(1. Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury - An adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest in the form of a Gundam show in which the sorcerer Prospero's plot to get revenge on King Alonso which partially involves getting the king's son Ferdinand engaged to his own daughter Miranda with the aid of the spirit Ariel is adapted into the cyborg Prospera's plot to get revenge on President Delling which partially involves getting his daughter Miorine engaged to her own daughter Suletta after winning her hand in a mecha duel with her Gundam Aerial.
(2. Cosmic Princess Kaguya - An adaptation/follow up to the ancient Japanese story The Tale of The Bamboo Cutter/Tale of The Princess Kaguya which takes place in a near future where virtual reality is commonplace and the tiny baby that's found in a bamboo pole by a bamboo cutter before rapidly growing into a beautiful princess is modernized into a teenage girl named Iroha finding a tiny baby in a telephone pole that rapidly grows into a teenage girl that decides to become a popular streamer. After a videogame tournament that adapted the trials Kaguya sent her suitors on to earn her hand in marriage, Kaguya suggests that she and Iroha get married instead.
(3. Goodbye Lara - An adaptation of The Little Mermaid in which the original story is condensed into the first episode which ends on Lara the mermaid princess reviving in modern day japan, after which she moves in with a girl named Mari. She learns that she needs to find true love more succesafully this time around in order to revive the mermaid kingdom with the light of her love, and the show quickly makes it clear that while she's looking for another prince, she's already found love with Mari. However in the final episode >!after Lara realizes that Mari was her true love and saves her from being sacrificed by the blade that manifested from her heart, the story's conclusion is that what she really needed was independence and she leaves Mari behind.!<
You may or may not have seen my previous three posts on how I've been giving away entry grades and similar beginner kits to anyone (Mostly kids but also the occasional adult) who show a lot of interest in my gunpla display at my family's pub on Sherkin Island, Ireland. But the reason I started stockpiling these kits in the first place was because my local customers had been encouraging me to do a workshop around it, and with funding from a local arts program I organized such an event over the past few months that finally happened today.
To account for the number of seats available in the room I was using as well as the fact that I'd never run such an event before, I specifically advertised it as being for up to 20 participants, with the selection being between 4 entry grade RX-78s, 4 Nus, 4 Wings, 4 Strikes, and 4 different SD-EXs intended for anyone younger than 7. As you can see in the 7th picture I eventually expanded the selection to include the Revival RX-78 for anyone who wanted something more retro-looking, and more SD-EXs simply to account for how popular the Sinanju has proved to be. There was also 6 Strikes because I decided to give each kit something to make it stand out more: In the Strike's case I also bought 3 sets of the 1/144 Launcher/Sword Striker parts to split between 6 Strikes, giving people the option of either the sword runner or the launcher runner if they chose the Strike. For the RX-78s I carved beam blades out of old runners so it was the only one you could give a beam saber. For the Wing I included an action base 6 for aerial poses. And for the Nu I added nothing because it was already the biggest one. To my surprise both versions of the RX-78 were the favourites by far, and the others weren't quite flying off the shelf until people started asking if they could buy another one.
You might have caught in the 2nd image that there was a TV playing the first Gundam episode in the room. In the weeks leading up to the event I was wondering whether I should just play Gundam music as the background noise or if I should go as far as to put an actual show on to get the participants filled in on the lore of what they were building (Especially since entry grade manuals aren't very informative). I figured a show would be too distracting, but got really fixated on wanting the option for them to get more familiar with what they were building. I even considered just making my own simplified lore breakdowns for each mobile suit to play. But on the morning of the event I figured there was no harm in setting a TV up and playing some episodes if I put it on a volume setting that was hard to ignore without being aggravatingly loud. In particular I played the first 2 episodes of the original series followed by the first 3 episodes of Wing (If you're wondering why those exact numbers I just thought thought those were the best places to leave off in their particular stories while evenly dividing them as best as possible). No one could give it their FULL attention but there were often eyes on the screen at any moment. Seed was up next after Wing (Ocean dub if you were wondering), though by that point most of the initial crowd had left. But a quartet of boys, 3 of which were building Strikes or bought one for their next build, got 3 episodes in before heading home.
Perhaps the highlight of the day was a 9 year old girl who'd kept a close eye on those 0079 and Wing episodes telling me "We're going to watch Frozen tonight but I'm gonna ask if we can watch Gundam as well".
If you paid close attention to the poster at the end you may ask (1. Why does it say 5 POUNDS instead of euro if I live in Ireland? Well they both look like Es and I got them mixed up. And (2. How the hell was I basically selling entry grades for half price? Well because my real payment is spreading this hobby I love (Well that and the funding from the arts program that doesn't fully cover the cost) and I would have had the whole thing be free but I felt I needed a minimum fee otherwise it would look kinda sus. I figured a poster that say "Hey 20 people, come get a free model robot" would just look weird. Speaking of which yeah, I didn't use the word Gundam on the poster because I didn't wanna be using the name of a copyrighted brand even though it's not like Bandai's got its eyes on west cork, and because most people here don't know what Gundam is anyway. "Model robot workshop" seemed easier to understand.
Don't know what else to say about this really. I'd been looking forward to it for several months and it may have exceeded expectations. I didn't keep track of how many others joined in beyond the 11 that had signed up but I don't think it reached my advertised limit of 20, which meant several kids went home with extra kits they were eager to build. I've already been asked if I'll do another one but I may have to expand it to include simple HGs because there's not many entry grades and any returning guests might not have anything new to build.
(Oh, and picture 3 is me explaining the history of the franchise to that aforementioned 9 year old girl when she asked why her brother's kit was called the Wing Gundam while hers was just the Gundam. I had no idea my mom was taking pictures at the time but I'm glad she was because I think it looks really funny even if I have to obscure everyone's faces for this post.)
For anyone unfamiliar with the original Little Mermaid story: A big change that episode 1 (And the Disney movie for that matter) made is that the Prince originally fell in love with a princess from another kingdom, dooming Lil' M because she was unable to to fulfill her deal with the witch. But on the night of the Prince's wedding her sisters made their own deal exchanging their hair for a dagger that would turn her back into a mermaid and save her life if she killed the prince with it, which she's unable to do out of love for him and dies, turning into sea foam. Depending on whatever mood Hans Christian Anderson was when he published a specific edition she may or may not have become an air spirit afterwards rather than simply dying.
This ending was depicted in the concept trailer from 2 years ago but as we're all aware it was almost completely absent from the abridged depiction of the story we saw in episode 1, as instead Lara turned back into a mermaid before she could kiss the prince and was rejected by him, dying afterwards seemingly because she ran out of time. I say "almost" because interestingly the dagger pops out of her body as she dies, forming out of the light that seems to represent her love.
So what's going on with this change? Why completely change the context of her death, but still give the dagger an appearance? Specifically as a dagger as well. Why is Gon-chan "bored with this ending" watching Lara's death, but then a lot more excited when the dagger is formed from the light? INCLUDING (And I'm just remembering this now) the magic mirror shattering when she saw it, which was established earlier as happening when your heart is moved by what you see in it. Is the dagger important to her goals? Did the dagger become the big obelisk over the centuries? Why did it appear specifically when Mari called Lara cute? Will the obelisk also require a sacrifice for Lara to get what she wants? Are we watching doomed yuri?
Yesterday or earlier this Comic Book Resources article was being mocked on the sub for its clickbaity headline full of franchise comparisons that the average Gundam fan is well used to being annoyed by. Most of the responses to it were targeting the article itself or CBR for being lowest-common-denominator geek journalism but much to my confusion many of them were talking like this was a bad sign for the movie even though an article on a movie has nothing to do with its production, and on closer inspection I started to suspect that people were specifically thinking that the headline was something that one of the filmmakers had actually said.
So to be clear: No one working on the Gundam movie has compared it to Transformers or Star Wars... yet. I won't be too surprised if the comparison does pop up in an interview in the future for the same reason that I'm not surprised a CBR journalist would make it: A lot more people in the anglosphere know what a Transformer is than a Gundam. Saying that this movie starring Sydney Sweeney is like a Star Wars war except they fight in transformers is the kind of sentence that's meant to get your dad interested in watching.
Anyway friendly reminder that Bandai is co-producing the movie so we're probably gonna get more than 5 minutes of mobile suit screentime so that they can sell model kits, and that's it's being directed by the showrunner of Sweet Tooth, which was a very well-recieved show. We should all at least wait for a trailer or general sense of the story and tone before we start jumping to the conclusion that it's gonna be worse than G-Savior.