My wife is a huge Gundam fan, and has wanted to show me the series for a very long time. In late 2025 we decided to finally start our chronological Gundam marathon, starting with the very original.

Prior to this, my only experience with Gundam was via cultural osmosis, having seen some Wing & SEED on Toonami as a kid, and watching a bit of IBO more recently. It's safe to say I'm very fresh to this series.

I love watching old anime! Gundam 79 definitely shows its age, but as a piece of history I've found it very interesting. It also has a lot of retro anime goofiness that I've found very entertaining, even if it's clunky from a more objective standpoint. I had a great time watching this anime.

On a first watch—as is pretty common with war-focused anime, especially if it's older—it was a bit hard to follow some of the series of events specifically with regard to the war aspect. I decided that it'd probably benefit me to read more episode summaries with future installments (hopefully I actually remember to...).

According to the Wikipedia page, the director of Gundam was inspired by Japanese aggression in Manchuria in 1939 and this was something he specifically wanted to allegorically depict (as this was part of WWII, Gundam also is inspired by WWII as a whole by virtue of this and some later details).

The story focuses on a group of primarily-teenaged characters forced into essentially becoming child soldiers after their home colony is destroyed during a skirmish between the Earth Federation and Zeon. The main cast end up allied with the Earth Federation as they must pilot the Federation's warship "White Base" through the galaxy, all-the-while pursued by Zeon and the famous blond gay guy from Gundam: Char Aznable.

The series, though you may assume otherwise due to its age and its status as a cool action anime if you're completely unfamiliar with Gundam, is not shy about depicting military officials on every end as pieces of shit and is very up-front with its depiction of war and all things related as dirty and miserable, even with cool giant robots (this is something Gundam would pioneer in the mech genre, as far as i understand it).

Zeon is a sort-of allegory for Nazi Germany even down to their uniforms (though lacking much of the worst aspects), with some of their officials even naming Hitler specifically as an idealistic figure. The Earth Federation is routinely shown treating the main cast like garbage. Amuro's (the protagonist) PTSD is at the forefront of the story very often, and he's far from the only character shown to suffer from it while still being forced back into scenarios that would set it off regardless.

I found the scenes where Amuro reunites with his father especially interesting, poignant and personally, my favorite part of the anime. For the time this anime aired (plus for an anime that I assume was aimed at younger boys), I feel it was likely very unusual to show a father who urges his son to fight as some deadbeat who you're meant to find pitiable and completely uncaring towards Amuro, who reacts very emotionally to the realization that his father sees him as simply an extension of his Gundam experiment rather than his son, showing no care for him even after they'd been separated for so long.

Along with other scenes depicting development of PTSD and other trauma responses to war, it's easy to see how this ended up pioneering a new genre despite apparently not being popular at the time. There were several points where I noticed the animators' attempts at visually depicting more of the brutal aspect of warfare, but tech and budget limited them from achieving the same horrifying effect that later Gundam entries would go on to refine; I appreciate the efforts here nonetheless.

Other aspects of Gundam 79 are much clunkier. Any attempts at depicting romance are laughably shallow (literally; i found these moments very funny), characters sometimes make dumb decisions beyond the "they're just dumb kids in wartime" justification, and for some reason they insist on keeping the three annoying little kid characters around the entire time as I guess... comic relief? I didn't laugh so I'm not sure. Their scenes and general existence in the story are grating and useless; they shouldn't have been shown more than maybe once. I found the episode where they had the option to leave them behind at a safe children's care center (a plainly logical decision, considering they are small children who risked being blown up by Char daily as long as they stayed on the White Base and they constantly got in the way of important military operations) but ultimately didn't especially weird with its messaging.

The implementation of "Newtypes" (a human with some form of psychic powers, though they're denied to be "psychics" exactly later on; it's complicated) was also rather clunky and felt like a bit of an afterthought. Wikipedia mentions its implementation into the anime as a means of explaining why Amuro could pilot the Gundam at such a young age, so I think my theory makes sense. I've been told that Newtypes are written into future Gundams with more smoothness, but it definitely felt a bit phoned in in this one.

Overall though, I had a lot of fun watching this and I would watch it again, even if a decent amount of my enjoyment came from some of the aged jank. Old animation has always fascinated me; especially landmark, culturally defining pieces of animation like Gundam. I'm happy that I finally watched it. I feel like this likely won't end up being my favorite Gundam anime, but it gets my respect for what it started and a smile for being a fun watch.