I’ve structured this review to focus primarily on how badly Victory Gundam drops the ball on these fronts. It doesn’t help that, due to producer-meddling (which plagued the series throughout its development and broadcasting), the series kicked off with the fourth episode and treated episodes one through three as flashbacks. These ranged wildly in content, but the two themes that suffered the most regarded the ever-popular environmentalism spiel and the rather controversial and counterintuitive presentation of feminism and matriarchy. The second problem was the show’s blatant incongruence between what seemed to be its underlying messages versus the overt dialogues and lectures that interrupted and bogged down the narrative on numerous occasions. The first amounted to the problem of depicting the horrors of war interlaced with a more light-hearted approach to character development, which ended up coming across as schizopherenic and jarring in execution. I suspect that it had more to do with two specific problems that the show never found a way around. Whether it was due to a shift in consumer desires or simply an inability on the staff’s part to connect with their audience is hard to fully determine at the moment. Victory Gundam, as it turned out, seemed to be the nail in UC timeline’s coffin, however. For anyone interested in a guide to the Gundam franchise, I’ve written an overview and guide available here.

After Victory Gundam’s broadcasting, UC timeline wouldn’t be wholly revisited again in series format, as future directors and creative teams would focus more on alternate scenarios and universes that happened to feature Gundam suits. Tomino directed the next three sequel series, up to Victory Gundam in 1993, continuing to work within the Universal Century timeline he’d created with the 1979 series.

Mobile Suit Gundam went on, more or less, to be the subject of twelve more series and numerous OVAs, specials, & films. For the next decade, anime producers and directors would mimic and explore the things he introduced with that landmark show, creating works varying from Ryosuke Takahashi’s Armored Trooper Votoms to Shōji Kawamori’s famed Macross franchise. In 1979, Yoshiyuki Tomino inadvertently kicked off an entire subgenre of mecha anime with Mobile Suit Gundam (or 0079 as it’s sometimes referred to), deemphasizing the seemingly integral aspects of unrealism and ‘logistics that simply work because it’s a cartoon’ wanton disregard for physics and gravitas in favor of a more hard science fiction approach to mechanical warfare and dealing with living or fighting in outer space.

Mobile suit gundam 0079 episode 4