>>1507265not much, I think
I'd recommend watching at least Char's Counterattack to have more information on the setting, and the movie is good too
if you'd like to go back more, I'd also recommend watching the three Gundam 0079 movies, Zeta Gundam follows that and is also very good
but basically you only need to know that there was a huge war between people who wanted humans to completely move to space and protect the planet earth and people who wanted to stay there (also a bit of pseudoscientific racial superiority rhetoric), earth is now completely fucked up and living conditions deteriorated a lot while more people keep getting sent into space to live there and that led to pro-earth anti-government terrorist organizations to appear both on earth and on the colonies
