Gurren Lagann aired during my last, and probably final, big run of watching anime, and let me tell you, there's likely to be few people here into anime as long as I was. Watching Speed Racer and Marine Boy as a kid on a black and white TV in my room in the 70s, hanging out with anime fans who hooked together half a dozen VCRs (and one poor bastard's Betamax!) and duping someone else's fourth generation copy of the Macross movie and Megazone 23. Seeing Akira in a movie theater not once, but TWICE. Renting the slow trickle of badly dubbed anime that started flowing into video rental stores in the early 90s, buying series on VHS where you got two episodes a tape if you were lucky and you had to pick dubbed or subbed, and paid ten dollars more a tape subbed, into the days where anime DVDs and manga were omnipresent. A long ass haul.
And I loved Gurren Lagann, don't get me wrong. But Gurren Lagann was the last series I bought on DVD, and it marked, to me, the end of my interest in current anime. I haven't watched any new anime in years, since the completion of Gurren Lagann, which I liked so much I was torrenting the episodes as fast as someone fan subbed them. But since then, nothing coming out of Japan has really interested me. My favorite anime series remains Cowboy Bebop, and it's been that for
fourteen years. Wow. This started as me heartily recommending Gurren Lagann and turned into a eulogy of my time watching anime.
Hey, though, I gave it over thirty years!