25:06 Michael Schumacher made his Formula One debut in August of 1991. Pakistan beat England to win the Cricket World cup for the first time ever. And 1992 marked the last time that the Summer and Winter Olympics occurred. In the same year, the Summer Olympics held in Barcelona saw the first unified german team since 1964, while the dissolution of the Soviet Union meant that Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania sent their own teams for the first time in many decades, while a dozen other former members of the USSR formed the unified team and competed together. The separation of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia into parts meant that this was the Olympic debut for the countries of Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzkovina. UN sanctions against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which consisted of present day Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo, meant that it could not send a representative team, though some of their athletes chose to participate as independent Olympic participants after having been banned for many years due to apartheid. South Africa was allowed back after a, quote, hotly contested women's 10,000 meters race. The gold medalist ethiopian runner Darartu Tulu, a black woman, and the silver medalist south african runner Ilana Mayer, a white woman, in a show of friendship, solidarity or mutual respect, ran a victory lap together, hand in hand. This feels cheesy saying it out loud. It felt cheesy writing it on paper. But when I imagine it, when I picture it in my head, I can see how moving it would be. Apartheid wasn't even completely dismantled at this point. Negotiations were still contentious. There had been plenty of other high profile incidences of racial tension, racial violence, and if there's one thing the Olympics is really good at, it's at grand displays of humanism. This is also the Olympics of the dream team for U. S. Men's Olympic basketball, the first Olympiad in which professional basketball players from the United States were allowed to compete. Previously, professional basketball players from Europe and South America were permitted in the games, but not us pros. The US team was usually college athletes, and japanese athlete Iwasaki Kyoko took gold in the women's 200 meters breaststroke at the ripe old age of 14 years, six days becoming the youngest gold medalist swimmer, woman or man in Olympic history, a record I believe she still holds today, which makes a decent segue into talking about Japan specifically during these two years. The prime minister for most of this period was Miyazawa Kiichi, who by the time he retired sometime after this, would have been a member of the Diet for more than 50 years. He had been minister of finance under Prime Minister Takeshita Noboru, but had resigned when he'd been implicated in the recruit scandal of the late 1980s, which we've discussed before, but basically amounted to insider trading by members of the diet. During his tenure, the LDP retained control of the diet, but only in coalition and only by a slim margin. He's remembered for being the first japanese leader to acknowledge that their military had coerced women into sexual slavery before and during World War II, the so called comfort women, for which he formally apologized while in South Korea in 1992, his government also passed a law that allowed Japan to send its self defense forces overseas for peacekeeping missions, which they did during the Gulf War and would continue to do subsequently. Not an accomplishment per se, but Miyazawa was also famously vomited upon by US President George H. W. Bush during a state dinner. I can imagine how much all the political pundits would have read into this, too, like it would have been such a big deal at the time. And now it's just a weird thing that happened. Emperor Akihito made a first imperial visit to China. And just before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev made the first ever visit of a soviet leader to Japan, a visit which failed to resolve the long standing dispute between Russia and Japan over the Kurel islands.
15:02 To be specific, this means that as we head into victory gundam and try to get a sense of the zeitgeist in Japan and the world during and just before the show's creation, I will be looking at the period from the release of f 91 on March 16, 1991 until the first episode of victory aired on April 2, 1993. Just over two years. Beginning with politics and economics around the world, there was an ongoing crisis involving international pressure on Iraq to disarm postgulf war. Iraq had accepted the terms of UN Security Council resolution six eight seven, which, in addition to calling for the destruction or removal of all of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons, also banned ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 iraqi soldiers, blocked official inspectors only to allow those inspectors access some weeks later, fueling suspicion that they had simply moved or destroyed evidence of noncompliance. Joint forces from the United States, Great Britain, and France conducted airstrikes against iraqi surface to air missile sites. And this back and forth that never quite broke into a new war continued throughout this period. There was civil war in Algeria and Afghanistan. Us military and UN peacekeeping forces were in Somalia. In South Korea, after student protester gang Kyung day was beaten to death by police, mass protests and riots in Seoul forced the resignation of the acting prime minister, and multiple pro democracy student activists immolated themselves in protest against President no TeU's regime in Los Angeles, California. In the United States, the acquittal of four police officers on trial for the beating of Rodney King leads to six days of riots and the deployment of more than 10,000 responders from the California National Guard, the US military, and several federal law enforcement agencies. The trial and subsequent riots brought attention to issues of police brutality and racial tension. In La, the Mount Pinatubo volcano erupted in the Philippines, killing hundreds of people and causing global cooling of nearly half a degree celsius. The Ethiopian Civil War, Mauritania, Senegal border War and cambodian Vietnamese war came to an end, as did the twelve year salvadoran civil War with the signing of the Chapultopec Peace Accords in 1992 and the ten year lebanese hostage crisis ended with the release of the last two hostages. Also in 1992, the indian government undertook liberalization of the country's economy. Mexico, the United States, and Canada finalized the North American Free Trade Agreement commonly known as NAFTA, and Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay signed the Treaty of Asuncion, establishing the south american trade bloc Merco Sur. With the signing of the Mastricht Treaty in February of 1992, the European Union was founded. In these couple of years, North Korea, South Korea, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Marshall Islands, and Micronesia joined the United nations, although the negotiations to end apartheid in South Africa wouldn't conclude until November of 1993. In 1991, enough of the system had been dismantled that the UN lifted economic sanctions against the country. Czechoslovakia separated into the Czech Republic and Slovakia after years of unrest and conflict between its constituent republics and the central government, and a series of revolutions and declarations of sovereignty by those republics. In late 1991, the leaders of three founding members, Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, declared that the Soviet Union no longer existed. Eight more republics joined this declaration soon after, and by the end of the year Gorbachev had resigned and the soviet parliament had voted to end itself. Less than two months later, in early February of 1992, US President George H. W. Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin formally declared the end of the Cold War, and this whole period was marked by deescalation between the two countries and their allies or blocs, including the signing of a second strategic arms reduction treaty. I'm sure some of you are wondering why I haven't yet brought up the yugoslav wars. As I mentioned in the introduction, Tom is of the opinion that the yugoslav wars had a particularly strong influence on victory gundam, and so we'll get their own separate research piece or pieces during the season. For now, I'll summarize by quoting the Wikipedia page because I really like how the writer or writers phrased it. Quote the yugoslav wars were a series of separate but related ethnic conflicts, wars of independence, and insurgencies that took place in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1991 to 2001 that both led up to and resulted from the breakup of Yugoslavia in mid 1991. In science and technology, the Internet was still largely confined to research institutions, but in August of 1991, CERN announced the first ever website info CERN Ch, and.