The first thing that they do is change the art work on the cover of the English VHS boxes. That was some of the work art work ever.
Finish the manga in North America.
Patlabor is one of my favorite series.
Yeah, that'd do it.
Or Not. The only mecha franchises bigger than Neon Genesis Evangelion are Macross and Gundam, this is actually going to be insanely hard.
They're
very different shows. Eva was something else when it first came out, as was Patlabor, but not as much. Eva was dark, introspective and everything else, Patlabor is cops with mecha.
Evangelion also has that stupidly complicated art and crappy budgeting to make it "deep," which will naturally drive talk and everything that comes after.
Maybe if Anno had been a bit better with money, it wouldn't have been as big in Japan, so there's no End of Evangelion, and it just dies there? Meanwhile, to give Patlabor a new series in the early to mid 90's, that pretty much bounces between You're Under Arrest! and Hill Street Blues in feel, and then the two TV series also run on *Toonami in the states. That might do it, simply by drowning Eva under the weight of everything else.