bullethead wrote:It's Gundam, because Bandai and Sunrise say so
so it's still
Macross if you take out the singers and aliens and love triangles? it's still
Dragon Ball Z if you take out all the energy beams and super-powered aliens? it's still
Yu-Gi-Oh if you take away the cards and have them all literally fighting with monsters like
Pokemon? really?
Gundam is just a name and the audience has no expectations of certain ideas and tropes that come with it?
'cuz a focus on what goes on around the Earth with humans is one of the things that defines
Gundam. what would it be if you took that away? if you spread it out to the whole galaxy or whatever, you have to explain why you aren't turning
Gundam into something like
Legends of Galactic Heroes or
Macross. and if you try to keep
Gundam the same with simply a new setting, it means the setting change actually doesn't matter, which raises the question of why you did it. so that means it's just a gimmick. i'm not sure
Gundam really needs more gimmicks. at any rate, i doubt anyone would really be fooled. after all, you can hardly call it "original" or "new" if
Gundam is simply aping some other show's tropes. if that's what you do then you're pretty clearly just opening yourself to the charge of ripping off some other show--which makes
Gundam even blander and less original, because instead of rehashing its own tropes, now it's stealing other shows' tropes.
so, if you don't like
Gundam's tropes, well, don't watch
Gundam. i have no interest in singers and love triangles and all the other stuff that goes into
Macross shows, so i just don't watch
Macross. expecting it to produce a show that goes against what everyone understands it to be just because i don't like the things that make it be something other than all the other mecha anime out there is kind of silly.
on the other hand, the way around this is to put twists and new perspectives on
Gundam's various tropes.
AGE tried to do that with its three-generation focus;
Unicorn seems to be actively drawing attention to how Full Frontal is a Char clone;
00 tried to reorient the typical antagonist setup;
SEED tried to address racism in the context of
Gundam; and so it goes. of course, you could do that badly, as many
Gundam shows have--but they're still recognizable as
Gundam shows.
It's like the business guys don't understand that the reason UC is such a juggernaut is because they built up that brand over decades and if they want AUs to do well, they have to put in the same amount of work into each AU or have a decently long delay between new shows and hire the biggest names they can for each new AU.
um...they do, obviously, very much understand that.
you're assuming that they actually want to build an AU show into the same thing as UC. seeing as how they can pretty reliably make money on whatever One Year War thing they vomit up next, there is no incentive for them to develop the AUs; and either way, if they started to do that, it would require a substantial reworking of the entire business model. by the time they started making AU
Gundam enterprises, they'd already had fifteen years' worth of material in the Universal Century to fall back on. and then there was
G Gundam, which is far and away the most different show in the franchise, and see how many people shat themselves because it was "super robot" and "not really
Gundam"
hence, the
Star Trek comparison doesn't work, because everyone shifted their attention to the Abrams film and there's no comparable concurrent development of the other, original universe. but UC
Gundam continues to see major productions alongside the AUs, which means it's not just some musty old TV show with some cultural cache and very badly dated production values; it's an ongoing thing.
either way, if
Unicorn can get such a great following with the fans, apparently those cliches don't really matter after all. if they did matter, then everyone would be as tired and disdaining of
Unicorn as they apparently are of
AGE.
besides which, let's be honest. if
Gundam really did abandon all these tropes and try to ape some other show, people would just call it a
Macross ripoff or a
Patlabor ripoff or a
VOTOMS ripoff or whatever and say it's not "really
Gundam" and we'll be back in the same place as before, except with even more One Year War.