So it’s been a bit since I’ve written a Wing Wednesday! So long, apparently, that I forgot it’s supposed to come out on Wednesday. Whoops.
As you’ve probably noticed, we released our Toonami Special on Youtube yesterday, a video you were likely familiar with since we originally released it back in 2020. But why did we choose to put that particular video back up on Youtube? Why now?
Getting Back On Youtube
The simple answer for why we chose March 6th is to celebrate the date Gundam Wing originally appeared on Toonami in the United States. It’s a date that holds a lot of significance for me, personally, because I was 11 and glued to Toonami every day after school at that point in my life. I watched every episode of Gundam Wing when it was brand new, and it was the coolest thing in the world.
But more importantly, we haven’t published much MSAGW content on Youtube because we’re worried about a channel takedown. Every video we publish using Wing visual content runs the risk of a sudden copyright flag in the middle of the night, and if we get three of those, our channel is gone. (Again.) This is why we have this website, and why I pay to host our MSAGW episodes on Vimeo. It’s a safe haven. The problem is… everyone uses Youtube. It’s virtually impossible to grow our channel without posting the content you actually want on our Youtube channel, you know?
So this was an experiment. A toe dipped in the water, if you will. Not a full episode, just a goofy special that can be watched as a standalone experience. But what makes this time different?
Remaking The Visuals
If you watch our original 2020 Toonami release over on Vimeo, you’ll notice a difference in the video quality compared to our 2024 release now on Youtube. That’s because I actually remade and replaced all the Wing visuals using our new source footage. (Well, almost all. I skipped Quatre’s bit because those were all still images.)
When I say “new source footage”, I mean the actual rip of Gundam Wing that we use for our visuals. Our original source footage was a rip of our Wing blurays at the highest quality we could get them. But in the process of digitizing the 1995 show, the blurays are quite grainy and fuzzy, particularly by modern animation standards. This is the footage we used for our first eight episodes, as well as Toonami.
Here you can see our new footage and old footage side by side for comparison. The new footage was altered by an AI to clean up the blocky grain, brighten and saturate colors, and embolden the black lines for character models. We started using the visuals with episode 9, and not only does it look cleaner, but it’s actually easier to make edits for as well due to the clean lines.
But all of these alterations made by the AI come with an interesting by-product: no video we’ve released using this footage has been flagged by Bandai’s copyright bots. In our 2021 channel takedown, episodes 1-8 were all flagged for copyright, but interestingly, episode 9 never was. Since relaunching our channel, the episode 10, 11 and 13 previews we published to Youtube have also never been flagged for copyright. Neither has Heero’s Effin’ Playlist. This could be correlation rather then causation, but the new footage was five-for-five on Youtube. And so far, the Toonami remake makes it six-for-six.
I’m cautiously optimistic that we could bring MSAGW back to Youtube using the new altered footage, but doing so will take a lot of time and energy. The Toonami Special was an experiment to see how much work it would take, and let me tell you. It’s a lot. Every single visual edit made for the original source footage needs to be replaced. Every lipflap, background fix, eye edit, etc. needs to be remade from scratch.
What’s more, our original rips were made by the disc, not by the episode. Meaning that I can’t simply copy/paste our new footage into the same folder and have it all instantly replaced. Instead, I have to go and manually find each and every scene and reapply it from scratch, so I’d effectively be remaking every episode from the ground up. Just with instructions this time.
It’s a huge commitment, and one I only want to make if I know we can put all of our content back on Youtube. In order to test my hypothesis, we should release something else on Youtube using the new footage, something brand new and fun for you guys to enjoy…
Enter Inspector Acht
The new Toonami special wasn’t exactly a 1:1 remake. The original video we released in 2020 ended with a thank you for 10,000 subscribers (ha…) and an open casting call for Hilde and Dorothy (who have since been cast). So this time, I added a new ending. A teaser of things to come. (And a new voice that took advantage of my sore throat I’ve had for the last two weeks.)
Yep. It’s a Toonami sequel. And it’s Acht.
I’ve gone on record saying we’d never put Acht in the show. It’s not that I have anything against him. It’s that his entire two-episode subplot added nothing substantial to the story and I didn’t want to commit any time to him. It was easier to just have Noin say, “We’re going to Antarctica,” then put them in Antarctica. Remember that this is an abridgement, and some things just need cut so we can get on with the story.
But while I was brainstorming for side videos we could try putting on Youtube, I was hit with an idea: What if we revisit our Toonami special and continue it? What if COPPA wasn’t the only threat our pseudo-out-of-character heroes faced? What if we carried our sillier plot forward in the show’s effort to not get cancelled? What character in Gundam Wing has the explicit purpose of trying to cancel something?
This f***ing guy.
And there you have it. I hope you enjoyed revisiting our Toonami Special, and look forward to Twonami, coming whenever it’s ready.
If you guys have any other burning questions about the show’s process, let me know in the comments and I might just answer yours in a future blog post.
See you next Wing Wednesday, on April 3rd!