The original Gundam, droppin' beats, yo!
Before Setsuna fell in love with his Gundam, before Shinn ruined SEED Destiny, before Lacus entertained us with her songs and ended up leading a military faction in SEED, before we have psychics running X, before Gundams where used for martial arts tournaments. And most especially, before we have five pretty boys started piloting their respective Gundams, we have Amuro reading a manual on how the heck he will pilot Earth’s newest mobile suit called, Gundam! Yep, yet another retro first episode review and this time, we have the original Gundam show!
The first episode basically is this in a nutshell; everyone in the colony called Side 7 must evacuate in a bunker because of a battleship will arrive in their area. Enter Amuro who is one of those who evacuated. Because of the Zeon attack (the bad guys), who learned that the Earth Federation has new mobile suits, naturally, one guy from their group wants to act “hero” and decides to ruin the supposed recon mission, Amuro looks for his father and this is when we saw the very first Gundam and Amuro mets his father, Tem.
Because of the explosion and he picks a manual, reads it. After Fray Bow appears and another attack caused by a Zaku happened, after seeing Fray Bow cry along with the corpses, he pilots the Gundam and fights the Zaku, which ends up opening a hole in the colony. This causes the engineers (his father and his assistant) to fly out of the colony, fights the other Zaku, wins and the people from the White Base needs Amuro’s help to move more MS. So yeah, that is how the original series rolled.
Amuro Ray, the only Gundam pilot that I saw reading his MS's manual.
Anyways, the first episode was a really good opening to the series. Amuro is just a regular teenager who ends up piloting a Gundam... that needs to reads a manual. Sounds familiar? If you watched SEED, this same thing happened to Kira except he decodes Strike’s computers and pilots it. What makes it more similar is that both of them are inexperience in terms of piloting this stuff and uses their respective Gundam’s weakest weapons.
Here’s more SEED similarity. ZAFT is on a mission to discover EAF’s new Mobile Suits which of course, the Gundams. But unlike what the members of Zeon members did who just takes pictures, ZAFT here steals EAF’s Gundams! Now I understand why SEED is considered the modern take of the original Gundam series.
Let’s go back to the original Gundam’s first episode. In this episode, it established that Zeon and Earth are fighting for a month now and it seems that Earth is losing, that is why with the help of Tem Ray, they created their own mobile suits and it turns out that it is stronger than an average Zaku! Because of this, I am starting to wonder the reason why Side 3 aka Zeon wanted to become independent with Earth? Is it because of their own egos or something else?
To the characters, Amuro here is just your average teenager who is a mechanical genius that ends up piloting a Gundam for him to save his colony from the attack made by the Zaku. Unlike the pilots after Amuro, he is no pretty boy, which makes him authentic as a teenage pilot and not as a fashion model or a pop idol. What makes him more of an authentic teenager is that, we saw fear in his eyes when the Zaku attacked him add the fact that he is panicking when he doesn’t know what weapons that his mobile suit has!
Char, Gundam's first masked villian. Him being a badass is just a bonus
Fraw Bow is just one female support character that I might forget. Skip. Now I will talk about my first impression regarding Char! One of the things that bothered me before I watched this anime is that, what’s with the Char love? Now I understand. He is Amuro’s opposite. He is experienced in terms of war, he is serious and he wears a mask with that reminded me a little of Darth’s helmet design!
As for the original Gundam, it looks simple. If I will compare its specs with the newer Gundam models, the original Gundam will look weak beside them. But hey, it was designed to fight against Zeon’s Zakus, so there is no apparent reason on why they should overpower it! Plus, the design of the original Gundam looks amazing even now. I guess it’s the simplicity and the functions that seems realistic (which I heard, it is possible that they can make the original Gundam in real life!) makes this MS lovable.
Overall, the first episode is one heck of a first episode. The animation back in the day tried itself to innovate with the concepts of the show, and it did. Seeing the Side 7 colony from outer space caused my jaw to drop a little due to how beautiful the animation is. As for the fights, this is what I expect with a first time Gundam pilot. Amuro is seriously panicking because he don’t know where the heck are the weapons are! This episode cause me to watch the next episode if I have time, and oh, the next episode screams more of Gundam SEED!