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48:13 Ten, USO has a brief conversation with League militaire engineer Otis about the etymology behind the organizations name and the name of its mysterious commander. Its a rapid fire succession of good research prompts, but the one that stood out from the rest as the most bizarre was Uso's statement, confirmed by Otis that League militaire actually means holy alliance and that it comes from ancient Roman. Id like to explore this claim a bit. Its an odd one. The more info were given, the more confusing the illusion seems to become. Rousseau makes it fairly clear that the name is meant to be a reference to something, but the terms he uses and the things he says about those terms point in different directions. The name of the league militaire is pretty odd overall. The english name combines the english league with the French militaire. The japanese riga sounds like a straightforward japanese pronunciation of league, but in fact, both the english league and the french league are normally rendered as rigu in Japanese. Even the spanish liga is written with a long e. Soundlla is similarly weird. Standard japanese pronunciation of the french militaire is miriteru, as used for the famous military academy Ekoru Miriteru or an Hermes bag available in Miriteru Beiji military beige. The english military would be Miritari after Gundam's league militaire. The only other prominent use of the word miritea that I could find was in the title of a super Famicom game developed by Namco. Released in the United States in December 1993 as metal Marines, and in Japan in November 1994, the japanese version bore the title Militia, written in English but with Furigana showing it was meant to be pronounced militeia, just like the militaire in league militaire. The game is set in a Sci-Fi future world where humanity has established orbiting space colonies around the earth in the aftermath of a terrible war that left much of the planet devastated. One colony garrison commander Zorgeff declared himself to be the emperor, conquered the other space colonies one by one, and then invaded the earth. The player, an officer in a civilian resistance force called the Myritea and leading a force of 16 meters tall mecha, must liberate the people of earth from Zorgefs tyrannical rule. Im guessing that this game was what you might call an unauthorized adaptation of victory Gundam, and that they got the spelling Mirytea for militia directly from victory. Still, this is good evidence for how contemporaneous audiences interpreted the term militeia. Obviously that means militia, so the term as a whole feels just a little bit off in the way that so many names in Gundam have. It's probably meant to capture the way language and pronunciation drift over time. I wonder if in the translation, the anglo french ligue militaire was chosen specifically to capture a similarly uncanny feeling of linguistic discontinuity. Militia actually strikes me as a better fit for the organization anyway, militaire implies a certain professionalism, an organization of soldiers, but the league militaire is, as people keep saying, a civilian resistance movement operating behind enemy lines and outside the formal hierarchy of the federation forces. This becomes a bit clearer when we look at the sorts of real organizations historically known as league militaire, or military league for one. In the early 20th century, the french army officer Emile Drian remembered principally as the first high ranking officer killed at the battle of Verdun, and before that as a writer of epic war fantasy novels in which the glorious armies of France crushed the perfidious Germans and British, was also one of the key figures in the creation of a political pressure group called the League Militaire. The story goes like Drian was a rising star in the french army in the 1880s, when he married the daughter of his patron, the general and minister of war, Georges Boulanger. Boulanger himself had been one of the french commanders responsible for crushing the Paris commune in 1871 and became a major political figure in the latter part of the 1880s. The nature of the movement he led has been characterized as everything from far left to far right, as one of the precursors to fascism, as socialism gone astray, etcetera, into infinity. But it was definitely populist, nationalist and animated by a mixture of anti government resentment and desire for revenge against the hated Germans. In 1889, amid fears that Boulanger was preparing to seize power in a coup d'the, government issued a warrant for his arrest. Boulanger fled Paris rather than defend himself and his boulangist movement collapsed, as did the career prospects of his son in law and protege, Drian. Drian remained in the army for several years and all reports suggest that he was an exceptional officer. But despite the promising start to his career, he found further promotion out of reaching. In 1904, it transpired that the new minister of war had collaborated with masonic lodges throughout France to secretly gather information about the political and religious positions of the members of the officer corps, creating a vast index card record so that republican and masonic officers could be preferred for promotion, while catholic, nationalist or royalist officers were held back. At first this revelation caused a major scandal, but not enough of a scandal to stop them doing it. Instead, the system of political preferment continued out in the open for a further eight years. Unsurprisingly, Driant found himself on the naughty list, partly because of his association with the disgraced Boulanger and partly because he was catholic. When news of the index card affair broke, he resigned his commission. Now a fervent opponent of Freemasonry, Drian got into politics. He started running for office and he formed a series of political leagues, the Anti Masonic League, the Joan of Arc League, and in 1908, he and a group of other former army officers created a league that they called the old army. The old army billed itself as a political pressure group affiliated with no party or broader political ideology, but exclusively focused on the reform and strengthening of the army. Well, no political ideology except strengthening the army, promoting nationalism, reviving old traditionalist values, and purging the country of Freemasonry. In 1910, in response to complaints that the term old army made them seem rather backward and narrow minded, Drian and his comrades changed the organization's name to la Ligue militaire, the military league for maintaining the traditions of the army and the defense of its interests. The league militaire endured for four years, ending with the start of the First World War. Ironically, the main thing it did during that time was to publish its own index of undesirable officers, which is to say, those soldiers that they believed to be affiliated with Freemasonry. At around the same time, but somewhat further east, a bunch of nationalist junior officers in the greek army formed a secret society which was called the League militaire in French or the military league in English. They were as nationalists frustrated by greek impotence and incompetence in a recent disastrous war against the Ottoman Empire and in the geopolitical maneuvering that followed the war. As career soldiers, they were frustrated that their own prospects for promotion were stymied by the rampant nepotism dominating the upper echelons of the armed forces. In 1909, while Druon was getting himself elected to the Chamber of Deputies, this military league went into open revolt. Rather than trying to suppress the military league, the government opted to negotiate. After months of political wrangling, the king agreed to hold new elections and the military league dissolved itself. The elections were held one year after the league went into revolt, and a reformist coalition led by the now famous cretan statesman Elephios Venizelos triumphed. A decade later, and just across the border in Bulgaria, a group of current and former army officers formed their own military league to put pressure on the government of Prime Minister Alexander Stomboliski, whose program of downsizing the army, cultivating good relations with the countrys neighbors, and focusing national resources on economic development really cheesed off the officer corps. Unlike the greek military league, who got what they wanted without spilling any blood, the bulgarian military league conspired to launch a violent coup along with other dissident factions that took the government completely off guard. Stambouliski was caught five days later by allies of the military league and was murdered in quite sickening fashion. Many of the other leaders of his movement were killed as well. Folks, I just don't think that any of these leagues militaire are a very good fit. But what about Rousseau's notion that it actually means holy alliance and comes from ancient Roman? What an odd thing for him to say. At first glance, it seems to confuse more than illuminate. Where in ligue militaire are we meant to find any sense of the sacred, even the reference to ancient Roman? Literally, he says, furui roma no cotaba. The words or the language of old Rome is not as straightforward as it might seem. It's true enough that both league and militaire, or militia, derive from latin terms league from ligare, meaning to bind together, and from which we also get words like ligament, liaison, and alliance militaire from militaris. Yet neither of these latin roots convey any sense of sacred or holy. The classical latin terms for a military alliance don't use ligarettes. When Livy describes how a military alliance of gauls and tiburtes, the people of what is now Tivoli, were defeated at the very gates of Rome in 360 BC, he called them a societate belli, an alliance for war. When Caesar wrote about an alliance of gallic tribes against his invasion, he called it both a societate, an alliance, and a foidus, a confederation. But the term ligua was used rarely in this sense by medieval latin writers. And to add another wrinkle to this shar pei of a problem, Uso doesn't actually say that the league militaire got its name from Latin. He just says it's a word of old Rome. Since Gundam has already played with the flexible nature of terms like Middle Ages, which we now know to be a period in earth history that gave rise to both bicycles and Hitler, old Roman could well mean the modern Italian spoken in Rome today. It could just as easily refer to the people of what we call the byzantine empire, who knew themselves to be roman and mostly spoke greek. Or the connection with holiness, the Shinsei in Shinsei dome might instead suggest that the origin lies in the Shinsei roma te koku, or the Holy Roman Empire. And this would not be entirely without precedent. As listeners soup and Luna pointed out, the name of Bespa officer Pipinidan is a japanese pronunciation of the german term for the descendants of the medieval frankish lord Pepin of Landon. In English, we call them the Pipinids. And the most famous scion of that house was Charlemagne, who was crowned emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III and thus became either the first holy roman emperor or a precursor to that position, depending on your opinion about the continuity between the carolingian and autonian empires and how much you want to get into an argument today. For our purposes, let's just agree to call it close enough to bring the Holy Roman Empire, its frankish predecessors and its austrian successors into victorys orbit. As for the connection between the austrian holy roman frankish empires and the League militaire, well, that will have to wait for next week when I start looking at holy alliances and sacred leagues throughout history.

[transcript]

48:27 And now the third and final maybe of my research pieces about the history of the advertising agency in Japan. In prior episodes, I talked about how by the early 1990s, when victory was made, the ad agencies there had positioned themselves as an indispensable component of TV program development. They were the marketing experts, identifying the kinds of shows that would appeal to particular audiences and devising overall business plans that balanced the sometimes conflicting interests of advertisers, studios and TV stations. And ultimately, it was their job to secure the money that made everything else possible. We began this deep dive into the world of japanese advertising agencies by asking why Victory Gundam was relegated to the relatively weak 05:00 p.m. Friday time slot on TV Asahi, despite an obvious mismatch between the show's content and the expected audience for the time slot, a mismatch that was apparent even at the time, especially to those working at TV Asahi. We return to that question today. Let me introduce the players in this corporate drama. Besides Sunrise and main sponsor soon to be parent company Bondi, there were also the advertising agencies, Densu and Sotsu, and the TV stations TV Asahi and Nagoya television, to take the advertisers first. Densu and Sotsu represent opposite ends of the spectrum for ad agencies, the massive generalist versus the tiny specialist. One was built around conventional, above the line advertising, the other tightly focused from its inception on below the line merchandise and intellectual property licensing. Founded in 1901, by 1953, Densu had become the largest advertising agency in Japan, a crown which it retains to this day. In 1990, it was the largest agency in the world by billings and employed around 6000 people in 28 japanese and 16 international offices. Densu has been in the news lately due to a number of scandals. In 2015, the agency's abusive work environment, sexist harassment and excessive overtime demands were blamed for the death by suicide of a young office worker, 24 year old Takahashi Matsui. Although no individuals were charged in connection with Takahashi's death, Densu admitted fault, paid a fine and pledged to reform its culture. But in a tragic, ironic twist, the conditions that led to Takahashi's death already violated Densu's own selfimposed rules against overwork rules the agency had established after a hauntingly similar incident in 1991, the year of Takahashi's birth, when another 24 year old employee, Oshima Ichiro, ended his own life after reportedly working for 17 months without a single day off. More recently, a number of Densu employees were arrested in connection with allegations of bribery and bid rigging for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which is to say that they have been accused of accepting bribes from wouldbe olympic game sponsors like clothier Aoki holdings and using their influence to circumvent the supposedly competitive bidding process for coveted sponsorship contracts. Now, you might be, huh? That doesn't sound like the Densu Olympics bribery scandal that I remember, which is entirely fair because this is not the first time that Densu has been investigated for alleged participation in Olympics related corruption. Back in 2013, french prosecutors raised the possibility that Densu had been involved in a scheme to bribe International Olympic Committee members to select Tokyo for the 2020 games. Densu counts the ruling Liberal Democratic Party among their clients and is said to operate as a kind of de facto publicity arm for the party. This marriage of political and business convenience is symbolized by one of those rare, naturally occurring metaphors in the form of the actual marriage of former prime minister and head of the LDP, Abe Shinzo, to former Densu employee Matsuzaki Akie, now Abe Akie. Besides buying up all the best airtime, bullying its employees, and pumping its clients for under the table payments, Densu is also said to wield considerable influence over Japan's media companies, influenced enough to suppress unfavorable stories about their clients and about themselves. One commentator, a former employee of rival agency Hakuhodo, described Densu as untouchable in the japanese media, and in his book a japanese advertising agency, anthropologist Brian Moran, described an incident in which two brands of television sets from two different manufacturers were both reported to have an unfortunate tendency to catch fire. These incendiary television sets were blamed for a blaze that levelled an apartment building in Tokyo. One of these two manufacturers, represented by the unnamed agency in which Moran was conducting his research, asked that agency to do everything possible to suppress bad publicity related to the fires. The agency was able to convince the news media to soften their coverage in various ways, suppressing some stories outright and convincing other outlets to balance their coverage by including the manufacturer's defenses in their articles. Yet the other manufacturer, represented by Densu, managed to disappear from the story entirely. It's a neat little conjuring trick to make a flaming television set disappear live on stage with an audience full of reporters. Sotsu on the other hand was a small and highly specialized advertising agency, mainly known for its expertise in merchandising and television production. The agency started in 1965, handling the merchandise for a popular baseball team, the Yomiuri giants. Then they broke into TV and the branded character licensing business in 1972 with Tokusatsu series Thunder Mask on Nipon Television. In 1977, they collaborated with a newly independent anime studio and an inexperienced freelance director to produce their first anime, Invincible Superman, Zambot Three. Though none of them could have known it at the time, this partnership would change the fate of all three, first raising them to unimagined heights, and then, like something out of a Greek tragedy, dooming each of them in turn. In the moment, Zambot was successful enough to convince Toymaker and sponsor Clover to fund a follow up in the form of invincible steel man ditarn three, which was followed by mobile suit Gundam. The Gundam phenomenon of the early 80s made Tomino and Studio Sunrise famous, but it made Sotsu rich. It's not entirely clear to me how the copyright and merchandising interests for Gundam were distributed among the participating companies. We know from Uda Masro's tweets on the subject that sunrise was collecting some part of the royalties from Gundam merchandise. We also know from statements he's made that Tomino sold whatever rights he had as series creator to sunrise for what he said was the industry standard amount of ¥300,000, most likely in 1979, before the show started airing. But some portion of those rights definitely fell into the hands of Sotsu. If you're the kind of sicko who scrutinizes the credits of shows looking for things like copyright notices, you will have noticed that Sotsu is always listed as one of the copyright holders. The agency survived for decades, largely on the profits from its control of Gundam merchandising and other related intellectual property rights. If Gundam was the goose that laid Sotsu's golden eggs, it did not take long before it grew into a mutated, radioactive mega goose too large and powerful for the humble goosekeeper to manage. From victory onward, Sotsu's participation seems to have declined, and since then, most Gundam shows have been handled by larger ad agencies, usually either densu or asatsu, working in collaboration with Sotsu. But even with other agencies sharing the burden, Sotsu still found itself overwhelmed by the scale of work needed to manage their increasingly global IP. A 2019 notice sent to shareholders described the situation with fewer goose metaphors recently. The investment scale of each project, especially the ones related to the business of the mobile suit Gundam, have tended to be large scale. Although these challenges have required a response from Sotsu, the agency believes that it is limited in what it can do to deal with these challenges with its own resources, with its current human and physical resources, business scale, et cetera. The solution to this problem, it turned out, was for Bondi to buy out the agency and transform it into a subsidiary, much as they had done with Sunrise in 1994. So on November 25, 2019, Bondi forked over more than ¥26 billion in cash, buying out the agency and consolidating their control over the Gundam brand. Now, let's talk about television briefly. The japanese television industry is organized into a handful of nationwide networks. One, Nipon Hoso Kyokai, or NHK, is a public broadcaster funded through a license fee charged against anyone in Japan with a television set. Although practically everyone I know who has lived in Japan for any length of time has a story about hiding from the NHK man when he came around to check whether they had a TV set in their home. In the 1990s, NHK operated two channels available throughout Japan, but they didn't and still don't run commercials, so we're just going to ignore them. Besides NHK, there were a bit more than 100 terrestrial broadcasting stations throughout the country, and almost all of them were affiliated with one or more of five commercial networks. The principal way for a TV station to make money was by selling advertising time, which was broken into two categories. Time advertising was advertising that played during a particular program. The ad agency or agencies that successfully pitched a new program were granted the right to broker the sale of the time advertising associated with that program to the program's sponsors. Spot advertising was advertising time between programs and it was sold on a piecemeal basis, whereas time advertising was settled well in advance when the program was first accepted by the network. Spot advertising could be purchased as little as a month out from when the ad was scheduled to air, or even shorter in extraordinary cases, as might occur if another advertiser backed out at the last minute. For both time and spot advertising, the agency was entitled to a healthy commission based on the sale price and, if they produced the ad themselves, a separate commission on the cost of production. The standard industry rate for both types of commission was around 15%, but special deals and kickbacks meant that the actual commission rate for any particular transaction might be much less or much more. After the agency took their cut, they would pass along the rest of the money to the TV station. This was lucrative business in 1990, sponsoring a 30 minutes program on a major network for one month cost between 60 and ¥120,000,000, depending on the station chosen to run the ad. The station on which victory gun emaired TV Asahi was consistently in the middle of the pack on all the relevant metrics, and in this case the sponsoring cost was around ¥90 million per month. Sponsoring a full 51 episode series like victory could thus cost over a billion yen, and at the height of the bubble economy, wouldbe advertisers that had not yet established a rapport with the relevant TV stations might try to compensate by offering to pay more than the official rates, sometimes as much as 50%. More spot commercials involved less of a commitment, but they were no cheaper. In 1990, a single 15 2nd spot advertisement running just once in a premium time slot on Fuji television costs ¥900,000. The crucial difference between time and spot advertising is that spot advertising runs on a specific station, while time advertising attaches to the program and runs wherever and whenever the program airs across the whole network. For regulatory reasons, and also because of the nature of physical reality, any one station can only broadcast to a certain geographic area. Broadcasting to the whole country requires a network of affiliated regional stations broadcasting the same thing. Each of these networks was based around a socalled key station located in Tokyo, which generated the lion's share of programming. One source from 1992 figured that about 80% of all programming originated from these key stations. They received the sponsorship fees for the time advertising associated with those programs. Some of those programs were network programs distributed to the affiliates for broadcast in their regions. Affiliates were paid a network fee to reserve blocks of time in their schedule for these network shows. When a network show runs in a network time slot, it airs with the original sponsor. Commercials included allowing the sponsors to reach the whole network in one go. Thus, when victory started airing on TV Asahi, the key station for the all Nippon news network, it also aired simultaneously on eleven other ANn affiliates. It aired half an hour early on the affiliated station in the Kansai and up to a week late in eight other regions, mostly in the north of Honshu. Affiliates were also allowed to sell their own commercials during time slots, and they could keep time slots open for their own programs, either programs they made themselves like local news, or programs that they purchased to air specifically in those slots. Similar to the way syndication works in the US, the affiliate stations sold the advertisements for these local advertising time slots, and they kept the money. You can think of this system like one of those champagne waterfalls with the big stack of tiered glasses. The advertiser is the bottle of champagne which gets poured into the top glass the advertising agency's commission. Once it's full, the rest of the champagne money pours into the key station, which then spills some of that champagne into the regional affiliate glasses at the bottom of the tower. They are probably not quite full at that point, so you can bring in some other, smaller bottles, the local advertisers, and fill those up. Now, there's no particular reason why the regional stations can't make their own shows for national distribution. It's just that most of the people and almost all of the money lives in Tokyo. So those are the stations best able to recruit the kind of big money advertisers necessary to produce expensive television. That's where most of the ad agencies, the advertisers and the production studios keep their offices, too. In fact, in 1990, the offices of the key stations, TV networks, and ad agencies were all concentrated shoulder to shoulder in a single neighborhood, the glamorous Ginza district. And as a matter of fact, sometimes the pipeline does go in reverse. Sometimes a regional station produces a show that gets picked up by the network and aired in a network time slot on the key station and throughout the country. The stations that manage to do this with some regularity are called semi key stations, and they're usually regional affiliates situated in major commercial hubs outside of Tokyo. Most of them are in Osaka, the largest and wealthiest city outside the broadcasting range of the Tokyo stations, and in Nagoya, the next largest after that. Given their limited resources, it makes sense for semi key stations to specialize somewhat in the kinds of programs they develop. Kansai television, for example, has earned itself a reputation in recent years for producing TV dramas that buck the conventional wisdom of the Tokyo based industry in order to offer fresh stories told in their own style. But their output is limited in part because the Fuji television network, to which Kansai television belongs, allocates only a single time slot per season for dramas originating from Kansai television. TV Asahi and Nagoya television are both part of the all Nippon news network, which in 1990 consisted of 20 stations and ranked in the middle of Japan's five commercial networks on most of the relevant metrics, number of viewers, number of stations cost to advertise that kind of thing. Tokyo based TV Asahi, a subsidiary of the powerful Asahi Shimbun media conglomerate, is the key station for the network. Nagoya Television is a semi key station and famous among anime fans who care about such things for its long and productive relationship with sunrise. Having served as the originating station for much of that studio's output during the don't know this for certain, but I think it's fair to assume that ANN reserved at least one network time slot per season for Nagoya television anime in the same way that the Fuji network reserves a slot for Kansai television dramas. This means that from the outside, from the audience perspective, Victory Gundam aired on all the same ANN stations as every prior Gundam TV show. Prior Gundams had aired on TV Asahi in the Tokyo region, and Victory did air on Nagoya television, but from the inside, the specific people involved and the structure of the business relationships were completely different. On a previous episode, I mentioned a tweet by Ueda Masuo talking about the attitude at sunrise in 1988 when Bondi canceled their sponsorship of the Nagoya television Saturday evening anime time slot. Sunrise was frantic because that specific time slot allowed their shows to reach a national audience at a time when they did not have a foothold on any of the Tokyo based key stations. If I'm right and an did reserve a certain amount of network time for anime from Nagoya television, it seems entirely plausible that the Saturday evening time slot was the only one to enjoy that privilege. Naturally, network programs with National Reach Command significantly higher advertising rates and receive significantly higher production budgets than do local ones. That doesn't matter much for a relatively cheap production like nightly news, but TV anime is far too expensive to produce on a local scale. Losing their only network slot to another studio would have been devastating, and you can just imagine the rival anime production companies salivating over the prospect. But Nagoya television was willing to extend a little grace to their longtime partners, and they were rewarded before long by a succession of hits, starting with legendary armor Samurai troopers and culminating in the long running Brave series. This, however, meant that when Bondi decided to bring Gundam back to television in 1993, there was no spot waiting for it by default the way there had been for Zeta and double Zeta. They would need to convince some station to accept the program and schedule it in one of those precious network time slots. I suspect, although I don't know this for certain, that Bondi had hoped to reclaim Gundam's traditional Saturday evening time slot. Now, assuming Bondi did campaign for that slot, Nagoya television must have rejected their bid, and that would not be surprising. The brave series was going great at that point, and production on the next entry in the franchise was well underway. Why mess with success? Besides, Bondi's intransigence as a sponsor had put the station in a very awkward position just five years prior. That meant Bondi had to pitch victory Gundam to the various key stations as a new program, and I suspect this is why they picked Densu, the single most powerful ad agency in the country, famous for its deep rooted connections throughout the TV industry. You see, in theory, the key stations operated an open system where any agency could bid for any time slot. But with so much money at stake and so much industry practice based on informal handshake agreements, human chemistry, and favor trading, it shouldn't be a surprise that in practice they relied heavily on a small handful of long established favored agencies. In his book, Moran described these favored agencies as an elite cartel. Other agencies might even be obliged to go through one of the favored agencies in order to place ads on certain networks or during certain coveted times. The logic behind this system was simple. If an advertiser pulled out at the last minute, leaving everyone else in the lurch, their agency would be left to either find a new sponsor or be on the hook for it themselves. The favored agencies were those that the TV stations considered reliable enough, thanks to their financial and institutional resources, to bear that risk. Densu, as always, is the archetype of the favorite agency. It enjoyed strong and long lasting relationships with all of the commercial networks going back to the very beginning of television. Back then, Densu bought ad time on all the available networks, whether it had advertisers ready to fill the spots or not, essentially subsidizing the whole TV industry for years before it really got off the ground. They bought themselves a lot of goodwill, and they have continued to buy up an outsized portion of the best time slots on every channel ever since. In 1989, Densu bought roughly 40% of all primetime advertising spots on all major networks. And when the Summer Olympic Games rolled around, once every four years, Densu bought up all the advertising time on every network. Densu is such a huge and dominant player in the ad industry that you can't read too much into any company's decision to award them a particular account. Everybody works with Densu, but I do think the decision to switch from Sotsu to Densu after more than a decade of collaboration suggests either that Bondi was unhappy with Sotsu or they wanted something only densu could offer. And given the circumstances surrounding victory Gundam and what happened next, I suspect that Densu was brought on board at least in part because victory needed their help to get on TV. In television, the industry standard practice was for the pitching process to begin, with ad agencies presenting business plans for new programs to key stations in January. Final decisions by the stations were not announced until the last week of February or the first week of March, and accepted programs began broadcasting just a month later, in April. Now that is a sharp turnaround time for any kind of production for anime, it's nightmarish. That's probably part of why there was so much inertia for these long term blocks of time where a single sponsor, a single ad agency, and a single studio produced show after show after show for a single network. If you can be confident that you have a particular time slot locked down well in advance, you'd actually do a lot of work producing the show in advance without worrying that all of that work will be wasted if no TV station is willing to buy it yet. I think it's likely that the campaign to get victory on the air did in fact take place during that three month window. We know from comments by TV Asahi producer Koizumi Yoshiaki that three episodes had been substantially completed by the time he got involved. Based on internal production documents, it looks like the third of those three episodes, which ended up being episode number four, was not animated until after November 1992. That seems to indicate that the 05:00 p.m. Friday time slot was not secured until December 1992 at the very earliest, or March 1993 at the latest. Securing that spot triggered a wave of changes to the production, most obviously, the reordering of the first four episodes and the creation of the Shockti remembers framing narrative in order to get the Gundam in front of viewers eyeballs in the first episode. I have often wondered why they chose this fairly clumsy method of doing that when they could have just reworked the story, but now, knowing that they had to make those changes in such a short period of time, perhaps as little as a month, while also needing to stay on schedule, writing, storyboarding, animating, finishing, photographing, and dubbing other later episodes, it makes a whole lot more sense on paper. Switching from a semi key station like Nagoya television to a key station like TV Asahi should have been a step up for Gundam. But even disregarding the issue with the age of the audience, 05:00 p.m. Friday was not a good time slot. One source says that it wasn't even a network slot, that it had been one of those left open for the affiliate stations to fill with their own ads. And as far as I can tell, before Victory Gundam, TV Asahi just used it to air reruns. Time slots were graded according to how valuable they were with the best time slots, the so called golden Hour. Those that commanded the highest advertising premiums by far designated as grade A. In 1990. This was from seven to 10:00 in the evening. The next highest viewing periods were designated special B, then B for less desirable times, and finally C for the late night, early morning, and midday periods when most people were in bed, at work, or in school. 05:30 p.m. On Saturday was a special B time slot. Not quite prime time, but pretty good. 05:00 on Friday is B grade, implying significantly lower viewership. When you combine all of that information with UE Damasco's tweets in which he said that TV Asahi was not eager to have victory Gundam and in fact accepted it only because they felt they had no choice, it suggests a certain narrative. Now, this is speculation on my part based on the information I've laid out for you over the last three weeks, but it seems like no one wanted victory Gundam. Gundam as a franchise was in a slump. F 91 had been a flop. Even Zeta and double Zeta had not exactly been barn burners. The ovas had done well. 83 seems to have been considered a success, but the OVA market was completely different, and besides, Victory was nothing like that show. But Bondi still wanted Gundam on TV. They wanted it badly enough that they had made it a condition of their offer to acquire sunrise. So they brought in the big guns and densu delivered for them. But remember, Densu was not already active in the anime industry, and it seems like Sotsu retained the merchandising rights for the show. Plus, with Victory Gundam airing in a B grade time slot, the cost of the sponsorship and thus the commission earned by Densu would have been comparatively low. So I suspect that Bondi must have given them very good terms for their service. So Victory found its time slot, not a great time slot, but very possibly the only one it could get. It's easy to imagine alternate histories where things went differently, where victory aired in a better time slot and found an appreciative audience, sold a lot of toys, and reinvigorated the franchise. But it's just as plausible that victory might have never gone to air at all. If Densu had not somehow convinced TV Asahi to schedule the program for an otherwise dead time slot, Victory might have joined the legendary pantheon of canceled Gundam projects, like the 1983 Hollywood movie Doozybots or the mysterious Poca Gundam, surviving only in the form of two or three episodes worth of rush film buried deep in the Sunrise archives, waiting for some avid Gundam fan to dig it up again and wonder what might have happened if this show had actually made it to air. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get to everything that I wanted to talk about this week. In particular, I wanted to talk more about TV ratings, how they're calculated, and how to know if a particular number is good or not, but that project kept getting bigger and more complicated the more I worked on it, and this piece is long enough already, so I'm going to have to save it for some other research piece down the line. For now, though, let me give you one last anecdote about the subtle power of an institution like an advertising agency to shape our media experience. Did you ever notice that there are a ton of SD Gundam video games, many of which use the SD versions of mobile suits, even when it doesn't make any particular sense for that game, like in super robot wars or G generation? Well, supposedly this is because Sotsu treated SD and real Gundam properties separately, and they made it both easier and cheaper to license SD Gundam compared to the real thing. Next time on episode 10.9, Casarelia Stampede. Nina will be back, and together we will research and discuss episode nine of Victory Gundam and chicks, birds and a babe. The most humiliating experience of my career. New and improved Haro now with bubble blowing action Flanders, you traitor. A breach of operational security. Once is chance, twice is coincidence, but three times is fate. But what will happen to the sheep? Perfecty. Susie's battering ram attack. Sorry, sir, there was no pilot. Just this boy sitting in the pilot seat of a mobile suit so easy to use that a child could do it. OSHA violations and the old switcheroo. Please listen to it. Mobile suit Breakdown is written, recorded, and produced by us, Tom and Nina, in scenic New York City, within the ancestral and unceded land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is wasp by Misha Dioxen. The closing music is long way home by spinning ratio. The recap music is slow by Lloyd Rogers. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the Lenape people, and more in the show notes on our website, gundampodcast.com.

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41:32 remember like people being tear gassed in Mexico from inside

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12:10 and develop a situation wherein Britain and France invade Germany 12:36 with Britain and France, right because they are clearly like

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1:00:54 back into Mexico and released there, and they generally try 1:04:38 they're just being dropped back in Mexico, right, Yeah, They're 1:14:56 never had anything like it. And then I got Mexico

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11:12 the Syrian calendar was adopted in most countries. In France, 1:06:51 he never returned. He died in exile in France. This, 2:09:23 the border from Mexico is an invasion and that this

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1:29:34 people flee to France. 1:29:42 bend all down and move to France. 1:29:23 on fire and cause people to flee to France.

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1:09:44 and Tyrese Halliburton. That's our roster for the Olympics and

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1:07:25 Well, you know the Summer Olympics is coming up. 1:07:37 the only sport in Olympics. Fifty thousand for gold medals.

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1:05:01 go to Mexico, you want to go to Europe?

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32:34 Hey, we need to go Olympics than. 33:50 This is the summer athlete some Olympics. 37:51 There ain't. You can't go to Mexico.

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23:39 Miss Diana in New Mexico says, I'm in my mid

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02:20 and Tyrese Halliburton. That's our roster for the Olympics and

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00:03 Well, you know the summer Olympics is coming up. Yeah, 00:15 the only sport in Olympics fifty thousand for gold medals.

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00:13 What paras Olympics organizers plan to pass out three hundred

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01:37 can't go to Mexico. 01:53 No, okay, is it safe to go to Mexico? Okay?

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04:20 This is some athlete some Olympics. 02:48 Olympics organizers will have three hundred thousand condoms on hand 03:05 We need to go Olympics cuz it's way more than.

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17:56 Mexico flip flops.

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07:14 Mexico flip flops. Oh I like the Philadelphia stilettos.

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07:44 that's incorrect. Dark It was the London Olympics. James Bond

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07:17 Dark it was the London Olympics. James Bond was there.

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16:58 won a gold medal of nineteen ninety six Olympics in Atlanta,

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02:37 learn something about specifically Mexico, but you know, will broaden 02:51 Brand Censor had some great observations about this. Mexico set 03:00 investment happening. Tesla is building a factory in Mexico. We

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02:34 Yeah, I mean, this is not the Olympics. We're trying 40:43 it's not the Olympics, but of course life is competitive,

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17:47 in Mexico. 18:43 What is interesting is the reason I reference Mexico is

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06:39 focus on US Mexico trade. You've been interested in Mexico 06:59 Person, Mexico freight expert, Mexico freight expert. May that's a 10:32 Mexico City, Puebla. It's starting to spread all throughout Mexico

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25:07 Like my favorite little cocktail chatter is that Mexico Dairy 39:47 a few years ago how the gangs in Mexico gone 25:03 that environmentally cannot sustain it, the Texas Panhandle in New Mexico.

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1:30:28 my heart studies about France. Yeah, it's not fun. If 1:30:31 you're not from France, you are to them what England

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50:29 I just came from France.

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53:52 Make a handball off national sport in the Olympics.

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44:59 and niece France, I cried. 45:26 every race in Nice France, it was just so overwhelming

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2:26:32 No, I didn't go to France. I didn't go to France. Yeah, 2:26:30 But was you with them in France?

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10:41 Mexico

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15:59 France 16:27 France 17:06 Mexico

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01:55 Mexico 27:49 Mexico

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22:02 Mexico 30:59 Mexico 31:22 Mexico

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32:31 France

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33:02 I don't, but they look luxurious. There was in France. 33:05 I think when I was in France that there the. 37:21 was the first female muralist in Mexico. And we also

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18:41 including france Is, still advocated for equal rights for women.

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08:10 but also include Brazil, Mexico, and Thailand. By twenty thirty,

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29:33 of the US, for instance, France just enshrined abortion rights 25:02 meeting in Edgewood, New Mexico. Such a victory quote would

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01:06 Mexico border, which is the Haitian Bridge Alliance or HbA 02:33 on the US Mexico border, turned Joseph from an outspoken 03:37 end racist border policies like the Remain in Mexico policy

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27:07 Even though the Olympics are gonna be here in 2032,

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47:54 strongness of the genes in their hair because in Mexico,

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34:13 Yeah. Coming in coming into Olympics at 2032 where they are where the where they're hot hot ones, that would be pretty fucking cool, though. Like Yeah. If it's like The sponsors the podcast sponsors. The Olympics. Jeez.

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01:35 Guatemala and Mexico. 16:52 Mexico City, places 06:19 guy in Mexico who had a

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33:24 like when I was in Mexico