Martian Successor Nadesico 

Imagine this. Earth's colonies on Mars are attacked by alien invaders. Sounds original, right? (Roll your eyes now, thank you)
Well, we get our butts kicked. And it causes a lot of property damage too. So it's no surprise that one of the space navy's contractors, Negral, decides that it can't afford to loose any more assets, and goes ahead and builds itself a space battleship to protect them. That ship is the Nadesico. Unfortunately, they do run into some trouble crewing the large ship. For example, the best qualified candidate they could find seems to be the daughter of an admiral who scored well on her exams, Yurika Misumaru. Fringe benefit of good academic performance? Well, that's not all. You get a crew of cute girls with strange qualifications. Ruri thinks that everyone around her is a moron. Megumi was a seiyuu (anime voice actor). Minato is...well, the object of the Y-chromosome bearing crew members' desire. And then there's poor Akito, the cook, who is the quite-embarrased object of Yurika's desire. And you wonder why he's so quick to jump into a mecha suit and fight in the vaccum of space? Oh, and did I forget to mention that most of the crew are anime fans as well?

Space combat with mecha and the ubiquitous "lucky-stiff kid who's too dumb to realize that he's got a good thing going in the beautiful woman that's chasing him around" motif make this an interesting comedy, with some inside jokes that only the most dedicated otaku will understand. Recently, AD Vision announced plans to release this television series in the US. Guess they needed something now that Evangelion is over. But since we never actually get any proper anime in the UK, there's not much point really, unless you get the fansubs of course!

Recently AD Vision have started to realease Nadesico on VHS so you can now purchase it in your local store.

Michael Tao