No, not the Pearl Jam song. I'm talking about the anime. It's a horror sci-fi show from 1999 that takes place in the same world as The King of Braves GaoGaiGar. It has very little to do with GaoGaiGar, but a few minor characters show up in Betterman if I'm remembering things correctly. I think there was going to be an anime that was a big crossover between the two that ended up getting canceled. I'm asking because this show has stuck with me ever since I watched it in the early 2000s and it's extremely funny that in the nearly 25 years since I have not seen a single person ever mention it.
Anyway, I'm going off memory, but it's about an organization called Akamatsu Industries investigating a phenomenon called "Algernon", in which people suffer sudden, violent psychotic breaks. They investigate this a lot of the time by punching large monsters with mechs called Neuronoids, which have to be piloted by two individuals that can sync their brains together. A lot of the time they have to be bailed out by Lamia, the dude in the first image who is some type of evolved human who eats special seeds that transform him into Betterman, the dragon type thing in the second image. There are multiple forms of Betterman based on what type of seed he eats.
The protagonist of the show is Keita Aono, who I remember being a very pathetic teenage boy who doesn't actually accomplish much other than be awkward and extremely horny while all of the actual adults and/or Betterman do stuff. Keita's only special quality that makes him useful in any way is that for some reason he has DOUBLE BRAIN and he can pilot a Neuronoid entirely on his own. Whenever the show doesn't feel like being sci-fi horror it switches into Horny Mode by having all of the women at some point accidentally fall over and sit on his face.
There is way, way more than that going on in the show by the end and I remember it being fairly insane. The show goes to great lengths to justify all the insane monster fights and biological horrors they encounter with, uh, an attempt at real world science? Enemies are frequently not defeated by being punched to death, but broken down at the molecular level by Betterman screaming at specific frequencies or something. At some point people start being assassinated by a squad of cloned psychic girls that have been genetically fused with crustaceans? I think? One of the head guys of Akamatsu Industries has a very frail, psychic daughter who can access something called the "Limpid Channel" and can use this to analyze giant monsters and get vague impressions of the immediate future, which she does by being strapped into a chair in a way that doesn't look particularly consensual.
Anyway I'd love to know if anyone actually knows about this show. It's wild and I kind of want to rewatch it sometime? I think I could get away with streaming the show considering the rights holders don't seem to care about it at all.
The GGG x Betterman stuff eventually resurfaced as a web novel (guy over at Pyroxene Scans translated a bunch of it from what I remember) and as a major segment of the plot in Super Robot Wars 30. Betterman also has the bizarre "honor" of being the first widescreen TV anime... in the sense that it was a permanently letterboxed 4:3.
