Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* Lions Led By Robots 16: Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

GET THE FULL EPISODE ON PATREON HERE: patreon.com/posts/130683478 COME SEE US IN LONDON JUNE 22ND: bigbellycomedy.club/event/lions-led…ival-southbank/ Freed from the oppressive yoke of G Gundam, we venture into a different OVA series where Gundam is actually... good? We watched Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket, a show about the horrors of war seen through the eyes of a child who, while not exactly bright or good at school, is somehow able to outsmart every single adult in this show. To include entire military organizations and spy agencies?

The main character, Al, is an 11 year old and he lives in a neutral colony that's not involved in the one year war, militarily anyway. Obviously they're involved. We get to see something unique, I think, in war media and certainly anime, which is him and his classmates complaining about like the after effects of the war, like supply ships being interdicted and things of that nature. And like Al's dad, who was a deadbeat to the last five minutes of the show, also voiced by Spike Spiegel, uncredited may I add. The same voice actor of Spike Spiegel, also seemingly the voice actor of everything until about 2010. Like everything everything is, like, it feels weighty and like, they're interested in the war because they're children.

They're little boys. And I don't know if this is a universal little boy thing, because I know I went through this, of like, playing soldier and stuff like that, because we have no, we see so much war media and war in the news, and we're always taught that it's very fun and heroic and adventurous. We've talked about this countless fucking times on lions and Al is just like that. Him and his friends are going out and playing war while simultaneously being enamored with this one year war and the heroic, chivalric,

almost picturesque version of a Gundam pilot or a mobile suit pilot. In the case of our other main character, Bernie, who's dumber than shit. Bernie is outsmarted by an 11 year old boy at every turn. Boomstamongers. And I don't know if this is meant to be this way. I don't know if you picked up on it, but Al runs this show. And by that, I mean he's an 11 year old. He's not a particularly smart 11 year old.

I should point out he's failing in school. Yeah. But he outsmarts and manipulates every single adult in the show. Yeah. Many of them dying. Yeah. As well, like something that we should talk about when talking about like children's fascination with war is the bit at the start where they're in the classroom and he's with his two friends

and like one of his friends produces like a Gundam pilot badge and they're all like, Oh, can I hold it and everything? And then another kid is like, Oh, that's fake. We don't even have any mobile suit pilots here. Yeah. The, the, the, the, the, the federal earth forces don't even have Gundam pilots and she was making fun of them. And then leads to a fist fight between two boys and a girl and the girl wins. Yeah. She punts one of them straight in the dick and balls, which is fun. But yeah, then we find also weird that Japanese child is called Albert, but I

don't know. We're operating in post-World War Two where a lot of American men had Japanese children. Well, I mean, technically not Japanese. Yeah. He lives in a colony in space called Side Six. Yes, yes, Joe. But they still have Christmas. Yeah, they still have Christmas. And we is canon by, I think, Episode four or five. Don't remember that Australia still exists, like as a nation state with a

very distinct accent, which is weird. Also, Christianity exists in space. Yeah. Which is always a fun thing that you see in science fiction that it's common amongst, I mean, anime in general, but also just science fiction. Just like, no, they just brought, I mean, like the expanse is like this, like the Mormons go to space and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like if you haven't read the expanse books, they can't recommend enough. I'm actually in book five now. They're really, really good. But like the Christian church still exists. Like Hinduism still exists. The Mormons build a attempt to build a giant ship for colonizing deep space.

Okay. Yeah, they're all there, but like they're very interesting. And you know, the, the arguments of like, how can you still believe in all this? Like there's nothing in the Bible about space. The, the, the mental gymnastics everybody works through is it makes it very compelling. And this one is just kind of confusing that Al is praying to Christian God while living in a space colony. I'll say the Shahada. I was getting the bus home on Wednesday evening and I saw like two Mormons on the bus and I'm like, it's, it's always so strange to see them in the UK.

It's a very American religion, but you can't go anywhere without seeing them. Whenever you see Mormons pop up in your neighborhood, it's because you know the economy is bad. Well, actually, you know where I was coming home from. That makes sense. Like I know that's some people probably aren't going to like me putting up, but it's true. Like the Mormon church does prey on the economically disadvantaged because they're easier to convert now Mormon Church's rules not mine It's like how Scientology preys on the rich. Yeah. Yeah. Well, ironically Scientology is also

Getting its tentacles out into more developing places Mostly not because of the money obviously they don't have as much, but they have less of an understanding and knowledge of the Church of Scientology. Yeah. So like your average person that says, say like, you know, lives in Guatemala or El Salvador probably is less of an understanding of the various controversies of the Church of Scientology or the Mormon Church for that matter than your average guy who grew up around them their entire life. Yeah. Like it's a, it's just really strange. Like I know I was getting a bus from an area

that like is in very far north London and I was like, are those Mormons? And then, and then I was like, wait, those are Bible's off Oh fuck. There's two Mormons on the bus. And it was one of those like single deck buses that are like quite small. So I was like, how can I like look at them without obviously looking at them? But yeah, space Mormons can't wait for that. Unfortunately. I mean, maybe Mormons do exist in the Gundam universe. We haven't gotten that far yet. This is our first real Gundam that we've watched. G Gundam does not count. But yeah. So then I'll get a new neighbor called Chris. Chris. Yeah. Makes him tea and

befriends him. I won't say she's looking through his a zoom cam quarter at her window. And uh, it's a bit of a creep. Yeah. And before this, Al went to the spaceport to look for his dad and just does some industrial spying with the same binoculars slash video camera. Because it could like take pictures too. Yeah. And that will become important later on. Weirdly, for people who maybe are going to watch this and be like, wow, Chris's voice sounds very familiar. Her other voice role that most people have probably heard her is Bulma from Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball Super. Hell yeah.

Also TK, the original Digimon, she played a very important side character in Rurouni Kenshin. Don't look too much into that one. Deeply cursed production on that show. And she's just in like everything. But yeah, her voice, I was like, that sounds really familiar. And I had to look it up. Yep. It's Bulma. It's TK. I've listened to her voice for years of my childhood. Yeah. And essentially what we figure out is Bernie is sent on a Gundam mission. He gets shot down and then eventually returns back to Zion. People are going to be really mad because I don't know what any of this stuff means

and they're like, it's, it's a reference to this. There's a principality of Zion and the earth federation. They're fighting what's called the one year War. And Side Six is neutral. For some reason that doesn't really mean much because Federal forces and Xeon forces end up fighting there anyway, whereas Bernie is introduced. And I do like how destructive it shows the Gundam fight. Like, the fight is a sideshow. It's like four people total last five seconds and multiple buildings in the city are destroyed because for some reason Gundams can only fight over heavily populated areas.

Then Bernie's Gundam is shot down. And the one part of this that ever like my one like, Oh God, this irks me is Bernie's mobile suit. Sorry, not a Gundam. It's a mobile suit crashes. Bernie is the only one that goes running over to like to gawk at it. And my head jumped back to the episode that we did with Dr. Patrick Wyman about the Japanese fire balloons, where when the fire balloons crashed outside of like a school in Texas, and all of the kids

in the school ran outside to start parting it up, like parting it into pieces and souvenirs with pocket knives. Yeah. And that is what would happen to Bernie's Gundam. Yep. Like, yeah, there's just immediately like people will be like, Oh shit, what's that? Okay. Like, you know, scrappers, you know, people be trying to steal the metal off of.

Yeah. There'd be some little shit head kid walking back home with an entire Gundam arm draped over one shoulder. Mom, look what I got! But we do see that later on in the series where Albert's friends are like, Oh, look at these like empty shell casings that we found. And then the other kid just pulls out a full live round. Yeah. Yeah. From his backpack. How did he get that in there? It's because he's meant to be the token, you know,

the fat friend with the bottomless backpack full of sandwiches. It's a bomb. Yeah. That's a, that's the one thing I saw online. And I looked this up as people getting freeze frames from that scene where he pulls it out of his backpack. It's like, how it doesn't fit in there. It makes no sense. It's going to get increasingly angry at this cartoon because the logistics of this backpack don't make sense.