In a new interview with Kazuya Tsurumaki, director of Gundam GQuuuuuuX, he talks about how Gundam as a series has about a decade left, and he’s probably right.
In the interview over on Yahoo Japan, picked up by those nice people at Automaton, Tsurumaki talks about how he thinks that Gundam has a limited future and may only have a decade or so left.
Specifically, he thinks the following.
Tsurumaki’s reason as to why this is the case is that he thinks mecha is not all that popular, which actually goes against what we’re seeing in terms of games, toys, model kits, and everything else mecha-related selling like crazy across multiple demographics.
However, he is onto something here, but it’s more to do with the fact that Gundam itself has become stale, rather than the mecha genre as a whole.
While Gundam’s revenue has doubled in the last decade, that is down to the fact that pretty much all of the saga is now finally available in the West, and there is a new sturdy distribution setup for kits and merchandise internationally.
No single series has been the major “breakthrough”, despite what some vocal Western fans claim, but rather the simple availability of the various host anime and their media mix progeny.
This new success has made the management behind Gundam cautious in the new works they greenlight, because they don’t want to rock the boat.
The issue here is that Gundam is a complex and nuanced saga, which is now aging out due to the original generation that watched the first Mobile Suit Gundam getting older.
In fact, GQuuuuuuX was a great example of this, as its popularity was split heavily between Japan and the Western fanbase. Mainly because it turned out to be a multiverse-infused nostalgia trip. Naturally, the older Japanese fans loved this (as did I), but the newer Western fans felt left out.
What Gundam needs is a new and entirely fresh take by a team of fiercely creative people, without risk-averse micromanagement from Bandai Namco. Otherwise, it will just age out like all the older anime before it.
Gundam GQuuuuuuX is now streaming worldwide via Amazon Prime Video.
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