Those damn Minovsky particles don't come cheap goy, OY VEY!
And somehow we can mass produce them up the ass by the time Zeta rolled around.
It's just another reason to be satisfied with the chief's ultra smug refusal of a seat in Jaburo at 08th MS team during the two final episodes.
And it's quite the opossite tictac, Tomino, good old Kunio "
totally-not-Wolverine" Okawara and Yasuhiko Yoshikazu turned in a very "Super Robot"-like main mecha to have kids yearn for its toy(it's why Gundam has so many combinable parts and is designed more like a toy, rather than a plastic model, like in later series) :
Original :
Redesign :
Fucking night and day. That's because the main trio wanted the whole robot conflict to be more gritty andhave their robots look more like war weapons rather than super heroes. That's why the Zakus look like they do and the Guntanks were made. But the sponsors pushed them, so they made the main character use the magical Super Robot knock-off and they focused on making all kinds of weird designs for the grunts. Boy, god for them that the sponsors pushed, because while Japan wanted to bang Char and Sieg all the Zeons, nobody bought the Zakus. Nobody. That would have killed Gundam in an instant if the toy sales were that bad back then, especially during a time period where Sunrise was still a shitty, humble studio that was occasionally visited by their Yakuza-sponsors. Heck, there's a story about Tomino insisting that the thing shouldn't be a toy commercial and instead should be treated as a serious, dramatic anime like Dororo or Astro Boy and the sponsors were so agasped by his claims that they let him actually do the whole "real robot" thing instead of making Gundam a Mazinger knock-off.
Of course others followed that train of thought later, with Votoms starting like that and becoming huge with figures and statues after the first OVAs, with Macross not being interested in plastic models but music initially but due to Kawamori's excellent plane designs, sponsors flooded and offered him deals that would make Tomino eat his glasses. And the list goes on.