Nope, Never Heard of It

I mentioned the other day (in a title text picture caption) that an actual plot point in the Gundam Build Fighters anime was that the writers had a hard time imagining someone had never heard of Gundam unless he was from another planet. The loose sequel series, Build Fighters Try, turns around and pokes fun at this very same idea:

And no, this character isn't from another planet (though he resembles the character who is from another planet to a substantial degree).

Having completed both series at this point, I have to say that I rather enjoyed the second one more, partly because it was deliberately more ridiculous (it was much more of a super robot show than the first series, though the first series had pretty substantial super robot elements, being basically a Gundam series with a nonexistent body count, plus it heartily embraced the same oddball goofy sense of humor that the first series had) and partly because there was a substantially more interesting and well-written team dynamic*, and they also made certain game rules much less ambiguous**.

Plus the Meijin Kawaguchi, that goofball I posted about on Friday, got a lot more awesome in the intervening years between the two series, as evidenced by the fact that the beginning of this video is the scene that reintroduced him:



Yes, his entrance caused a flower (albeit a simulated flower, this series' mecha combat being a semi-virtual simulation of some sort) to come back to life. Magnificent.

*You know how in a lot of shonen anime/manga, there'll be one to three protagonists who are remotely competent, and then there's also no question that this one person in that group is the strongest of that lot? In this series, the three main characters each have different strengths, and while one of them is considered the strongest, he's also regarded as something of a blunt instrument and each of them usually contributes to the victory in a real way, and on at least one occasion said strongest team member went down hard and barely contributed to the fight at all. Which just goes to show that you shouldn't bring martial arts to a Tryon 3 fight.

**Like, there was an episode of the first series where a guy used G-bits, which are remote-controlled full-sized mecha, during a tournament, and if I recall correctly had somebody independently piloting each of them. That struck me as very odd to permit in a supposedly fair tournament (even if it had turned out to be completely ineffective), and would have been distinctly Not Allowed under the Build Fighters Try tourney rules.

-Signing off.