-Strike Witches 1st Series, ep04

As I'm currently working on a series of posts, tentatively titled "Wonderduck's Favorite Anime Series Of All Time," and can't be bothered to come up with something clever today, here's a picture of Gertrud Barkhorn from a series that isn't on the list, Strike Witches the first season, which is a perfectly acceptable show, but doesn't make it onto the short list of my favorite anime series of all time, and thus I end this run-on sentence.

By "(Completely) Random," I mean it.  I used a totally impartial random number generator in Virginia to give me the number of a folder I have sitting on my external hard drive, then chose an episode by waving the mouse over the episodes contained therein with my eyes closed.  Then I chose a spot in the episode, also at random, and voila!  A Barkhorn appears.  Enjoy!

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-Amagami SS, ep16
She's welcoming you with open arms, how sweet!

more...

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-Strike Witches 2 ep12

The new series was really quite good, but it could have used more Sanya V Litvyak for my tastes.  As a lark, I went back and watched the original OVA, which I called "the greatest seven minutes of anime ever", and I discovered something...

-Strike Witches OVA
...it's amazing what you can do with a budget.

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-High School of the Dead, ep11

Who's a cute widdle warrior?  Alice is, Alice is a cute widdle warrior!  Yes she is!  Yes she is! 

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-Sora no Woto, ep 7.5

A wagon-mounted gatling squirtgun created by a genius armament designer being pushed by a nun with the ammo supply carried by a trumpet player, all three of whom are drunk.  Sure, I can see that.

Actually, this DVD-only episode was really, really funny and well worth watching if you're a fan of the show.  Heck, maybe if you aren't a fan, too.  Heck, just for the facial distortions that Noël displays when she reveals her secret weapon:

Gotta love it when a person takes pride in their work...

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-Sketchbook ~full color'S~ ep13

As if having President Aria show up as a bowling alley mascot wasn't enough, Akari makes an appearance too!  Okay, sure, it's actually after the credits roll on the last episode of Sketchbook, but there she is.

There is a little bit of backstory here, of course.  Both Sketchbook and the ARIA franchise were animated by Hal Film Maker, and ARIA the Origination was their next show to air.  In fact, I seem to remember reading somewhere that they even ran in the same timeslot.

I really enjoyed Sketchbook, at least until Kate the Canadian otaku shows up.  At that point, my skin began to crawl a little bit, but not enough to truly dampen my enthusiasm for the show.  My recent rewatch of the series just confirmed that opinion, both of the show and of Kate.

If you liked ARIA or Hidamari Sketch, you'll feel right at home with Sketchbook.

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For a lark, I decided to watch the first episode of Sketchbook ~full color's~ this evening.  I'd forgotten just how much I enjoyed the whole laid-back pace of the show... and then this came across my monitor:

-Sketchbook ~full color's~, Ep01
I nearly fell out of my chair, I was laughing so hard.  I completely forgot that was in there!

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I've begun work on the writeup for the final episode of Ga-Rei Zero.  While you're waiting, please enjoy this picture.

-Hatsukoi Limited ED

Unfortunately, she never actually wears that outfit in the show...

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-Railgun Ep19

Who knew they had sandtrout in the Railgun/Index world?

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1 10 geek points for Wonderduck!

Sandworms everyone knows about, but sandtrout earn you geek points.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at March 03, 2010 09:55 PM (PiXy!)

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-The Cockpit OVA, ep02

If there's one thing military-based anime do well, it's concentrating on the appearance of the hardware being used.  Case in point, the picture above.  That's a Mitsubishi G4M, perhaps better known by its Allied reporting code of "Betty." 

Unfortunately, Bettys were known by their crews as the "Type One Lighter," or "Cigars".  That's what happens when you put big, non-self-sealing fuel tanks in a lightly-built airplane with no armor... and then put it in the path of the Big Blue Blanket.

You may also notice that it's carrying a Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka... which is the whole point of this episode from The Cockpit.  Considering that most of the Ohkas that were carried aloft never made it to a target, and the Bettys almost invariably were shot down, the above picture seems particularly detailed.  Episode 02 also the only of the three episodes I like.  Eventually, I'll get around to a writeup like I promised back in November.

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I'm about halfway through the full rewrite of the dive bomber post.  I decided earlier this evening that I pretty much had to scrap the original version, save for the introduction: that, I kept.

So, tomorrow.  While you're waiting, another in the 'lazy blogger's best friend' series... this one behind a NSFW tag, though:


-Jeremy Clarkson, 1991.

Okay, okay, I'm sorry.  That was mean of me.  Just click the "more" button for the hot girl picture.  It's worth it.


more...

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Since it appears that people actually want to read my thoughts on the dive bomber as a weapons platform, I'll rewrite it on Sunday with an aim of getting it posted that night. (UPDATE: No, it'll be on Monday... I think.)

 And for once, it won't be limited to the Pacific theatre, either... though that's where the majority of the dive bombing action took place.

In fact, it's rather surprising how little dive bombing was used in Europe (other than by Germany and to a lesser extent, Italy), but we'll cover that in the post.

While you're waiting, also by demand, here's another cute girl.

-Hatsukoi Limited, BD ED

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I just spent two hours on a post.  A post that I thought was clever.  It wasn't.  It fails.  Miserably.  On so many different levels.  It's a treatise on how the dive bomber was an evolutionary dead-end, yet a war-winning one.  I'll be darned if I can figure out how to make it something more than "Huh huh huh me luv Dauntless durrrrrr" however.  I've saved it, so it may see the light of day sometime after a major rewrite and much sacrificing of farm animals to dark gods, but for the moment, yeeeesh!

So, instead, here's a cute girl.

-Hatsukoi Limited, ep10

See?  Everybody wins.

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-The Cockpit OVA, ep02

Say what you want about Leiji Matsumoto (and I will!), but he does do "fetishistic detail" very well....  One of the least-loved planes of WWII, the SB2C "Helldiver" earned every bit of its nickname: "Son of a Bitch, 2nd Class".  It was big, unmanueverable, underpowered, and a handful to fly.  Worse yet,  in its first iteration it was actually banned from dive bombing due to structural weakness. 

On the plus side, though, it was fast enough to keep up with escorting fighters, carried a bombload almost twice that of the plane it replaced, the Dauntless, had a heavier armament and a longer range.  Eventually, over 7000 copies of "The Beast" were built.

It barely appears in The Cockpit ep02; it takes longer to read this post than it's on screen. 

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-Kiddy Girl -and, ep01

I lasted about seven minutes before I couldn't take it anymore, but really, how could you expect me to pass that screencap up?

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-Fate/Stay Night, ep04

This is funnier out-of-context than in.

Who would have imagined?  F/SN is a slice-of-life fighting show!

UPDATE:  No wonder I like the music for the show: Kenji Kawai was the composer.

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1 OK, I think the term "slice of life" is now officially being abused.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at October 11, 2009 02:25 AM (2rIl8)

2 See, I was all set never to worry about F/SN, and then you had to go and use the magic words:  soundtrack by Kenji Kawai.

I'm re-watching Vampire Princess Miyu TV now, mainly because Kenji Kawai did the OST and it's perfect.  And I'm contemplating watching Blue Seed again (which is, at least, a series with better writing than VPM) because you-know-who did the music, and I happened to listen to a couple of tracks from that OST a few days ago.

*sigh*  The life of an anime fan is fraught with peril.

Posted by: Ed Hering at October 11, 2009 07:16 AM (z8tFa)

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-Sora no Manimani, ep08

Well, of course Sayo lives in a temple... it makes perfect sense, all things considered.  *rolling eyes*

Alas, this is a fantasy sequence (though she does live in a temple).  No miko magic here, probably... though one could always hope.

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So I was watching the series Rozen Maiden tonight, and while I'm unsure how I feel about it, I did notice something that set me to laughing.

It appears that the main character, Jun, is something of a F1 fan!  For instance:

-Rozen Maiden, ep03
Please notice the poster directly above his bed.  Here's a better look at it:

While you can't see it too clearly in either shot, the poster shows the year of the race as being 1994.  So, I looked up the poster for the actual 1994 Grand Prix of Monaco:

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-Bakemonogatari, ep06

"Araragi-kun, your wounds heal very fast, don’t they? So I bet it’ll be okay if I just took out an eyeball."

And this is a happy couple!  Eeeeeesh... remind me never to piss off Tsundere-chan, 'k?

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-Taisho Yakyuu Musume ep03

After that debacle of a 4th inning (and game, for that matter) on Wednesday night, I've given up on my Cubs for the season.  If they make it to the playoffs, swell.  But I'm no longer investing any more time than I absolutely have to to the Cubs this year.

Perhaps that makes me a 'bad fan' or something.  So be it.  They're a bad team, so I think I'm justified.

Go Bears.

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