The Mobile Suit Gundam franchise is probably the biggest scifi franchise people have barely heard of. The original show plain, simple Mobile Suit Gundam aired in 1979 in Japan, but wound up being cancelled. Like Star Trek, reruns gave it a large fanbase that justified reviving the franchise in the 1980s with Zeta Gundam, which eventually led to 3 movies, 20 shows (with a new one starting in October), and tons of video games, manga (Japanese comics/graphic novels), and books. For most people in the Western hemisphere though, their first encounter with Gundam was Gundam Wing during the early 00s. The show's combination of giant robot action, political drama, and quality animation garnered a large fanbase in the US, which bled away as Bandai, the owner of the Gundam IP, mismanaged the brand into irrelevance. While it's hard to completely assess a Japanese franchise because of the language gap, there's enough information out there in English to get a decent idea of what's going on with its EU. Back in the day, just two years before the release of Zeta, the first wholly original bit of EU material made was MSV Mobile Suit Variations (mobile suits are what the giant robots in Gundam are called the Gundam is one specific mobile suit). Essentially an excuse to make new Gundam models and toys (get used to that), MSV did expand on the events of the original Gundam by adding unseen campaigns and characters by writing backstories for each new mobile suit or vehicle it added. MSV's success paved the way for every major Gundam having an MSV equivalent. The main bulk of the Gundam EU is sidestories manga, novels, and games that fit into the gaps in the stories and timelines of the numerous Gundam universes. Like most other EUs, Gundam sidestories span the spectrum of good to meh to bad, but there's an odd sort of repetitiveness to a lot of these stories, especially in the original Universal Century (UC) timeline. Almost all of the UC sidestories involve a) at least one never before seen mobile suit design, b) a remnant of Zeon (the Nazi Germany/Imperial Japan inspired villain faction from the original Gundam), c) the hijacking of a prototype Gundam or mobile suit, d) a random evil faction somewhere in the solar system that will kill tons of people, e) an unseen front during the events of the original Gundam, or f) some combination of the above. Repetition of certain story elements is fairly common in Japanese franchises and Gundam in particular suffers from it. The reasoning behind this is that people liked and bought a previous work with those attributes, therefore more works with those things will sell just as much. The problem is that the execution is lacking not only are the tropes and general plots reused, but they're executed in much the same ways. After a while, it just saps the fun out of the setting and makes you wonder about some of the unintended implications of the stories (for example, whether or not the "kill all the space colonists" plan was a good idea). But the worst misstep came with the sidestories for post-2000 shows. At the time, the global entertainment industry thought that telling one giant story over a bunch of mediums (aka transmedia storytelling) was a good idea (Star Wars' prequel trilogy was a victim of this). How did they implement it? By shoving plot points, character relevant information, and world building into manga and leaving vague allusions to the sidestories in the show (at best). While the stories themselves varied wildly in quality (from good to one being the male equivalent of Twilight with giant robots), it resulted in shows with numerous plot holes and an apparent backlash of some sort, since the latest show avoided that for the most part. Sadly, there's little chance of Bandai pulling a Disney and rebooting the EU, which started flooded the canon material with old MSV designs in the Gundam Unicorn miniseries. Even with a remake of the original Gundam in the works for next year (and appropriately named Gundam: The Origin), Bandai simply can't afford to anger the hard core fanbase as long as they keep buying toys and model kits. How long can they keep squeezing money out of the UC timeline? Who knows, but Bandai will keep it up until the UC branch of the franchise collapses into a black hole of manga, novels, and games. Disagree with my rankings? Have a suggestion for an EU that's even more ridiculous than these? Drop a comment below.
Living in Florida, enjoying the weather when its good, writing for a living. TV, Film, Animation, and Games are my life blood. Follow me on Twitter @xbsaint. Just try not to get too mad when I live tweet during Toonami.
