Today is an auspicious day for anime fans everywhere: the 30th anniversary of the start of Mobile Suit Gundam, which burst onto TV screens on April 7, 1979. Essentially the first anime series in which the humans were more important than the robots they piloted, it told the story of humanity after it had emigrated into space and of the One Year War for independence between the space-based Principality of Zeon and the United Earth Federation, with plenty of drama and political intrigue to go with giant robots destroying each other. Interestingly enough, the show was slow to catch on and was ended 9 episodes early. With the introduction of the Bandai’s line of Gundam models and the three compilation movies, popularity began to pick up, and the show went on to become an icon of Japanese animation. Today, characters like the everyman-hero Amuro Rei and the charismatic Char Aznable are as much a part of Japanese popular culture as R2-D2 and C-3P0 are in the West.
Congratulations on 30 years of Newtypes, spacenoids and colony drops.
