Oh crap, I have explain Double Zeta. What have I done?
OK, Double Zeta (ZZ) was the third Gundam TV series and an immediate sequel to Zeta. Zeta had gotten exceptionally bleak, and Double Zeta was something of a pendulum swing towards the other extreme. I don't think that's immediately a bad thing, although I've not heard much that makes me want to watch it. ZZ, in my limited understanding, seems to be a regression to older tropes, with many shenanigans in the first half, only for Tomino to take it seriously again in the second half, after the Char's Counterattack film was greenlit. The military realism seems to have faded with this one, and I have some deeply undiplomatic things to say about Neo Zeon, both in the general and the specific, but I digress. While not unpopular, ZZ doesn't the get the same reverence as the preceding two series. None of the above is me saying it's a bad show, but it is a hard sell. It does have some memorably excessive mecha in it though, see the eponymous Gundam for example, so there is that.
The GM III is of course, by some margin, less immediately interesting than the entire Neo Zeon fleet and whatever Judau's bunch happened to be fielding at the time. With the Titans gone, Federation arms development seems to have stalled a wee bit, and basically everything with a monoeye has either been retired or absorbed into the various Zeon spin-offs. A casual glance at the animation roster implies that the GM III is the only machine the Feds got to mass production during the ZZ period, and is arguably the only thing the Feds actually made during that period. I am not joking. Ancillary media like the famous Gundam Sentinel adds a few, but, yeah. The main thing the Federation did was upgrade the GM II to III. My research indicates this was mainly a refit situation too, new build machines ending up with a slightly different name. I have two opinions about this. 1) If you're doing military realism, it makes sense to incremental improvements to platforms for any number of practical/boring/sensible/logistical reasons. 2) As mentioned, ZZ really isn't doing military realism, and the GM II was outdated at the start of last season, so it doesn't reflect well on the Feddies.
I'm put in mind of the term "bomb truck". This can refer to an older generation of jet fighter, one that has aged out of frontline roles, and now operates as an ordnance carrier. That's what the GM III looks like to me. It's a skinny frame whose engines have been enlarged, but now mainly carries missiles. Said missiles are however in hardpoints, so you can remove them, and go for a more melee focused machine if that's what you want.
As a kit, the GM III invites comparison with the Nemo, and that Origin GM. It's from 2011, so it's a polycaps build with 7(?!) hands, and some waterslide decals. Joint design seems fairly modern, and was actually a touch closer to the Origin version than I expected. As it's an older kit it uses stickers marked with kanji, and, as you may recall, stickers are my recurrent bugbear of gunpla design. While largely inoffensive, or easily avoided with paint, there's a teal trim you have to sticker, as well as yet more of the red lined thrusters common to older designs. As a side note: Gundam Unicorn updated the colour scheme and removed some of this inconvenience, but other than a P Bandai release that's not something you can easily take advantage of. It would possibly be an airbrush job at that point. Furthermore, even with the stickers, there's areas like the missile pods and the inside of the shield that needs some dark grey. All in all: this makes for an acceptable mid-tier kit, with some ignorable flaws, but enough to annoy a perfectionist or GM III stan. I'm not so much the former these days, and I'm not sure the latter exists, so I'm fine with it. I did find that the parts fit wasn’t great in a couple of places, but maybe that’s just bad luck.
I did a basic weathering job on this one, picking out some bits with paint, and some with stickers. I’m not happy with the leg thrusters, this plastic did not like paint, but hopefully it doesn’t look that bad on the photos.
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