Gundam Wing #1 Bandai 125 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles 05/16/2000

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I hate rewatching shows I don't like, but what's more than that I hate rewatching shows I don't like that are unbearably long too. Here's a hint distributors (though I doubt you'll follow my advice): I don't even care to watch anime I LIKE if it's more than four episodes on a DVD, so five of something like Gundam Wing isn't exactly going to be stoking any fires deep within my loins. Yet still they persist in doing it! I really don't get what the paradigm they're working off of is. Long story short, I can watch as many Gestalts and Sailor Moon movies you want to throw in front of me, but please god, no more Gundam Wing. In a funny kind of way, my advice is heeded, but it's more in a "I'm writing this two years after they finished putting the show out, so it's not likely that there's going to be any more chronicles of the five boys with ambiguous sexualities put out in the near future, but I like to have my bases covered. It just kinda sucks that this doesn't help me because I own somewhere between five and seven discs of this show and I don't really want to watch any of them.

Gundam Wing, like some sort of twisted Sentai show, is the tale of five boys sent down to a planet to save the world from evil forces. Wing, however, bears some pretty big divergences from traditional Sentai mechanics (as well it should, considering it's not a Sentai. But bear with me here). 1) All the people are boys, and there's strong indications (even now) that at least ONE of them totally digs on another one of them. 2) They're all way too pretty and they're not distinguished by color. Now that alone is more than enough for me to immediately go on a hate parade against this show, but I figure I should probably go into a little more detail than that. It seems like for every thing this show does even relatively right, it's replaced by some other flaw that clings to its back like a parasite. The soundtrack is actually pretty reasonable in points, for example, and the action music is often something I can totally dig on. Any good score though, is immediately nullified by the theme Just Communication. You know, every year or two I'll think back and say "Hey, Just Communication, that was a pretty good song, right?"

It sure does have an excellent first thirty seconds, it's just a damn shame that the rest of the song must've been written out on tablets hewn from the very BONES OF SATAN. Jesus Christ this song sucks so much they'd have to make a new category for it! That category, if you'd like to know, would be "Songs that suck and manage to be incredibly boring". Sorry Two-Mix, but I can't stand your freaking opening song, even if "Just wild beat" might be one of the coolest things I've ever heard. And while I find myself heartened that (the majority) of the main characters don't have the strong distaste for killing you'll find in many shows like this (not that I'm necessarily against pacifism, but it's seriously been done to death by now) the other extreme is just as bad. Heero, show here pointing a gun at his fifteen year old FEMALE classmate, goes out of his way to totally kick the shit out of four EMTs, seemingly just for the hell of it! While most people would've just pushed them out of the way and stolen their ambulance, Heero finds it necessarily to spinning kick three of them, then burst through a car window and strangle the other one.

Way to go Heero! But what I like even better than that is Relena (his erstwhile hostage) and her absolute megalomaniac obsession with him. I don't know about you guys, but I'm not in the business of falling in love with people who have intentions to kill me for no real reason. I mean, we've all seen some pretty stressed affairs in anime before, but I'd have to say that this one takes the cake by FAR. I mean, come on! When someone holds me up at gunpoint I certainly don't spend the car ride home espousing to myself how I'm going to discover their secrets. I don't see how even Japan could think this is legitimate behavior. So, in the end, it's not that Gundam Wing is really BAD, but it's so underwhelming that I'd rather be doing almost anything else (and believe me, I tried!) than watch it. Just to give you a scope of how god-awful it was, there was one of the most obsessed moments in my screencap taking career and I didn't even bother taking a picture of it. While I totally dig on the character design of Noin, even a sullen chick off center isn't going to save this crap mine of a show.