It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

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Zeino
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It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

On this day which is also the 36th anniversary of Mobile Suit Gundam, New Mobile Report Gundam Wing first aired in Japan. I know that a significant portion of the fandom is still ambivalent to Wing at best, but it introduce many, many people in North America to the franchise and for a brief time gave it a place in the sun over here. And that is worth remembering and honoring.
Last edited by Zeino on Tue Apr 07, 2015 8:05 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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LightningCount
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Re: It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

I'll give a round of applause for Gundam Wing and its creators. While not my first exposure to the franchise, it was the first Gundam series I saw from start to finish, and still my favorite overall. I remember my first thoughts being something along the lines of..."This looks cool, but is it as good as Robotech?" The first run kept me on my toes and guessing with its huge cast of characters, quick pacing, and many plot twists. It's remarkable how much material gets crammed into each episode. I still find things in this series to get excited about today in some of its visual artistic choices, its music, its many uniquely choreographed scenarios, and thought-provoking dialogue. I would say I looked differently at the world of history and politics after seeing this series, and in terms of mecha anime, and anime in general, it's still a benchmark I sometimes subconsciously judge a new series on.
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Dark Duel
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Re: It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

Gundam Wing was the second anime series that I really watched, because it came on in the same timeslot as Ronin Warriors after that ended its run way back in the day, and the shoulder and head design of the Wing Gundam vaguely reminded me of Ryo's armors, so I thought I'd check it out.
And that was my introduction to mecha anime in general as well. So it has a special place for me, and I have gone back and rewatched it since.
And on a certain level, I still kind of use it as a benchmark by which I judge other shows. That's part of what initially drew me, for instance, to Gundam X - the similarities to Wing. What has led me to rewatch X more than, to date, ANY Gundam series in my possession(which is all of the ones released in the US except the full original series) except 08th MS Team is...other things. But that's a topic for an entirely separate discussion.
Part of the appeal of 00 S1 for me, to use another example, was how it tackled sort of the same concepts as Wing, in a very different way.

Also, Wing gave us this line, which is possibly my single favorite line in the entire history of the franchise:
"Outer space has a bad habit of sending menacing objects to Earth."
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SNT1
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Re: It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

It's my introductory Gundam as well, but not around the time most Westerners got introduced---I still lived in the Philippines and it was the hot new Gundam franchise at the time I was evolving my tastes from Power Rangers to something cooler (96?)

I think it's still very much my personal standard for judging other Gundam shows. For the most part, it only gets bad flak because of the cool anime kids thinking they're cool because they've been watching UC before Cartoon Network picked it up :evil:

Now, is Banrise preparing anything big for their 20th? They didn't do much for G-Gundam IMO (I just follow toys) but surely Wing deserves some 20th love? Or will it always be overshadowed by a much larger anniversary of some other show?
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Re: It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

SNT1 wrote:Now, is Banrise preparing anything big for their 20th? They didn't do much for G-Gundam IMO (I just follow toys) but surely Wing deserves some 20th love?
We can always keep our fingers crossed for a Frozen Teardrop anime. :mrgreen:
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Re: It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

Like many, Gundam Wing was what introduced me to the Gundam franchise, and I'll always be grateful for it. It's also largely responsible for me getting into anime; at that point I had seen maybe a half a dozen anime movies on the Sci-Fi channel, but that was it. While I have subsequently seen the majority of the other Gundam series and have found several of them superior to Wing, I still look back fondly at the show and continue to be a fan.
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Outlaw
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Re: It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

I remember when they started playing the previews for Wing on Toonami, Peter Cullen intro-ing each Gundam. I was big into Transformers and Robotech, (okay, technically I only liked the Macross part of the trilogy) and he thought I would be interested and called me in to check it out. I watched that show religiously for nearly it's entire broadcast by the time I got my own TV to watch on I'm pretty sure my parents were sick of Gundam Wing but they always took it in stride. :lol:

Quiddity wrote:... at that point I had seen maybe a half a dozen anime movies on the Sci-Fi channel, but that was it.
I remember that!
Me and my older brother, waking up bleary eyed in the morning just to see what was on this week. Vampire Hunter D, Record of Lodoss War, Dominion Tank Police, EYES of Mars, Venus Wars, 8 Man, Casshern (Casshan), Demon City Shinjuku, and I think they even had a butchered cut of Akira.


Man, this topic's making me feel nostalgic, misty eyed, and old.
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AmuroNT1
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Re: It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

I've talked about this show a lot over the last decade and a half (as most of you know :D), so I'll just make a random remark: Once years ago, I had the show's OST (the actual BGMs, not the theme or image songs) on the stereo while I was cleaning up, and my mother remarked that it was the first anime music she'd heard that she thought was actually pretty good. Bearing in mind that most of her past exposure was shojo-type theme songs (blame my brother).
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Outlaw
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Re: It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

Sometimes I'll find myself listening to the Wing and G sound tracks and I'll think to myself;
"modern anime doesn't have enough sax..."
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Re: It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

Wing was the first gundam for many Filipiinos back in the 90s. it's one of my favorite gundam series.(but not all time fave. that's Zeta's to claim.) one memorable thing about the local dub was that it changed Treize's last name to Coastlander. how they got that is beyond me. a few felow gundam fans also mentioned something about the gundams also getting their names changed.

wing was followed up by G, the X. and surprisingly enough, it turned out well that one would expect.

a frozen teardrop pictured has appeared online recently BTW. :D
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AmuroNT1
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Re: It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

I wonder why they changed Treize's name. Maybe it was an ease of pronunciation issue.

I also remember hearing back in the day that when the show aired in Arabic countries, Relena's skirts were digitally lengthened to her ankles. Never saw any proof.

I would tell some of the fun stupid rumor stories I've heard about the show over the last few years, but I fear most of them were used up way back on Gundamn's retrospective.
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Henyo
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Re: It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

AmuroNT1 wrote:I wonder why they changed Treize's name. Maybe it was an ease of pronunciation issue.
possible. then again, the quality of dubbed anime in the philippines is narmy at best and ear busting at worst.(and sadly, its been like that since they started doing it.)

i talked to my supplier and he recalled some of the changed names:

romefeller=rockefeller
dorothy=tolis
sanc=sangu
the dessert, (sandrock if you didn't get it. XD)
double dragon
zero type wing
Duo's nickname is a literal translation:diyos ng kamatayan(God of Death)

at ANN meanwhile we have this:
Relena Pittskurt
Rhine(Noin Lucrezia)

it bears mentioning that there are intances of name changes in between episodes. the Filipino english dub of Daimos is a good example. it took them a while to get weapon names consistent.
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Re: It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

AmuroNT1 wrote:I also remember hearing back in the day that when the show aired in Arabic countries, Relena's skirts were digitally lengthened to her ankles. Never saw any proof.
I didn't catch that particular detail, but there's some merit to it because I did catch a scene where women wearing bare shoulder dresses were digitally covered up.

I tried to check if this was during Relena's birthday party in episode 2 but wouldn't you know it that entire scene was cut out. :lol:

It's possible we had our own version of cut/uncut Wing in which the cut version was the Arabic dub with whole scenes removed and the uncut version was the English dub with digital alterations, but I have no way of confirming that.
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Re: It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

Yeah, I'm one of those who isn't too into Gundam Wing aside from the music and some MS designs (same with SEED, SEED Destiny, later 00, and the last 1/3 of AGE). I guess it's because I first saw the previous Universal Century Gundam series' and so have come to appreciate the more "real robot" version of Gundam as opposed to a bunch of the more "super-robot"-leaning AUs.
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LightningCount
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Re: It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

Henyo wrote:wing was followed up by G, the X. and surprisingly enough, it turned out well that one would expect.
Yeah, how was that experience of seeing G and X right after Wing? It seems logical, and that it would be a lot of fun.
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Kyuzo Aoi
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Re: It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

^ Actually, I also was suckered into the Gundam fandom when I first watched Wing. It is the same experience with Henyo in our country. We also call some of the characters differently back then due to being released first in the Philippines rather than North America. At first I thought they were Robotech.

At first, I did saw some Universal Century model kits in the mall years before I watched Wing, but I have no idea what they were. I also saw and bought a lot of bootleg Chinese toys with different Gundams from other series but back then, I have no idea what they were. It was only then when I watched G-Gundam and Gundam X plus the Internet that I found out about the rest of the Gundam series.

I still admit to this day that any Gundam series should have elements of Wing as well as of the older series. That explains to this day why some characters in SEED look like their Wing counterparts and properly hailed 00 as the Wing of the 00s.
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Re: It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

Kyuzo Aoi wrote:I still admit to this day that any Gundam series should have elements of Wing as well as of the older series. That explains to this day why some characters in SEED look like their Wing counterparts and properly hailed 00 as the Wing of the 00s.
In ways, that's what Gundam X was to me; a more balanced Gundam Wing by using more ques from the Universal Century.

For example, while the Gundam type Mobile Suits are unquestionably more powerful than previously used Mobile Suits types up until their introduction, at the same time, they weren't the "end all" Mobile Suit type either, and even after being upgraded, it's not like they merely had one or two moments of slightly more difficult battles, then right back to effortlessly owning grunt opponents.

Or the Gundam X's Satellite Cannon (and the Double X's Twin Satellite Cannon) being quite a bit like the Wing Gundam's (Zero's) (Twin) Buster Rifle, but actually making more sense in terms of where the power comes from - via the super-microwave energy beam from its own dedicated station on the moon whereas Wing Gundam Zero's Twin Buster Rifle at least, as far as I know, has never really given any sort of clear-cut explanation for how it's so powerful and, as far as we know, unlimited in use. (Wing Gundam's Buster Rifle at least having a three shot limit, and even then, wasn't as powerful, while the Vayeate had an energy collector to power its own large beam cannon.)
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Re: It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

Pseudo-Hapsburg aristocrats and pseudo-Victorian industiralists are less enjoyable as the enemy faction. They are not futuristic enough for a Gundam series, unlike Zeon or Titans. There are ways to do it right, but it's not right in Wing.
Though, it's the first time the spacenoids made the Gundams to fight a powerful Earthnoid oppression - Zeta is technically a mid-war uprade. I always wanted to see the Wing five fighting for Char in his second Axis war, but no official crossovers ever did that. Gather Beat even has OZ signing a contract with Zeon to rule Earth together in its backstories.
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Re: It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

teslashark wrote:I always wanted to see the Wing five fighting for Char in his second Axis war, but no official crossovers ever did that.
Well, it doesn't happen because there's no way it can make any sense if you're using the characters' actual personalities and motivations. Even EW-era Wu Fei wouldn't be up for it, since he simply thought that soldiers like himself couldn't exist without war, while Char claimed to bring peace by forcing all humans to become Spacenoids and later Newtypes. The only way it could work is with the rather flimsy justification of "The boys and Char all claim to fight for the colonies".
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Re: It's Gundam Wing's 20th anniversary

AmuroNT1 wrote:
teslashark wrote:I always wanted to see the Wing five fighting for Char in his second Axis war, but no official crossovers ever did that.
Well, it doesn't happen because there's no way it can make any sense if you're using the characters' actual personalities and motivations. Even EW-era Wu Fei wouldn't be up for it, since he simply thought that soldiers like himself couldn't exist without war, while Char claimed to bring peace by forcing all humans to become Spacenoids and later Newtypes. The only way it could work is with the rather flimsy justification of "The boys and Char all claim to fight for the colonies".
And it also doesn't help that Heero got through to Wu Fei in making him realize just how much pointless death there would be because of war constantly existing (making Wu Fei remember when L5 self-destructed rather than surrender). Also, at least 3 of the boys (Duo, Quatre, and Wu Fei) refused to use their Gundams as tools for genocide with the original Operation Meteor anyway (Duo even trying to self-destruct Deathscythe beforehand), so Char dropping asteroids on Earth most likely wouldn't sit well with them, no matter the reason.
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