Pretty much done translating extra interviews for an update to my "Z Gundam" production history. (Still a few music-related snippets and excerpts in the queue, though.) Latest additions include... First, a selection of short staff comments from the 1994 laserdisc "Z Gundam Memorial Box". This includes some of the same folks who were interviewed for The Anime's earlier book. ultimatemark.com/gundam/product…

Looking now at the short staff interviews from the "Z Gundam" laser disc memorial box. I only have partial pictures of these, so I won't do them all, but I like this anecdote from setting manager Shinji Takamatsu... Takamatsu: "Director Tomino has a great appetite as a dramatist, continually incorporating things he likes into his own works. Around that time, he heard that 'Transformers,' which hadn't yet been brodcast in Japan, was becoming popular in America..."

Meanwhile: I thought I was done researching "Gundam F91" production, but I ended up translating this interview with animation director Shukou Murase and adding it to the Yasuhiko one from the 4K Remaster box set. ultimatemark.com/gundam/product… Lots of nerdy detail on the attempt to shift to a new widescreen "VistaVision" format for the animation drawing, and how that affected the onscreen appearance, plus the difficulties in working with Yasuhiko's new manga-flavored drawing style.

Okay, now I'm really truly done translating "Z Gundam" staff interviews. I just added the one with producer Kenji Uchida from Z Gundam Hand Book 4: ultimatemark.com/gundam/product… Most of this concerns the process of staff selection, in which first-time producer Uchida ran around seeking out fresh-faced newcomers to satisfy Tomino's demand for a new generation of younger staff. (That's where the Masamune Shirow anecdote comes in.)

Sometimes things seem to align in weird ways. I'm currently checking a text translation (for work) which uses a lot of weaving metaphors, and recently I was reading up on the etymology of the Norse term "Gandr" which connected it to weaving as well... A Gandr was apparently a kind of spiritual creature sent forth by a shaman, so it seems this might have been conceived of as unspooling a metaphorical thread and then winding it back in again once the Gandr's mission was done.

Whew, finished translating the interview with animation director Hiroyuki Kitazume from "Z Gundam Historica": ultimatemark.com/gundam/product… Kitazume only did animation direction for 8 of the show's 50 episodes, and his final one was episode 36, but as the animation director for the first episode it seems he had to figure out a lot of the stylistic issues.

"Gundam ZZ" trivia tidbits for my comrade @Petsuchan! I think one of the first uses of the term "Neo Zeon" may actually have been in the novelization by ZZ scriptwriter Akinori Endo, published July 1, 1986 (between TV episodes 17 and 18). @Petsuchan Endo introduces the term as soon as Mashymre shows up in chapter 6, "Knight of Neo Zeon". Like the later Entertainment Bibles, he claims Haman adopted this name after the end of Z Gundam. The second highlighted passage reads:

Gundam trivia note: My scrutiny of the "Hi-Streamer" novels pays off, as I finally find a population figure for the chimerical refugee colony Sweetwater from Char's Counterattack (pictured here in the form of a high-quality desktop model). Ten million, we're told... Thus, CCA gives us two colonies with known dimensions and populations. Side 1's Londenion, a doppelganger for ZZ's Shangri-La, has a land area of about 250 square kilometers and a population of 5 million. That's a Parisian 20,000 people per square km.

Deep in the comics inking-and-coloring zone, so just a brief Gundam trivia digression today. Let's talk space colony population density! As per the specs for Shangri-La from Gundam ZZ, a standard 32-kilometer space colony would have a habitable land area of 10.2 x 25 km... That comes to a total of 255 square kilometers. And as per Gundam 0083, colonies can be up to 45 km long, which would give you a maximum of 50% more land area. So can we compare this to modern cities? Preferably with diagrams...?

And now, a grab-bag of bite-sized Gundam trivia. First, let's consider the flashback of Char and Sayla's parting in the Gundam II movie. We see Char's lips move, but we can't hear what he's saying... It turns out that Char's muted lines are in the script, though! "Take care of yourself, Artesia. I'll write you." (Spoiler: he doesn't.) Sayla asks why he's going, and he replies, "It's a man's duty to avenge his father, right?"

As previously foreshadowed, here's a starter batch of excerpts from the first volume of director Yoshiyuki Tomino's Zeta Gundam novels:
ultimatemark.com/gundam/archive…
I'll add to this in the near future, but for now.... I was mostly concentrating on bits that relate to the state of Earth's environment and the Earth Federation's reconstruction efforts, because I wanted to share some notes on that. Inevitably, this also gets into the motivations of the AEUG resistance movement.