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This fan-favorite anime TV series, which debuted in Japan in 1996, is a bizarre combination of low-brow double-entendre comedy and truly adventurous science fiction. It unfolds on a distant planet whose human population, sustained by cloning, is entirely male. All the "women" here are lifelike but entirely submissive robots, known as marionettes. The early episodes are fairly conventional, a mix of splashy design elements from the shojo school of anime for girls, and a plot premise lifted from naughty fantasies like Video Girl Ai, which are aimed at horny adolescent males. Here, too, we have a nebbishy teenaged hero, Otaru, fending off the advances of several nubile nonhuman females, a trio of affectionate automatons named Lime, Cherry, and Bloodberry. But this fast-paced series gets richer as it goes along, and slapstick elements are sidelined. It emerges that each of the leading nations on this planet, Terra 2, are theme-park retro-re-creations of dimly remembered Old Earth originals. Our Asian heroes live in Japoness, a pastiche of samurai-era Tokyo, while their Euro-Trash archenemies have molded nearby Garlant into a Soviet-style dictatorship. The nine episodes in this gorgeous double-disc package launch a story arc about the rising tensions between Japoness and Garlant, and pivot upon the discovery that Otaru's trio of marionettes may be a promising new breed: they have been outfitted with "maiden circuits" that seem to generate quasi-human emotions. Females with free will would be a scary novelty on Terra 2 and could shake the place to its foundations. Stay tuned! --David Chute
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