Gundam (ガンダム Gandamu) is a metaseries of Japanese anime, featuring giant robots,created by Sunrise studios. The series started in April 1979 as a TV series called Mobile Suit Gundam, and later became a franchise name with more sequels, prequels, side stories and alternative timelines, published and aired in various media including TV anime, OVA, manga, novels, and video games. Gundam became a collective term for 7 different time lines, all featuring their own story-lines, with a few common denominators and war machines called Gundam.
The original timeline for the Gundam series was the Universal Century (UC) series, which included Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) and Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (1985). Since the 1990s, alternative timelines have been produced and developed, including the Future Century, After Colony, After War, Correct Century, Cosmic Era and Anno Domini timelines.
In the 2008 ranking of average sales figures for anime copies sold in Japan (1970-2008 total sales figures averaged by episode), Gundam series were in 4 of the top 5 places: Mobile Suit Gundam ranked second, with Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny third, Mobile Suit Gundam SEED fourth, and Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam fifth. Also, New Mobile Report Gundam Wing ranked 18th and Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ ranked 20th.
As of 21 January 2008, the Gundam franchise is a 50 billion yen trademark. Gunpla's (Gundam Plastic model) income is 90% of the Japan character plastic model market's income.
Academic fields in Japan also view the series as a good inspiration in research fields. The Gundam academy, or officially International Gundam Society is the first academic institution based on an animated TV series.
In 2009, the Gundam franchise will celebrate its 30th anniversary.

Distinctive characteristics

Gundam is the name or nickname of several mobile suits or mobile fighters, although in some of the related series, such as G-Saviour do not use the term Gundam in the show and presume viewers can tell the difference of Gundam type mobile suits from its general characteristics. The OVA series Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO mainly based upon other famous icons from the first series like the Zaku to relate the show with other Gundam series.
The term Gundam is more of an idea instead of a clear image. Each series can show very different design and colouring for the Gundams. Most of the Gundam in various shows normally have a head following the design of the first Gundam, from the design of Kunio Okawara. Some are different from others, like Zeta Gundam using an angular white mouth-piece instead of a squared red one. One of the notable incidents in early history of Gundam design was when Katoki Hajime presented his line art design of S Gundam to the Sunrise officials, they felt that it did not look like a Gundam and rejected the design, yet when Katoki added in the major colouring, red, blue and yellow, to the same design and added a few more pictures displaying the suit from different angles at the next meeting, the same officials found it to look quite like a Gundam. The producer, Masahiko Asano noted in his notes that everyone had their own idea of Gundam, and in the meeting, they were trying to find the asymptotic view for everyone in the meeting.

Further development

An interview of Yoshiyuki Tomino in the OtonaFami 2009 February issue, he commented about the lack of planning of Sunrise and Bandai, and pointed out his own view on plans for the next 10, 20, 30 years. He also decided to create concepts suitable for Sunrise and Bandai for the next 100 and 200 years from now. and claims that a good movie needs 3 to 4 years of production time, and thus it is too late for him to do anything for the 30th anniversary of Gundam, yet it is still not too late for the 35th anniversary, and he might do something for that, yet he denies about directing a new Gundam series in 2015. However, he foresees that on next year's(2010) January, he would still scolding Isn't there only 4 more years left? and no action would be taken by the company. His wish is that in the future, a common sentence people will use is Think like Gundam.