Bandai Entertainment seemed to roll through the US anime scene's most turbulent year since the first Otaku cursed-out a dub like it was a speed bump. Now you know why they change out Power Rangers faster than Menudo. All that Megazord money adds up. It also helps when your US subsidiary consists of a single marketing guy, who says there's a PR guy although nobody has actually ever seen or heard from him. Come to think of it, Bandai started playing it conservative around 2000. They must have caught one of those 20/20 doomsday reports about the big 2000/2001 tick of the tock. In any case their latest contribution to keeping us huddled around the giant flat screens we'll be paying interest on long after they become obsolete is none other than the dynamite Gainax show Gurren Lagann(!), one of the top series headed for the homeless shelter when ADV went kablooie.

From the outside Gurren Lagann may look like just another boy-meets-mecha retread, but this one is from that "other" side of Gainax. Imagine a cluster of cubicles stuffed with random stacks of line art from the last decade of shows, 3 to 4 empty, a computer monitor lined with sticky notes and somewhere in the center an extremely gifted animator who appears to need an immediate nap. That would be the Neon Genesis Evangelion / Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water side. Across the way things appear in similar disarray, only the walls are covered with an overlapping patchwork of everything from a Daisy Duke poster to a Pug calendar from 1995, there's a Famicom on the floor attached to a 13-inch TV on a chair, and the extremely gifted animators all have tattoos, brightly colored hair and are wearing sunglasses keft over from the last Flock of Seagulls concert. That would be the FLCL, Gurren Lagann side. That seemed like an awful long way to go for simple analogy didn't it?