Essay: “This wasn’t what we expected…”
Gundam UC Production Note #1

Late 2002, in a conference room at Kadokawa Publishing. I was enthusiastically pitching an idea, half making it up as I went along:

“Look, in the sequel ‘Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam,’ Haro was being mass-produced as merchandise, right? So naturally, they must have gotten Amuro’s permission and used the original Haro’s blueprints for development. Someone had to have made that happen. This person would be an employee at Space Bandai, a toy manufacturer in the Universal Century, who gets the idea to commercialize Haro, Amuro’s famous mascot. They try to contact Amuro, who’s been out of contact since the war, visiting former White Base crew members’ homes. But Amuro’s whereabouts remain unknown. Meanwhile, Federation intelligence agencies, wanting to isolate Amuro as a potential threat, notice that ‘someone is looking for Amuro’ and start monitoring this Bandai employee. Through a series of misunderstandings, the employee becomes a wanted person. Unaware of all this, they continue pursuing Amuro just to commercialize Haro. These mutual misunderstandings escalate into a spectacular situation involving mobile suits, creating both an entertaining story and a poignant corporate worker’s tale…”

The Gundam Ace editorial team surrounded me with bemused smiles. I thought I was pitching something clever, but the room’s lukewarm response gradually silenced me, leading to an awkward silence.

This all started about two months earlier, following my interview with Yoshikazu Yasuhiko in Gundam Ace magazine. I had hit it off with then-editor-in-chief Hideaki Kobayashi, who casually invited me to “write something for us.” Since it was primarily a manga magazine, I thought I’d write a humorous short story. I put together this pitch in about five minutes, but the response was as cold as described above. Looking back, this was the first instance of what would become a recurring phrase throughout this project: “This wasn’t what we expected…”

Eventually, Editor-in-Chief Kobayashi broke the silence and, while diplomatically setting aside my pitch, said the words that would determine everything that followed: “Do it properly.”

And thus, Mobile Suit Gundam UC was born… I can almost see your disappointed faces as I write this, but it’s undeniable that this moment shifted my focus to “developing a Gundam sequel with potential for anime adaptation and model kit production.”

I subsequently wrote the blueprint for what would become UC and had several meetings with Yoshikazu Yasuhiko and Hajime Katoki, whom I would later formally invite to join the project. However, we all agreed this couldn’t be a side project, and the plan was temporarily frozen. It wasn’t until 2006, more than three years later, that we could “do it properly,” and full-scale project development began with Sunrise’s involvement.

At that time, I envisioned a story filling the gap between Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ and Char’s Counterattack, essentially a side story. This would have been manageable as a mini-series, with the novel fitting into a standard long-form format. However, Sunrise intervened, saying, “If we’re going to do this, let’s create a story that encompasses the entire Universal Century world.”
I should note that my comfortable relationship with Sunrise existed because I had previously participated in Turn A Gundam as a novelist under Director Yoshiyuki Tomino’s direction, which had acquainted me with key staff members. Project producer Arata Sasaki and series producer Naohiro Ogata were, like me, relative newcomers at the time. While we hadn’t explicitly planned to “do something big together someday,” these connections certainly helped advance the UC project.

After this second rejection, I resolved to tackle Gundam head-on. I began exploring a storyline that would trace back to Universal Century year one, creating a narrative that would thread through from the original Gundam to Char’s Counterattack, addressing themes like “Federation versus Zeon = Conflict between Spacenoids and Earthnoids” and “Overcoming human nature that triggers conflict = Newtypes.”

Committed to this scale, I formally approached Yasuhiko and Katoki, believing they were the only suitable designers. Though both were initially cautious about joining a new Gundam project, they eventually agreed after my persistent visits to their workplaces.

The preparation period lasted over nine months. During this time, I was too busy with design orders and setting development to begin writing the novel. Sunrise and Kadokawa were likewise consumed with various adjustments, all of us thinking, “This wasn’t what we expected…” However, looking back, it’s clear that UC gradually expanded as we challenged each other.

Whether due to Gundam’s inherent magic or not, this sentiment of “This wasn’t what we expected…” would continue to spread among all involved. Take the model kits, for instance. Typically, Gundam series models start with affordable smaller scales before developing high-end larger versions. However, UC, targeting “former Gunpla boys who had grown up,” began immediately with high-end Master Grade models. The phrase “This wasn’t what we expected…” surely crossed the minds of Katoki and Bandai Hobby’s development team as they tackled designing a “perfect transformation” model without established know-how.

Then there was the anime. Initially, we estimated “OVA quality episodes of about 40 minutes each.” Given Sunrise’s capacity to produce high-quality weekly TV anime, we thought we could release episodes monthly, or at worst, quarterly. However, the completed first episode turned out to be nearly 60 minutes of “frighteningly high theatrical quality.” This resulted from Director Kazuhiro Furuhashi and the entire staff pouring their hearts into the work, Producer Ogata’s conviction in accepting this approach, and the understanding of all involved parties who supported the production despite schedule delays.

While we created something we could proudly present to the world, the initial release plan became purely theoretical, and the staff had to prepare for a much longer production period. The sighs echoing through Sunrise’s Studio 1 were undoubtedly “This wasn’t what we expected…”

Thus, the UC Blu-ray & DVD in your hands is the crystallization of numerous “This wasn’t what we expected…” moments. While it might be called a demonic content that disrupted everyone’s life plans, I should note that the staff’s true feelings are far from regretful. Creators, myself included, are used to working within defined boundaries. Opportunities to express ourselves fully without such constraints are rare – practically unheard of for original projects. This time, the power of the Gundam name gave us such an opportunity.

While muttering “This wasn’t what we expected…,” we saw this as a once-in-a-lifetime chance and tackled it with triple our normal output to prove ourselves. For creators, this is a joy worth dedicating one’s life to, and you, who can witness these results in real-time, are fortunate… or so we tell ourselves and others while asking you to look forward to episode 2!