As an adolescent, I would stay up to watch Cartoon Network’s late-night, “big kid” block, Adult Swim. In a streaming era, admitting this fact makes me feel 100-years old, but to my generation, Adult Swim was important—its esoteric, low-as-highbrow programming made you feel like you belonged to an exclusive club, even if all it really meant was that your parents paid for cable.
There have been many excellent (and terrible) shows on Adult Swim, but the channel’s biggest contribution is the role it played in popularizing anime in America. Cowboy Bebop debuted in the States on Adult Swim, and close behind it was FLCL—pronounced “Fooly Cooly”—a similarly beloved series that aired on Adult Swim in 2003.
But unlike Cowboy Bebop—which is a beautiful albeit staid take on the cyberspace western—FLCL is impossible to put in a box.