Gundam

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Gundam (ガンダム, Gandamu^?) is one of the longest running series of anime featuring giant robots or mecha. Gundam is the collective term for the Universal Century (UC) series like Mobile Suit Gundam and series in alternative timelines, such as Gundam Wing, made by Sunrise Inc.. The name "Gundam" itself stems from a variety of theoretical sources, most commonly attributed to a need to conform with common giant robot naming conventions during the 1970s.

Overview

Concept

Mobile Suit Gundam was developed principally by Yoshiyuki Tomino, along with a changing group of Sunrise creators who went under the collective pseudonym "Hajime Yatate".

During its conceptual phase, the series was originally titled Freedom Fighter Gunboy or simply Gunboy, because the title robot was armed with a gun and the target demographic was young boys. In the early stages of production, there were numerous references to the word freedom, such as the White Base being originally named Freedom's Fortress, the Core Fighter as the Freedom Wing, and the Gunperry named the Freedom Cruiser. The collective Yatate team combined the English word Gun with last syllable of the word Freedom, Dom, to form the word Gundom. Tomino then changed the name to the current title Gundam, suggesting that the name Gundam signifies a power wielding a gun that is strong enough to hold back enemies like a dam holds back floods.

Gundams are not sentient, but rather large robotic exoskeletons controlled by their pilots. Like many of the "mobile suits" appearing in the series, a Gundam is usually piloted from the torso area with a camera built into the head area transmitting to viewscreens in the cockpit, although some have been known to mount cockpits on other areas (Like the mobile suit's head, which is the case in the Guntank model).

Innovation

Gundam is a turning point in the history of anime and manga, as it is credited for inspiring the Real Robot genre. The Real Robot genre differs from its Super Robot forebearers on a few stylistic and thematic points such as attempts at realism in robot design and weaponry, as well as the thematic and ethical roles of the robots themselves (popularly known in English as mecha, a re-borrowing of the Japanese abbreviation for the English word "mechanical"). Zambot 3 was an earlier program by Tomino in which he began developing the ideas that in Gundam, along with The Super Dimension Fortress Macross, would form the basis of the genre.

Read more at Wikipedia.org