Bandai Entertainment has announced the licensing of Planetes, the 26-episode science fiction anime series produced in 2003 by Bandai Visual and Sunrise.  Set in the year 2075, Planetes is a realistic 'hard' science fiction saga whose hero works on a space station sweeping up space debris and dreams of owning a space ship of his own.  While the carefully extrapolated 'hard' sci-fi anime series like Planetes have never been as popular as the more fantastic and apocalyptic series such as Evangelion, Planetes is extremely well produced and should appeal strongly to both hardcore anime and science fiction fans.

Bandai has also announced the acquisition of the 13-episode Avenger anime series produced by Bee Train, the studio responsible for Noir.  In this bleak look at the future, mankind has been forced to live in deteriorating dome cities and animated 'dolls' take the place of children.  Though its narrative line is a jumbled mixture of science fiction fact and fantasy, Avenger gets by on pure style.

Bandai's third new anime announcement is the Shin Megami Tenshi Devi Children anime TV series, which has been re-titled Fantastic Children for it U.S. release.  The 50-episode series, which began its run on Japanese TV in 2000, is based on a video game franchise and is associated with another card-collecting game in the same vein as Pokemon, Digimon, and Yu-Gi-Oh in which kids collect trading cards that feature various monsters.