This is liable to be a long, meandering post, full of Gundam spoilers, but I finished watching Zeta Gundam for the first time, and am pretty drained. So obviously I needed to share some thoughts in the form of a book--. Also, it's kind of late, and I'm delirious.
I don't recall why it had come up, but after realizing a number of weeks ago that the Gundaminfo channel on youtube had all of the Gundam Wing episodes available, remastered in HD. I decided to take the opportunity to rewatch the series. I was a huge fan of GW when I was a teenager, but I sort of suspected that it would not hold up in retrospect. Unfortunately I was right. A handful of the early episodes, a couple around episode 20, and the last four or so are fairly good, but on the whole, it's rather poor. The animation quality ranges from decent to good, but the remaster is unfortunately not very good at all. (Maybe that's just youtube, though.) The BGM is still quite nice, but I found the usage, and splicing of the tracks into particular moments to be a bit haphazard and chaotic.
Pretty much as I was finishing up that rewatch, the Gundaminfo channel posted the trilogy movie version of the original Gundam series. I had never actually seen this particular version of the original before, but it was honestly pretty magnificent, if sequenced a little bit poorly in places. For whatever reason this seemed to reignite some long lost part of me. I very quickly turned around and bought the BluRay sets for both the original Gundam tv series, and Zeta Gundam. (I even pulled out a couple of Master Grade models from storage, that I had built almost 20 years ago: RX-78-2 Ver1.5, Super Gundam, Sazabi.)
I've only checked out the first episode of the NA BluRay release of the original series so far. It's basically perfect, though, in terms of features. The video is remastered from the original 35mm prints, and it looks fantastic. The original opening and ending are present, with untranslated credits, and the subtitles aren't hardcoded to the Japanese audio track. Essentially, I can view it as if it were the Japanese BluRay release. The only downside I can conceive of is the lack of Japanese audio captions; Really not a problem, just handy for some occasional spots where I have trouble following conversations, but there's also rewind for that.
Unfortunately, the NA BluRay release for Zeta Gundam didn't fair as well, despite coming out four years later. I put a fair amount of time into trying to get Japanese releases of Zeta Gundam after finding out about the shortcomings of the NA release from some of the reviews. Sadly the only way to get them is in Memorial Box form, which are basically $500+ (even used). I seriously considered it, but at ~$75 for the NA releases, I decided it wasn't really worth it. The main issue is that the openings and endings are a bit neutered by not having the original theme songs licensed for the NA release. It sounds like a pretty small thing, and it sort of is, but it's a pretty big loss for me. I get the first opening, and the ending theme, since they were apparently Japanese versions of a couple Niel Sedaka songs, but I don't really see where the issue could have been with the second opening, 'Mizu no Hoshi he Ai wo Komete' (which happens to be my favorite of the three). What I sort of did to combat this was to watch them on Youtube repeatedly, while I was waiting on my shipment to arrive. When watching through the series, I was basically able to recall the songs from the first couple seconds of the op/ed animations, and then I would just skip them to not get too much of an association between the animations and a couple of the regular BGM tracks from the show that they used in place of the original songs. A bit of a weird compromise, I'll admit, but it worked out all right for me I suppose. Definitely not ideal, though.
Aside from those glaring omissions, they translated the credits, as well as a couple notes presented during the show. So that kind of sucks, but the Japanese audio track and English subtitles are still independent, so I was able to watch without subtitles over everything. The touch-up work on the animation isn't as good as what was done for the original series, but it's still quite nice, even with 50 episodes crammed onto six discs. There is some noticeable, and persistent thermal noise in the audio track, but it's not too distracting, fortunately.
As for the show itself-- wow, where to start. I'm going to assume that no one is actually reading to this point (if there was anyone who even started) without being pretty familiar with Zeta Gundam, but I guess my general, non-spoilery thoughts are that it's quite well done. However, I prefer the original series, still. In the time between watching the movie trilogy for the original series, and starting into the Zeta Gundam BluRays, I had come across a few things in passing about Tomino failing to court one of the voice actresses on the show, all kinds of hostility between production staff over the course of the series, feuds between Tomino and producers over mobile suits and model kits, and Char's VO admitting to phoning in his performance in later parts of the series. I saw conjecture about some of these things leading into women being severely mistreated in the context of the narrative, but honestly, I don't see it. I do see some of the strain between production staff, particularly in a couple instances of the animation (suddenly Camille has a lazy eye when his mother dies, and that one horrendously drawn shot of Char in the Hyakushiki toward the end of the series--looked like an intern drew him).
There are certainly some antiquated ideas about men and women on parade in Zeta Gundam, but I felt the themes were fairly consistent throughout the series. Where the original Gundam felt a little more like it broadly painted men (and women, actually) going out to fight, and leaving people behind to mourn the loss of their lives, Zeta Gundam feels like it's playing with the idea of women being at the forefront of these battles. What I felt the series ultimately aims to illustrate is a mistreatment of women, even in military settings. The casual sexual harassment was the part that felt the most pointed to me, in this regard. I felt that almost all of the women in Zeta Gundam were at least very sympathetic figures. Thoughts on Rekoa may vary, though. There was a point where I actually thought that Tomino was actively trying to sabotage her as a character, but I eventually came to a sort of acceptance of her, even if I thought the process was pretty sloppy. Really, I would point to one moment where I think the message kind of stumbles the most: When Fa is trying to reason with the men on the bridge over Rekoa going to infiltrate Paptimas' ship. I'm really not sure what Tomino was trying to get at with that whole episode, really. I sort of took it to mean that the men in the crew weren't treating her as a capable adult, but it doesn't really read that way from some of the characters' actual statements.
Ultimately I think I could have done without some of the more slovenly aspects of the romances in the show, but I do sort of enjoy some of it. In particular, I thought it was an interesting dynamic to have Camille connecting so deeply with so many of the "enemies" he encountered, without really being romantically fueled most of the time. I think it kind of toyed a little bit with the idea of relationships on occasion, as well, with Fa forcing Camille to recognize at times that his actions don't really match with what he's telling her in reassurance. I think I most enjoyed the dynamic between Camille and Fa, and how it developed throughout the show. It would often regress a lot after progressing a little, and there were many ebbs and flows to their interactions, in sort of a more realistic way (certainly for kids their age). I guess a lot of people find Fa to be really annoying, but I actually quite enjoyed her character. She shows her youth at times, but I felt like she held the most grounded, and admirable positions out of all of the characters in the show. (Without being as much of a twit about it as Katz, also.)
I kind of enjoyed the way in which, I felt, that Camille fit into the overarching narrative. He's a boy with a traditionally female name, and I don't think that was an accident, or just something for the first episode and relating to Four with. Especially on the stage in the final episode, it felt like Haman was sort of pushing back against the male perspectives in the room, while Camille entered to represent something of a more neutral entity between the two. At times I felt the show attempting to draw a dichotomy between the sexes in a world (the battlefield) that hypothetically doesn't make these distinctions, and Camille often acting as the glue to form a more perfect union (or at least attempting to).
There's quite a lot going on in Zeta Gundam, and it treats a lot of its ideas with a good deal of care. Although, in some ways there's so much going on that it feels a little crowded, and maybe certain more important themes don't bear out quite as cleanly as others because of it. There's a lot of Earthling-Spacenoid-Newtype ideas, but they almost feel a bit secondary this time around.
Spoilery character-death discussion: I had read beforehand, accidentally, that "everyone" dies, and in particular that Emma would die. That specific death seemed to be fairly traumatic for people, and somehow I kind of assumed that she would be offed fairly early into the show. I was always sort of waiting for her to go, and maybe that affected my attachment to the character in some way, but I did not really find her to be that interesting. I honestly didn't enjoy her character much, in general. She felt a bit flat, and I couldn't help but feel that she was delusional about Camille having any real feelings for her. I kind of felt like Camille had a sense of respect and some amount of admiration for her, but ultimately didn't really like her. Maybe that's just me projecting, though. I don't know. It's hard for me to point to anything that she really seems to represent, and aside from having a conscience, I don't know how she really benefits the story. Also, I still don't understand how she got back onto the Argamar from the Radish in the episode after Camille and Char return from Dakar.
I didn't expect Katz to die, though. I was pretty surprised by that one. Not because I thought he was likable at all, but I just didn't think they could kill one of the returning characters from the original series. It felt like the show even forgot about him completely, at a couple points. Similarly, I was kind of surprised by the death of Jerid. It was kind of weird to me that in that particular instant he just wasn't lucky anymore.
This isn't technically a death, but what happened to Camille at the end was really one of the most distressing things I've ever seen happen to a protagonist before. It's right up there with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, but unlike that example, it leaves me with more of a question of, 'Why?' I'm still sort of searching for what it illustrates, or what purpose it serves to the narrative themes. That might be the toughest part about it.
Quick note on the mobile suits: I like a lot of them, but the transforming ones, for the most part, don't do much for me at all. I find them a little stupid, visually. I love the Gundam Mk-II, and a lot of the mobile suits in the early part of the show, but even the Zeta Gundam just doesn't do anything for me, in terms of its design.
After all that, I'm still sort of trying to decide whether or not I want to watch ZZ. I remember renting a recorded tape of ZZ from a local Japanese market when I was a kid. Couldn't understand a lick of it, at the time, but the opening really stuck out to me. It seems like the New Generation movies basically write ZZ out of the continuity, though, and I already kind of know a lot of the plot elements. It has a bit of a poor reputation, but I'm sure it has some positive aspects. I think for now I'm just going to rewatch Char's Counterattack, since I pulled my old DVD release of it out of the closet. At that point, I think I might rewatch the original TV series, and maybe Zeta right after.