"Lost Universe" ran for 26 episodes and was plagued with numerous production problems. Most notably, large amounts of the raw work for the first few episodes was destroyed in a studio fire and had to be quickly replaced leading to fairly sketchy quality for those episodes. It also ran in during the Southeast Asian financial crisis of 1998 which severely limited budgets for anime series across all studios. A "Lost Universe" film was rumored in 1998, but was cancelled in favor of more "Slayers" films.