Before I can give my thoughts of the franchise, just this past Friday, the Gundam Channel on Youtube released a music video about a boy who grew up with the Gundam franchise along with his friends. The song is called "Kinjito" performed by PEOPLE 1. This is a part of the 50th anniversary project that launched with the help of a new prologue movie called “A boy with GUNDAM ,” directed by Tsukuro Hayakawa and featuring the work of many creators from the history of the series. As for my thoughts of this series, it became one of my favorite mecha anime IPs along with Evangelion and Code Geass even since high school, more specifically, the 11th grade. When I started watching Mobile Suit Gundam 00 (Double-Oh) in late 2008 on SyFy, I was blown away from the first two episodes of the show with the Gundam Meisters performing their armed inventions against opposing forces both on Earth and in space, one of my favorite things about the mobile suits themselves is that they can withstand heavy damage during fights for their toughness especially the Human Reform League's MS which unlike the Union and AEU that uses Transforming Mecha, the HRL simply stick to grounded MS units that are armed and armored to hold their ground. Anyway, to make a long story short, I was amazed to see how beautiful the anime look in high definition and I remembered recording some episodes on DVD to rewatch later, I still have those old TV recordings to this very day on both seasons before SyFy stopped airing anime in mid-2011. Anyway, after that, I got around with the newest Gundam series, AGE, around the time I watched the 00 movie, Awakening in the Trailblazer, the one with humanity fighting against the alien race, ELS (Extraterrestrial Living-Metal Shape-Shifters). AGE was not as good as 00 due to the Third Generation (second half of the show) being a downgrade from the first two gens. Time went on and I finally watched Wing in late 2013 along with the original Build Fighters, only to found it as middle of the road average Gundam AU series, the reason why I said that is because I didn't have much nostalgia with it being a gateway series to Western fans especially on Toonami in 2000 despite seeing promos and bumpers of it during commercial breaks. Fast forward to 2016, after during the first season of Iron-Blooded Orphans, I went back to the Universal Century and worked my way up from the original 1979 show to 1993's Victory Gundam, then I started hoping around with the AU stuff with X, Turn A, SEED, its sequel, Destiny and the OVAs like The 08th MS Team, 0080, 0083, Thunderbolt, The Origin and Unicorn. Two years later, in 2018, I finally checked out G Gundam and it was funny because the whole cheesy fighting spirit of the Gundam Fight. Going to the 2020s, I have pretty much got around many animated projects of the franchise with the movies like Hathaway and SEED Freedom to the TV shows, The Witch from Mercury and GQuuuuuuX. My overall thoughts of this franchise are mostly transformative, discovered the ones I missed out to revisiting the ones I know. I can hope that the future of this mecha franchise is bright. I know I haven't talked much on shows like Reconguista in G (the one is overly confusing until the movies made the story more focused and less jarring.) and I didn't grew up with Gunpla stuff but I just wanted to talk about Gundam with you guys, I know this has nothing to do with female feet, just how I got around with this series. How did you got into Gundam?
