I bet you were thinking I was going to pick on the CG rosarios in the OP sequence – well, think again. The first season of MariMite has something that definitely trumps Kanons rubber ducky – a CG card. Yes, it’s a red rectangle, which rotates around a little. How exciting!

All joking aside, I really like MariMite. I mean, I know it’s pretty much a whole series of non-events, but it’s all so, well, lovely and pleasant, not to mention surprisingly funny (if unintentionally on occasion).

As for what prompted this post, well, I received the first R1 set a few days ago – the same day as the second volume of Gurren Lagann, amusing as they are pretty much as different as you could get. in terms of content, though both are presently receiving low-cost, subtitle-only releases.

Actually, there’s a couple of points worth making about the MariMite release. Curiously, there’s two different subtitle tracks – the standard one, and a second “with honorifics” version. The differences are marginally larger than just honorifics – it reverts some of the name flipping in the regular subtitle track, and things like “Onee-sama” are kept as is rather than attempting an English variant. A little weeabooish, maybe, but nice of them to do it (and it was the track I ended up defaulting to).

Also kind of curious, but very much appreciated, is the fact that they spread the thirteen episodes over four DVDs. They are only single layer DVD5s, but when you are only dealing with three or four episodes, one audio track and only around five minutes of bonus material on the first, it’s more than generous enough. It just strikes me as a little odd when other studios seems to be trying to minimize the size of cheap sets, presumably as in order to reduce the transport and storage costs associated.

As a contrast, Funimations release of the second half of Aquarion (a show which sports Kawamori at his most crack-tastic – it’s hilariously brilliant and utterly trashy simultaneously) split it’s thirteen episodes across two dual-layer DVDs, as opposed to the first set being spread across the three. Given there’s more extras (forty-odd minutes according the the box) and two audio tracks on the DVDs, as well as loosing two gigs worth of storage space compared to MariMite, it does suffer on the technical side as a result, but it’s half the size and half the weight of the MariMite release. Must surely be cheaper to ship out to retailers, not to mention having a smaller in-store footprint.

Not that I really have much of a point here, I’m just surprised they didn’t try to stick MariMite on three disks instead of four. Not that I’m complaining about the fact that we got a higher quality release, it just seems to be contrary to the way the industry has been going R1 side recently.

On a lighter note, Yoshino is definitely my favourite character in MariMite. It’s not really like me, but I was kind of tempted just to make this entire post screengrabs of her – I consider her character design to be pretty much the most lovely and perfect character design in all of animedom ever.

By the way, the first season of MariMite also contains, between it’s last two episodes, what I consider to be one of the most brilliant cliffhangers (and resolutions) ever to be committed to film – yes, even better than that episode of Macross 7 where Mylene almost fell off a ladder before the adbreak. I guess that makes this following series of images something of a spoiler, in so-much as you can actually spoil MariMite (which, given how uneventful the first season is, isn’t really an easy thing to do – there’s very little to spoil).

It’s short-handed just the tiniest bit, but that’s pretty much how it transpires – it literally happens in the last second of episode twelve, and is resolved before the OP sequence of the thirteenth. Genius.

And just a little more Yoshino, from one of the omake featurettes, before closing this post.