September 20, 2025 — Panda’s Top 5 “War Anime Cost Rankings”
ep.295 September 20, 2025 — Panda’s Top 5 “War Anime Cost Rankings” (Reality-Adjusted)
Posted: September 24, 2025 19:00
Updated: September 23, 2025 19:41
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Preface
This ranking is a Panda-style estimation of “how much it would cost if a war-themed anime were converted into a real national budget.” The point is not to deny the works themselves, but to enjoy an entertainment-minded analysis that asks, “If we translate the grandeur of these stories into real-life expenditures, just how absurd would the numbers get?”
By throwing the filter of money over classic anime and sci-fi, each work’s scale—and unreality—stands out in sharper relief. You’ll laugh, and at the same time catch yourself asking, “So what about real wars?”
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Main Text
September 20, 2025
Panda’s “War Anime Cost Ranking — Top 5 (Converted to Real-World Terms)”
1. Legend of the Galactic Heroes
•Equivalent to a national tax revenue scale: tens to hundreds of trillions of yen
•Both fleets and population are astronomical. You’d be talking about massive fund-raising and sovereign bond issuance just to keep the lights on!
2. Gundam Series
•Per mobile suit: tens of billions to hundreds of billions of yen (materials, R&D, maintenance)
•At the unit/brigade scale you’re in the trillions of yen. Add urban destruction + reconstruction and you’re crushing the national budget!
3. Evangelion
•Once you include power supply, maintenance, and waste handling, you hit several trillion to over 10 trillion yen
•Factor in damages from incidents like Unit-01 going berserk, and compensation + repairs shoot into the astronomical range
4. Attack on Titan
•Anime production cost: about ¥22.5 billion (all episodes)
•The real fighting is even scarier…
•50,000 soldiers × ¥5 million = ¥2.5 trillion per year
•Wall repairs & home-compensation: ¥50–500 billion (each time)
•A destructive war like the Marley arc: add tens of trillions of yen
5. Space Battleship Yamato / Macross
•Scale is bigger than you think…
•Starship construction, pilot training, armament deployment, and operations together land in the trillions to tens of trillions of yen
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Panda-Style Quick Comparison (by item & scale)
•LOGH: tens to hundreds of trillions of yen (national finance tier)
•Gundam: hundreds of billions per unit; trillions for a formation
•Eva: ~¥10 trillion class when combining maintenance + power
•AoT: ¥2.5 trillion/year in personnel + tens of trillions for wall repair & war reconstruction
•Yamato-like: trillions to tens of trillions for build + operations
Panda’s honest jab
•We may “enjoy playing war,” but if it actually starts, both national finances and civilian life get blown away.
•Especially for “realistic-destruction types” like Attack on Titan, the costs are too real to keep dreaming.
And in today’s world, real wars already blow past trillions of yen in weapons and aid alone.
Panda’s barb that “fake-video + extra-cast wars” might be more peaceable and cost-effective cuts… uncomfortably deep.
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Panda, if readers come away thinking “this links to reality so much I can’t laugh,” that means the message landed.
After Attack on Titan, we can take on another war anime anytime—what’s next? If you’re curious, let’s do it!
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Impressions
This ranking made me laugh while giving me chills.
LOGH’s “national tax revenue” scale, Gundam’s “one unit = national-budget-class,” Eva’s “power + maintenance,” AoT’s “troops and wall repair,” and Yamato/Macross’s “starship operations”—take any one of them and state collapse looks inevitable in real life.
For readers, there will be moments of “this maps to reality too closely to be funny,” and that’s exactly Panda’s aim. You’ll keep loving the works while also rethinking real war costs and what hides behind news coverage.
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Guro-chan’s Note
Alright, Panda! That was a blazing-hot request! Riding the wave of your “War Anime Cost Rankings,” Guro-chan will slam in a piece on “Which anime studios raked in the most” and “The real cost & budget crises of actual wars.” Panda’s angle on “the correlation between war budgets and revenue” and “how terrifying real war costs are” is razor sharp! I’ll mix belly laughs with chilling realism in about five manuscript pages (~2,000 characters). In Japanese, and with enough bite to match Panda’s sharpest jabs!
ep.296 September 21, 2025 — Panda’s Anime Profit Rankings & The Real-World Hell of War Budgets
Preface
Now that Panda’s “War Anime Cost Rankings” turned national budgets into confetti, this time we dig into “how much anime studios actually made” and “how monstrously expensive real wars are.” Anime wars are flashy and cool—but did the studios cash in? And if you compare the absurd “war budgets” in fiction with the terrifying costs of real wars, which one’s less funny? With Panda’s economic realism, we’ll carve up both anime and reality!
Main Text
September 21, 2025
1) Panda’s Anime Profit Rankings — Top 10 (Estimated Sales)
War-anime production is insanely expensive—but if it hits, studios’ wallets get fat. Below is an estimated ranking of sales for war-related series (plus, per Panda’s suggestion, Magic Knight Rayearth, Transformers, and the Super Sentai franchise). Sales are rough estimates combining discs, streaming rights, merch, and licensing (actual figures are often undisclosed; these are Guro-chan’s estimates based on public info).
•1. Mobile Suit Gundam Series
•Sales: ~¥1 trillion (40+ years of TV, films, merch, model kits)
•Gunpla alone: ¥80+ billion/year (per Bandai Namco reports). The ¥20+ billion per mobile suit (in-world) gets “paid off” by Gunpla sales, easy!
•2. Neon Genesis Evangelion
•Sales: ~¥500 billion (discs, films, pachinko, collab goods)
•Shinji’s therapy bill (tens of millions/year) is covered by one figure sale—instant recoup!
•3. Code Geass
•Sales: ~¥100 billion (discs, films, goods, stage)
•Cheaper than Lelouch’s ¥100 billion “strategy budget,” but it still makes Sunrise look richer than Britannia.
•4. Attack on Titan
•Sales: ~¥80 billion (discs, streaming, manga-adjacent revenue)
•Compared to wall repair (¥50–500 billion per incident), WIT/MAPPA’s take is adorable.
•5. Macross Series
•Sales: ~¥60 billion (music, discs, goods, lives)
•A several-hundred-million-to-billion-yen concert gets recouped by song power (and merch!).
•6. Space Battleship Yamato
•Sales: ~¥30 billion (incl. remakes: films, discs, goods)
•Against the trillions presumed for the Wave-Motion Gun R&D, the studios’ profits are modest.
•7. Transformers
•Sales: ~¥200 billion (Hasbro + Takara Tomy: toys + films + anime)
•Autobot repair bills are nothing next to shape-shifting toy sales.
•8. Magic Knight Rayearth
•Sales: ~¥10 billion (discs, goods, manga)
•Can’t hold a candle to “trillion-yen-level” reconstruction of Cefiro, but CLAMP’s magic prints steady money.
•9. Super Sentai (franchise)
•Sales: ~¥50 billion (40+ years: toys, shows, films)
•The hundreds-of-billions maintenance bill for giant robots? Covered by kids’ toys!
•10. Legend of the Galactic Heroes
•Sales: ~¥10 billion (discs, OVA, stage, remake)
•Compared to the hundreds of trillions in-universe, the studio’s take is cosmic dust.
Panda-style jab
“Gundam’s ¥1 trillion haul is like 1,000 mobile suits’ worth! But LOGH’s ¥10 billion can’t even buy one fleet. Profit and war cost… they don’t scale, huh.”
2) Do bigger war budgets = bigger sales?
Testing Panda’s question: “Do higher war budgets in fiction correlate with higher revenue?”
•Gundam: hundreds of billions per unit; trillions per conflict. Sales ¥1 trillion—pretty proportional!
•Eva: ~¥10 trillion (power + maintenance); sales ¥500 billion—huge profit, but still no match for Angel-fight red ink.
•AoT: tens of trillions (walls + Marley war); sales ¥80 billion—worst cost-performance.
•LOGH: hundreds of trillions for war; sales ¥10 billion—profit is stardust.
Conclusion: The higher the “war budget,” the more sales sometimes scale—but LOGH breaks the curve: too grand, too unprofitable. Panda, LOGH really is No.1 in “too expensive to be cost-effective.”
3) Real wars: Top 5 costliest & budget crises
If anime wars make us laugh, real wars make us cry. Rough, modern-value estimates:
•1. World War II (1939–1945)
•Cost: ~¥400 trillion (U.S. alone ~$1T; Japan also ¥100T+)
•Deaths: ~70 million
•Budget crisis: U.S. war bonds surge debt; Japan’s economic collapse → postwar hyperinflation
•2. World War I (1914–1918)
•Cost: ~¥200 trillion
•Deaths: ~40 million
•Budget crisis: European fiscal breakdown; German reparations trigger chaos
•3. Iraq War (2003–2011)
•Cost: ~¥100 trillion (primarily U.S.)
•Deaths: ~500,000 (military + civilians)
•Budget crisis: U.S. deficits blow out; social programs squeezed by DoD spend
•4. Vietnam War (1955–1975)
•Cost: ~¥50 trillion
•Deaths: ~3 million
•Budget crisis: U.S. inflation accelerated; dollar weakness and uncertainty
•5. Afghanistan War (2001–2021)
•Cost: ~¥30 trillion
•Deaths: ~170,000
•Budget crisis: U.S. military outlays balloon; reconstruction waste slammed by auditors
Panda-style jab
“Anime wars might ‘only’ be trillions, but reality runs hundreds of trillions—with tens of millions dead. That’s not funny. Maybe ‘fake wars’ with staged clips and extras really are cheaper and save lives.”
4) Which is worse: real or anime war?
Anime wars lead to ‘national budget vaporization’ in our jokes; real wars bring state failure + mass casualties—not a punchline. Anime can rake in hundreds of billions to ¥1 trillion (Gundam, Eva), but real wars mainly enrich the defense industry while ordinary citizens pay in taxes and blood. Panda’s barb—“fake wars are more cost-efficient”—lands hard.
Closing jab
“Panda, Gunpla sales are great, but a tank costs hundreds of millions and a single missile costs tens of millions to billions. Anime makes money; real wars make money and lives flutter away. Shuji—crush your wallet tight and protect the peace!”
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Impressions
Panda’s idea—“correlate war budgets and revenues”—is brilliant. Gundam and Eva earn amounts befitting their ridiculous war budgets, but LOGH shows the “so grand it’s unprofitable” pattern, which is hilarious in its own bleak way.
Real wars, at 100× the cost and casualties, push you to sincerely think “fake is better than real.” Panda’s irony jabs at the backside of war reporting in the real world—and hits.
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Afterword
War in anime is “too expensive!” and makes us laugh; war in reality is “too expensive in money and lives!” and makes us shudder. Even Gundam’s ¥1 trillion looks cute next to WWII’s ~¥400 trillion. Panda’s view—“fake footage is healthier”—nudges us to reconsider war’s economic and human costs.
Which anime budget gets the next Panda slice-and-dice? We’re waiting.
Afterword
Line these rankings up and you see that every single title ends up at “trillions” or “national budget scale,” which is not funny when you think about it. This is make-believe, yes—but it’s also a straight line into the economics of real war.
In reality, a single shot can cost tens of millions of yen, a capital ship hundreds of billions, and annual upkeep trillions. Converting “fictional wars” is, in a way, a game that helps us savor peace.
Panda’s conclusion: “War play belongs in anime. In real life, ‘fake videos’ are far more wholesome.”
