You can finally watch Gunbuster, one of the most influential anime ever made

polygon.com:

Mankind faces extinction from giant aliens, and the only path toward salvation is giant mechs. In a twist of fate, the most vital mech is piloted by a teenager with confidence issues.

This might sound like the legendary anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion, but it’s not. It’s actually Gunbuster, the iconic mech series from Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno. The 1988 six-episode OVA series was a foundational title for both studio Gainax and Anno. It set the standard for what audiences could expect from Gainax’s epic mech battles, high-concept science fiction, and plentiful fan service. Gunbuster was the first truly profitable title to come out of Gainax, and provided Gainax and Anno with the cachet to explore more challenging projects, like Evangelion. Without Gunbuster, there would be no Evangelion.

While it doesn’t have the reputation of Anno’s more lauded masterpiece, Gunbuster’sinfluence can be seen throughout Gainax’s catalog, as it contains the foundation for all the tropes and ideas that would come to define the studio. Gunbuster is only now, for the first time, being released in the West in full, with a high-definition format and an English dub. But its influence has been all over anime in the decades since it was first released in Japan, whether audiences know it or not.

In 1988, after working on Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honneamise, Anno was preparing for his next big project when he came upon the script for an OVA series that would become Gunbuster. He was intrigued by the script’s correlation to the classic Japanese fairy tale of Urashima Taro, which tells the story of a fisherman who spends a few days with a princess, only to discover 100 years have passed. According to studio Khara’s biography of Anno,