SDW Heroes Zhao Yun 00 Gundam Command Package Gundam is a Japanese animated franchise created by Yoshiyuki Tomino and Hajime Yatate for the Sunrise studio in 1979. The series is set in the near future where humanity has begun to colonize space and is centered on anthropomorphic combat robots with a human pilot, called mobile suits. It is part of the mecha genre of science fiction, in which it introduced a sense of realism in the narrative and in the treatment of mobile suits as combat weapons which gave rise to the subgenre of real robots in Japan. The franchise began in 1979 with the anime television series Mobile Suit Gundam and after a quiet start it experienced unexpected success in the first half of the 1980s, which will accompany it from then on; thus the franchise has expanded to contain around thirty television series, films, OVAs and ONAs, as well as dozens of manga, light novels, novels and video games. Gundam also relies on a vast and lucrative merchandising, which is dominated by plastic models of mobile suits, the so-called Gunpla, and which constitutes the most profitable brand of the manufacturing company Bandai. Gundam is considered a series of fundamental importance in the panorama of Japanese animation. However, its relevance is manifested above all in the social and cultural sphere, through a tangible presence in the daily life and mass culture of Japan, given by advertising campaigns, quotes, exhibitions and influences in the scientific and technological fields.