The block that raised us, and everything that grew out of it. From the after-school lineup to the late-night Adult Swim run, these are the stories behind the shows that made a generation care about anime: the deals, the decisions, and the fights that got them made. Start anywhere. Arguing encouraged.
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Serial Experiments Lain Was Made by a Team With Almost No TV Anime Experience. The Character Designer Had Never Worked on an Anime Before.
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Attack on Titan Was Rejected for Being Too Dark. The Teenager Who Created It Refused to Change It. It Crossed Into the Prestige-TV Mainstream That Anime Almost Never Reaches.
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Gungrave Launched as a Game and an Anime at the Same Time. Only One of Them Became a Tragedy People Never Forgot.
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Cowboy Bebop’s Own Sponsor Tried to Kill It Halfway Through Production
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Neon Genesis Evangelion Was Made by a Man in the Middle of a Four-Year Depression. It Became One of the Most Influential Anime of the 1990s.
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Death Note Was Built Around a Single Question: Would You Root for the Villain?
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The Woman Who Created Inuyasha Also Created Ranma ½ and Urusei Yatsura. She’s Been Publishing Manga Since 1978 and She’s Still Going.
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Gurren Lagann Starts With a Robot the Size of a Person. By the Final Episode, the Robot Is Bigger Than a Galaxy.
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Paranoia Agent Was Built From Ideas That Didn’t Fit Into Satoshi Kon’s Films. It Was His Only TV Series.
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FLCL Is Six Episodes Long. The Director of Avatar: The Last Airbender Ordered His Staff to Watch All of Them.
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In Darker Than Black, Every Superpower Comes With a Cost. One Character Has to Break His Own Fingers After Every Use.
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Wolf’s Rain Was the Only Show Cowboy Bebop’s Head Writer Ever Created From Scratch.
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