How I Became A Gunpla Addict

[Neo]

Wow, I'm the first dog in the room to soil the carpet!  😆

OK so here is my Gunpla story:

I started out as a "normal" kit builder at the tender age of five, building mostly 1/72 WW II planes.  I got into armor in 6th grade or so when I was given a Tamiya M3 Lee.  This interest in armor got me buying books on the subject; I think my first two were on the Merkava and T-72.  I spent my intermediate and high school years building Vietnam-era jets and Star Wars kits.  Like many self-proclaimed "serious" modelers, I considered Japanese sci-fi/anime kits to be toy-like junk, with wind-up motors and spring powered "rocket punch" arms.    Silly kid stuff.  Pffft.

A trip to Japan in 1980 confirmed this bias, as I was shocked that there were gobs and gobs of models of the Yamato battleship with a rocket engine - sacrilege!  Little did I know that Gundam had aired on Japanese TV the year before, and the first kits from the show had hit the shelves.  I was however aware during my stay in Japan that there was some kind of ruckus that happened in a Tokyo department store, when customers got trampled on an escalator by crazed Gunpla fans trying to get the latest kits.  I left Japan with a suitcase full of Tamiya and Fujimi planes and tanks, with nary an anime kit in tow.  And that would have been it for my brush with Gunpla.

But on a fateful summer day in 1983 I bought my first Gundam kit for something like $3.  I bought it as a joke, and had no idea what a Gundam was or what it would do to my wallet and storage space.

After building the kit, I became curious about the series and decided to start digging.  This was all pre-internet days boys and girls, so information was hard to come by.   I recalled the department store incident from 1980, which only increased my curiosity.   What the heck WAS a Gundam?  What was all the fuss about?  Now I had to find out (cue the ominous music).  I bought a second Gunpla kit, something called Char's Zaku.  It looked kind of like a football player colored like an orange popsicle.  I didn't like the color scheme, so I painted it in military greens.

I didn't know it at the time, but this cemented (yes this was all pre-snap fit days) my love for Gunpla and Zakus.  A friend got me a catalog book of Japanese anime kits produced in 1983, and inside I saw Gundam MSVs - Mobile Suit Variations, versions of Gunpla that looked more realistic and military than their TV counterparts.  And in 1986, my dearest mom came back from a trip to Japan with a Gundam Mk.II and a Hi Zack.  The shopkeeper she bought the kits from said these were from Zeta Gundam, which was airing in Japan at the time.  By now I was ready to trample customers in a Tokyo department store! 

The latter half of the 1980s was also when modern Japanese anime exploded with such force that some it washed up on our shores.  This made access a little easier, but it was not mainstream - we rented bootleg VHS tapes of anime shows from a seedy hole in the wall joint.  The only other way was to get someone to go to Japan and buy the tapes, but at $40-$80 a pop!  Yikes.  When laser discs hit the market, they were no less expensive than the VHS tapes, plus you had to "flip the record"!  But that was the only way to get a Gundam fix.  Those were heady days, with classic Gundam titles like 0080 War in the Pocket, 0083 Stardust Memories, Char's Counterattack, and the 08th MS Team.  Luckily for us, some local specialist hobby shops stocked the kits we so eagerly wanted.

When Bandai introduced their 1/100 Master Grade and 1/144 High Grade universal Century kits in the 1990s, it reignited my interest in Gunpla.  The older kits were really hit or miss, with a lot of misses in terms of proportion and overall quality.  But the new MG and HGUC kits addressed many of these shortcomings, and per Bandai's evil marketing plan, made me buy all my old favorite kits all over again, in their new formats.  They were really banging out the kits right out of the gate, and I was hard pressed to keep up with their release schedule.

In the 1990s, before Bandai acquired Nippon Sunrise (the creator of many anime shows including Gundam) and pulled a Disney, there was a flood of Gundam garage kits.  Smaller companies made resin Gunpla kits of not only the stuff you saw in the shows, but original takes from famous mecha designers like Kazuhisa Kondo, Yutaka Izubuchi, and Makoto Kobayashi.  I developed a particular interest in Kobayashi's works, as his stuff looked positively weird, kind of like Gundam meets Moebius.

By the time Cartoon Network aired Wing Gundam in the early 2000s, I was already hopelessly addicted and had a closet full of unbuilt Gunpla kits.  OK that ran a little long.  My apologies.

So what is your Gunpla Story?  How did you fall into the rabbit hole?  I'm sure the reasons are as diverse as there are Gundams!

Oh yeah, to answer the question of what a Gundam is, it's this:

Edited January 24, 2024 by Neo

[ghodges]

Great looking work.... I'm not a Gunpla builder, but we have several in our local club who've been educating me!

I know the MOST impressive thing I've seen, and one I'm still waiting to see bleed over into more traditional kits is the ability of companies like Bandai to mold different colored parts on the SAME set of sprues. I could hardly believe my eyes at how much more advanced Gundam kit molding is compared to more traditional kits! 

As I stated elsewhere, we've added a dedicated Display Zone/category JUST for Gundams/Gunpla at Jaxcon 2024. We're looking forward to seeing what turnout we get. We've also been promised several Gundam kits as donations for our raffle by one of the local shops doing a hot business in them and they'll have their own separate raffle can for those wanting to win them. 

 

Gil 

[Neo]

Gil,

The multi-colored sprue thing was pioneered by Bandai around 1987.  They originally called it System Injection 21 and showcased it on their 1/144 Dragonar I kit, which was not a Gundam but was a Gundam-like hero mech.  The thing is that they integrally molded things like colored stripes on single parts, truly amazing stuff.  I had a chance to examine the actual kit and it boggled my mind that such a thing could be done on a mass production product.  Bandai did a couple more kits like this, but I think the mold tolerances were too exacting, so they settled on color separated parts, but molded on single sprues like we see today.

But what really blew me away was Bandai's line of Star Wars kits.  They combined their snap-fit know how with detail levels never seen in Star Wars kits.  I was a skeptic until I saw their 1/72 X-Wing up close.  It made me a believer, and I immediately ran out and got their Y-Wing, which actually looks better than Fine Molds' kit.

But getting back to Gunpla, I think it's the armor community with their weathering techniques that brought the genre to the mainstream.  Even the silliest looking Gundam kits can take on a very different scale-like look when weathered properly.

[Ron Bell]

Very impressive body of work.