Mobile Suit Gundam Wing

Overview

Mobile Suit Gundam Wing takes place in the After Colony timeline. It aired starting on April 7, 1995, and ending on March 29, 1996, on TV Asahi, and the anime satellite television network, Animax. It was created as part of the 20th anniversary of Gundam, and it is the second alternate universe in the Gundam franchise following Mobile Fighter G Gundam. It aired on Cartoon Network's " Toonami" program in 2000, and since then helped to nearly single-handedly familiarize American audiences (and other western countries' audiences as well) with the Gundam franchise. The series has a sequel movie/OVA called Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz, and a rare OVA that was never released outside Japan called Odds & Evens.

The plot focuses on a war between numerous factions that shift throughout the show, originally starting with the Gundams (and part of the colonies) against the Earth Sphere Alliance and the OZ organization, and ending with the Earth Sphere Unified Nation against the White Fang faction (with numerous complicated power shifts in between). The Gundams and their pilots are treated mostly as their own faction, though they do not necessarily have the same objectives at times and on occasion end up fighting one another instead. The story is primarily told from the Gundam pilots' perspectives and a handful of key characters.

Plot Summary

(This is a summary of all events in the TV series itself only. For a list of all events prior and after, refer to the After Colony Timeline)

The year is After Colony 195. Human beings have left earth to live in space colonies, most of which strategically placed at the five Lagrange points around the Earth and sun. On April 6th, AC 195, Operation Meteor is commenced, an attempt by colony rebels to stop the Earth Sphere Alliance and OZ military forces from oppressing the colonies, by using five mobile suits built with gundanium alloy armor (Gundams). Each Gundam is sent by a different one of the five main colony clusters: Wing Gundam and Heero Yuy from the Lagrange Point 1 cluster (L1), Deathscythe and Duo Maxwell from L2, Heavyarms and Trowa Barton from L3, Sandrock and Quatre Raberba Winner from L4, and Shenlong and Wufei Chang from L5.

OZ's satellite surveillance teams initially detect the five Gundams in various reentry vehicles, but they are originally believed to be just meteors. Lieutenant Zechs Merquise though catches on to the situation, and manages to intercept the Wing Gundam while beginning atmosphereic re-entry. Zechs sucessfully disables it, causing it to crash into the Pacific Ocean near the JAP Point, but it costs Zechs two Aries and his Leo in the process. Heero survives the engagement, and washes up on a nearby shoreline. It is here he meets Relena Dorlain, and worried that she may have discovered his identity as a Gundam pilot, he hijacks an ambulance to get away.

The other four Gundams safely manage to reach Earth, and immediately begin their attacks on various Alliance and OZ forces. Wufei attacks a naval fleet in the Yangtze River, Trowa targets the Alliance spaceport at Dover but ends up destroying most of the base as well, Quatre takes out a scouting party sent to look for his capsule in the Middle East, and Duo destroys a Leo production plant in North America.

At this point the Alliance and OZ become slightly concerned with the new Gundam threat,

(THIS SECTION IS A WORK IN PROGRESS)

Characters

Heero Yuy

Duo Maxwell

Trowa Barton

Quatre Raberba Winner

Chang Wufei

Relena Peacecraft

Milliardo Peacecraft

Lucrezia Noin

Treize Khushrenada

Lady Une

Dorothy Catalonia

Campbell Lane ... Narrator

Duke Dermail

Tsuberov

Samantha Ferris ... Sally Po (2nd Half of series)

Moneca Stori ... Sally Poe (1st Half of Series)

Music

Below are the theme music and insert songs from Gundam Wing.

Theme Music

Insert Music

Notes

Fun Trivia

• Toonami and Bandai producers found the original promo for the series to be so riveting that they decided to use it as the official promo on Toonami instead of the DVD promo as originally planned.
• At just over a week of its premiere on Cartoon Network in the US, the series was the top rated program in every age group for Toonami. The initial airing of the OVA Endless Waltz on November 10, 2000 was the channel's second highest rated program ever at the time, only being topped by the season three premiere of Dragon Ball Z.
• Many of the pilots and main characters have names that are simply numbers in other languages. The most obvious being Duo meaning two, but others, such as Treize meaning thirteen (in Italian), Noin meaning nine (in German), and Zechs meaning six (in German) are less noticeable.