Kids Should Have Watched Zeta Gundam

For many American millennials, their first experience with the Gundam franchise was Gundam Wing. It debuted on Cartoon Network in March 2000 and was unlike anything else on the channel’s afternoon block, Toonami. The series dealt with political and philosophical ideas of colonization, warfare, and human nature. These were all garden-variety themes for Gundam, and they weren’t as robust when presented in Gundam Wing, but the young audience didn’t know that.

Gundam had previously been released on American home video in various iterations beyond Wing, but Gundam Wing would be the first exposure for those not tapped into the anime video scene. The show was a success, and the merchandising took off, launching Gundam’s first big push into American pop culture.

In the summer of 2001, Cartoon Network debuted Mobile Suit Gundam, the original anime series that launched the Japanese franchise in 1979. Despite its age, the show hit harder than Gundam Wing for enforcing its anti-war themes with greater detail and bluntness. In Gundam Wing, when a character dies, they usually have enough time to deliver one last monologue. In Mobile Suit Gundam, people just die as a consequence of war. Some manage to get one last comment in, but most just die abruptly.

Even though I found Mobile Suit Gundam more compelling, it wasn’t as popular as Gundam Wing. It suffered low ratings and for being such a blunt depiction of war, it was pulled before finishing its run due to the events of the September 11th terrorist attacks. It was promptly replaced by episodes of Dragon Ball, like on the very day of September 11th.

After being pulled, the following sequel series and side stories of the Gundam Universal Century timeline were not as recognized on Toonami. The remaining UC Gundam series would only debut on the late-night blocks, while the tamer Gundam spin-offs like G Gundam and SD Gundam, which didn’t address the same anti-war themes, would play in the afternoon.

It’s a shame that Mobile Suit Gundam wasn’t more of a hit. Had it taken off and not been prematurely canceled, Toonami would have aired its sequel series, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam. It seemed like there were plans to do this. By 2004, Bandai had released Zeta Gundam entirely on a big DVD boxed set with all the episodes dubbed. And while this set was nice, it was also costly, meaning that only the hardcore fans with more disposable income would seek it out. It also meant that the same young crowd watching Cartoon Network wouldn’t get to see it.

And they really should have.

Zeta Gundam takes place seven years after the events of the first Gundam series. Having won the war, the Federation tries to quell any remaining Zeon or colony resistance by developing the Titans. The Titans, however, are a bunch of dicks. They make mistakes in the colonies, they oppress the colony inhabitants, and they treat Federation officers horribly. The more you learn about them, the more you realize they’re fast-tracking a new Zeon-style totalitarianism.

Combatting the Titans are the Anti-Earth Union Group. They’re a rebel group fighting back against the Titans for independent control of the colonies. They’re led by Lt Quatro, a cool dude in shades who looks suspiciously like Char Aznable from the first Gundam series. I really love how his character is first introduced. He first shows up piloting a red mobile suit and your first thought its “Oh, it’s Char!” but then they address him as Quatro and you’re like, oh maybe not every pilot wearing red is–but then he talks about Amuro and Lala and you’re like “no, wait, it IS Char!”

Well, I mean, we know he’s Char. Most people in the show still think he’s Quatro, so there’s a bit of a Racer X thing going on here.

Gundam Zeta is one of my favorite Gundam TV series because it essentially does most of the same stuff as Mobile Suit Gundam up amps it up. This is best showcased in the series central character Kamille. He’s our new Amuro but perhaps even more aggressive and emotional.

Just look at him in the first episode. We first see him ditching class because he wants to watch a shuttle arrive in his colony. His girlfriend Fa tags along, but he just ignores her. While watching the docking, he notices some Titans soldiers that he despises. The cockiest of the Titans, Jerid, misgenders Kamille, and Kamille’s response is to just leap over a turnstile and punch this dickhead in the face. He’s brought in for questioning by the local law enforcement, but an encounter with the AEUG makes them forget about him. Kamille uses this opportunity to sneak away, steal a car, and just blow through military personnel. And that’s all just in the first episode.

And he gets even wilder in episode 2. Kamille, still angry at the Titans, hijacks one of the Gundam suits, shoots at the cops, beats up a Titan unit, and then tells the invading AEUG soldiers that he wants to join them. That’s amazing. Did I mention that Kamille is confirmed to be autistic on the show? This is the best mecha anime ever.

One key aspect that Tomino leans into far more in this series is how he treats death. A scene from the Gundam Movie trilogy always stuck out to me. A Zaku is just about to explode and we get a shot of a nameless pilot. The pilot cries out for his mother just before he dies. It’s a brief but notable reminder that people inside those suits are dying. And that they had lives beyond just serving a political power.

Zeta Gundam has a lot of scenes like this. Many characters die in mobile suits and usually have a moment of reflection before passing. Some of them have some profound recollection of the errors they’ve made in their existence, while others just have brief flashes of the important people in their lives. This happens a lot, and not just for primary and secondary characters.

There’s also this really shocking moment of animals dying. A battle at Jaburo leads to environmental damage, with trees being demolished. One tree falls on a monkey, killing him instantly. Another monkey tries to save his dead monkey friend. Kamille watches this from his mobile suit, saying nothing as he watches this poor monkey grieve over the loss.

Zeta Gundam offers up a lot of parallels to the original series. It’s kinda funny that the mascot robot Haro returns and constantly refers to Kamille as Amuro, making it clear that he’s the same type of character. Similar events also repeat but in a different fashion. Kamille goes through the same arc as Amuro by befriending a fellow Newtype named Four. Their relationship is short-lived as she dies in combat, capping her demise with a brief moment of psychic contact for peaceful release.

The series does not lose its cyclical nature as Amuro watches this unfold. He’s seen this before and is disgusted by how war often repeats itself with tragedy.

Remember when I mentioned how Char denies his identity and insists his name is Quattro? There is something to be said about how he wants to redefine himself. He doesn’t want to be known as man who served the ideals of Zeon. He might not even want to be known as the man who took down Zeon when he obliterated its last leader, Casilia. Nearly every returning character of Zeta resumes their commitment to fighting back against oppression and maintaining their identity. Char does not, and it’s a choice that has a slew of pros and cons for wanting to change the future, but by denying the past.

Everything about Gundam Zeta is just visually and tonally better than the original series. It feels like a massive upgrade of a sequel. The animation feels crisper and on-model. The mech fights are detailed and don’t have as many wonky shots. The character designs don’t feel as goofy and they actually age up the characters surprisingly well.

Another exciting aspect of the show is handles its female characters, especially in episode 28. In this episode, Requoa volunteers to go on an infiltration mission to escape her troubles. Fa, finding this move to be irrational, tries to argue to Bright and Quatro that Requoa needs to be recognized more as a woman than a soldier. Bright and Quatro push back on this, citing how gender is irrelevant when it comes to operations during wartime.

It almost feels like Bright and Quatro are trying to be a bit more progressive, but it only happens because Fa brings up gender roles.

One aspect I kinda dug into was the progression of Fa. At first it seems like she’s going to be the next Frau Beau in the same way that Kamille is the next Amuro. Like, really, it feels like they just removed two letters from the name Frau and wrote the same character. Thankfully, Fa takes a bigger role rather than just being the woman constantly on Kamille’s shoulder. Fa assumes two roles within the AEUG; she acts as both a pilot trying to prove herself and a mother figure to the new war orphans of Shinta and Qum. It usually seems like she’s only present to do one thing or the other in certain episodes but there’s a solid balance of both in Episode 38.

There is one sequence with Reccoa that is pretty great. During her battle with Emma, Reccoa remarks on how damning it is to live in a world dominated by men. She notes how men treat women just as expendable as anything else during war and that it’s only through manipulations of systems that they’re born into that any progress is made. The fact that Reccoa communicates this to another woman is pretty remarkable for the series. After such a rant, it’d be interesting to see where she goes next in the series–oh, she’s dead now. 

Speaking of death, Zeta Gundam gets darker as the show goes on.

One of the best episodes is episode 37, The Day of Dakar. The episode features Quatro infiltrating the colony of Dakar to hijack a Federation meeting and make a case against the Titans. While doing so, the AEUG and the Titans are battling with mobile suits just a few miles away, with Kamille leading the fight.

This, to me, is Gundam at its best. Quatro is arguing against the fascistic nature of the Titans and how their authoritarian rule does more to damage Earth than preserve it. As the Titans try to stop this broadcast, one of them overhears the speech and really starts questioning how corrupt their organization has become. Jerrid, ever the antagonist, argues that it doesn’t matter if their ideals are wrong, only if they have the power. It reinforces the very motivations of Jerrid: He’s not fighting because he believes in defending Earth against those who live in space. He’s fighting because he has a small dick-I mean, he wants to be on top.

By the end of the show, our hero, Kamille, hasn’t succeeded. He’s driven mad by the death and destruction around him. It’s been said that Tomino fell into a depression during this anime, channeling some of those feelings into the series’ direction. And it shows.

Episode 49, the second-to-last episode, sums up the show’s thesis so well. Kamille watches as Captain Henken and Jerrid die in battle. Shaken by these events, Kamille bitterly questions how pointless all this fighting is when it results in so much loss of life.

He then indirectly poses the question to the audience: Why would anybody applaud what’s happening? Who would think that such loss of life during war was justified or even entertaining? Kamille tries to prevent further violence but fails. More people die, and just in case you haven’t received the message yet, he states the condemnation once again.

By the 50th and final episode of the series, much of the philosophy behind what is being fought for is better revealed. During the final battle between Kamille and Scirocco, it’s more than just a fight over who has the better mobile suit. It’s a question of vengeance and how to proceed after losing so much. It’s not just Kamille but the souls of those lost that channel their guidance through him.

Kamille finally kills Scirocco by piercing through the cockpit. With his dying breath, Scirocco curses Kamille and vows to take his soul with him. This is considered one of the greatest death scenes in Gundam, but most people seem to forget the all-important aftermath.

With Scirocco dead, Kamille has finally won the war by killing the central antagonist. And then, Kamille loses his mind. He forgets where he is and what he’s done. War becomes too much for him and he crumbles immediately after completing his mission. He’s not happy about having won the war or reduced to hysterics for the nihilism of combat. He’s not even sad. He’s just so numb that he resets, like his mind is trying actively to make him forget everything for the sake of his own mental health. There’s no anger for the madness or relief from victory. Only fear.

This is the last we see of Kamille in Zeta Gundam. The hero of the series doesn’t just accept victory and come home to process the mixed feelings of war. The damage kicks in immediately. To end on such a down note really makes this series feel closer to the message of the original Gundam series.

The original Gundam series ended prematurely on Toonami before reaching its most impactful final episodes. It really shouldn’t have cut off before the crucial point. The final episode of Gundam would eventually air, but only during a New Year’s marathon in the latest hours, far from younger eyes.

I understand why Cartoon Network pulled the show after September 11th not to show insensitivity. But Gundam felt like it was an essential show for trying to process the post-9/11 era and even more so with Zeta Gundam.

The kids who watched Zeta Gundam might have been able to make sense of a world that became complacent with its nationalism, imperialism, and erosion of privacy in the name of security. They might have recognized greater futility in war. They might have been able to better identify fascists when they rose to power.

Some media questioned the war in Iraq and the controversial Patriot Act following 9/11, but nearly all of it was media for adults and considered highly controversial. Cartoons aimed at kids that criticized this paradigm shift in politics were rare. Probably the only cartoon targeted at kids from this era that effectively questioned American politics in this regard was the Justice League Unlimited episode, literally called Patriot Act. The episode is brilliant, but it only aired in 2006 and on weekends in the oddest timeslots.

In the early 2000s, criticizing America’s global reach and questionable laws that brought decay to freedoms was deemed un-American by conservatives. Famous country music group The Dixie Chicks were quickly thrown under the bus by their fans when the group rightly condemned the war in Iraq. It’s hard to imagine what the scrutinizing conservatives of the early 2000s would have thought of Zeta Gundam had it aired on Cartoon Network’s afternoon block. It might have been seen as controversial, or it might have flown under the radar. We will never know.

I watched Zeta Gundam in the late 2000s and was struck by how stellarly it reflected that decade’s political problems despite being produced decades prior. It all clicked and it was incredible storytelling that had teeth for the aspects of war and humanity it wanted to cover.

I wished I had watched it sooner, and I wished it had been on Cartoon Network in the afternoons. I have autism, and if I had watched a cartoon like Zeta Gundam, where the badass young protagonist also has autism, maybe I wouldn’t have been as hesitant to deny that part of myself for so many years. That representation could have done wonders, possibly.

There’s no telling how I or those younger than me would have looked at the world if we had watched Zeta Gundam in our formative years.

Some might have been more critical of the US government’s choice in wars and policies or missed all the politics of Zeta Gundam and stared doe-eyed at the big giant robots. It’s hard to say. Like I said, we’ll never know for sure because Zeta Gundam was never given a chance on American television aimed at kids. And it should have had that chance.

American millennials deserved a reflective cartoon that tried to make sense out of a chaotic decade. They deserved a cartoon with rebellious heroes who were women and autistic. They deserved a cartoon that challenged gender norms, fascism, and war in a more uncompromising matter. We were robbed.

Oh, well. Maybe today’s kids will discover the show for themselves and find that level of relatability I craved as a teenager. Kids these days could do a lot worse than Zeta Gundam.