© 2000 Wonder Farm/TNK/Pioneer LDC/PEA.

Hand Maid May. V.1, Maid to Order. V.2, Product Recall. V.3, Memory Failure.
TV series (10 episodes), 2000 + 1 video episode. Director: Shinichiro Kimura. V.1 & V.3, 4 episodes/100 minutes; V.2, 3 episodes/75 minutes. Price & format: VHS English language $24.98; DVD bilingual $29.98. Distributor: Pioneer Entertainment.

The rather avant-garde NieA_7 was followed by a return to the anime "safe formula" for adolescent humor of the '90s: a relentlessly cheerful fantasy with an attractive cartoon art style and chipper bubblegum pop songs, about a handsome but introverted teen boy who is suddenly smothered in cute not-quite-human girls.

Kazuya Saotome is a college student majoring in computer technology and robotics. His rival is Kotaro Nanbara, a comedy-relief rich-kid rotter who is jealous of Kazuya's academic success. Kotaro slips Kazuya a disk containing a super-virus intended to wipe out his class project. Instead the virus connects Kazuya's computer to a Cyberdyne computer superstore, and he accidentally orders a "hand maid," a Barbie-doll sized and lookalike (but bustier) robotic housemaid. May is slightly damaged during delivery, and Kazuya's tinkering to restart her without instructions results in her developing an independent personality. Kazuya is happy to turn his apartment housework over to May, who evolves from mothering him to developing romantic feelings after watching a TV soap opera (rather, a hilariously over-the-top parody of one). Nanbara wants to steal May so he can claim credit for inventing her. But Cyberdyne's bill for May is $1,450,000, and when Kazuya cannot pay, Cyberdyne starts sending collection agents -- all human-sized attractive robot girls -- to repossess her. (It is obvious to the audience far sooner than to the characters that Cyberdyne is in the future and that Nanbara's virus somehow makes time travel possible.) Kazuya's modifications to May's programming prevent this, so all the girls move into his apartment building to keep May and he under embarrassingly close scrutiny. Halfway through the series May gains a full-sized human body, which gives her the hope that her romantic passion for Kazuya may be realized. This doubles the level of the romance-comic-book comedic misunderstandings and double-entendres.

There is some mild human-rights moralizing about intelligence and memory being more important in establishing humanity than whether a person is flesh or circuitry. There are some mild crises every couple of episodes to keep the one-dimensional plot from completely stagnating. There is also some mildly sexist humor; May's breasts are almost as bouncy as her personality, and as a 1/6 scale doll she has a computer cord that plugs into an unmentionable part of her anatomy. One of the attractive human-sized cyberdolls has an I.Q. of 50,000, so she should make an ideal office secretary. But Hand Maid May is so happy and upbeat (even Nanbara is reformed by May's radiant wholesomeness) that it is hard to take offense. This TV production by the TNK studio was numbered episode 1/10, 2/10, and so on, but an extra episode 11/10 was added as a sales hook for the video release.

Boogiepop Phantom. Evolution 01 - 04.
TV series (12 episodes), 2000. Director: Takashi Watanabe. V.1 — V.4, 3 episodes/85 minutes. Price & format: VHS English language $19.98; DVD bilingual $29.95. Distributor: The Right Stuf International.

Another adolescent TV series, but far removed from humor, is Boogiepop Phantom. This 12 episode surrealistic horror mystery, "produced by Project Boogiepop" through the Madhouse studio, was so grim, gory and intellectually challenging that it ran, on TV Tokyo from January 6 through March 23, 2000, in a 1:45 am slot.