Thanks for your comment. People who share your past similar thoughts like yours is the reason why I decided to make this post. Gundam introduced a bunch of new concepts too, but as I said to another writer on here, it's all gradual. Every series introduced its own new thing. Even after Mazinger and before Gundam, Tomino co-created Raideen which gave Great Mazinger a tough time during its airing especially because it had more dramatic aspects which people liked. This forced Toei to innovate and create Grendizer along with Nagai. Tomino also directed Zambot 3, another show that isn't what you would expect from the genre at the time. Just like Nagai's Mazinger Z manga, it got very brutal when the villain decides to attach bombs to people and even Kappei's friends, and this all led to them exploding one by one. Ideon isn't Tomino's first kill them all outing.

The mecha genre was known to be silly with its peers at the time. If they only did what american productions were doing at the time, to continue pandering to kids for blatant profits (G.I Joe anyone?) without bringing about the innovation, we would have never gotten our Tetsujin 28th, Mazinger Z, Gundam and Evangelion.

With the amount of Gundams out there, one would easily think it did everything right, but that's hardly the case. It had one hit anime after it re-aired, but so did Mazinger Z which was a hit from the get-go. Sunrise then had to pump a huge amount of money in its future productions and once they got the ball going, they could easily never let up. Works like Votoms, Vifam, Layzner etc all came from post-gundam's success. The difference is that Mazinger Z is primarily manga first, and whatever is decided for the next Mazinger series is mostly based on the author's whims, while Gundam is the result of several production people agreeing on where they should move on next.

Gundam is great, but lately, Sunrise has been making too much of it, making it feel overly commercialized and overstay its welcome. Tomino's G Reco was definitely curious, but everything else was just TOO much. I can't keep up.