Any mecha oldheads out there: How was ZZ received at the time?
I'm personally having a lot of fun with the tone of Lupin III suddenly being in Gundam (I think that's a much better swerve away from "war is hell" than "wao so cool" because it's wearing the dissonance on its sleeve), but I know what fanboys tend to be like when anything becomes less serious (on the other hand, I know G Gundam is beloved, so)...
I think to answer this properly you need a different, better-informed kind of fan than me. Probably the answer would involve digging through a bunch of contemporary magazines.
I've never heard, though, that it was poorly received at the time. When ZZ aired, there were older Gundam fans, but nothing like the kind of demographic spread that a forty-year-old property can muster. The first animated stirrings of an impulse to serve up Gundam for an older audience, and to focus UC material on the One Year War, are close in 1986, but they haven't arrived (0080 started coming out in 1989, though you could argue CCA ticks the first box).
And exactly what (TV) Gundam was meant to be was in some ways less defined. I've thought about this before in connection with, of all things, the design of the Zeta itself: it's kind of a non-traditional Gundam design in various ways, right down to the bird-skull head, but of course many of the things we use to understand 'traditional Gundam design' postdate Zeta and ZZ.
I'd gladly defer to anyone who knows more about this than me, though.
I guess I had a hard time placing what the situation was because one of the things that stood out about Zeta to me is it doesn't even really feel like a transitional period between the 79 show and """modern""" Gundam; the latter has just kind of fully arrived
g gundam (and the other 90s AU shows) was pretty contentious back in the day though!! but that's bc gunotas had a more rigid vision of what should be Proper Gundam by then. ZZ seemed well recieved? it still gets a lot of stuff and it seemed to sell well and get tons of fanart in anime mags of the time, so i would say it was well liked
