Animators' Almost-Hidden Humor

Black Magic M-66

Bubblegum Crash!

Bubblegum Crisis

This is an old in-joke. In several Patlabor OVA's (p-series) the two members of the Dirty Pair may be seen standing in the crowd. An example is at the beginning of the "Griffon returns" OVA where one of the villans is juggling and a crowd is watching. Look carefully and yup, it's them.

Madox/01

Just shy of the opening title, the Madox/01 Slave Trooper is diagrammed and labeled. Unfortunately, at the point in time when this disc was subtitled, AnimEigo was still using equipment which effectively allowed no better than VHS resolution on LDs. As a result, many words are unreadable on my version. If you have the Japanese version, maybe you can add to this.

1'54" into the OVA appear these labels for Madox/01:

• Knee labeled "Oldfield.M"
• Hips labeled "Down Town" [??? can't tell for sure]
• Ankles labeled "Hilbert [Hubert??] Laws"

1'56" into the OVA appear these labels for Madox/01:

• Knee labeled "[unreadable], Part I"
• Hips labeled "Trad. Arr. Oldfield"
• Ankles labeled "Tubular Bells"

1'59" into the OVA appear these labels for Madox/01:

• Thigh labeled "The Complete Mike Oldsfield"
• Other side of thigh labeled "Excerpts from [unreadable]"

7'20" into the OVA, the Madox/01 transport container is labeled:

1. Walt Disney productions Stephen Linberger, Director, "The design work for this feature started with the Aircraft
2. For this sequel to the Famous '2001' I designed the exterior of the Russian space ship Leonov. For the interior
3. Originally, working personally with Ridley Scott, I was

Robotech

After SDF-1's radar tower is destroyed, a computer screen on the bridge shows the old ascii computer game 'trek'. It says the Enterprise has been hit by a Klingon. The text displayed is exactly what the old game looks like.

Patlabor 1 & 2 OAV

Contributed by Dietrich Leimsner:

The guard droids in the first part and the military robots in the second part (each appearing in the showdown) are directly taken from mangas by Katsuhiro Otomo. The ones in Patlabor 1 are a quotation from Akira (they just appear in the manga, not in the film, I believe), while the ones in Patlabor 2 are from an older short manga. I can't recall its name (it may be something like "Fireball"), but they were called "Gongs".

Mike Markowski