Mobile Suit Gundam

Our Review

The one that started everything, 1979. Amuro Ray, a teenage mechanic, climbs into his father’s prototype mobile suit as a war crashes into his space colony, and spends the rest of the series learning what war does to a boy who is good at killing. Across from him is Char Aznable, the masked ace with a personal grudge, the greatest rival in anime history.

Watching it now is meeting the source code of every mech show since. The animation is forty plus years old, the pacing is deliberate, and the writing about war, child soldiers, and refugees was decades ahead. This is where the entire real robot genre was invented.

Forty three episodes. If you want the full Universal Century story that Unicorn and Zeta build on, it starts here.