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Debuting over Japanese television under the title Toraigan in 1998, the half-hour animé series Trigun was, like so many others in the sci-fi genre, essentially an outer-space Western. The hero of the piece was, technically speaking, the villain: Vash the Stampede, the most notorious outlaw on the planet Gunsmoke. With a reward of 60 billion dollars on his head, the blond, blue-eyed Vash would have been well-advised to keep himself scarce, but he insisted upon poking about and trying to rescue the weak and helpless from worse outlaws than himself. And besides, despite his gunslinging prowess, Vash never killed anybody (a rarity in a Western, to say nothing of an animé series). In America, Trigun premiered March 31, 2003, on cable's Cartoon Network.