A recent online questionaire quizzed 401 Japanese college students about their experience with the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise in an effort to gauge the popularity of the long-running science fiction / mecha series among younger people, and the results may surprise you.

When posed the question "Have you ever seen any of the Mobile Suit Gundam anime series?", the results were as follows:

YES - 32.4%

NO - 67.6%

College age men indicated a greater amount of familiarity with Mobile Suit Gundam, with 40.2% of them responding YES and 59.8% of them responding NO. College age women, on the other hand, responded with only 24.4% of them responding YES and a whopping 75.6% responding NO.

Students also supplied interesting responses for why they were or were not familiar with the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise.

Among the YES camp, one women noted that her brother was a Gundam otaku, while another explained she watched Gundam with her father, who was a Gundam fan. Still another indicated she caught re-runs of an older Gundam series when she was in elementary school. She started watching it because it looked different from modern cartoons, and continued watching it because she grew fond of the voice actor for one of the characters.

Among the NO camp, one man indicated that he wasn't really interested in manga and anime, while another said he hadn't seen any Gundam because there were so many different series and he didn't know where to start. Another woman claimed she hadn't seen any Gundam because she was more interested in things like Pokémon.

The data was collected via online surveys distributed by the My Navi Student website from June 09 to June 11, 2016. Of the 401 respondents, 204 of them were college age men, while 197 of them were college age women.

Source: My Navi Student via Otakomu

Paul Chapman is the host of The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast and GME! Anime Fun Time.