Solo4114
Master Member
Two things.
First, with anime and manga, at least with two of my favorite long-running series, there's very much a sense of "recycling" and immortality of sorts. If not with the specific characters, than with character analogues. So, take Macross. How many times/ways has the original Macross saga been done? At least three (I'm not counting Robotech) by my count. You have the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross anime, Macross: Do You Remember Love?, and Macross: Flashback 2012. Then you get Macross 7, which, while having a bunch of new characters, still falls back on "Bad aliens attack earthlings, who defeat them with the power of music." I seem to recall that Macross Plus had a similar digital idoru involved in its story, but I may be misremembering. It's been a long time since I saw it. Macross Frontier is...mostly the same. Aliens attack, beaten by music. I gather there's a new series, Macross Delta, which has a similar premise. There are often character analogues, too, where Hikaru Ichijyo (Rick Hunter) is reflected in future characters, as is Misa Hayase (Lisa Hayes), as is Lin Minmei (Lynn...actually, never mind. You can probably guess.).
Similar story with the Gundam universe. while it's true that for the first...oh, 10-15 years of the series, you had continuing development with characters (Gundam 0079, Gundam 0080, 0083, Gundam Z, Gundam ZZ, Gundam V, Gundam F91, Char's Counterattack), the situations are almost always recycled. Teenaged prodigy with almost no previous piloting experience takes over the latest razzle-dazzle Gundam, turns out to be a Newtype (or probably one), fights in long war with some of his teenaged buddies against Zeon or some similar power, often with a grudge against a particular Zeon pilot. Char or a Char analogue shows up (dude in metal mask with secret history who's not entirely clearly on the bad guys' side), and...lots of people die. Oh, there's also usually a mass destruction event like dropping a colony on a planet, or firing a massive space laser at a colony or whatever.
It gets even more obvious by the time you get to Gundam Wing, and then Gundam Seed, and Gundam Seed Destiny, and so on. And then they started recycling those properties as Gundam Wing got basically remade as Gundam 00.
Now, while this avoids the cliched notion of "comic book death," it's still basically the same overarching story told again and again, and with similar character archetypes each time. And you also have the whole "updated for the current social age" thing happening, too.
Second, with Bond, the film versions are the ones most prone to "We'll do what's current, and the character never dies." The novels (the original ones, anyway), though, are all just one guy, with his continuing adventures.