It really does come down to preference. I personally think 0079 both the movie and the TV show hold up remarkably well too.
Particularly the TV show, given its time constraints and production issues. I think there's probably just as much awe for the original's quality as there are people saying it looks dated. It's all in the eye of the beholder.
There was a really great and insightful watch party thread online that broke down the show episode by episode that I saw in December while I was rewatching it (and introducing my wife to Gundam for the first time). I stumbled across it when I was looking up something about a plot point. I was delighted by what I read because I
love seeing people finding out how good older shows can be. It's the whole reason I write my blog
Animehead's Retroworld. I hope that I can get across why I love them and how watching them can help you appreciate the ways both the medium and certain franchises have evolved and how Japanese pop culture is constantly referencing itself and paying homage to its past.
Anyway I got a little side-tracked with enthusiasm..... the point is some people in this watch party thread hadn't seen it before and they were noticing a lot of the things you mentioned and were blown away. Things like the extremely good fight choreography that homages and takes its cues from classic samurai movies, the in-depth characterisation and the maturity of its writing. Also they were really enjoying the characters and even some of the comedy which really warmed my heart.
I've always been an "all-in" kind of guy on everything I like and because I used to read all the UK Anime magazines in the 90's as a teenager I developed this real hunger of knowledge to find out all I could about
the past of this new exciting thing I loved. Because of the small number of titles available at the time I always feel I've been working backwards in terms of watching older shows.
It's funny to think that by today's distance in time that when I got into Anime the original Gundam was only as old as Madoka Magica and Tiger & Bunny are now.
The big difference though being that by 2011 any of us could watch those two shows I mentioned as soon as they came out via the magic of streaming and digital fansubbing whereas with the original Gundam I had to wait almost 20 years to see it uncut (I passed on the edited dub only 2001 release and waited till it was uncut in 2011).
I think my journey of always playing catch up has helped me appreciate older titles more since I was denied so many of them for so long. Finally being able to watch some of em was like Indy getting his hands on a legendary relic to me.
