Char Aznable and Camille in Z-Gundam

We are approaching the planet Gundam, a strange world inhabited by robots where the limit between Good and Evil, Love and Hate is unclear ... Space, the final frontier ... Err, sorry, wrong opening. Moeagare, moeagare, moeagare, Gundam... Kidôôo senshiiiii Gundaaaam ! Gundam Geez ! Scotty ! the Captain has run amuck ... Security ... stop him ! Yes, amazing but true, in march of 1994, on discovering the movie Char's counterattack, I fell in love with a universe that was, as I then believed, far from my usual standards of selection. It offers ideas, visions, concepts radically different from those beneath other Mecha series (Macross/Robotech excepted). I finally realized why these works became a cult series in Japan ... Yes, my friends, who like emotion of all kinds, I can assure you that Gundam is one of the most beautiful anime I've ever seen.

It's a complete world, parallel to ours and 150 years in the future. It was built in detail, so that one can live in it independently from the released series. It is precisely this degree of accuracy that rebukes anime fans looking for info about Gundam. How to find your way out of this maze of characters, places, dates, political credos ?

My aim here is not to provide additional data (other than what you can access elsewhere), but just to present the series in the simplest and most methodical way. With my style, the one you are familiar with by now. I only hope that it will enable you to understand and like Gundam in around ten minutes, instead of the long months I've spent diving in the mass of material I had in hands. Contradictions, misprints and mistaken translations have to be dealt with before the finest points can be understood ...

These are the video sources drawn from to compile this file :

Four episodes from the original series
Gundam Gyakushû no Char
Gundam F91
The first SD Gundam OAV
Gundam 0080 episodes 1-2 and 5-6
Gundam 0083 episodes 1-13 and movie
V-Gundam eps 12-16 and 29-32 (Yummy !)
And finally Z-Gundam eps 1-26 and 44-50...

Only the characters that are truly important for the storyline are included in my descriptions, because in my opinion, giving the name of the 6875 secondary characters (Hey ! come back ! only joking ... there are no more than a few hundred ...) would only be an impediment to understanding the whole thing.

Speaking about names, I've retained the most satisfactory ones in terms of spelling (I prefer to read "Bright" and "Minerva" as opposed to "Brite" and "Mineva"), pronunciation or popularity of the name (Char Aznable is a sure bet although I'd rather had Char Aznavour) ... In addition, to satisfy everybody, I have whenever possible fallen back on the original japanese spelling of the names. It proved interesting for names like Gunei Gass, as the first name of this dear person (at least dear to me - No, I didn't ask you) is pronounced "Gyu nei", or "guee you neï", as you will have it.

For complete starters, just know that the action is set in the 22nd century on Earth and its Sides (see the Lexicon), colonies orbiting the Earth-Moon binary system. One of the colonies, known as the Zion Duchy, initiates a war of independence that lasts a year and causes the death of billions of innocents. Thus the story begins ...

Gundam

Original soundtracks and voice actors
Military Ranks
Lexicon (coz it's a vast universe...)

The Works

The setting stone : Kidô senshi Gundam
Movies from the first series
The heir : Kidô senshi Z-Gundam
The renewal : Victory-Gundam

Acronyms used in the text to refer to the different series ...

MS	Gundam	Gya	Gyakushû no Char	G83	Gundam 0083	W	Gundam-Wing
Z	Z-Gundam	SD	SD Gundam	V	Victory-Gundam	8MS	8th MS Team
ZZ	Gundam-ZZ	G80	Gundam 0080	G/GG	G-Gundam	GX	Gundam X

Cyber Namida was created and designed by René-Gilles Deberdt. All rights reserved.