Chronopin: upcoming release dates, events and other important dates

TMS Entertainment's Soreike! Anpanman, based on Takashi Yanase's picture books, began its decades-long run on Nippon TV, making the bean-bun superhero Japan's defining preschool anime.

Gainax's Gunbuster (Top wo Nerae!), the directorial debut of Hideaki Anno, follows aspiring pilot Noriko Takaya as she trains to crew a giant robot defending Earth from an advancing alien species.

The six-episode OVA Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket begins release, following a boy on the neutral space colony Side 6 whose fascination with the One Year War turns serious once Zeon commandos infiltrate his home searching for a hidden Federation mobile suit program.

Toei Animation begins broadcasting Dragon Ball Z, the sequel series to Dragon Ball following an adult Goku, his son Gohan, and the Z Fighters against escalating threats like Frieza, Cell, and Majin Buu.

Kiki's Delivery Service follows a young witch, Kiki, as she leaves home at thirteen to complete her training year in a new city, opening a flying delivery service with her talking cat Jiji.

The 34-meter, five-loop Olympia Looping premiered at Munich's Oktoberfest on 17 September 1989, becoming the largest portable roller coaster ever built and the only one with five inversions.

In 1990, Orange County opened the Frank R. Bowerman Landfill in the hills above Irvine, California, which grew into the ninth-largest landfill in the United States.

The Rocky Mountaineer's first scheduled luxury rail journey left Vancouver for the Canadian Rockies with 200 guests aboard, launching what became one of the world's most iconic train trips.

The Exorcist III is a 1990 American supernatural psychological horror film written for the screen and directed by William Peter Blatty, based on his 1983 novel Legion. It is the third installment in The Exorcist film series and the final installment in Blatty's "Trilogy of Faith" after The Ninth Configuration (1980), serving as a follow-up and direct sequel of The Exorcist (1973).

Hours after announcing allied air attacks on Iraq, President Bush ordered the first emergency sale in the reserve's history. The Energy Department released its sales notice on 17 January 1991 and eventually sold 17.3 million barrels to 13 companies, half of what it offered: bids for sour crude came in too low to accept.

Crayon Shin-chan begins its television run on TV Asahi, an irreverent slice-of-life comedy following five-year-old Shinnosuke "Shin-chan" Nohara and his family in Kasukabe, Saitama.

Munich Airport opened at its current site on 17 May 1992, replacing Munich-Riem, and is one of only two European airports to hold Skytrax's 5-Star rating.

The direct-to-video Giant Robo the Animation: The Day the Earth Stood Still begins release, a seven-episode OVA reviving Mitsuteru Yokoyama's 1960s manga/tokusatsu property with a retro-futurist mecha story about the secret organization Big Fire's plot for world domination.

Developer Triple Five Group opened the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, debuting 330 stores and an indoor amusement park inside the largest shopping mall in the United States.

Shin-Ei Animation's feature-length Crayon Shin-chan TV specials, extended event episodes built around the mischievous five-year-old Shinnosuke Nohara, began airing at the end of 1992.

Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama, a Japanese-Indian animated adaptation of the Hindu epic, releases in Japanese theaters, retelling the exile of Prince Rama and his quest to rescue his wife Sita from the demon king Ravana.

The TV special Dragon Ball Z: The History of Trunks tells the tragedy of an alternate future where the androids have all but wiped out humanity, following a grown Trunks as he trains under a dying Gohan before traveling back in time.

The direct-to-video Kyou kara Ore wa!! begins release, a delinquent-school comedy OVA adapting Hiroyuki Nishimori's manga about two transfer students, Itou and Takashi, who reinvent themselves as tough guys at a new school.

One of the longest-running anime in the medium’s history, Nintama Rantarou has aired on NHK continuously since April 10, 1993, adapting Sōbē Amako's manga about Rantarou, Shinbei, and Kirimaru — first-year students at a Sengoku-era ninja academy who are more interested in food, money, and mischief than in mastering ninjutsu. Produced by Ajia-do, it packages short comic vignettes into each half-hour episode and has grown into a multi-generational institution in Japan, with an episode count now well past 2,000.

Slam Dunk begins its TV run, a basketball comedy-drama following delinquent freshman Hanamichi Sakuragi as he falls for a classmate and, through her, discovers the sport.

Tezuka Productions begins releasing the Black Jack OVA, adapting Osamu Tezuka's manga about an unlicensed surgeon of legendary skill who charges enormous fees to save lives others have given up on.

Cafe Batavia opened in 1993 in the second-oldest building on Jakarta's old town square, a Dutch colonial house restored as a restaurant, with teak floors, ceiling fans and walls papered in old portraits. It faces the former city hall across the cobbles of Fatahillah Square.

The $15BN Channel Tunnel opened, linking Britain to mainland Europe by rail for the first time since the last Ice Age, after six years of construction under the English Channel.

Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) moved into its purpose-built Vauxhall Cross headquarters, ending decades of hiding in increasingly compromised office buildings.

The 1995 relaunch of Chibi Maruko-chan, Momoko Sakura's slice-of-life comedy about a scatterbrained third-grader navigating school, family and small everyday embarrassments in a quiet Japanese town. Produced by Nippon Animation, this version replaced the original 1990-1992 series and has stayed in weekly production ever since, making it one of the longest continuously running anime on air.

Studio Ghibli's Whisper of the Heart releases in Japanese theaters, a coming-of-age story following bookish schoolgirl Shizuku as she chases a mysterious cat and discovers her own ambitions as a writer.

Amazon.com went live from a rented house in Bellevue, Washington, selling books out of a garage-scale operation with a catalogue it did not stock. Within a month it had shipped to all fifty states and forty-five countries.

Gainax's Neon Genesis Evangelion begins airing, a mecha series following teenage pilot Shinji Ikari as NERV's Evangelion units battle mysterious beings called Angels threatening Tokyo-3.

APPP's Golden Boy premieres on home video, a comedic OVA following Kintarou Oe, a law-school graduate who bikes from town to town taking odd jobs and chasing life lessons (and misadventures with women) instead of a career.

Production I.G's Ghost in the Shell opens in Japanese theaters, Mamoru Oshii's cyberpunk thriller adapting Masamune Shirow's manga, following cybernetic Section 9 agent Major Motoko Kusanagi as she hunts a mysterious hacker known as the Puppet Master.

TMS Entertainment's Detective Conan begins its television broadcast, adapting Gosho Aoyama's manga about a teenage detective shrunk into a child's body who solves cases under a false identity while investigating the organization responsible.

Sunrise begins releasing Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team, a One Year War-era OVA following Ensign Shiro Amada as he leads a Ground Type Gundam unit while falling for an enemy Zeon pilot.

Oshkosh Truck Corporation bought fire apparatus builder Pierce Manufacturing outright, a deal that kicked off Oshkosh's diversification and set up Pierce to become the world's largest fire truck maker.

The Roslin Institute reveals that a Finn-Dorset lamb born the previous July was cloned from an adult mammary-gland cell by somatic cell nuclear transfer - the first mammal cloned from an adult somatic cell.

Studio Ghibli's Princess Mononoke opens in Japan, Hayao Miyazaki's epic about a cursed prince caught between the spirits of an ancient forest and the humans of Iron Town.

Gainax's The End of Evangelion opens in Japan, a theatrical film providing an alternate, more conclusive ending to the TV series as NERV comes under full assault from SEELE while Shinji, Asuka, and the rest confront the Human Instrumentality Project.

The 1997 TV adaptation of Kentaro Miura's dark fantasy manga Berserk begins airing, following mercenary swordsman Guts on a revenge-driven hunt for the corrupt king of Midland and the demonic Band of the Falcon that betrayed him.

Frank Gehry's titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum Bilbao opened in October 1997, reviving a struggling industrial city and popularizing the aircraft-design software that made its curved form buildable.

MV Solitaire, converted from a 1972 bulk carrier into a 300-metre pipelaying ship, entered service for Allseas in 1998 and became the world's largest and most powerful pipelay vessel.

Water begins flowing from the newly completed Katse Dam through the Lesotho Highlands Water Project to Johannesburg, the first payment on a 1986 treaty that turns Lesotho’s rainfall into its biggest export.

Artland releases the first episode of the Legend of the Galactic Heroes Gaiden OVA, a collection of side stories set before the main series that trace Reinhard von Lohengramm's rise through the Galactic Empire's command.

Perfect Blue releases in Japanese theaters, Satoshi Kon's directorial debut for Madhouse, a psychological thriller about a retiring pop idol whose grip on reality frays as a stalker and an impersonator blur the line between her old and new selves.

Andoni Luis Aduriz opened his Basque restaurant in Gipuzkoa in March 1998. Restaurant Magazine has counted it among the world's best since 2006, ranking it as high as fourth.

Sunrise's Cowboy Bebop begins airing, a genre-blending space-western following bounty hunters Spike Spiegel, Jet Black, and their crew aboard the ship Bebop.

Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page present Google, a search-engine prototype that ranks pages by the link structure of the web rather than by page text alone. The paper describes PageRank and a prototype indexing 24 million pages.

Triangle Staff's Serial Experiments Lain begins airing, a psychological sci-fi series following withdrawn teenager Lain Iwakura as she is drawn into the Wired, a networked reality blurring into the physical world.

Brain's Base begins releasing Getter Robo: Armageddon, a dark direct-sequel OVA in which Ryoma Nagare and his allies must pilot Getter Robo again after a resurrected Dr. Saotome unleashes a catastrophe that nearly wipes out humanity.

Caterpillar unveiled its 797 — at the time the world's largest and most powerful haul truck — at its Decatur, Illinois assembly plant on 29 September 1998.

Rurouni Kenshin OVA: Trust & Betrayal (Tsuioku-hen) premieres, director Kazuhiro Furuhashi's darker, more graphic prequel OVA telling the origin of Himura Kenshin as the assassin Hitokiri Battousai.

Studio Pierrot's GTO: Great Teacher Onizuka begins airing, following reformed biker-gang delinquent Eikichi Onizuka as he becomes a wildly unconventional high school teacher, adapted from Tohru Fujisawa's manga.