The Witch From Mercury has become the ultimate Gundam show

polygon.com:

One of the first questions to ask in one’s anime journey is, quite literally, a big one: Are giant robots right for me? Lucky for you, there’s never been a faster way to find out. Just watch Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury.

Massive humanoid robots are an anime staple, and fewer names in giant robots are bigger than Mobile Suit Gundam — the mega-franchise spawning from Yoshiyuki Tomino’s 1979 anime of the same name. In some ways, Gundam is synonymous with giant robots, kind of like Kleenex and facial tissues. Also like Kleenex, that can be an oversimplification. There are a lot of giant robot shows old and new, and they all do very different things. This is true even within the Gundam franchise, which has spanned eight U.S. Presidents and counting — i.e., it has been around long enough to be a lot of different things, from “grounded military sci-fi about the horrors of war” (the original) to “boy-band revolutionaries” (Gundam Wing) to “Street Fighter with robots” (Mobile Fighter G Gundam).

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury’s selling point has always been its stand-alone nature, which made it the ideal jumping-on point for the Gundam-curious. It’s also new Gundam, which has been all too rare of a thing these days — the occasional movie notwithstanding — and thus bears a bit of an undue burden to be all things to all people, the Gundam faithful and uninitiated alike.

The bananas thing about it is that The Witch From Mercury is pulling it off. Now that the show has begun its second cour of episodes following a brief winter hiatus, the series is kicking into high gear and making a case for itself as the ultimate Gundam show, a showcase for all the many ideas that encompass the Gundam franchise, remixing