Getting to Know Gundam Again: Part 2

Posted On August 31, 2025

Hello everyone! This is Part 2 of my look back at UC Gundam. With the onset of the pandemic back in 2020, I decided to use my new-found spare time to go through UC Gundam, both revisiting old favorites, and watching entries I hadn’t seen before. For a more detailed introduction to this series of posts, I suggest reading Part 1 here.

Anyway, onwards!

Zeta Gundam

As a teenager, I begged and pleaded with my parents for them to buy me that giant-ass Bandai Entertainment Zeta Gundam boxset for my birthday^[1]Or Christmas, or whatever. The begging and pleading paid off, because I got it, displayed those pencil sharpeners^[2]I have no idea where they are now. and watched the show. By this point I assume the show was available on digisubs, but my family’s pipe wasn’t fat enough to download torrents on the magnitude of multiple gigabytes–and I likely didn’t have the storage either–so my only option was that huge thing.

Thankfully my boxset arrived intact^[3]I recall there being many defective ones., and I was able to make my way through the show over the course of a month or so with no issues. It was a rough watch for me, for many reasons. For one, it was probably the first ‘80s anime I ever watched^[4]Okay, I probably saw episode 1 of Angel Cop first… and possibly Akira., and while I was fine with First Gundam’s classic cartoony ‘70s artwork, the middle ground the 80s anime aesthetic occupied between clearly retro 70s anime and the “modern” 90s works I was accustomed to was something I had a hard time getting used to. It was certainly old, but not old enough–yet at the same time new, but not new enough. Also, watching Zeta was probably the first time I had ever seen a show of its length completely in Japanese. Still a dub boy tuning into Adult Swim regularly at the time, I rarely watched anime in its original Japanese. However, when I noticed that Char had a different voice from that original First dub, I switched over to the Japanese immediately–it was an easier pill for me to swallow, as opposed to having to listen to a different English voice portray the Red Comet. Lastly, while at this time I had not finished First^[5]Due to it being pulled off the air after 9/11., I did have a strong affinity for that original cast of characters, and Zeta being frontloaded with a new crew did throw me off. While I did finish it and realized there was something to it, for all the hype, I felt I was missing something by the end. Obviously, the New Translation films that dropped later on did nothing to help.

16 years later in 2020, as an older and more seasoned anime fan, and with correctly collaborated expectations, I dove into Zeta again, and enjoyed it far more. Don’t get me wrong– it’s still a hot mess–but there’s a lot to chew on between the large cast of characters and the greater political machinations. I was particularly surprised at how much I enjoyed Kamille, if only for just how much of a little shit he is. Haman Karn is also as cool as everyone says, but given how popular she is, I was surprised that she’s only in a handful of episodes near the end. And that messiness? While it’s likely just a function of the show being directed by Tomino, given the richness of the world and the motivations of the different factions at play, one could argue that it does feel messy in the way that real war feels messy.

This probably contributes to the messiness, but I also liked how despite having a serialized story, many episodes of Zeta manage to function as solid one-shots, allowing the show to drop in extended explorations of the world from time to time. One episode that stands out is the mid-series Ghost of Zeon episode, which does result in the death of a Titan mid-boss, but is mostly just an excuse to have the AEUG boys poke around in a destroyed Zeon ship. It’s episodes like this that let Zeta get lost in a bunch of minor details, and gives the show a ton of texture. The show also nails its iconic moments as well, be it Kamille’s tragic encounter with Four and the Psycho Gundam, Char’s speech at Dakar, or the now forever-memed final battle between Kamille and Scirocco.

And at the end of the day, the robots are just sweet as hell. Sure, sometimes they’re off-model, but they usually look really cool. Gotta love it when the camera pans over the Zeta, and suddenly it has multiple layers of extra mechanical detail for a fleeting moment. I also especially love how Zeta brings back the monster of the week mobile armors from First Gundam. I think many of them look super awesome, or at the very least, each one is quite interesting. And ultimately, that’s all a robot show needs–sick designs.

Needless to say, I look forward to hitting up Zeta again.

Gundam Double Zeta

Similar to how it originally aired, after I finished Zeta Gundam, I immediately started on Double Zeta… but about three or four episodes in, I took a break for about half a year or more. While this break was mostly due to work, the slow pace of those early episodes focusing on the crew stuck in the junkyard didn’t really help. Sure, I enjoyed all the wacky antics^[6]Didn’t realize the iconic chicken-on-Bright’s-head episode happened so early on. but it wasn’t quite working as well as I hoped it would. I didn’t hate the concept of “Wacky Gundam” on paper, but in practice it was a bit lukewarm. 

After the crew leaves the Shangri-La colony, I gradually got into the characters and started to enjoy their relationships^[7]Though at this point I would be hard-pressed to tell you why–it’s been a while. While this is the first show where I feel Tomino’s “unique” writing style starts to shine through, it’s still tolerable at this stage of his career, and didn’t affect my enjoyment. As the show goes on, more so than the ongoing story–which feels paper-thin at best–I enjoyed all the strange diversions and explorations of 0088 world, such as the extremely bizarre Moon Moon and Tigerbaum space colonies. I especially loved the arc on earth, as there are a handful of great one-offs that give the world some great and palpable texture. Unfortunately, it does feel like the show was made up as it went along^[8]Which it seems was the case, given they apparently had to re-write the back-half after Char’s Counterattack got greenlit., and it ends on a bit of a wet fart–and does Haman quite dirty, in my opinion. 

With hindsight 20/20, it certainly feels like the setup for Double Zeta would have worked better as a side story than a mainline entry, because the core cast is strong, and I feel a lot could have been done with further explorations of the world, rather than trying to rehash the same UC Gundam beats for a third time. 

…and to let the dirty old man in me loose right at the end, I do also appreciate Double Zeta for being the first Gundam with a truly moé cast of cute female characters. And yes, I do like their dumb ’80s-tastic outfits in the back-half of the show when they’re on Earth. That said, I’m not sure if the power of cute girls will be enough to get me to revisit this one any time soon, though. 

Char’s Counterattack 

With the legendary status this work has amongst a certain segment of anime fans, I was looking forward to revisiting Char’s Counterattack. Like many, when this dropped on DVD in the early 2000s, it was the only other UC Gundam I had seen outside of First. And also like many, I was left royally confused. 

Years later, I suppose I’m less confused… but this is still a fucking crazy movie, in both good and bad ways. First of all, for some reason I assumed that watching ZZ would help contextualize this for me–but as the record shows, of course it doesn’t. Once I made peace with that, I was just along for the ride. With the introduction of a whole new timeline and a ton of new characters, packaging this out as either a duology or a 6-to-8 episode OVA would help it go down easier, but in reality all we have is this one film. However, I do appreciate how crunching it all into one two-hour film lends to a riveting feeling of never-ending chaos, which is something I feel would go on to define Tomino’s career in the years after.

It’s definitely got its moments, and it nails those moments–Char and Amuro fighting in the park, Char’s impassioned speech to the Neo Zeon, and the final space battle between Char and Amuro–to list off the big ones. Hell, even those weird quiet moments like Char staring into that stupid whiskey glass live on in the memory. But the connective tissue is so thin, and with only two hours it’s hard to develop the large cast of new characters it throws at us. That said, part of me thinks that’s part of the fun, as well. While a more streamlined take on this would be great, perhaps it wouldn’t be Char’s Counterattack if it wasn’t pure chaos.

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We’re almost to the end, folks. Keep your eyes open for the third and final part!