TOKYO, Feb 8 — When Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway: The Sorcery of Nymph Circe hit Japanese cinemas on January 30, audiences expected cutting-edge mecha spectacle — not a blast of late-’80s American rock.
Yet the film’s surprise ending theme, Guns N’ Roses’ 1987 classic Sweet Child o’ Mine, has quickly become one of its biggest talking points, sending downloads of the 39-year-old track soaring 12,166 per cent on the iTunes Store in Japan.
According to Rolling Stone Japan, streaming of the song jumped 410 per cent on Spotify within days of the reveal, while the band’s debut album Appetite for Destruction climbed to 16th place on the iTunes album chart.
Shazam searches also spiked as cinemagoers tried to confirm that, yes, that really was Slash’s unmistakable intro closing out the latest entry in anime’s most storied mecha franchise.
The unexpected pairing makes more sense in context. Hathaway’s story traces back to Yoshiyuki Tomino’s late-1980s novels and follows the fallout of Char’s Counterattack, anchoring the narrative in the era when Sweet Child o’ Mine was still a recent hit. Its lyrics — floating between innocence and melancholy — mirror Hathaway Noa’s own journey from idealistic youth to battle-hardened revolutionary.
Even so, few predicted the cultural impact. The film dominated Japan’s weekend box-office charts, drawing more than 600,000 viewers and ¥1 billion (RM25 million) in five days.
Meanwhile, the classic rock anthem — long a staple of nostalgia playlists — has found new life among younger fans encountering it for the first time through Gundam.
Released in 1987, Sweet Child o’ Mine ranks 88th on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Frontman Axl Rose wrote it as a love letter to his then-girlfriend Erin Everly, daughter of the Everly Brothers.
