*PREVIEW* Lions Led By Robots 16: Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket

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The main character, Al, is an 11-year-old and he lives in a neutral colony that's not involved in in the one-year war militarily, anyway.

Obviously, they're involved.

We get to see something unique, I think, in war media and certainly anime, which is him and his classmates complaining about like the after effects of the war, like supply ships being interdicted and things of that nature.

And like Al's dad, who was a deadbeat to the last five minutes of the show, also voiced by Spike Spiegel, uncredited, may I ask, may I add.

The same voice actor of Spike Spiegel.

Also, seemingly the voice actor of everything until about 2010.

Like everything is, like, it feels weighty.

And they're interested in the war because they're children.

They're little boys.

And I don't know if this is a universal little boy thing because I know I went through this of like playing soldier and stuff like that because we have no, we, we see so much war media and war in the news.

And we're always taught that it's very fun and heroic and adventurous.

We've talked about this countless fucking times on Lions.

And Al is just like that.

Him and his friends are going out and playing war while simultaneously being enamored with this one-year war and the heroic, chivalric, almost picturesque version of a Gundam pilot or a mobile suit pilot in the case of our other main character, Bernie, who's dumber than shit.

Bernie is outsmarted by an 11-year-old boy at every turn.

Hoomstamongos.

And I don't know if this is meant to be this way.

I don't know if you picked up on it, but Al runs the show.

And by that, I mean he's an 11-year-old.

He's not a particularly smart 11-year-old, I should point out.

He's failing in school.

Yeah.

But he outsmarts and manipulates every single adult in the show.

leading to many of them dying.

Yeah.

As well, like something that we should talk about when talking about like children's fascination with war is the

bit at the start where they're in the classroom and he's with his two friends and like one of his friends produces like a Gundam pilot badge and they're but they're all like, oh, can I hold it and everything?

And then another kid is like, oh, that's fake.

We don't even have any mobile suit pilots here.

Yeah, it's the, the, the fed, the, the federal earth forces don't even have gundam pilots.

And she was making fun of them and then leads to a fist fight between two boys and a girl, and the girl wins.

She punts one of them straight in the dick and balls, which is fun.

But yeah, and then we find

also weird the Japanese child is called Albert, but I don't know.

We're operating in post-World War II where a lot of American men had Japanese children.

Well, I mean, technically, not Japanese.

Yeah, he lives in a colony in space called Side Six.

Yes, yes, Joe, but they still have Christmas.

Yeah, they still have Christmas.

and we and is canon by, I think, episode four or five, I don't remember, that Australia still exists like as a nation state with a very distinct accent, which is weird.

Also, Christianity exists in space,

which is always a fun thing that you see in science fiction.

That

it's, it's common amongst, I mean, anime in general, but also just science fiction.

Just like, no, they just brought, I mean, like the expanse is like this, like the Mormons go to space and things like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, if you haven't read the expanse books, I can't recommend them enough.

I'm actually in book five now.

They're really, really good.

But, like, the Christian church still exists.

Like, Hinduism still exists.

The Mormons build a attempt to build a giant ship for colonizing deep space.

Okay.

Yeah.

They're all there, but like, they're very interesting.

And, you know, the.

the arguments of like, how can you still believe in all this?

Like, there's nothing in the Bible about space.

The mental gymnastics everybody works through is it makes it very compelling.

And this one is just kind of confusing that Al is praying to Christian God while living in a space colony.

Al save the Shahada.

I was getting the bus home on Wednesday evening and I saw like two Mormons on the bus and I'm like, it's always so strange to see them in the UK.

It's a very American religion, but you can't go anywhere without seeing them.

Whenever you see Mormons pop up in your neighborhood, it's because you know the economy is bad.

Well, actually, do you know where I was coming home from?

That makes sense.

Like, I know that's some people probably aren't going to like me putting it up, but it's true.

Like, the Mormon church does prey on the economically disadvantaged because they're easier to convert now.

Mormon church's rules, not mine.

It's like how Scientology preys on the rich.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, ironically, Scientology is also.

uh getting its tentacles out into more developing places mostly not because of the money obviously they don't have as much money, but they have less of an understanding and knowledge of the Church of Scientology.

Yeah.

So like your average person that says, say, like, you know, lives in Guatemala or El Salvador probably has less of an understanding of the various controversies of the Church of Scientology or the Mormon Church, for that matter, than your average, you know, guy who grew up around them their entire life.

Yeah, like it's a, it's just really strange.

Like, and I was getting in a bus from an area that like is in very far north London.

And I was like, are those Mormons?

And then, and then I was like, wait, those are Bibles.

Oh, fuck.

There's two Mormons on the bus.

And it was one of those like single deck buses that are like quite small.

So I was like,

how can I like look at them without obviously looking at them?

But yeah, Space Mormons.

Can't wait for that.

Unfortunately,

I mean, maybe Mormons do exist in the Gundam universe.

We haven't gotten that far yet.

This is our first real Gundam that we've watched.

G Gundam does not count.

But yeah, so then Al gets a new neighbor called Chris

who

makes him tea and

befriends him.

At one stage, he's looking through his Zoom camcorder at her window and is like, yeah, Al's a bit of a creep.

And before this, Al went to the spaceport to look for his dad.

and just does some industrial spying with the same binoculars slash video camera because it could like take pictures pictures too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that will become important later on.

Uh, weirdly, uh, for people who maybe are going to watch this and be like, wow, Chris's voice sounds very familiar.

Her other voice role that most people have probably heard her is Bulma from Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and Dragon Ball Super.

Hell yeah.

Also, TK of the original Digimon.

She played

a very important side character in Roni Kenshin.

Don't look too much into that one.

Deeply cursed production on that show.

She's just in like everything.

But yeah, her voice, I was like, that sounds really familiar.

And I had to look it up.

Yep, it's Bulma.

It's TK.

I've listened to her voice for years of my childhood.

Yeah.

And essentially, what we figure out is Bernie is sent on a Gundam mission.

He gets shot down and then eventually returns back to

Zeon.

People are going to be really mad because I don't know what any of this stuff means.

And they're like,

it's a reference to this.

There's a Principality of Zeon and the Earth Federation.

They're fighting what's called the One Year War.

And side six is neutral.

For some reason, that doesn't really mean much because Federal Forces and Zeon forces end up fighting there anyway, whereas Bernie is introduced.

And I do like how destructive it shows the Gundam fight.

Like it's the fight is a sideshow.

It's like four people total last five seconds, and multiple buildings in the city are destroyed because, for some reason, Gundams can only fight over heavily populated areas.

Then Bernie's Gundam is shot down.

And the one part of this that ever, like, my one, like, oh, God, this irks me is Bernie's mobile suit.

Sorry, not a Gundam, it's a mobile suit, crashes, right?

Bernie is the only one that goes running over to like the gawk at it.

And like, my head jumped back to the episode that we did with dr patrick wyman about the japanese fire balloons where one of the fire balloons crashed outside of like a school in texas and all of the kids in the school ran outside to start parting it up like parting it into pieces and souvenirs with pocket knives yeah and that is what would happen to bernie's gundam yep like yeah there's just immediately like people will be like oh shit what's that okay like you know scrappers you know people be trying to steal the metal off of yeah there'd be some little shithead kid walking back home with an entire Gundam arm draped over one shoulder.

Mom, look what I got.

But we do see that later on in the series where Albert's friends are like, oh, look at these like empty shell casings that we found.

And then the other kid just pulls out a full live round.

Yeah, yeah, from his backpack.

How did he get that in there?

It's because he's meant to be the token, you know, the fat friend with the bottomless backpack full of sandwiches.

It's a bomb.

Yeah, that's uh, that's the one thing I saw online when I looked this up: people getting freeze frames from that scene where he pulls it out of his backpack.

It's like, how it doesn't fit in there, it makes no sense.

Just gonna get increasingly angry at this cartoon because the logistics of this backpack don't make sense.