The story of Zeta Gundam is more than three decades old, and the Zeta Gundam compilation movies won't let you forget it. Watching 2005's Heirs to the Stars and Lovers and 2006's Love is the Pulse of the Stars is like excavating an anthropological dig; this trilogy layers brand new material right on top of the old. It's a decision that garnered mixed reviews during its first release, and ten years later, not much has changed. Right Stuf's latest offering brings back the trio as is, without any additional content. It's not the movies that have changed, Right Stuf very likely hopes, but the audience. This collection comes on the heels of the Zeta Gundam Blu-Ray release, available in North America for the first time this year, and just late of the original show's 30th birthday. This DVD re-release makes a hard-to-find DVD set accessible again, and makes the entire story available to a new generation of Zeta Gundam fans.

The result is a new take on Zeta that even TV show viewers will find fresh—if not totally unrecognizable. It makes the unusual decision to commemorate the original TV show with a number of alterations to its art, story, music, and voice acting. From confusing reanimation to a quicker, more upbeat story, to the rocking power ballad inserts of J-rock musician Gackt, it's a mixed bag of positive and negative changes to the original.

Released twenty years after Zeta Gundam first aired on TV in 1985, the Zeta movies make significant alterations to the original canon, but no change is more overt than the decision to redraw and digitally re-master significant sections of the footage. The result is a story that acts like a dialogue between the past and the present. Characters drawn in '85 step into another room, and have suddenly become modernized, with cleaner line art and smoother animation. It's even more jarring when half of a scene is remastered, like when Haman, animated in 1985, shouts loud enough to anger a newly animated 2005 Quattro. As the scene swaps between past and present, it's hard to pay attention to the words when the setting is so artificially altered.

What's most surprising, and a little upsetting, is the selection of scenes that were reanimated. There are a handful of iconic moments in Zeta Gundam: Four and Kamille's rooftop kiss. Quattro's theatrical confrontation with Haman and Scirocco on stage. Kamille's mental Newtype battle with Haman. Not one of these was reanimated! Meanwhile throwaway scenes, such as Bask Om delivering orders to his subordinates, got the star treatment. It's really hard to know what the animators were thinking. It's clear, however, that the movie team did figure out how popular the reanimated material was. While a third of Heirs to the Stars was reanimated, it was more like 75% for the following two movies. It's much smoother and makes a big difference in how well the movies flow, though important scenes still retain their '85 roughness.

The movies also sound different. Characters Fa Yuiry and Four Murasame were the most prominent characters to switch voice actresses, an alteration that enraged some fans. However, the audio quality is excellent because the dialogue was all re-recorded in 2005. No matter how erratic the animation, the sound remains consistent. New songs from Gackt further assist the Shigeaki Saegusa's original 1985 score, giving it a modern vibe with rock elements.

What the characters are saying, however, might be a little surprising. Story alterations brought dialogue changes both large and small. In some places, the new story brings levity to the original Zeta Gundam's somber tone—Minutes after Kamille becomes an orphan, a new scene delivers the infamous “The lieutenant was touching my butt” line, in which Reccoa covers for Kamille with a ridiculous accusation. In other places, it gets even darker. Fans may think they don't have to worry when Four Murasame is in danger, but her revised story arc says otherwise. Given the 300-minute runtime of the movies, this isn't director Yoshiyuki Tomino on a killing spree. Characters' stories and lives are often cut short due to a lack of time.

There are too many alterations to count, but the overall effect is a much swifter pace that takes us through the motions of the story very quickly, sometimes erratically, and sometimes skipping over or revising events altogether. Don't take it as a replacement for the original, however, since the show's notoriously tragic conclusion gets a happy ending makeover—breaking with canon since followup Gundam ZZ assumes the TV end. This is a major sticking point where Zeta fans' opinions will differ from newcomers. Viewers who attempt to watch the movie instead of the lengthy show will find character development, plot transitions, and exposition truncated beyond recognition. But fans who've put the TV show behind them will be able to fill in the blanks and find excitement through discovering each of the ways the movies revise key moments.

The Zeta Gundam movies aren't entirely successful because they're torn between two very different times. Though both are beautiful on their own, the fluid animation of 2005 clashes uncomfortably against the hand-drawn 1985 original. The grim tone of the original show meets new attempts to lighten it up and speed it up in discord. It's like two halves of two excellent but very different shows were spliced together, and even the very best aspects of each half are never enough to reconcile a total lack of harmony. Zeta Gundam is a classic, but its movies are not a must-watch.