more toward his Ingmar Bergman mode for it. A great performance by Martin Landau didn’t hurt.  Highly recommended.

The Searchers

I thought I’d like this one more.  This was what I chose to be my first John Wayne western, since it looked more complex and nuanced than much of his work.  Despite a very good story and some great supporting performances, Wayne still comes off like a fake macho jackass for too many scenes.  I’ll still see some of his other classics, but I don’t have much hope that I’ll ever be able to get through John Wayne trying to be the badass that Clint Eastwood managed to pull off so effortlessly.   John Ford sure can direct, though.

“History is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace, and revolution continue on forever.”

Anime news was harder to come by in 2000.  By the time Gundam Wing was over, I knew there was a sequel OAV called Endless Waltz, but I knew next to nothing about it.  There was the general impression that Cartoon Network was going to pick it up and show it, but no date was announced.  It was frustrating.

That summer I attended my first ever anime convention: Otakon. The main reason for attending, beyond wanting to check out an anime convention, was that the creators of Serial Experiments Lain were going to be in the house, and in the summer of 2000 I was in the midst full-on Lain obsession.  What I wasn’t expecting when I arrived was the see a sneak preview showing of Endless Waltz.

“Looks like we’re fighting another losing battle.”

As difficult as it was for me to objectively review Gundam Wing, it’s worse for Endless Waltz.  The sneak preview was shown in the main event area of the convention, packed with more people than could fit into most movie theaters.  Not only was it a big crowd, it was a crowd of fans.  The experience of seeing Endless Waltz with a bunch of enthusiastic Gundam fans is possibly the greatest film experience of my life.  Endless Waltz isn’t even close to the best film I’ve ever seen, but nothing matches the feeling of being in that room, at that time, watching that film.

Endless Waltz is set one year after the events of Gundam Wing.  Peace has come to Earth and space.  The Gundams aren’t needed anymore, so the pilots have decided to rid the world of these weapons forever.  Four of the five Gundams – Wufei, of course, has to stay the loner – are put aboard a shuttle and fired at the sun.  But in After Colony 196, war was beginning…

Like its predecessor, Endless Waltz introduces a dozen too many political factions into a story that needs far less to work. The daughter of deceased pilot Treize Kushrenada, Mariemaia, emerges as leader of one of Earth’s colonies and declares war.  Because she thinks, I don’t know, she has the right to rule, or something.  Her backers are the rich and powerful Barton family, who were one of the original backers of  the Operation Meteor plan that sent the Gundams to Earth.  Their goal had not been peace between Earth and the colonies, though. It had been domination.  They reveal that the Gundams were not phase one of the original Operation Meteor.

The plan was still to drop Gundams on Earth, but only after they had dropped a colony on it first.

Faced with the possibility of renewed war, the Gundam pilots decide to reclaim their suits to face Mariemaia.  Heero, Quatre, Duo and Trowa spring into action only to learn that Mariemaia has a Gundam of her own. Altron, piloted by Wufei.  His reasons? Well, I have a challenge for you.  If you can watch Endless Waltz and make sense of why Wufei has sided with the Bartons, I owe you a beer.

“How many more people must we kill? How many times must I kill that girl and her dog? Zero won’t tell me anything. Tell me, Wufei.”

Endless Waltz is technically a three episode OAV, but it’s best watched all in one run.  There’s a theatrical version which cuts some things out but add some other scenes, but personally I recommend sitting down with the three OAV episodes and getting it done.  Partly because it takes a bit to get going, but also because, as it gains steams, it becomes a nearly perfect feast of fan pleasing events.  From the reveal of the new, utterly improbably Gundam designs to the fantastic character reintroductions to the long delayed back stories of the Gundam pilots, Endless Waltz needs to wash over you in one big wave.

Maybe I’m corrupted with the experience of seeing it with fans.  Every time a Gundam was revealed, the crowd freaked.  When Wufei showed up, once again, as a bad guy, someone in the crowd shouted “Wufei sucks!”  Then there were the little moments of badass dialogue that made everyone go nuts.  And the not as badass moments of dialogue that also made everyone go nuts.  Mostly, we were all nuts about seeing Endless Waltz early.

The OAV benefited from an actual animation budget. The battles, which were well handled by poorly animated in the TV series are here kind of gorgeous.  As idiotic as the idea of putting actual, feathery looking angel wings on Wing Zero is, they look frakking cool in motion, even when the animators decide to animate little feathers floating around it like it’s a Sailor Moon character. The last episode is basically one giant battle, and unlike the series, they have the money to do it well.

“I will never kill anyone, ever again. I don’t have to anymore.”

Like the TV series, Endless Waltz does the right things with its characters who aren’t named Wufei.  Heero, especially, gets the last bit of closure he needed, and the rest of the pilots get a bit more time to find a happy ending than was afforded them in the series.  The plot is a bit muddled even by the standards set by the TV series, but it works well enough in setting a framework by which we learn about the pasts of our pilots.

And its ending.  Oh, its ending.  If you fear spoilers, bail now.

After Mariemaia and the Bartons are defeated, we learn that the pilots finally destroy their Gundams.  Not only have they brought peace to the world for now, but for all time.  The narration informs us that their war for pacifism was so successful that Gundams were never needed, ever again. That’s one way to avoid anyone doing unnecessary sequels in your alternate timeline.

Like Gundam Wing, my love for Endless Waltz is irrational and complete.  In some ways it’s weaker than its television incarnation, but it gives us things – like well animated battles – that the series never could. If you’ve seen Gundam Wing, Endless Waltz is a must.  It’s the capstone of the story, it fills in the back stories of the pilots and it has a mecha with flapping angel wings.  How do you not give that a chance?

My review of Gundam Wing got me all nostalgic for the old, awesome Toonami videos from that time.  There are things channels in their early years can do that older channels cannot.  Once the commercial money becomes available, you just don’t have the time for two and a half minute AMVs about how cool outer space is.

Space. It’s so quiet.

Note: This review contains spoilers. I don’t give away the entire series, but I do reveal major plot points.

“The Gundams will soon come to rectify your mistakes.”

The early days of anime on Cartoon Network were exciting.  There was the feel that behind the scenes, geeks and fanboys were free to do anything they could to prove their network knew what was up.  The shows they chose weren’t restricted to Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z.  They got Peter Cullen – yes, Optimus Prime – to do narration over the commercials.  And their advertisements rocked.

I still rattle off Gundam Wing quotes stuck in my head from these advertisements.

Ok,  a warning: Part of my love of the show is wrapped up in the experience of watching it, of discovering what Gundam and mecha were all about.  I’m not sure I have an objective view of Gundam Wing.  This review, of all my Gundam reviews, will probably be the least focused.

The world of Gundam Wing is set in the After Colony era; as in, it’s been 175 years since space colonization began.  Since that time, the Earth Sphere Alliance has come to oppress the colonies, treating the people in space as little more than laborers.  The five colonies, sick of mistreatment, launch Operation Meteor.  Five mobile suits of immense power are created, one by each of the colonies, and sent down to Earth to wage a guerrilla war against its nations.

The Gundam pilots know of each others’ existence, but are neither allies nor friends.  Though their mission is the same, the pilots themselves have very different reasons for fighting.  But, as Earth unites against them, they’re forced to join together to free their homes.

And that’s just the first 13 episodes.

The plot is a mess, but it makes a fun kind of sense when you watch it play out.  The centerpiece for the show isn’t the Rube Goldberg political machine, though.  It’s the five Gundams and their pilots.

“Come and get me you monsters!”

In any Gundam show, the primary weapon of war is the mobile suit, which rules the battlefield until some scientist wheels out the ultimate weapon of war: the Gundam.  The power of the Gundam, and the source of said power, changes from show to show, but they’re always an order of magnitude stronger than anything else on the field.  In Gundam Wing, the Gundams are full-on beasts, capable of slaughtering entire armies on their own.  They’re apparently made of something called “Gundanium”, an alloy from which they take their names.  Whatever.  They’re basically indestructible and armed to the teeth.

Where early Gundam shows strove for realism of a sort, the Gundams of Wing are the mecha equivalent of superheros.

For instance, Deathscythe is a black Gundam with stealth capabilities and a beam-scythe.  Its pilot, Duo Maxwell, shouts things like “The god of death has returned!”  as he kills multiple enemies with one swing.  Heavyarms, piloted by Flock of Seagulls reject Trowa Barton, has a Gatlng gun for an arm and carries more missiles than could fit in all the Gundams.  Quatre Rababba Winner, the blond, boyish, overly sensitive psychic pilot runs around in Sandrock, whose primary weapons are two giant Khopeshs. Chang Wufei is a dick and pilots Voltron Shenlong, a lion-armed Gundam which I ignore as much as possible.

Then there’s Heero Yuy.  Every Gundam series has, at its center, a teenage boy with emotional problems who has to, you know, conquer them and save the world.  Gundam Wing, rather than go with the stock whining pacifist pilot of other entries, gives us a sociopath in a giant energy rifle wielding Transformer.  Where most shows would give us a love interest, Gundam Wing has Heero Yuy spend most of the series threatening to kill his romantic interest, Relena Peacecraft.  Dissatisfied with subtlety, the writers hand us a primary character arc of a murderous terrorist’s troubled romance with the queen of a pacifist kingdom.

Heero’s Gundam is Wing 01, the only mecha in the series to sport the classic Red/Yellow/Blue color theme of a true Gundam.  It’s also the only one, at first, to use the classic beam saber.  In case you hadn’t realized, a mecha with a beam saber is your clue the Gundam franchise started right after the release of Star Wars.

These five pilots – all teenagers, of course – end up in combat with the pilots of Earth – also mostly teenagers – and occasionally each other.  The Gundams are so powerful that only other ace pilots in super-suits can threaten them, leading to the typical Gundam arms race that we get in most series. By the end, everyone’s gotten an upgrade to increase their armament from unrealistic to batshit.  That’s how Gundam rolls.

“We’re from outer space! Every one of us!”

Somehow, despite all of the silliness, Gundam Wing is an affecting series.  I doubt I’d like it as much if I hadn’t seen it first, but I also doubt I’d have hated it.  The show plays out like a teenager’s overly complicated political drama, with constant betrayals, impassioned speeches about the purpose of war and a group of outsiders becoming the heroes of the world.  It also displays the emotional stuntedness of said teenagers: in lieu of an actual romance, Heero and Relena spend most of the end of the series looking out into space and saying each others’ names. A lot.

Though it’s nearly impossible to keep track of when people have switched from villain to hero and back, the characters somehow stay consistent through it all.  Like Treize Kushrenada, who begins the series as the political villain manipulating the Earth Sphere Alliance into total domination of the colonies.  Until OZ debuts its newest weapon: the Mobile Doll.  Unmanned, AI controlled mecha whose reaction times far exceed that of a normal pilot.  Though the mobile dolls are strong enough to even overpower the Gundams, they lead Treize to forsake his masters and become a sort of anti hero.

Why?  Because war should be carried out by people. A war fought by soulless dolls has no honor.  Treize, through all the machinations of the plot, maintains himself as a throwback to the warriors of Homeric epics, even if that kind of thing makes no sense in a series about scythe-wielding super-mecha.  By the end, he’s in a mecha with a head plume like a Greek warrior, in case you didn’t get the hint.

Watching Gundam Wing is a bit like watching the original Star Trek.  It’s not that you like it in spite of its cheesiness. You like it because it’s so strange and unrealistic.  I don’t overlook the overwrought speeches of the characters in Gundam Wing.  I look forward to them.

It also helps that Gundam Wing has some of the most fun technology of the franchise.  Like the Zero System. Pure awesome.  Where early Gundam had a race of psychic-ish Newtypes who could use their power to become dominant pilots, Gundam Wing introduced the experimental Zero System.  Using probability calculations and a lot of technological hand waving, it allowed its pilot to see into the possible future, giving him not just an advantage in battle but the power to ramble on about what the point of any of his actions were.  Unfortunately, the Zero System tended to overpower its user, driving them mad with visions of the future.  In the end, only Heero and Zechs are able to master it.  In case you’re wondering, in a Gundam series that means “They’re going to fight at the end.”

Also, we get to hear Heero talk to his upgraded Gundam, Wing Zero, all the time.  Which is more fun than it sounds.

“I will survive!”

Like most Gundam series, the show comes down to a fight between the two best pilots in the two most powerful mechas, and though Gundam Wing‘s animation is subpar compared to its peers (and uses a disturbing amount of recycled animation), the end duel brings it when it comes to the drama.  So does the climatic effort against a falling battleship, whose impact will wipe out all life on Earth.  Despite juggling far too many plot threads for their own good, the writers remembered that at its core the series hinged on its strange but sympathetic cast of characters and built a finale that used them all.

If I had to be objective, I’d say Gundam Wing is an above average show. A “B” effort, at best.  But I can’t.  Not at all.

When it comes to Gundam Wing, I have nothing but love.

This post is the introduction to a series of Gundam reviews, currently in progress. In fact, if you’re reading this it’s at all close to September 24, 2009, this is probably the only post in the series.

I don’t know if I’m more shocked than it’s been a decade since I started watching anime or that it’s only been a decade.  Though my otaku cred is minimal, anime’s been an important influence on be both as a writer and in the way I look at animation.  Yet before sometime in early 2000, the only anime I had seen was Voltron and Noozles.

Seriously. Noozles.

I was hired at Electronics Boutique in 1999 as a register jockey.  In the same mall was a Suncoast, one of the only stores at that time to have a dedicated anime shelf.  I wish I could remember why I decided I needed to know more about anime, but all I can recall is walking into Suncoast, seeing the eye-catching cover of the first DVD of Serial Experiments Lain and buying it on the spot.  At the time, I thought it was a movie.  When it came to anime, I knew nothing.

Around the same time Lain was corrupting my fragile mind, Cartoon Network was spinning off its successful Toonami block of mostly anime programming into a late-night offering intended for teenagers trapped in adult bodies called Midnight Run.  It was Midnight Run where I first saw Gundam.  And it was good.

Giant robots are like sword-fighting skeletons.  There’s genetic code attached to the Y chromosome that predisposes boys to love them.  Combined with an early childhood spent watching Transformers and Voltron, the love of giant robots fighting each other can become overwhelming.  Once I started to get into the world of anime, it was only a matter of time before I heard of Gundam.

The first thing most people hear about Gundam is it’s the Star Trek of Japan. It’s actually not a terrible comparison.  The show started in 1979, was ahead of its time as an animated mecha show that dealt with more complicated themes than whether a giant lion robot could free humanity from enslavement, failed to find an audience and was canceled.  It found an audience in the years after, leading the studio to reconsider and relaunch the franchise as a series of television and film projects that have been a nearly endless cash cow since.  Where Star Trek told the story of an endless series of spaceships named Enterprise, Gundam focused on its eponymous mecha.  In the same way that the Enterprise became a symbol of the ideals of Star Trek, so did the Gundam become more than a simple mobile suit.

The comparison should stop there.  Gundam is a very different franchise from Star Trek, a fact I learned from the first series I saw: Gundam Wing.  While Star Trek became increasingly obsessed with its own continuity, Gundam saw a decline in interest in its core timeline as a chance to reinvigorate the franchise.  After 15 years of telling stories in the Universal Century timeline, Bandai released Mobile Fighter G Gundam, an alternate universe take on the Gundam mythos.  Rather than continuity as the cornerstone of their francise, they decided that what Gundam meant was the key.

Gundam Wing was the second of the alternate universe Gundam stories, set not in the Universal Century timeline of original Gundam nor in the Future Century world of G Gundam.  It was a stand along story, set 175 years after the colonization of space.   Where original Gundam was primarily a military story and G Gundam was a one-on-one combat story in the mold of  Dragonball, Wing was a complicated political drama.  With mecha beating on each other. That doesn’t go away.

Brent, Brennen and I caught it on Midnight Run halfway through the series.  We all decided, for reasons I no longer recall, to give this strange and convoluted mecha series a shot.  We were all in separate places, so we chatted online through the show.  None of us had a clue what was going on.  There was a cold, murderous pilot at the center of the series, five insanely powerful mechas fighting either Earth or the Colonies or both – it was hard to tell – and some very uncomfortable proto-romance between the emotionally stunted pilots and the overly emotional women they met.

It was fun, at first.  And then it got good. Really good.  By the end, all the political nonsense started to make sense and the pilots ended up in life or death struggles against enemies in mecha even more unrealistic and silly than their own Gundams.  Somehow, it got to me.  All of it.  The battles. The characters.  The Gundams themselves.  The speeches on the ethics of dropping a massive spacecraft on Earth’s surface so as to destroy the source of all war.  I loved it.

That was enough to turn me into a bit of an otaku, but it was a while before I made my way back to another Gundam series.  Very little had been brought over to the US, and I was concerned about watching anything set in the original, U.C. timeline  without seeing it mostly in order.  All I knew of the original Mobile Suit Gundam was that it was badly animated and no one wanted to spend the money to bring it over.  I watched a few episodes of a stand along OAV set in U.C. called 8th M.S. Squad and liked it, but never got around to finishing it.  I had plenty of anime to watch, anyway.

Then, after moving back to Pittsburgh in 2003, I stumbled into a site hosting all 50 episodes of the newest series: Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, another alternate universe series. (This one is set in the “Cosmic Era).  I devoured it.  Where Wing was excellent cheese, SEED had all the elements of a really great show.  The animation was lovely, the fights crazy and the character arcs cleaner and less goofy than Wing.  Whatever I needed to push me into full on fanboy mode for Gundam, SEED had it.

In the years since, I’ve seen almost as much Gundam as I have all other anime combined.  Of the dozen Gundam television series, I’ve seen all but 3.  And they’re 50 episodes each.  I’ve jokingly named my last two cars after Gundam.  I’ve spent hours and hour talking about it with friends, mostly fellow Gundam fan Brent.  The last two series to go on television, SEED Destiny and 00 I’ve watched as they came out, downloading the fansubs as soon as they hit the net.

I like anime a lot.  I’ve gone to anime conventions.  I spent most of the last two weeks plowing through Code Geass.  When it comes to new television series, I’m at least as excited about what’s coming out in Japan as I am with what American television is dripping out.  But I love Gundam.

If it weren’t for Gundam, I’d probably still be an anime fan. I adore Lain and Cowboy Bebop.  Without Gundam, though, I’m not sure I’d have the enthusiasm for it.  It was Gundam Wing that made anime a communal experience for me, that tuned me onto something deeper in the culture of anime than the fanservice and the obsession with blue hair.  My love of Gundam has enabled my love of anime as a whole, and yet it’s also stood on its own.

It is, without a doubt, the best television franchise of all time.  Its closest competitor, Star Trek, reached a similar moment as Gundam did in the early 90′s.  Popularity was flagging.  Creativity was dried up.  The answer? Remake the original series.  Rather than tap into what made Trek what it was, it settled for a remake, missing its one chance to do something truly new.  Nothing would stop them from covering similar ideas and concepts, but they’d be free of characters literally named Kirk and Spock, just as Gundam is free of Amuro and Char.  Which is why Gundam stands alone, a franchise that’s lasted 30 years and found ways of renewing itself whenever it needed.

And Gundam taught me my favorite anime word of all time.  A word I use now as I plunge into a long term project to review every Gundam show.  A word Gundam pilots have used for 30 years before launching to fight an impossible battle.

Ikimasu!!!

A haiku inspired by @aimeesblog’s Apple accessory woes.  Thanks to @rmurken who got most of the words down for this one.  I just ran with what he did.

Beautiful Design

Not immune to wear and tear

we buy plastic shells

And here’s one directly from @rmurken

Delicate iPhone

Ever thus, with Apple stuff:

Beauty needs a shell.