The Original Gundam Anime Is On Netflix But There’s An Annoying Catch

Now, the Mobile Suit Gundam movies are official, very good, and for someone dipping a toy into the franchise, a great place to start. If you see all three films, you’re ready to dive into Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, Char’s Counterattack, Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn, and Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway. What you won’t get is the full character arcs from the original series and a good chunk of Universal Century background, so while you know enough to enjoy what comes later, it’s not the complete picture.

Notably, Mobile Suit Gundam’s hero, Amuro Ray, goes from bumbling around in his first mobile suit and accidentally killing his dad to becoming a hero of the One-Year War. In the series, this is a long journey, with many ups and downs as Amuro grows, loses friends, and becomes scarred by the ravages of war. If you only watch the movies, you get the beginning and the end, but you miss context, nuance, and the small moments of growth.

Another more noticeable change is that when compiling the Mobile Suit Gundam movies, Tomino pulled out some of the more fantastical elements of the series, including the more absurd Gundam weapons. The original G-armor? Gone. Gundam Hammer? Also gone. And to differentiate the series from Macross, the transforming Gundam scenes have mostly been cut.

While this does establish Mobile Suit Gundam as a serious mecha franchise, some of those, especially the Hammer, were pure fun.

All of that pales, though, when compared to the biggest difference between the series and the movies, and that’s the quality of the dub. Mobile Suit Gundam has a fantastic dub, but the movies, which weren’t dubbed until Bandai got their hands on the home video release in the United States, are so atrocious that they mispronounce “Gundam.” Later releases have been subtitles only, with no option for a dub, and that’s not a bad thing.

The three Mobile Suit Gundam movies are also important relics in anime history, with the release of the first film into Japanese theaters earning nearly two billion Yen, and collectively, all three broke five billion Yen in total. That’s not bad for a series that faced cancelation only a few years earlier. Their success proved that anime could be a big business, which changed the Japanese industry to the point that today, Demon Slayer is skipping television and finishing with a series of anime movies.

For the curious, if you don’t mind subtitles, you can catch all three Mobile Suit Gundam movies on Netflix. Once you’re caught up, keep it rolling by streaming Char’s Counterattack and Hathaway, and then start to explore the other shows that aren’t set in the Universal Century, like Gundam Wing and G Gundam.