Watching Gundam Wing in Your Late 30s: Part 2 – The Not-So-Hot Stuff
In August of last year, I turned on Gundam Wing for the first time in what must have been 25 years. As it was the third anime I had ever seen, I was keen to see how it would hold up. Furthermore, 2025 was the 30th anniversary of the show, so the timing was perfect. And you know what–it was a fun ride! As documented in my previous post, there’s a lot of cool things happening in Gundam Wing, even watching it today. However, as the record shows… as the show progresses, Gundam Wing begins to tear at the seams as work behind-the-scenes becomes more hectic.
How Gundam Wing Falls Apart
It’s no mystery that Gundam Wing’s quality declines as it goes on–it’s one of the key criticisms leveled at the show. However, as someone who only saw the series through to the end once when I was a kid, I wanted to see for myself just how “bad” it gets. Indeed, once past the two clipshows, the back-half of Wing is indeed a huge mess, but to be honest… it’s not dire. But who knows, maybe that’s just the nostalgia glasses talking.
As Wing gets late into its run, the momentum from the start of the show completely evaporates, and while there is a story that is in motion, each episode effectively feels like a one-off. And don’t get me wrong–they are entertaining one-and-done tales, at times providing some cool world-building. But ultimately nothing really happens for all the time spent on these stories, aside from the main plot constantly breaking the different sides of the war into further microfactions, as if they’re some far-left student organization in the 1960s. It ultimately feels like the writers are buying time to focus on getting the ending right–which is what I assumed happened, without going back to check the twisted history of the show’s production in detail.
Eventually Wing falls back on established Gundam beats, which is glaringly clear to someone who has eaten up much UC Gundam in the years since watching Wing for the first time. The record shows that the initial idea for Wing was to tell a story that covered the UC beats spanning from First to Victory, but this idea was scrapped when the show actually got started. However, to wrap it all up, the staff ended up going back to that original idea. I suppose this is an okay way to save the production, but as a result the Gundam boys become extremely sidelined in the back-half of the show. By being caught up in the traditional Gundam military conflict, the boys’ initial cool factor–being radical militant secret agents–disappears into thin air.
The story also takes the hero robots out of the picture for a long time, making one wonder if this show really has “Gundam” in its title. When I was younger, the manner in which Wing portrayed the Gundams as overpowered weapons helped to rationalize why they don’t show up all the time–because when they do appear, they tear up the scene in incredible fashion. However, as someone who has seen a bunch of fucking Gundam now, I expect to see a Gundam in every fucking episode. Wing throws in more than a few episodes where the boys are just working for one side of the conflict, in grunt suits–and sometimes they’re just stealing them. My nostalgia memory told me that Heero piloted Wing Zero for the entire last stretch of the show–but in reality, he probably only pilots it a few times, and other times Zero is mind-fucking the other pilots. And in general, the robot just doesn’t show up that much! Consider how often both of Domon’s Gundams show up in G Gundam–it’s night and day compared to Wing, and feels like a waste of a cool mecha design. This goes for all the other suits, too!
The animation quality also drops as the staff hastily works to keep up with the weekly broadcast schedule. While the show was never quite a looker from even the beginning, as mentioned in my previous post, the show was sure to flex for the action and set pieces, even if at times other parts looked flat, with zero layers of shading[1]Paul “Otaking” Johnson must be going insane.. By the back-half, the look becomes even flatter as artists have less time to fully color in a majority of the cels, and with battles moving to space, Wing starts to rely on copious beamspam and sliding robots, where action scenes earlier on in the show set on Earth had far more dynamism. And as someone who watched this without its openings on Toonami–only seeing them as videos downloaded off of someone’s fansite–I had no idea the second opening was more or less incomplete until the last one or two episodes. For a majority of the time that they’re using that second opening, the visuals are primarily recycled TV footage with some new clips spliced in.
Ultimately Wing comes together fine, and I think the last few episodes are quite good. And even for all the flaws I’m citing above, as mentioned earlier on, I still feel the back-half of the show is entertaining fluff, but a far cry from what the show was delivering from the start. I suppose it’s a lost cause to criticize a long Gundam show for losing the plot during its year-long run, but in something like Zeta it feels like the production crew always kind of has an idea of what they want to do, and the previous AU series before Wing, G Gundam, has a solid, charted out trajectory, despite some slow points. Wing’s production was clearly fucked, and it really shows in the final product.
Be Forever, Gundam Wing – Endless Waltz
I also got through Endless Waltz on this revisit, to appropriately cap things off, as it may well be the most iconic portion of the series. I did write up some thoughts on it here, which will likely be parroted below, but read away if you wish!
It goes without saying that Endless Waltz is all fanservice. It’s all about capturing the same vibes folks enjoyed from Wing, and doing it with as much polish and style as possible. That’s not to say that Endless Waltz has some amazing tight story that will blow your mind–it’s basically just more of the same, and even opens up more questions–but with its incredible animation, slick action and comparatively bite-sized runtime, it’s the perfect capstone for the series, and leaves a great last impression.
For this watchthrough, I hit both the OVA and the movie cut. I don’t believe it was my first time seeing the OVA cut, but the movie cut is certainly the one I kept watching as a kid, so the OVA take on the material felt quite new to me. I much prefer the film cut–the OVA feels rushed at just around 75 minutes, and has the typical Wing problem of things kind of just… happening. The extra 15 minutes added for the film makes a great difference in helping to contextualize certain scenes, and letting the whole story breathe.
The story itself is certainly an attempt to try and patch up some of the holes that were opened up due to Wing’s haphazard storytelling, but as mentioned above, it does also invite more questions. And compared to watching it as a kid, the conflict feels a lot smaller and far less “epic” than I remembered. Cool-looking robots went a long way for me as a kid, and they still help a lot now, but I can’t help but feel that the story lacks the kind of scale I want out of a sci-fi epic with giant robots.
But hey, who cares–it’s a super fun time. By this point Une, Noin and Sally are basically the Hot Moms for the Gundam boys, so you can see them drawn at Ultimate Hotness, and have fun watching them help their screwball sons out. Meanwhile Endless Waltz feels like one of the few times we see the Gundam boys all together, and eventually come together as a team[2]…basically by the very end. Watching the TV show, the boys are more or less separated into different groups throughout the story, and only really come together as a unit in the final few episodes.
As a result, it’s one of the few times we get to see all of the robots together as well, blowing up a bunch of bad guys in the final battle, albeit with a bit of a struggle to keep things spicy. Another advantage the film has over the OVA is that this final battle is extended, so we can get the most of the robot action, and those sweet custom Endless Waltz designs. Furthermore, in the OVA cut, due to the way the story is broken up, the middle episode has very little mech action, which feels slightly less weird across a 90-minute film. And yeah, the action is incredible–the animation is super smooth, the robots are perfectly rendered, and each clash is incredibly dynamic. While the TV show had some stand-out battles, if you want Wing action, Endless Waltz is the way to go–but that goes without saying. All said, Endless Waltz is a lot of fluff, but it’s a super fun time. And yeah, the nostalgia glasses help a lot.
Not that this take will come as a surprise to anyone who’s engaged with discourse on Wing over the past three decades, but when taking into consideration both the cool parts and not-so-cool parts of Gundam Wing, I think it’s fair to say it’s a huge mixed bag. While it certainly squanders its potential due to poor production management, I think it remains entertaining throughout and never really becomes actively bad. That said, if I was watching this fresh as an adult, I don’t think it would do it for me–this one has to be enjoyed through nostalgia glasses. Meanwhile, something like G Gundam is a show I could see myself enjoying fresh–I revisited it through reruns just before the pandemic, and was still compelled by Imagawa’s signature style of storytelling–perhaps even more so than when I was kid. Meanwhile, the impression I get from Gundam X is that it’s quite solid without the veneer of nostalgia–so maybe I’ll check that out. But first, I need to get through that Eva watch I mentioned in my last post. I’m currently on episode two!
But yeah, Wing ain’t bad–though you need the nostalgiavision for it to hit. Otherwise, skip it for better Gundam outings.