tetsujin
Active Member
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2009
- Messages
- 101
I've been working on this guy lately - I think I'm just going to add clear lenses to the rifle scope and call it done...
For those who aren't familiar with Gundam: it's a robot show that aired in 1979 in Japan. It's hailed among its fans for being one of the first and most prominent examples of giant robots being portrayed in a gritty, wartime setting. Most of the trappings of the "super robot" genre are gone or at least toned down - and instead you have a lot of regular soldiers piloting mass-produced giant robots - and the alien invaders from most "super robot" shows are replaced with a murderous fascist regime who have bent the idealism of the space emigrants to their own purposes. Gundam was the first big success in this genre, known as "real robot".
...And yet, it's still all so silly, isn't it? This is the same show where the primary-colors hero robot does mid-air conversions, docks with a flying platform thing, takes down the enemy robots in one-shot kills. Add to that the fact that a lot of the mecha designs were created with a cheap TV animation budget in mind, and that the model kits introduced their own set of distortions, and it's a bit hard to take them seriously....
But still, people did (and still do) take the Zaku seriously. In the early 1980s, Bandai released versions of the kits in "Real Type" colors - the same goofy molds, but with a decal sheet containing a bunch of markings, and instructions suggesting various, less-vibrant color schemes.
This build is meant to invoke that "Real Type" style - and generally the whole idea of a comically bad rendition of a silly design being taken way too seriously by the modeler.
For those who aren't familiar with Gundam: it's a robot show that aired in 1979 in Japan. It's hailed among its fans for being one of the first and most prominent examples of giant robots being portrayed in a gritty, wartime setting. Most of the trappings of the "super robot" genre are gone or at least toned down - and instead you have a lot of regular soldiers piloting mass-produced giant robots - and the alien invaders from most "super robot" shows are replaced with a murderous fascist regime who have bent the idealism of the space emigrants to their own purposes. Gundam was the first big success in this genre, known as "real robot".
...And yet, it's still all so silly, isn't it? This is the same show where the primary-colors hero robot does mid-air conversions, docks with a flying platform thing, takes down the enemy robots in one-shot kills. Add to that the fact that a lot of the mecha designs were created with a cheap TV animation budget in mind, and that the model kits introduced their own set of distortions, and it's a bit hard to take them seriously....
But still, people did (and still do) take the Zaku seriously. In the early 1980s, Bandai released versions of the kits in "Real Type" colors - the same goofy molds, but with a decal sheet containing a bunch of markings, and instructions suggesting various, less-vibrant color schemes.
This build is meant to invoke that "Real Type" style - and generally the whole idea of a comically bad rendition of a silly design being taken way too seriously by the modeler.
