A short history of Gundam in the UK

Just when you thought speed climbing was frightening enough, you now need to impress a Transformer too at #Tokyo2020! 👀🤖 pic.twitter.com/0GzmVd3CnX

— BBC Sport (@BBCSport) August 5, 2021

 

 During the Tokyo Olympics multiple team GB commentators repeatedly failing to understand what those giant Gundam statues were. In addition to calling it a transformer during the speed climbing, I remember hearing the talking voices for a marathon fixture get the name right but trip over pronouncing it. "Gan-damn" its pronounced Gun-dam, though some Japanese voice actors put an extra syllable on the end sometimes.

It's a mammoth of a franchise, has lasted decades and has spun off a mountain of products and creative directions. Taken as a whole it's arguably the largest, most in depth attempt to grapple with militarism, conflict and its associated traumas. At least when it isn't being a light-hearted comedy or a show about a martial arts tournament with giant mobile suits.

It's not surprising that none of the team GB hangers on knew about Mobile Suit Gundam, because it practically doesn't exist here if you're too old to be an avid consumer of fansubs and torrents. The title says short, and it will be, because there just isn't much to talk about. 

A quick primer, the "robots" aren't robots they're mobile suits, most of them have a pilot inside them who directs what they do, it's more accurate to think of them as human shaped tanks or jet fighters. Not every mobile suit is a Gundam, but don't worry, you'll know when one shows up. Broadly speaking the television shows and movies are set in a future where humanity has begun to explore the solar system, there's usually space stations and cities on the moon. And the story is usually concerned with war and its effects on people and the environment, though comedy is still found, and some outlier series are more light-hearted. 

While Gundam as a franchise has been in existence from 1979 to the present with projects queued for release in the future it's had surprisingly little impact in English-speaking territories, and this was especially the case for the UK. The first official major  release of the franchise was the English dub of Gundam Wing on the Toonami block on Cartoon Network, in the early 2000s. Gundam Wing was released in Japan in 1995 and was a standalone continuity. If there was an earlier official release of a Gundam property I could find no evidence, the closest I could find is American VHS tapes which could be second hand. 

Wing was quite popular in the United States, I can't find much information on how popular it was in the UK, I watched it, and remember there were some toys in shops, not the famous model kits, these were more like action figures with detachable accessories (guns, swords, shields) and alternate limbs. Anecdotally speaking, none of my friends and schoolmates who liked anime were into it, I think I met one over kid who watched it. Cartoon Network at the time was only available on Satellite and Cable, so quite limited in audience reach back then. And also in general English-speaking circles Wing hasn't left a very big impact, outside its prominence in popularising same sex pairing fan fiction in the west. 

In North America, watershed events included the broadcast of the anime series Gundam Wing
- Boys' Love Manga: Essays on the Sexual Ambiguity and Cross-cultural Fandom of the Genre

In my experience this largely what gets Wing talked about to this day, the only exceptions I can think of are when a Gundam forum user talks about it as part of rewatch and is amazed at how well it holds up or is baffled by how poorly it holds up. Personally I'm in the latter category.

Other than that, in 2007-8 the UKs first and so far only channel dedicated to Anime, Anime Central aired Gundam Seed, I never watched Gundam Seed at the time, but I do remember seeing adverts for it in between shows I did watch, mostly Cowboy Bebop! Again the potential audience was very limited, Anime Central was only available on Sky Satellite and shutdown within a year. And that's it for TV broadcasts as far as I know. 

 

It's not the most gripping branding, but it got the point across.

 There is however one other area where the Gundam franchise made its presence felt in the UK, video games. Despite only seen one series and film (Endless Waltz) I considered myself a fan of the franchise because I really enjoyed playing them. The most popular where Gundam spin-offs of the Dynasty Warriors games, a serious I've enjoyed for a long time. Dynasty Warriors was still a niche product in the UK but it had a fanbase and that fanbase grew over time. In fact, I can remember a tv show that reviewed video games having a brief introduction to the setting before it reviewed one of the games, it ended with a sarcy "what do you mean you've never heard of it?"which I probably remember out of a sense of satisfaction since I had in fact heard of it.

 

I first learnt about Amuro Ray and Char Aznable through playing their story missions in Dynasty Warriors Gundam 1 and 2. There were other games released by other developers, but I don't remember them very well. It was also through these games that I first began to grasp just how vast this setting actually was, there were characters from dozens of shows and films with their original art styles that stretched over 40 years of animation developments. Mashing the square button and occasionally throwing in a random triangle for flavour was quite engaging and got me curious. So I turned to the net, where most of the Gundam franchise was available in varying quality. If you live in the UK and you had opinions on Gundam pre-2015, you almost certainly encountered it on the internet or via an anime club that ripped DVDs of fansubs without the teacher finding out. Thanks to these shady means, I was able to explore a large chunk of the available media, but there's so much of it that from 2010 to now I've still only experienced a minority of it. And I occasionally I have to google lists of releases to check if I'm missing something.

 At the present DVDs and Blu rays, have gradually increased in availability, though it's dependent on the US market getting a release with the UK being a secondary route of sales. In still more positive news Netflix the dominant streaming service which is now available in over half of all homes in the UK also shows some of the franchise, mainly Iron Blooded Orphans and Gundam Unicorn, both very new shows, but occasionally alternating some older shows. Currently, they have a number of movies released in the 1980s to 2021. 

The IP holders have also released a youtube channel Gundaminfo which cycles through the franchise. And as a result of this growing official presence, and it's less than legal channels the audience within the UK and in English-speaking parts of the web generally has been steadily growing, though it still lags behind other parts of the world, especially Japan, but also Italy and Latin America. There's never been a better time to check it out if you're in the UK.