Zeta Gundam

Having recently finished rewatching 08th MS Team, I decided it was time to go back and give Zeta Gundam a proper viewing. I bought the first half of Zeta on DVD about three years ago, and gobbled it up quickly.  I watched one episode a night before going to sleep, on my old, dying CRT television (for that authentic, 1985 feel).  In retrospect, this was a bad idea.  The TV's sound system was dying, meaning I often couldn't hear dialogue properly, and my PS2 had troubles reading the discs, causing me to fumble with the playback frequently.

Worst of all, however, was the fact that I was a newly diagnosed Narcoleptic trying to watch a television before turning in for the night. It wasn't obvious at the time, but I wasn't giving the show anywhere near my full attention.  As a result, I often missed the names of new characters, and couldn't recall when they first appeared. I had trouble understanding why operations were being launched , and my mental timeline of how past events played out was all out of order.  Zeta, like many Gundam shows, can be confusing, and my sleepy mental state made it worse.  While I recalled some of the episodes being thrilling, on a whole my opinion of the show was quite low.

Perhaps this is why it took me until the tail end of 2010 to obtain the second half, and only then because I found it for half price during the liquidation of the local Suncoast.  Volume 2 has sat on my shelf ever since, and is the only anime DVD up there that I haven't yet watched.  With both 08th MS Team and Gundam 79 recently rekindling my interest in the franchise, I decided it was time to give Zeta a second chance, with a proper viewing from the very beginning (while being very much awake).

So far, the plan is working.  I am encountering dialogue that I don't remember hearing before, and combined with the extra Gundam knowledge I obtained over the years, it is helping dispel most of my confusion.  And while the script is still awkward (in that way that all Gundam shows tend to be), I can come up with explanations and interpretations whenever someone says or does something jarring (when I first began watching, I literally paused the show at times just to stop and think).  Zeta Gundam is starting to really feel like a good piece of space opera, with a coherent plot and some semblance of character development.  It feels like a drastically different, and much better, show than what plays out in my old memories.

I am also finding the animation to be much more impressive, though I'm not sure if this is due to a better TV, or because I can keep my eyes open.  I get the impression that the animators skimped when drawing certain scenes, in order to devote more attention to the battles.  That isn't to say that every fight scene is perfectly fluid, but on a hole they are more detailed and kinetic than I expected something circa 1985 to be.

Overall, I'm hooked for real, and the best part is that I still have a whole new half to get into for the first time.