Galaxy Angel (anime)

BROCCOLI had a problem. The first game in the Galaxy Angel gameverse was announced as an epic Dating Sim meets Real Time Strategy game, to much applause and speculation. But as video games often are, Galaxy Angel: Project G.A. was delayed... and they still had an anime deal. A lesser franchise would have cut their losses and gone for the Adaptation Decay that was sure to follow; after all, they had little to no information, just the basic designs and personalities of the five beautiful, powerful and quirky Angels.

The anime producers, however, had another idea.

The Galaxy Angel anime became a strange little Gag Series, featuring a gang of cute but unusual women with jobs as a peacekeeping force in the galaxy. In place of honest Adaptation Decay, they outright parodied the concept, taking out all the characters but the Angels and fitting in new ones, exaggerating the Angels' personalities for comedic effect, and using the premise as an excuse to send them on strange 12-minute excursions.

Galaxy Angel followed an evolution much like many of Cartoon Network's Williams Street productions, gradually almost instantly abandoning continuity and going into more surreal episodic tangents. Although "Lost Technology" is commonly used as a comedic plot device, it is very difficult to predict any given episode, which can range from whole parodies to violent alternate realities. Ironically, this setup makes the show surprisingly accessible to the causal viewer.

The original show lasted four seasons:

• Galaxy Angel (26 episodes)
• Galaxy Angel Z (19 episodes)
• Galaxy Angel A, Galaxy Angel AA and Galaxy Angel S (56 episodes)
• Galaxy Angel X (26 episodes)

A Sequel Series, Galaxy Angel Rune, aired for thirteen half-hour episodes.

Just about every single trope in this wiki gets spoofed at one time or another (Yes, all of them.), but these are the tropes present in every episode or series to some degree or another.

See the character sheet, and would you mind editing it? It desperately needs fans of the series to give it some love.

Tropes used in Galaxy Angel (anime) include:

• Adaptation Decay: The entire show is a parody of this, throwing out everything in the game besides the Angels, their ships and the notion of Lost Technology, and highly exaggerating the rest.
• Aliens Speaking Japanese
• Aerith and Bob: Takuto Mayers has a Japanese first name and a surname that came from a brand of Jamaican rum. The main heroine, Millefeuille Sakuraba, has a first name taken from a type of French pastry and a Japanese surname. Everyone else, for the most part, have weird full names. Though, since this page seems to only refer to the gag anime Takuto may not count.
• All Musicals Are Adaptations
• Animated Actors: The final episode of X reveals the cast to be these...or not.
• Anyone Can Die: For comedic effect.
• Art Shift: Happens frequently, for comedic effect.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Happens several times throughout the series for various reasons. Mostly Lost Technology.
• Balloon Belly: The inevitable result of visiting Millefeuille while she is baking.
• Baker's Dozen: One DVD-exclusive episode per season.
• Blatant Lies:

Forte: You ate [the forbidden Lost Technology sweetened chestnuts], didn't you?
Giant Millefeuille: No, I didn't.
Forte: You ate them, didn't you?
Giant Millefeuille: No, I didn't.

• Call Back: Believe it or not, there are numerous callbacks in the later seasons to gags made in the earlier ones, such as Millefeuille singing the theme song for a Combining Mecha or Chitose, Kokomo and Malibu growing larger due to eating sweet broiled chestnuts.
• Cipher Scything: The anime tossed out several aspects of the games it's based on, including the male lead.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: In one episode the angels are on a space ship trying to defuse a time bomb. Meanwhile, Millefeuille is standing in the corner with Vanilla repeating "teleport, teleport, teleport". She not only teleports out of the room but subsequently removes the entire invading army by teleporting them away.
• Cold Turkeys Are Everywhere: In one episode, Mint is told that she has the kigurumi disease and that if she wears another mascot costume she will die. This conveniently coincides with the Angel Wing's trip to a planet that is in the midst of an animal costume celebration.
• Colour Failure
• Conspicuous CG: Any sequence involving the Angel or Twin Star Troupes' Emblem Frames.
• Corrupt Hick: Parodied. Forte meets a Corrupt Hick owning a hospital full of completely incompetent staff and blaming his bad patient turnout on the existence of a kindly town doctor across the street.
• Even the Girls Want Her: When Forte gets transformed into a man, Ranpha starts gushing over her.
• Five Girl Band
  • The Heroine: Mifeulle
  • The Big Girl: Ranpha
  • The Smart Girl: Mint
  • The Lancer: Forte
  • The Heart: Vanilla
• Flashback Echo: Played for laughs when the Angels come under attack by guerrillas. It turns out each one of them has some kind of traumatic memory from their past...except Millefeuille. Then Forte starts waving her finger in a circle...
• For Science!: Malibu builds a machine to predict the future.
• Gag Series
• Heroic Sacrifice: Subverted in one episode where Normad has to load himself back into his missile in order to destroy a threat to the universe. What he neglected to mention was that they only needed to upload the guidance program.
• Honest Axe: Mint is offered a gold animal costume and a silver animal costume at a time when she believes that wearing an animal costume will kill her. She's not very happy when the water sprite tries to give her both.
• Hurricane of Puns
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Every episode has the name of a food inserted.
• Ironic Hell: One episode has the Angels go here, except for Milfeulle who's in an Ironic Heaven
• JAM Project: Performed the ending theme for AA's final episode.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The Region 1 collection of A is long out of print and impossible to find at non-Crack is Cheaper prices. (The original series and Z's R1 collections suffered the same fate, but those seasons also had individual volume releases that aren't too hard to find yet.)
• Kewpie Doll Surprise
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: By the main characters of Di Gi Charat and Mazinger Z itself.
• Left Hanging: Almost every episode ends abruptly with no resolution. This is even Lampshaded in a Fourth Wall Mail Slot segment where Normad explains that it's because the writers are lazy.
• Living Prop: You can actually see Chitose in the background throughout the first episode of X, before her first actual speaking episode.
• Mildly Military: More like Barely Military.
• Mood Whiplash: A handful of episodes are completely serious.
• The Multiverse: Can be accessed by Lost Technology, including realities where the Angel Wing is completely serious about their jobs, a pop band, a pirate gang, a basketball team and humanoid lizards.
• Negative Continuity
• Our Doors Are Different: several that are best described as art-major sci-fi.
• Out-of-Genre Experience: Westerns, Soap Operas, High School Romance Comedies, Super Robot Anime, you name it.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Oh no, Millefeuille is late to a meeting that could decide the fate of the Angel Wing's funding! What do? Volcott promptly excuses himself from the room...
• Plant Aliens: One notable instance has the Angel Base taken over by a sentient mass of Kelp. It demands that the girls apologize for earlier Kelp-related insults and wait on it hand and foot.
• Porn Stache: Volcott ...and Vanilla.
• Recycled in Space: Many episodes feature a SPACE CONTEST that is otherwise indistinguisable from a Normal Contest.
• Reset Button: Sometimes blatantly invoked with no explanation whatsoever for comic effect. In one episode, all the characters were hanging off a cliff edge, developed various ways to fly, then suddenly lost their methods of flight for no explained reason and were hanging off the cliff again. Normad was terribly confused.
• Screwed by the Network: Bandai Entertainment only dubbed 8 episodes of X, the final season, due to poor sales of AA and S, although most fans of the dub take it as a "fuck you" due to paying full price for an incomplete dub. This happened after the trainwreck company Bandai Visual USA released Rune with no dub and Region 2 format, and volume 1 had a grand total of one episode. It's not even worth it.
• Secret Government Warehouse: shown several times, where Lost Technlology is stored on shelves out in the open. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
• Shout-Out: There's an episode where Ranpha and Col. Volcott are contestants on Takeshi's Castle Charge! The Fearsome Castle.
  • Later episodes pay tribute to Combattler V and Mazinger Z.
  • The cat-masked bandits end all their sentences with -nya, -nyo, or -nyu.
  • AA had Lt. Kensit "The Rattlesnake" complete with eye-patch and a never before seen dilapidated slum; plus a defensive sattelite that's no moon.
  • X has a familar zoom into green numbers that are part of an Epiphanic Prison; as well as one episode with Aliens, a tiny medical experiment, and a giant monster battle.
• Snap Back: In many episodes the majority of the cast is killed off, the universe is destroyed, or someone is altered permanently in some drastic way.
• Something Completely Different: A dramatic episode "played straight" once every season.
• Stock Visual Metaphors: A common one is the tree in autumn outside the hospital window, with the patient's life being as short as the last leaves. Then the tree gets destroyed or the leaves blow off in a sudden wind.
• Stop Helping Me!: After associating with Millefeuille leads to her getting run over by a train, flushed out of an airlock, and being fried during an alien invasion, Chitose becomes terrified of Millefeuille's particular brand of "friendship".
• Strong Family Resemblance: Occasionally, Mint's family will all have rabbit ears (even their butler, maid, and pet), Vanilla's family will all wear the same helmet, and Ranpha's family will all wear the same hair ornaments.
• Surreal Theme Tune: Five of them.
• Theme Naming: The five girls are named after foods and spices.
• Thirteen Episode Anime: Although the writers "cheat" in later seasons by sticking two 15-minute episodes together to fill a half-hour time slot.
• Time to Unlock More True Potential: The Angels are playing the King Game and Vanilla orders Millefeuille to awaken Mint's true power...which takes the form of flying and reciting tongue-twisters perfectly.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer: Or, in this case, a chikuwa.
• Widget Series: The show is loaded with obscure puns, tongue-twisters, Buddhist proverbs and references to Japanese culture that don't translate particularly well.
• Wiki Rule: Yep.
• Blu-Ray: