Gundam - UNCUT 5 Song Opening Study: 'Tobe! Gundam,' MAN WITH A MISSION 'Raise your flag,' TWO-MIX 'JUST COMMUNICATION,' YOASOBI 'The Blessing' & Hiroko Moriguchi 'Mizu no Hoshi e Ai wo Komete' (64 min)

Mecha anime is the best! This takes me back to when my brother and I watched Voltron and Speed Racer thanks to syndication. Go Speed Racer, Go! Good times.

Perfect timing for this! Just started playing through my fav PS2 Gundam games from my childhood! Still hold up 20 years later which is great! Wow that last live performance was incredible! That violin!! 🎻😍

33:30 not really content "reactors" but there's a lovely podcast called Mobile Suit Breakdown that has been going through watching and discussing the entirety of Gundam in release order every week. It's hosted by a couple, one who's been a lifelong Gundam fan and the other who's never watched any of it before. It's actually really great, because they do serious deep dives into not just the shows but also all the inspirations for the shows, from other media to real world socio-political events. Being weekly in nature though, it's going to take them years to finish, and they've already been broadcasting for a few years (They are currently on G-Gundam, which came out in 1994! The podcast started in 2018). If the Gundam bug ever bites you, I recommend listening to the podcast as you watch it (assuming the series you decide to watch has been covered by them already). It's first timer friendly since Nina is herself a first-timer!

In terms of reaction-type content then the Mobile Suit Breakdown podcast has been running since 2019 with the goal of watching every episode of every piece of Gundam media from the beginning, in release order, along with accompanying research pieces. They're currently about halfway through 1994's Mobile Fighter G-Gundam. Great Gundam Project as well though I'm less familiar with their content. They're also doing a chronological order watch.

Anonymous singers have been a thing since the 70s however Man with a Mission and a couple other JP bands got the idea from seeing the Gorillaz. These bands got really popular and with the growing number of Utaite on the internet. It was only a matter of time until this became more and more a very real art form as we see with ADO and 9lana. Obviously out of this Vtubers were an inevitability. The core concept of this is incredibly simple - It's about the music/skill, not your looks. This is the main thing I love about Vtubers as a whole. It's not about your looks, the hottest person doesn't automatically become a big time streamer. Anyone can look however they want so how popular you become is based purely on your personality/skill/abilities/talents. Things we should actually be praising people for, not just cause they got lucky in the DNA lottery.

Gundam is more like Star Trek then just space. The original show was actually cancelled on television, ending with only 42 episodes. They only wanted the show to sell toys so the only thing demanded of the creator was to put in giant robots. They didn't look over the show before sending it to TV stations otherwise they would caught that the show dealt with War, Racism, tragedy, death, grief, depression, survivors guilt and other such themes. Gundam only became popular several years later when a TV station needed to fill a late night spot and reran the show, becoming a huge hit with teenagers and young adults.

If you get the chance then honestly, watch the first Gundam show from 1979. It holds up remarkably well.

About Man with a Mission: as you could kinda see in the First Take, the two singers have different masks for live performances that expose the lower half of their face. I got to see the band live in Germany for the past 3 years, and they only fill indie venues of about 500 people here. The melody guitarist with a white mask is a touring member who goes by "E.D. Vedder".