My favorites story was the one with the wood and clockwork Japanese mech vs. the iron mech with the European mad scientist at the controls (was it steam, coal powered, or something else?). Very exciting, funny, and a clever spoof of the giant fighting robot genre of anime. Nice bit of steampunk as well.
One of the first anime features I ever saw, WTBS used to show this and a heavily edited
Vampire Hunter D in the 90s on weekends. Considering the growth in popularity and influence anime has had in the US since
Akira first got real notice on these shores, I think TBS missed a real chance to tap into a growing and loyal audience by not creating a block of anime film programming at the time.
SciFi did this a little but never expanded on it or had strings of episodes of OAV series lumped together as "films" but only had part of the series, I remember being annoyed with them for only having the first few episodes of
Record of Lodoss War. And for showing
Casshan Robot Hunter over and over and over, along with
Venus Wars which the guys at the local comic shop hated so much they kept calling it "Penis Wars" If anyone - like say Menard
- wants to make a porn and/or fanboy joke, leave it over there. ==========>
