6.3: Rock 'n Roll High School

Mobile Suit Breakdown: the Gundam Podcast

Show Notes

This week: SD Gundam returns to theaters and MSB returns to your ears. We're covering the first half of SD Gundam's Counterattack, and we... liked it? Is that possible? While still marred by several of SD Gundam's persistent issues, this short manages to deliver on the series' potential for madcap, irreverent parody in a way prior episodes haven't.

Show Notes Yankii, Bousouzoku, and Sukeban:

• Books consulted for this week's research:

Ashcraft, Brian, and Shoko Ueda. Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential: How Teenage Girls Made a Nation Cool. Tuttle, 2014. Cherry, Kittredge. “Sukeban - Boss Girls.” Womansword: What Japanese Words Say About Women, Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, CA, 2017, pp. 73–74. Kawamura, Yuniya. Fashioning Japanese Subcultures. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Marx, W. David. “Damn Yankees.” Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style, Basic Books, New York, NY, 2015, pp. 123–148. Monden, Masafumi. “Ribbons and Lace.” Japanese Fashion Cultures: Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan, Bloomsbury, London, UK, 2015, pp. 107–134.

• Wikipedia pages for Bōsōzoku and Sukeban.
• Tofugu article about bōsōzoku.
• Vice article about sukeban and the media they inspired.
• Collection of photographs of sukeban from the 1970s and '80s.
• Review of the Sukeban Deka manga and OVA from Okazu (blog covering yuri media).
• Visual aid showing a select few photographs of modified cars and motorcycles (especially with the huge exhaust pipes), and screenshots of the episode that show similar style of exhaust pipes on the Counterattack School's vehicles and mobile suits.

Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded, and produced within Lenapehoking, the ancestral and unceded homeland of the Lenape, or Delaware, people. Before European settlers forced them to move west, the Lenape lived in New York City, New Jersey, and portions of New York State, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut. Lenapehoking is still the homeland of the Lenape diaspora, which includes communities living in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario.

You can learn more about Lenapehoking, the Lenape people, and ongoing efforts to honor the relationship between the land and indigenous peoples by visiting the websites of the Delaware Tribe and the Manhattan-based Lenape Center. Listeners in the Americas and Oceania can learn more about the indigenous people of your area at https://native-land.ca/. We would like to thank The Lenape Center for guiding us in creating this living land acknowledgment.

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The intro music is WASP by Misha Dioxin, and the outro is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio, both licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 licenses. The recap music is Olivia by Hyson, licensed under a CC BY attribution license. All music used in the podcast has been edited to fit the text.

Mobile Suit Breakdown provides critical commentary and is protected by the Fair Use clause of the United States Copyright law. Gundam content is copyright and/or trademark of Sunrise Inc., Bandai, Sotsu Agency, or its original creator. Mobile Suit Breakdown is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Sunrise, Bandai, Sotsu, or any of their subsidiaries, employees, or associates and makes no claim to own Gundam or any of the copyrights or trademarks related to it.

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