Nobody talks about Patalliro! because it's from 1982 and the premise sounds like a joke: a tiny genius prince, diamond smuggling, and an entire cast of impossibly beautiful men orbiting him like planets. It is not a joke. The show commits so completely to its absurdity, camp adventure, genuine stakes, romance subplots that hit sideways, that it loops back around to feeling real. You spend 49 episodes watching a kid outsmart every adult in the room while his bodyguard slowly realizes he's fallen for him, and by the end you believe every second of it. This is what happens when a show for girls in 1982 decides it doesn't need to apologize for what it is.

Patalliro is the short, round boy-king of Marinera, a land of eternal spring somewhere in the South Seas. His country is a major diamond producer, and the king himself owns one of the most productive mines in the world. The International Diamond Syndicate, a vast semi-criminal secret society bent on controlling the global diamond supply, will do anything to seize that mine. Early on it sends a string of bishounen assassins after him. That threat brings in a bodyguard: Major Jack Bancoran of British MI6, nicknamed the Bishounen-Killer because no male under seventeen can resist his allure. To Bancoran's lasting disgust, that includes Patalliro. The story moves between Marinera, MI6 headquarters in London and Bancoran's lavish home, and it also jumps into the past, the future and outer space. The result is an adventure comedy with a romantic streak, adapted from a manga for teenage girls that features gay men and beautiful boys.