Anime / Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket

Can't you see that you are sweet?
Oh, let me love you so!^note No such happy scene of the entire cast hanging out exists within the anime.

"Don't cry, Al. Soon there'll be an even bigger war with even cooler mobile suits!"

— One of Al's classmates.

The first OVA of the Gundam franchise, Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket is a six-episode series that offers a significant change from the standard Gundam formula. As suggested by its subtitle, War in the Pocket is a small, personal story; a side story focusing on the experiences of a eleven year old boy during the One Year War. Released in 1989, it served to commemorate Gundam's ten-year anniversary. It was also the first time anyone other than creator Yoshiyuki Tomino was given a chance to direct a Gundam story. That director was Fumihiko Takayama, an alumnus of Super Dimension Fortress Macross also known for helming the 1982 version of The Wizard of Oz and who would later work on Patlabor.

The story follows Alfred "Al" Izuruha, an eleven year old resident of a neutral space colony, as his home is drawn into the One Year War. Though supposedly uninvolved in the conflict, Al's colony is in fact home to a secret Earth Federation base, currently hosting the Super Prototype Gundam "Alex", which is undergoing final testing before being sent to White Base's Amuro Ray. A Zeon commando team is dispatched to destroy the Alex. During the mission, Al befriends the team's most junior member, Bernard "Bernie" Wiseman. A precocious kid who idealizes war (he's eleven, and this war happens to involve giant robots), Al is impressed with Bernie's (false) stories of being an Ace Pilot and general badass, and the two of them investigate the Alex as part of their ultimate plan to destroy it. However, unbeknownst to them, the Gundam's test pilot is none other than Al's attractive neighbor, and Earth Federation officer, Christina "Chris" Mackenzie. Also altering the situation is Bernie's awareness of his superiors' willingness to stop the Alex at all costs. The entire series follows Al's growing awareness of the reality of war as his two friends draw closer to an inevitable confrontation.

Although a Sunrise production (as are all Gundam series), one might call this anime an example of "Gainax Hills": Hiroyuki Yamaga, co-founder of Gainax and director of Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise, wrote the screenplay; character designs were done by Haruhiko Mikimoto, who had worked in the same capacity on Gunbuster as well as on Macross; and Takayama would direct an episode of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water the following year.

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This OVA provides examples of:

• Ace Custom: The Alex is a fine-tuned version of the RX-78 upgraded and intended to be used by Amuro Ray, fast and responsive enough to keep up with his Newtype reflexes and featuring an early (possibly the first) version of the 360° panoramic cockpit that would become standardized in Zeta Gundam and onwards.
• Action Girl: Chris is one of the few female Gundam pilots in the entire franchise. Unlike most, she did not inherit her Gundam from a male character - in fact, a male character was meant to inherit it from her.
• Advertised Extra: Thanks to merchandising, the three best known mecha from this show are the Gundam NT-1 Alex, the Kämpfer, and the GM Sniper II. The Kämpfer only fights in a single episode, though it is featured very prominently. The GM got about 30 seconds of screen time.
• Aerith and Bob: Averted. With the exception of Killing, most of the cast have ordinary sounding, if sometimes mismatched, names, which makes it fairly unique among the Gundam series. This is also the show that mostly started the trend of giving Zeon military hardware Gratuitous German names.
• The Alcoholic: Mikhail Kaminsky. He even has a flask filled with liquor which he hangs in the cockpit of whatever suit he's piloting by an elastic string.
• All for Nothing: The end of the OVA amounts to this; Bernie dies fighting so Zeon won't nuke the colony, unaware that the nukes (which Zeon was going to launch no matter what he did) have already been stopped. Zeon succeeds in preventing the Earth Federation from launching a new Gundam — only to lose the war a few weeks later, rendering their efforts pointless.
• All There in the Manual:
  • Technically, any of the Alex's non-fixed weapons, since we only see its arm Gatlings and beam sabers in the OVA. While the beam rifle and shield have been included with every model and action figure release, the Alex's custom hyper bazooka was much more obscure and didn't see plastic until the Gundam Fix Figuration Alex released in 2008, almost twenty years after this series came out.
  • Its iconic armor is also meant to include a headpiece only seen on a few obscure SD kits (presumably because of how fiddly it would be getting it on a normal-sized head) that mounts a three-tube micromissile pod, barrel extensions for its head vulcans and an integrated sensor suite, a forerunner of the Gundam Mk-II's optional vulcan pod.
• Alternate Continuity: In the novel's ending, Bernie miraculously survived the destruction of his Zaku. Though Al didn't know that.
• Big Bad: Killing cares nothing for the lives he has to throw away to get what he wants. Cyclops Team is treated as nothing more than disposable pawns. He stages a coup and murders his commander in cold blood, and plans to use nuclear weapons to blow up the colony just to prevent the Alex from getting out.
• Bittersweet Ending: The colony is safe, Al survives unharmed and Chris has only relatively minor injuries, but Bernie dies needlessly and Al has to learn the hard way that good people do die in war, and will never be the same again. Adding insult to injury, in their final farewells to Al (Bernie via recorded video), both Bernie and Chris ask him to say hi to the other for them. Al's the only one that knows the truth of the situation. Appropriately, the final scene of the OVA is Al collapsing into tears when some of his classmates express disappointment over the war's end and suggest that the next one will be even cooler.
• Blatant Lies: Al tells his dad he's getting an A- and B+ in math and science in school. Immediately, a copy of his report card flashes on screen and shows he has a C- in science and D+ in math. It's implied he's Brilliant, but Lazy - he's capable of better grades, but just doesn't care much about school.
• Bloodier and Gorier: "War in the Pocket" has much more gore, blood and other graphic violence than any previous installment of the Gundam franchise.
• Broken Record: In the first episode, Al is being lectured by his mother and responds with an (admittedly appropriate for an eleven year old) "Yes Mom... yes Mom... yes Mom..." (In Japanese, "Hai... hai... hai...") Al's mother is clearly aware that he's not listening, but disregards it. Al's "Yes Mom" quips continue to repeat for the better part of 30 seconds after she leaves until the scene fades to black. It's particularly effective, and chilling, because Al keeps playing his favorite shoot-'em-up video game as he repeats "Yes Mom" and purposely loses by destroying every building in the game.
• Call-Forward:
  • The Alex itself is the first mobile suit to use a panoramic cockpit and also features prominent leg thrusters and concealed forearm weapons not unlike the Zeta itself. It's an even more direct call-forward to the Nu Gundam, which (like the Alex was intended to be) was Amuro Ray's personal machine.
  • The GM Sniper II's legs and backpack are almost identical to the Nemo's, and was even Retconned into being the Nemo's ancestor. It also has a beam rifle that looked exactly like the Hyaku Shiki's in background materials.
  • The Hygogg is very obviously meant to be a forerunner of the Capule.
  • The Gelgoog J has a beam machine gun, which eventually became standard-issue mobile suit weapon for Neo Zeon in Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack.
• The Cameo: Several members of the cast appear in M.S. Era 0099, an artbook detailing numerous events from the OYW. Chris can be seen in a debriefing, the Cyclops team are seen together before the mission for the Alex, Stuart can be seen standing in front of the Kampfer's wreckage, Von Helsing's arrest by Federation soldiers is depicted, and Colonel Killing is shown dead, having killed himself at the end of the war.
• Cassandra Truth: When Al goes to the police to try and warn everybody that Zeon is going to nuke the colony, they remember that he's the same kid who faked a hit-and-run to get them to track down Bernie earlier and don't believe him.
• Character Development: It'd be easy to dismiss Al as a fool for not realizing good people die in war but again, the kid is eleven.
  • He's certainly figured it out by the end though once he's been present for the rapid dwindling of the Cyclops Team's numbers, and personally witnesses Bernie's death. He's appropriately shell-shocked by it after it all ends. Somewhat sadly, we never learn how the kid turns out.
• Chekhov's Gun: In preparation for the assault Mikhail parks three trucks around the Colony that are loaded with Mobile Suit weaponry. The Kämpfer utilizes Throw-Away Guns so in the chance he runs out of weaponry he can just grab from one of the vehicles. During the fight with the Alex he grabs a chain-mine from one. After the mission goes south, Bernie and Al try to re-arm the Zaku by tracking the parked trucks down but at that point, the Federation had caught on to the ruse and was trying to confiscate them.
• Collateral Damage: The battles within the Colony are especially dangerous to civilians with the Federation forces coming across as a Destructive Savior. Stray shots frequently damage buildings and kill civilians as do the Mobile Suits themselves when they keel over. The Kämpfer blasts a hole through the Guncannon, causing it to crash on a populated area and explode (and then its munitions detonate and fire onto other populated areas). The Colony forces aren't much better with their missiles destroying Al's school. Chris's role as a hero is further emphasized by her causing minimal damage as the battle with the Zaku she moves to an unpopulated area and her stray vulcan shots are never shown to have struck any bystanders.
• Cool Big Sis: Chris is Al's neighbor, but she fulfills this role, being a cool older friend who treats Al nicely and maturely.
• Cosmetically-Advanced Prequel: 0080's mecha design attempted to bridge the gap between the original series and Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam by introducing design elements from the latter (see Call-Forward above). Considering the two series took place eight years apart in-universe, the mechanical designer may have went a little overboard with this.
• Covers Always Lie: The packaging and box art for this series tries to make it look almost slice-of-life and whimsical. It's.... not. It's very much not.
• Deconstruction:
  • The series stars a young civilian child getting caught up in an espionage and conflict plotline that ultimately involves the Mobile Suits he adores so much, with Al being a stand-in for the audience (or a take on various Tagalong Kids common in Gundam series) akin to snagging a notable side-character role in a Gundam plot. Then it shows just how absolutely, horribly wrong all of this can go, and the harsh reality that War Is Hell, plain and simple.
  • The main heroes on both sides are not particularly special in any way, with Bernie an Ensign Newbie tagging along with seasoned commando units and Chris is a test pilot familiar with the machine but not very experienced in actual battle scenarios. That makes the film a Lower-Deck Episode with a Perspective Flip on top of that, since the viewpoint is primarily on Bernie you become aware that he is desperate to save lives by fulfilling his mission, killing the good guys.
• Dull Surprise: A couple of instances during episode one, when Al reacts to Bernie's Zaku coming within a few feet of crashing into his face and minutes later having a gun pointed at him by Bernie with a face that can only be described as slack-jawed boredom.
  • Al's best friends casually asking if Al is cutting class mere moments after above said Zaku nearly crashes into them in a battle which has wrecked large portions of their hometown with no hint of any emotion about what has just transpired also counts as this.
• During the War: A side story of the One Year War.
• Energy Weapons: Few and far between; after the attack on the Federation base in the first episode, the only ones seen outside of a simulator are beam sabers. Justified in that beam weapons, and the massive explosions that typically result from kills with them, would easily puncture the hull of the space colony the majority of the series takes place in, and nobody's here to destroy the colony itself or its people except Killing, and even then his attempt to do so is thwarted.
• Establishing Character Moment: The introduction of Cyclops Team all give brief bits of their personalities and their vices.
  • Hardy is the leader of the group, keeping them on track and telling them to stick to the mission. He still has time to light up a cigarette in his cockpit, however.
  • Mikhail has a bottle of alcohol he keeps in his mech hanging from an elastic string. He takes a swig and Hardy tells him not to have too much because they're on the clock.
  • Garcia is taking the time to put on his Bandana right before they engage in combat and his cockpit is decorated with nude women and pin-ups.
  • Andy has a mirror in his cockpit and he's meticulously styling his hair.
• Eyelid Pull Taunt: Dorothy pulls this on Al and Chay when she gets them in trouble after their argument about mobile suits gets physical.
• Foreshadowing: Bernie's last meal is a particularly gruesome example.
• Four Is Death:
  • Bernie's cargo ship entered the colony through gate number four.
  • Almost the entire Cyclops Team is killed in Episode 4.
• Fun with Acronyms: "Alex" apparently stands for "Armored Layers EXperiment," for its optional Chobham armor. In Real Life, it's a pun on the phonetic pronunciation of "RX", the model number for Federation prototypes.
• Flynning: Subverted: The Kämpfer gets out its beam sword but is immediately pulverized by the Gundam's arm-mounted machine gun.
• Gatling Good: The Alex has a 90mm Gatling gun in each forearm, intended to extend its combat performance.
• Girlish Pigtails: Dorothy wears her hair in twin ponytails.
• Glass Cannon:
  • The Kämpfer was designed as a high-speed assault model, capable of incredible speeds but possessing rather thin armor as a result. Demonstrated rather viscerally when it plows through an entire MS team while staying mobile, but gets shredded like tinfoil when it tries to engage the Alex in melee combat.
  • The Hygoggs most of the Cyclops team use in the first episode also demonstrate this, with Garcia in particular managing to quickly slide in close to two enemy mobile suits, grab one as a shield and shoot through it to hit the other, but then Andy stands out of cover trying to launch a missile at the shuttle they came after and takes a bullet through the cockpit for his trouble.
• Global Ignorance: An in-universe example. During the Cyclops Team's covert attempt to steal the Alex, Bernie (posing as a Feddie grunt) claims to be from Sydney, Australia and chats with a superior officer about how much he used to love the snow around Christmastime. A few minutes later, the officer realizes that the Southern Hemisphere has warm weather in December, blowing Bernie's cover (not to mention, at the time of this show's release it hadn't snowed in Sydney at all in over 150 years). To say nothing of what happened to Sydney earlier that year.
• Gory Discretion Shot: It's best left to the imagination what happened to Mikhail (a bloodied and bullet-pocked chair) and Bernard (a "pile of hamburger") after being on the wrong end of the Alex's arm-mounted Gatling and beam sabre respectively.
• Gratuitous English: There's some in the opening theme song ("Can't you see that you're sweet?/Oh let me love you so"). Also, most of the signs in Al's home town are in English, for the most part accurately rendered.
• Gratuitous German: In the English dub, we are subjected to von Helsing's badly imitated German accent. As above, 0080 is also the show that helped start the trend of Zeon mobile suit designs having German names, with the high-speed Kämpfer.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Gihren and Kycilia Zabi, whose presences can be felt throughout the show, but who never actually appear or are specifically named.
• Grey-and-Grey Morality: Present as ever. The Federation's behavior in Side Six is highly questionable (among other things, they're building and deploying mobile suits in a neutral colony with a large civilian population before the treaty allowing them to do so is signed), and Zeon's response, after a covert operation fails, is to break another treaty and try to blow the entire place up, civilians and all, with a nuke. Would qualify as Black-and-Grey Morality if the Cyclops team (and Bernie in particular) weren't so sympathetic.
• Groin Attack: Dorothy does this to Chay when he attacks her for daring to suggest that the Federal Forces badge he brought to school might be fake.
• Heroic BSoD: Al, when he watches Bernie's Zaku get destroyed, and later sees Chris removed from the cockpit of the Alex. He also gets a more minor one earlier when he comes across rescue workers at a destroyed building and sees them pull the corpse of a child around his age out of the rubble.
• Heroic Sacrifice: There's a couple of sacrifices that invoke the spirit of the trope even when its about a group of Villain Protagonists:
  • Garcia grabs a bomb and fights his way through Federation soldiers in an attempt to destroy the Alex in a suicide run and to give his comrades a chance to escape.
  • Bernie's final fight was meant to be this if it failed. If it succeeded they'd avert the nuclear bombing, but if they didn't (a possibility he knew was likely) Bernie left enough evidence behind to better convince the authorities of the threat.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In the final battle, Bernie sets up a number of grenades on the field he lures the Alex to. In the end, the only thing they do is blow off his own Zaku's arm when he grapples with the Gundam.
• Hope Spot:
  • Admit it, for a moment, it actually seemed Bernie could win, didn't it?
  • Or that maybe, just maybe Al would make it in time to stop the fight.
• Humongous Mecha: Duh.
• Husky Russkie: Mikhail Kaminsky, pilot of the Cyclops Team's Kämpfer mobile suit.
• Ikea Weaponry: The Kämpfer was smuggled into Libot in pieces and assembled on site.
• Info Drop: Gundam 0080 and Gundam ZZ provide Info Drops for fans trying to figure out when exactly the Universal Century takes place. The former has a newspaper that reads "Monday, 14 January 0080", while the latter has Axis proclaim itself Neo Zeon on February 29th 0088, which means 0080 is a leap year in which January 14th falls on a Monday. The original series and Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam both suggested that the calendar changeover happened in 2000, but these pieces of information were quietly retconned out in the Compilation Movie versions.
• Inter Generational Friendship: Both Chris and Bernie with Al.
• Killed Off for Real: Bernie and the rest of the Cyclops Team, though not in that order.
• Latex Space Suit: The pilot suits, as always.
• Lightning Bruiser: The Alex. Designed for Newtype pilots (Amuro, specifically), the Federation lacks remote weapon technology, so instead they make it a high-class, high-speed machine capable of keeping up with a Newtype's superior reflexes.
• Made of Explodium: Averted. Lots of mobile suits are taken out by gunfire, but the only ones that are actually blown up during battle are in a simulator, taken out by explosives, and Bernie's Zaku at the end when it takes a beam saber through its jetpack. Notably, after the initial attack on the arctic base, we are treated to a view of the aftermath, including at least one GM which is still holding its arm up to aim its gun. Rarely does any Gundam series have whole mobile suits still intact, especially like this.
• Mighty Glacier: The Gundam "Alex" when equipped with its Chobham Armor, which drastically ups its defense but slows it down both via weight and by covering up some of its thrusters. When the armor is ejected, the Alex turns into a Lightning Bruiser.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Colonel Killing.
• Neutral No Longer: Side 6 Riah (the Side depicted in the show) and its gradual shift towards backing the Federation (and the Federation's willingness to take advantage of that) is what kicks off the whole plot.
• Never Trust a Title: Most of the series takes place in U.C. 0079, albeit at the very end of the year. However, the ending takes place in U.C. 0080, after the end of the One Year War.
• New Meat: Bernie is this to the Cyclops Team, an attitude not at all helped by their still dealing with the death of their buddy Andy Strauss in the first episode.
• Nigh-Invulnerability: The Alex's most unique feature among all Gundams is the chobam armor, grey tank-looking armor placed over its standard form. This makes it extremely heavy, but allows it to No-Sell a direct chain-mine detonation.
• Nonstandard Character Design: The Zeon MS featured in this OAV all have a much more detailed, "realistic" look than the lumpy, spiny, almost medieval fantasy armor-like designs from the original series (courtesy of Patlabor's Yutaka Izubuchi). Sourcebooks explain this disparity as a result of the operation to capture the Alex were part of the "United Maintenance Plan", a planned overhaul of several major Zeon mobile suit designs to used standardized, interchangeable parts (so that, say, a Zaku and Dom could use the same joints or thrusters despite originally being made by competing defense contractors) in order to simplify logistics. Like all of Zeon's genuinely good ideas, it was yet another case of too little, too late.
  • The out-of-universe reason was that most mecha designs in the series were originally intended to be modernized reimaginations of the mecha designs from the original Mobile Suit Gundam, but they were retconned into separate models for marketing reasons. Notably, the Blue Destiny games featured the 0080 designs for all of its grunt suits.
• No-Sell: To show off just how powerful the Alex is, it takes a full shotgun blast from the Kämpfer and only receives a few dings to its armor. In contrast, that same blast completely scrapped a Guncannon. When the Alex is hit with the chain mine, the outer armor is damaged but the Alex itself is in tip top shape with only some scratches and a cracked V-fin.
• Nuke 'em: Zeon is not going to let the Federation introduce another Gundam into the war, by any means necessary. Subverted when a Federation fleet catches up with the ship carrying the nuke and the crew immediately abandons the mission.
• Obliviously Evil: At the beginning, Al unknowingly but functionally commits treason on his home colony by helping soldiers of Zeon without understanding what they are up to or the political ramifications of his actions purely because they're mobile suit pilots and he thinks mobile suits are cool.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: The novelization by Kyosuke Yuki (in charge of series composition for the anime) reveals that Dorothy's real name is Dolores, but no one ever calls her that.
• Putting on the Reich: While Zeon always had some thematic ties to Nazi Germany, 0080 marks the point where the connection was reinforced dramatically by having them adopt design elements borrowed from the Third Reich's arsenal (the Zaku II Kai's alternate "Fritz Helm" head, the Panzer Faust disposable rocket launcher) and giving several of the new MS Gratuitous German names (Rick Dom Zwei, Gelgoog Jäger, Kämpfer). This trend would be taken even further in the next OVA, Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory.
• Police Are Useless: Narrowly averted early on. In Episode 3, Alfred is nearly run over by Garcia (who is driving a trailer rig). When Al goes to the police, they initially fail to believe him until he shows them a bruise on his lower back. From here, the cops are surprisingly competent, which nearly leads to their deaths until Al figures this out and pulls a quick save and claims he made the whole thing up to keep the cops from investigating further (which would get them killed by Mikhail). This later comes back to bite Al when he's trying to alert the police to the Zeon scheme to blow up the colony, causing this trope to be played bitterly straight in the end.
• Red Shirt Army: The GMs get it especially bad here and receive a sound thrashing throughout the series. The Watsonian versus Doylist reasons are obvious. In-Universe it's to show just how necessary the Gundam(s) are by highlighting the sheer power difference between them and the grunt suits. Out of Universe it's because the Zeon's side are packed with much more named characters allowing a meaning to be attached to their deaths while the Feddies are largely Faceless Goons.
• Retcon:
  • In a meta sense; Mobile Suit Gundam is one of the only series in the franchise where the protagonist never receives a Mid-Season Upgrade. War in the Pocket retroactively alleviates this exception, providing an explanation why.
  • The Alex having a panoramic cockpit is also a retcon, as sourcebooks published before 0080's debut described the Hizack as the first mobile suit to use it. 0083's GP03 a few years later would also feature a panoramic cockpit, further solidifying the retcon.
  • Several of the mobile suits introduced in 0080 were deliberately made to serve as the "missing link" between machines from the original series and Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam. The Alex presages the Nu Gundam, the GM Sniper II was explicitly made to be the ancestor of the Nemo, and the Hygogg's design was clearly inspired by the Capule.
  • Most of the mobile suits in this OVA were originally meant to be updated redesigns of the same mobile suits from the original series. However, since the design changes were considered too drastic, they were later retconned to be more advanced models of those mobile suits. In particular, the Zeon suits were retconned to be products of the United Maintenance Plan, a plan to streamline mobile suit production and equipment drafted by M'Quve.
• Senseless Sacrifice: Another reason the ending is such a huge Tear Jerker; Berine destroys the Alex at the cost of his own life, in order to save the colony from nuclear annihilation — totally unaware that the nukes were stopped in mid-transit, and the colony was in no danger at all. Bernie ends up dying for nothing.
• Shoo the Dog: Bernie tries to do this with Al when Al tries to convince Bernie to fight the Gundam with his Zaku. He takes Al's Special Forces badge and rips it, showing there was a recorder inside and that the team never cared about Al, to get him to get out of the colony. However, Bernie changes his mind at the end of the episode.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog:
  • Bernie attacks the Alex in order to keep the colony from being nuked, but the ship dispatched with the nuke was captured, and its captain committed suicide. When Al learns this, he rushes to the battle in an attempt to let Bernie know that he doesn't have to fight anymore — arriving just in time to see the explosive end of the fight, nearly dying himself in the process. Played razor straight, and for tragedy. Very effectively.
  • They actually mislead you with another potential STSD story. Killing revealed he was going to nuke the colony regardless of Cyclops' success, just to make sure the Gundam's dead and buried. Regardless of whether or not Bernie would have destroyed the thing, the colony would have been nuked anyways. You'd think that he'd succeed only to realize that they're all doomed anyways, then the series throws you the curve ball above.
• Short-Range Shotgun: Averted for both human-sized and MS-sized shotguns. The Kämpfer's shotgun blasts are powerful enough to completely pierce through the armor of an MP Guncannon even from a long distance. Bernie also manages to shred two Federation soldiers with one shot from a short-barreled shotgun from a surprising distance.
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • The second half of "Bernard Wiseman", a triumphant BGM that plays during the climactic battle between the Alex and Bernie's Zaku, which almost makes you think the story might have a happy ending after all.
  • The upbeat Next Episode music at the end gets really inappropriate by the second half of the series.
  • Not to mention that the series ends with such a happy, upbeat track when the ending is anything but.
• Space Is Noisy: Strangely averted in only one scene in episode 3, when Al and Bernie are outside the colony, and the only sound that can be heard are their voices over radio.
• Spared by the Adaptation: In the novelization, Bernie "miraculously" survived, and he usually lives/can be saved in the Super Robot Wars installments that use 0080.
• The Squad: The Cyclops Team.
• Super Prototype: The Alex, a Newtype-use Gundam intended for Amuro Ray. Since the Federation doesn't have remote weapons yet, "Newtype-use" simply means it's fast enough to keep up with his superhuman reflexes.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • In episode 3, Al lies to the police to not only track down Bernie and his team, but to prevent Garcia and Misha from killing them to hide why they're really in the colony. But when Al learns about the Zeon scheme to blow up the colony, he tries to warn the police out of a genuine desire to help, but they remember he was the kid who lied to them and kick him out without even hearing him out.
  • Episode 4:
    • Bernie brings back photos that Al took of the Gundam to the rest of the team. However, instead of being praised, he was beaten up and berated for acting without orders and breaking into a military base with a child, potentially jeopardizing their entire mission. Also, by the time Bernie got back, Garcia had already gotten the location of the Federation base from Charlie, so his little adventure wasn't even worth the risk.
    • Steiner and Charlie's dialogue reveal that the reason the Cyclops Team was sent on a suicide mission with no backup, no extraction, and a complete rookie tagging along was that they were never actually intended to succeed, and the operation was just a decoy. Sure enough, the moment news of their failure reached Killing, he ordered a nuclear strike on the colony.
  • In Episode 6 it's revealed that the Zeon fleet carrying the Nuke was intercepted and captured by the Federation, which makes sense because the colony had been previously attacked twice in less than a week, so of course they'd send more forces to protect the surrounding space, and easily take out the nuke-bearing fleet that was seemingly comprised of a measly 3 ships.
  • Because of how Stuart (the commander of all Earth Federation troops in Side 6) allowed the Side 6 forces (whose only heavy weapons are anti-tank munitions) to get slaughtered by the Kämpfer in episode 4, they opt not to help the Federation forces when Bernie attacks them to destroy the Alex two episodes later.
  • And finally of course, the ending. It doesn't matter how much is on the line here; Bernie is a rookie piloting a mobile suit that is about to be out-moded in just a few weeks. Chris might not be a Newtype, but she's a lieutenant and piloting the then-most advanced mobile suit on the Federation's side. There's a reason why even though he lost, most people consider it to still be a badass moment.
• Sword Fight: Subverted in episode 4, where the Kämpfer closes in to have one with the Alex, only for the Alex to shred it with one of its gatling guns. Bernie gets into one( well, Sword and Axe) for real after he sets up decoy balloons specifically to trick the Alex into wasting its gatling ammo.
• Throw-Away Guns: The Kämpfer carries two of each of its main weapons (shotgun, giant bazooka, and sturm fausts) because none of them can be reloaded; its only internal weapons are beam sabers and head vulcans.
• Tomboyish Name: Christina MacKenzie usually is referred to as Chris.
• Wham Episode: Episode 4. Most of the Cyclops Team die during the attack on RX-78 Alex, and Chris gets her first taste of actual mobile suit combat.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: A good argument could be made for this series being a deconstruction of this trope, as the series focuses on the Mooks of Mobile Suit Gundam. Especially in light of both the Wham Episode and the ending, considering how Chris never finds out the identity of the pilots she's gunning down.
• You Bastard!: This show is a Deconstruction that seems to question why people love Gundam shows in the first place, when they tend to have such a staunch anti-war message. The final scene uses a group of children as Audience Surrogates, and has them talking about how cool all the recent bloodshed was and how they can't wait for the next war to start, so they can look at all the awesome new mobile suits.
• Your Size May Vary: The size of the mechs portrayed in the show tend to vary wildly from scene to scene with them being portrayed correctly in some or way shorter or taller in others.

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