I have mixed feelings on Gundam The Origin

I enjoy a good deal of it.  I think at some point every Gundam fan should check it out.  But my thoughts on it have evolved since I first posted about it on this Blog.

One of my missions in my online media critique is to advocate for the very concept of Prequels, to argue that expanding on a story and it's universe by going sooner on the timeline is just as valid as going forward on it.  With the Star Wars Prequels in particular being the often maligned Prequels I seek to defend and vindicate (there is little opposition to Fate/Zero).  And so it annoys me a bit that Gundam The Origin is now being mostly praised while I feel it is what idiots keep saying the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy is.

I definitely think a prequel to the original Gundam is a good idea, seeing how the One Year War started or the history of Zeon Zum Daikun.  But even if it was perfectly executed I don't think this would ever be a situation where the Prequel would be appropriate to watch first, because there was never any getting around that the basis for the title of the Franchise isn't there yet.  So I never had any chance of agreeing with Mother's Basement that this could be a good entry point to the Universal Century for new fans.  The first filmed Star Wars movie on the other hand was imagined as being an Episode IV from the start, it was meant to feel like jumping into the middle of a series you missed the start of.

In general I think fans new to Gundam should start with a recent non UC show like 00, or Code Geass which is effectively like a Gundam show in my view, those two shows were my gateway drug to Mecha Anime.  For UC Gundam the entry point should be the Trilogy, preferably it's Dub where Bright Noa has a British accent which it seems was annoyingly excluded from the recent BluRay release.  Then jump right to Char's Counterattack, it will feel like you've missed stuff but that's mostly stuff not Animated at all, none of it is really built up to by anything in Zeta or ZZ, those shows can be good on their own but forcing yourself to watch them before Counterattack will distract you from what they're actually about.

Unfortunately Gundam The Origin is far from a perfectly executed prequel.  I like how in the proper Gundam story it's never confirmed if the Zabi or anyone murdered Daikun, in this it's pretty much confirmed.  You can say the SW Prequels ruined the mystery of some things if you want, but Star Wars was never about Mystery Boxes until Abrams threw his fetish into it.

And the way Daikun himself is depicted in his brief screen-time utterly ruins the character, he was supposed to be imagined as a Timothy Lery or Gahndi or MLK figure, but here he's depicted as basically a nut job, like if the Zabi are Nazis then Daikun was their Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

And Casval's handling is annoying, this isn't about how he became a villain, it depicts him as being seemingly evil from birth, like he's Damien Thorn.  And what really annoys me is the sneaking suspicion that the people who hate the SW Prequels wanted Anakin to be done like this.

The Star Wars Prequels added nuance to what was originally a pretty simplistic story.  Gundam The Origin is doing the opposite, it's doing everything it can to destroy any potential sympathy for the Zeon side.  Thunderbolt was great because it basically flips the usual perspective by having it's Amuro be the Zeon lead and it's Char the Gundam pilot.  So I say watch it if you wanna see the One Year War with modern flashy 20teens Animation.

It also oddly draws attention to how weird Anime's ability to communicate age is.  Casval, Artesia and Garma clearly age over the course of Origin, starting out quite smaller then how we first met them.  But Kcyilia seems to be exactly who we're used to her being from the start and I really didn't think she was that much older then them.  It reminds me how most casual viewers of the original Anime think Amuro and Fraw are the only teenagers on White Base when in fact even Bright was only 19.  The fact that the show sometimes wants us to ship Amuro and Sayla is a lot less awkward when we know she's not that much older.

Having a good Dub is also key to being a good entry point Anime.  And Origin's Dub is mostly fine, and I love Wendee Lee, but she doesn't work as Kcyilia and that harms a lot of scenes.