Gundam

Gundam is a Japanese science fiction media franchise created by Yoshiyuki Tomino and the studio Sunrise, beginning with the television series Mobile Suit Gundam in 1979, which introduced giant piloted robots called mobile suits into a story treated with the moral ambiguity and political complexity of a war drama rather than the more straightforwardly heroic robot shows that preceded it. This approach established the real robot subgenre of Japanese animation, in which robots are portrayed as mass produced military machines rather than singular heroic inventions, and the franchise has since produced dozens of further television series, films and original video animations set across many largely independent fictional timelines, most prominently the long running Universal Century continuity. Gundam is also one of the best selling toy franchises in the world through Bandai's Gunpla model kit line, which has sold hundreds of millions of units since 1980, and the franchise's influence extends across Japanese popular culture, including a full scale walking Gundam statue built in Yokohama as a public attraction.