Yoshiyuki Tomino

Yeah, no, I'm, I'm glad, uh, you ended up sort of, uh, taking the deep dive on, on these guys, and it'll be fun getting to kind of, um...

It, it's nice to kind of leave the open door, I suppose, for Hathaway 3, uh, as well, um, when you get down to, to further Tomino, um, which is, is exciting.

I was looking, researching this, 'cause I was just kind of trying to figure out what he was up to at this time.

Um, but it's fun that, you know, we've d- we've discussed the sort of Bond flavor of these things.

And also Zeonic as well.

Someone should tell...

I'm, like, Tomino right now, he's thinking about his novels internationally.

He's like, "Yes, the, uh, the three Mobile Suit Gundam novels have been translated English.

Films were kind of intended to be the thing to turn Eva into a new Gundam-like franchise.

And so in very early stuff, he likened it to G-Gundam, right? G-Gundam being like the first- Yeah, G Gundam being like the first big thing that is not Tomino and is like not doing UC Gundam, right? Because a lot of the other stuff that had happened was like, okay, yeah, we're doing this OVA and it's somebody else, but it's still about UC Gundam, right? And this was like, let's make it a different AU or whatever.

Yeah.

Um, and so in fall of 2002, he begins work on what would eventually become the rebuild films.

It's different.

again and that's the only thing that's going to change so again this is the whole thing right this is the this is the this is why i don't fucking care until 2.0 comes out and people are like oh it's already differentiating a little bit it's already it's already there's some variations happening here and i don't know exactly what they are but i'm like oh i guess i'll check it out if they're already starting to like change things a little bit i'll go check it out um anyway in 2006 he also then compares it no not it's not g gundam but zeta gundam new translation which at the time i had not seen i've now seen it i actually like especially the second new translation uh movie of zeta gundam um i think i just like a new translation a lot more than zeta gundam um I will say, and like I know eventually at some point you'll probably get there, Connor, with your aesthetic Great Gundam project.

But my quick thing with like, I think Zeta Gundam is kind of the weirdest about women of like any of the Tomino shows in like a way that's like, Some of the other, Tomino's often weird about women, but in a way that's interesting.

And I think Zeta Gundam is the one where like, I'm the least interested in the way it's just being weird about women.

A meme explained.

Um, so, uh, director Tomino, apparently he hosted a New Year party a couple weeks back.

Um, and, um, a- and a few industry people were commenting about it on, on Twitter, and apparently F- uh, Fukuda was there, the, the director of Gundam Seed.

And according to Fukuda, Tomino complimented him for the movie.

So I don't know if that means Tomino actually watched the movie and liked it, or if he was just kind of giving him a pat on the back for his success.

Um, because Fukuda and Tomino, they do kind of have a long history together.

Um, they've known each other for, for decades at this point.

Um, but I thought that was pretty interesting.

It's been a long time coming.

I've been wanting to talk about this film for ages since first having watched it for the Tomino Book Club late spring, probably May-ish.

But we're going to get into the film in a minute.

We are covering the first roughly 24 minutes of the film.

as we'll talk about at the end it breaks down like inelegantly and not the most like climactic moment but I forgot how front ended this movie was to the point where when I'm taking notes about Giant Robo it's a completely different beast than taking notes on Tomino work but Giant Robo like six minutes can go by I've written down three notes of summary with the Tomino movie I'm like stopping every six seconds to capture the dialogue and the visual detail on screen But I'm sure we'll get into that.

To learn more about Thaliarchus and Russell, their history with both Gundam specifically and mech in general, plus their contributions to the fandom, you can listen to a whole fucking slew of Giant Robot FM episodes.

Probably over 48 hours worth of content there.

If I had to cherry pick some favorites for Thal, give our Gundam The Origin Volume 1 combo a listen, plus Moon Race Wireless 2 and 23, and the very first Radio Free Mercury a listen.

まあてか多分できる。

できちゃう未来もあるんだみたいなことを思うと、どんどんね、新型のガンダムが出てくるたびに、とんでも武装が出てきますけど、特にファーストの頃なんていうのは、まあやっぱ富野さんがこう想像してたものっていうのは、やっぱあってもおかしくないみたいなものが多いんで。例えばですけど、拳銃、今採用されてるのってなんだろう、ベレッタとかグロック四七みたいな。

何の話なの[笑い]。

ハンドガンですね。警察が使ってるようなやつって、正式採用されてるものは基本的に弾九ミリなんですよ。九ミリ弾。

And with that, let's jump in.

So Indisputably, the origins of the Hathaway film trilogy dates back to the late 1980s when Yoshiyuki Tomino, just a few years shy of his 50th birthday, cut a deal with Katakawa Shoten to publish a trilogy of Gundam novels set after Char's counterattack.

However, unlike the 12 Gundam books he had written over the previous decade, this undertaking was wholly original.

None of these novels were adaptations, however loose, of animated material.

Set in UC-0105 and centered on Hathaway Noah, Captain Bright Noah's 24-year-old son, Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway's Flash explores the aftermath of the Second Neozean War as an increasingly corrupt and stagnant Earth Federation combats a terrorist group of disaffected youths named Mafty.

Parsing Tomino's characteristically self-deprecating and idiosyncratic interviews can be difficult, but it's likely he saw this as an opportunity to expand the universal censure on his own terms without corporate interference.

I hoped it could stand as an original work, he remarks, not just a Gundam spinoff.

No doubt he had more ambitions for these books than prior literary undertakings.