Show Notes
When footage of the Walking Gundam went viral earlier this week, your loyal podcast hosts received a deluge of questions from friends and family about it. "Did you see this? What is this? Why did they build it? Is this one of those 'Transformers' you podcast about?" We knew what we had to do: it was our responsibility to make a public service announcement explaining Gundam and the Walking Gundam in a short, accessible mini-podcast. So, here's Mobile Suit Breakdown's first Public Service Announcement: What the Heck is a Gundam, and why did they build a giant robot? Our previously-scheduled podcasting will resume next week!
And here's the full transcript:
In mid-September 2020, millions of people around the world saw footage of a 25-ton giant humanoid robot called a “Gundam” moving on a scaffolding in Yokohama Japan. The footage went viral across different social networks and soon wound up on news channels from Australia to the United States. It reached well beyond the sheltered harbor of the Gundam fandom. And many of the millions of people watching that giant Gundam being put through its paces asked themselves, “What the heck is a Gundam? And why did they build a giant robot?”
We’re the hosts of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast about Gundam where we talk through the show’s 41-year history and research the context behind it - from science and history to art, culture, and psychology. Instead of our regularly-scheduled podcast, we’re going to answer those two questions: What’s a Gundam, and why did they build one in Yokohama? And we’re going to do it in under fifteen minutes.
If you’re one of Mobile Suit Breakdown’s regular listeners, then you probably already know the answers to those two questions, but maybe you can send this to your friends and family when they ask you,
“Hey, did you hear about that giant transformer in Japan? They built a real Voltron! What’s up with that???”
The big humanoid machine you’ve seen moving around in all those videos is called the Walking Gundam or the RX-78 F00 Gundam. It’s 18 meters or 60 feet tall and weighs something like 25 tons, and it is a life-sized, 1-to-1 model of The Gundam, a giant humanoid fighting weapon that originally appeared on Japanese television in the 1979 animated series ‘Mobile Suit Gundam’. This one has a slightly updated look for 2020, but it’s meant to evoke that same original machine.
During the 1980s the animation studio responsible for Mobile Suit Gundam started making sequels about different giant robots - some of which were also called ‘Gundams’, and they’ve been making ‘Gundam’ shows, as well as every conceivable kind of spinoff and merchandise, ever since.
A ‘Gundam’ is a particular kind of ‘mobile suit’, which is the name that the franchise uses for giant human-shaped fighting machines. Originally there was just one and it was called The Gundam, but the heroes of the sequels got their own Gundam-type mobile suits, so now we talk about ‘Gundams’ and the ‘Gundam franchise’.
This is actually not the first life-sized ‘Gundam’ statue to be constructed and displayed in Japan! Back in 2009, as part of a celebration of the Gundam franchise’s 30th anniversary, the company that owns Gundam erected a similar 60 foot Gundam in Shiokaze park in the Odaiba part of Tokyo. The Gundam statue was originally only meant to be there for 2 months, but it was such a popular tourist attraction that they left it up until 2017 when it was replaced with a model of a different Gundam from a more recent show. But unlike this new one, the first one just stood around and looked cool, while the second one had some cosmetic external bits that could kind of slide around a bit to expose internal lighting at night. Building one that can move around almost like the machines do in the show is a tremendous engineering achievement!
This new one was built both to celebrate Gundam’s 40th anniversary (in 2019) and to coincide with the Tokyo Olympics in Summer 2020. The Olympics were delay