Season 10 Q&A Part 3
Added 2025-07-12 15:30:21 +0000 UTCThank you all for your patience and your kind words of sympathy. We're ready to talk about Gundam once again, and this week a question from a listener prompts us to look back at the whole Tomino Era of Gundam, and on that perfect note we end Season 10.
NOTE: There is some mildly suggestive language in the outtakes.
Comments
Ya'll do what you need to in order to get where you need to. We'll be waitin' for ya when you're there.
Kaotic Machine
2025-08-26 20:30:06 +0000 UTCAh, here we go: Suzuki talking about this in the context of 1973's "0-Tester", as recorded in "Complete Works of Yoshiyuki Tomino": "The reason I had myself listed as original story creator wasn't that I wanted to promote my own name in order to broaden the scope of my work. I actually had a different objective at the time. In short, back then all anime was based on preexisting original stories by manga artists. Even when the initial plan and the content of the resulting work were our own original creations, it was still standard practice to credit manga artists as the creators. But if people from the animation industry were planning and actually making the work, I wondered why we couldn't describe ourselves as the original creators." "In those days, it was manga artists who were highly regarded by the public, and the people working on anime production sites had a much lower status. We weren't really appreciated. These attitudes made us resentful and frustrated, so we fought a battle to put forward the names of people from the anime industry as original creators, in order to raise public awareness about our position. That was partly the stubborn pride of a small production company, but it was also the pride of an anime writer."
Mark Simmons
2025-07-14 16:32:05 +0000 UTCWelcome back, and thank you for all the hole-innuendo! Regarding the question of who gets displaced when the auteur-director seizes the spotlight, I'm not a historian of anime in general, but I'm starting to get a vague sense of the vibes at the time. Up until the late '70s it seems like anime creators in general didn't get a lot of respect; "TV manga" was seen as a mere derivative of the print kind, and the animation staff were usually overshadowed by the original manga creator (who also retained the rights). Mecha and character designers weren't really a thing then either - the mecha were often ghost-created by toy companies, celebrity manga artists were hired to jot down character concepts (which will happen again in G Gundam), and then near-anonymous staff animators did the unglamorous work of retooling them for animation use. Yasuhiko and Okawara were actually among the very first people to become famous as anime designers in their own right, and they became known largely through their collaborations with Tomino. It seems to have been a deliberate policy by Sunrise to try and turn their creators into superstars, partly to make up for the low pay, but also to compensate for the fact that their shows were unknown originals rather than piggybacking off proven manga franchises. The one faction of creators that might have lost some status when people began focusing on the directors was the writing staff. At first, writer Yoshitake Suzuki was one of Sunrise's superstars, writing proposals and racking up "original story" credits on many of their early works. But he let Tomino have a co-credit on "Zambot 3," and after that, Tomino's listed as the original creator on almost all of his shows.
Mark Simmons
2025-07-14 04:55:16 +0000 UTCI am glad you have been taking time for yourselves and you should take as much time as you can. I've been going through a downward slope for none gundam reasons for the last few weeks and thus episode helped lift my spirits for at least a little while. I say this to let you know that your existence helps people and I want to let yall know you're appreciated.
ErosTraus
2025-07-13 06:38:07 +0000 UTCI MISSED YOU TWO!!!!
SHINIZEL
2025-07-12 15:46:34 +0000 UTC
