It sets you up with a storybook royal wedding and then quietly takes everything apart, and you don't notice how much it hurt until the credits. Keiko Takemiya's designs give Itaka and Lilia those enormous shoujo eyes and delicate lines, which makes it so much worse when the machine civilization comes down out of that night sky and starts hollowing people out into slaves, the king included. The whole thing runs as one special, so it moves like a compressed epic: a peaceful throne, an invasion, a birth on a doomed night, and twins who can't both stay in the palace. That's the reason people call it slept on. It's a 1982 TV one-off carrying more cosmic grief than most 26-episode space operas manage. Watch Lilia go from a bride in love to a mother making an impossible choice, and tell us you're fine.

On a planet in the Andromeda galaxy, an advanced human civilization is at peace. Gentle Prince Itaka and Princess Lilia of another kingdom are preparing for a love match and to take the throne when a strange object appears in the night sky. It later lands, and a mechanical alien civilization invades, enslaving nearly everyone in Itaka's kingdom. One fateful night Queen Lilia gives birth to twins. To ward off misfortune, the nanny Tarama carries one baby away and places it in the care of the gladiator Balga. No one yet knows that the children were born with great powers, or that they hold the key to resisting an enemy bent on wiping out every human civilization on the planet. A female android who lost her own home world to the machines also arrives and joins forces with the twins. This fantasy science fiction special tells the story in a single episode.