LAST EDITED ON Sep-12-14 AT 03:35 PM (EDT)
 
>The writers were adamant: no, never. This was girls entertainment.

I'm... going to have to admit I'm one of the people who aren't quite sure whether they believe that, but.

>There would be no male fliers, thank you.

Actually, check "Belgian Holiday" and "D-Day" again. The German and Allied gliders in both of those episodes are dudes. I'd suspect that of being a backhanded quip on the writers' part about the pressure they were getting to introduce male characters that, when they did, they were unpowered, expendable aircraft, but "Belgian Holiday" is the seventh episode ever, so I doubt there would have been time. Maybe someone in the writers' room was already anticipating it.

Admittedly, the German gliders in particular are really girly boys, but still, they're definitely boys. :)

>Fans also being what they are, there was a lot of fairly ugly
>misogyny involved. Bad things happened to Zero, you guys. A lot. I'll
>leave it at that. You know where to find the materiel if you
>really want it.

Man, I had purged those memory sectors. (Another bulk dōjinshi purchase gone wrong, you'd think I'd learn.) Now they're back. Unclean. Unclean.

>In season four, Hurry and P-51 are having an involved conversation
>involving a lot of bad puns, and they walk by his office... and
>there's a quick, blink-and-you'll-miss shot of his nameplate.
>
>CAMEL, S. (Colonel)
>
>Had to've been deliberate.

Oh, totally. He's mentioned in Hurry's dossier at the back of one of the early manga volumes - turns out he's her grandfather, although neither of them ever acknowledges it at school. (The animators got that joke slightly wrong, or possibly did it slightly wrong on purpose to obfuscate it a little more - he's actually Colonel Sopwith. Almost all the aircraft on the show have their manufacturer's name as their surname, though they rarely get mentioned. There are a few episodes where we see Spitfire signing autographs, though, and in one of the CBI episodes, 40 has to sign for an ammo shipment and we find out that her name is actually Kittyhawk Curtiss.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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