10 Underrated 1990s Anime You Probably Haven't Seen

Have you heard of Escaflowne, maybe watched it on Saturday morning cartoons in the early 2000s? Well congratulations, you probably missed out on the real series even if you answered yes. Escaflowne's anime originally ran in Japan from 1994-1997 and came to the west on VHS in '98, a few years before Fox Kids picked up the series and dubbed them.

Unfortunately Fox decided to butcher the series by cutting whole episodes worth of footage, adding numerous flashback sequences because they thought kids wouldn't be able to remember recent events in the series, and reduced the significance of the female main character, Hitomi.

How reduced you might ask? Well in the original series Hitomi was the star. The Fox Kids version was more centered around Van Fanel, the *male* pilot of the namesake mecha, Excaflowne.

That's right, Escaflowne is actually an Isekai anime wherein a high school girl with psychic powers is magically transported to a medieval-type world called Gaea where knights pilot ancient magical mechas. Sounds a lot more interesting than a run-of-the-mill lovelorn dude pilots mecha anime, right?