OLD First Gundam 1/144 Char's Zaku

Release 1980.9

Price ¥300

BANDAI BANDAI Japan product info

Runners

Parts diagram

Manual

Size comparison with a cigarette pack

The charmingly old-school original Zaku face ^^;

There's no hole to secure the head antenna, so you have to drill one yourself to fix it in place.

Cross-section of the arms and legs.

OLD 1/144 Char's Zaku - As you can see from the cross-section, there's no ankle joint — everything below the knee is one

As you can see from the cross-section, there's no ankle joint — everything below the knee is one fixed part.

Just like the 1/144 First Gundam, the shoulders use a ring-based glue-fixed structure.

The articulation looks a little better than the 1/144 First Gundam.

OLD 1/144 Char's Zaku - The forearm below the shoulder can rotate, allowing arm poses that weren't possible on the 1/144

The forearm below the shoulder can rotate, allowing arm poses that weren't possible on the 1/144 First Gundam.

Zaku Machine Gun firing pose

It's not easy, but a two-handed firing pose is possible too.

Alongside the HGUC Char's Zaku released 22 years later.

OLD 1/144 Char's Zaku - Together with the 1/144 First Gundam, which came out two months earlier. You could call these tw

Together with the 1/144 First Gundam, which came out two months earlier. You could call these two the founding duo that made Gunpla history. ^^

Two months after the very first Gunpla — the 1/144 First Gundam — hit shelves, Char's Zaku in 1/144 scale followed in September 1980, cementing itself as the other pillar of the Gunpla lineup.

As you can see, it sports broad shoulders, an inverted-triangle upper body, thick forearms, and narrow wrists — a classic, charmingly old-school set of proportions. I think that's exactly the appeal of vintage kits: those pure, unpretentious proportions that look like they jumped straight out of an old anime.

The molded color for Char's unit — often jokingly called "bad sausage" — is peak old-kit cheapness, and by today's standards it's got that candy-toy vibe that you really can't call pretty. That said, the color somehow suits the retro proportions, and the fact that Bandai still reissues it in this same old molded color decades later feels like a deliberate, knowing choice on their part. It's not a great color by any means, but honestly, it has to be this color to really feel like you're building a classic kit.

Structurally, just like the 1/144 First Gundam, the ring-type shoulders have to be glued onto the body, so you still need to be careful during shoulder assembly. And while there's no ankle joint at all — everything below the knee is a single part — the overall feel of the articulation is actually a bit better than the 1/144 First Gundam, which did have ankle joints. It's also surprisingly impressive that you can pull off a two-handed Zaku Machine Gun firing pose, something you'd never expect from a vintage kit.

One fun quirk: there's no pre-drilled hole for attaching Char's head antenna, so you have to cut one yourself with a knife and fix it in place. (Of course, all parts need to be glued together.) It's a bit of a shock if you're building a vintage kit for the first time, but this kind of thing — learning basic modifications the easy way, tweaking and fixing as you go — was very much part of early Gunpla culture. ^^

All in all, this is a landmark kit that helped write Gunpla history, and it's a meaningful build for getting a taste of what early Gunpla was all about. Modern kits with their sharp looks and great proportions are great, but this molded color and these proportions are exactly the kind of thing that hits old-school fans right in the nostalgia. A true treasured classic. :-)

AIThis page was translated by Claude Sonnet.