A little something different for Mecha Monday: Who wants to watch the original Gundam?

Because, as it turns out, the entire series is on YouTube for free! I feel a tad dumb for not knowing this sooner, especially since it's been on there for two years. I'd suggest muting the sound for the first minute or so on each episode. All of them have a commercial for the Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn DVD at the beginning. Then there's the music. I mean, if you're into listening to a guy singing the theme music overly-dramatically in Japanese, then you're day is made.

If you've never watch Mobile Suit Gundam, you are in a treat. The whole premise is that it's the year 079 UC - Universal Century) and a good chunk of the human race is living in giant space colonies orbiting the Earth, called Sides. Well, at the beginning of the year, a group of colonies, Side 3, join together as the Principality of Zeon, declare independence from the Earth and proceeds to commit acts of genocide that, if real, would made the Holocaust look minor by comparison. Both Zeon and the Earth Federation employed nukes, but the former went further. Zeon forces would actually wipe out the entire population of Federation-allied colonies or ones they suspected supported their enemies by pumping nerve gas into their air supply. Oh, it gets worse, believe it or not. I guess the writers really wanted to make Zeon totally despicable, because these guys would use colonies themselves as weapons against Earth. Believe it or not, Zeon would drop a colony into the Earth's atmosphere and completely wiped out Sydney, Australia.

Space colonies as kinetic weapons. Damn.

In any event, before the year was over, half the populations of the two sides were killed and common sense finally came to them. Horrified by what they'd done, Earth and Zeon signed a treaty in Antarctica agreeing not to go extreme like that again. The show opens in the eighth month of the One Year War. Anyway, check out the first episode below.



That awkward moment when a teenager with no prior experience at piloting a mecha manages to destroy several experienced veteran pilots.