The Lost Hollywood Gundam Movie

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Arbiter GUNDAM
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The Lost Hollywood Gundam Movie

Yeah, you heard me right. This article, by Tom Winnicki, goes into extensive detail on Mobile Suit Gundam movie that was in full pre-production in 1983, even before Zeta Gundam!

Some highlights--

The director would have been Chip Proser, who at the time had handled the major rewrite of Top Gun and the initial screenplay for Innerspace. This would have been his directorial debut.

Syd Mead did a lot of pre-production artwork including redesigns of the Gundam and Zaku II (called a Zak in the script) and a beautiful painting of the Zaks attacking the space colony with Amuro looking on.

The mobile suits would have been colossal at 100 meters; closer to the Neo Zeong or Pacific Rim's Jaegers.

There would have been new Gundam variations not seen before.

There would be no Principality of Zeon, instead it would be the Ziong Corporate Empire, probably because it was the 80s and everybody was bagging on corporations.
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Re: The Lost Hollywood Gundam Movie

Thanks for the link Arbiter. The author of the site has a lot of interesting bits posted on it. Worth a look for mech-heads into the background of classic anime.

Boy! This was a real trip back to the future for me. What might have happened... It might have really sucked; but maybe not. Movie audiences were a lot more forgiving back then, if a movie showed some imagination and willingness to engage the audience, and the produciton crew actually gave a damn. TRON was a glorious and beautiful financial failure that fired the imaginations of kids and young adults everywhere. Plus, TV animation was getting the youth of America ready to welcome anime. Bowdlerized imports and TV shows made by Japanese studios were becoming staples of weekend and after-school broadcasting. There really wouldn't have been a style disconnect; quite the opposite, in fact!

So I think a Gundam movie with that degree of creative effort put into it would have gotten a lot of word-of-mouth sales. "Dude, there's this movie about this guy who pilots a giant robot in space and fights the bad guys like Star Wars and it looks like TRON!! You gotta go see it!!" Even if the film didn't repay the producers' efforts in the theaters, the VHS sales and cable views and cult-classic status would have made it a winner in the long run. But in order to have a movie like that, it has to be made first, so...
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Omnislayer
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Re: The Lost Hollywood Gundam Movie

This is extremely interesting! I had no idea a Hollywood Gundam film was ever on the table.
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tHeWasTeDYouTh
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Re: The Lost Hollywood Gundam Movie

This has been an amazing read and thanks for the post because the website has a lot of other things that interested me. On the Gundam 1980s movie.........it would have sucked big time just like G-Savior
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Re: The Lost Hollywood Gundam Movie

tHeWasTeDYouTh wrote: Fri Oct 06, 2017 2:43 pm This has been an amazing read and thanks for the post because the website has a lot of other things that interested me. On the Gundam 1980s movie.........it would have sucked big time just like G-Savior
What is G-savior i...i...I'm not sure thats a real thing guys I think he's making up fake gundam movies that most definitely did(not) exist.
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Dark Duel
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Re: The Lost Hollywood Gundam Movie

As a low-budget B-movie, G-Saviour was decent, and the mech designs are pretty great IMO. As a Gundam movie, it was terrible. Though I was told by a friend who had it that the PS G-Saviour game was pretty awesome.
As for this movie...I dunno. Sounds interesting in theory, but I have a problem with mobile suits being scaled up to such an extreme degree, and I'm not sure how good the execution might have been. Still, it's interesting that at least they tried, even if apparently the effort never got off the ground.
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MythSearcher
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Re: The Lost Hollywood Gundam Movie

From a few exerts, the story seems so familiar to G Gundam?

Just replace Devil Gundam with the AI Ziong, brothers, father, MS with motion capture...

Hmm...
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