151 Tiny Robo is, naturally, based on Giant Robo from Giant Robo: The Night the Earth Stood Still. There is on the market a diecast Giant Robo toy that is precisely the size of - and in fact inspired - Tiny Robo.

194 Corwin delivers on this promise several years later by providing the parts needed to transform Gaigar into Gaogaigar, though there are those, such as the pilots of Super Getter Robo, who would argue the "world's strongest robot" title.

211 I don't know why Kei looks dubious; she's the one who picked the thing out in the first place.

239 Leonard is an avid modeler and has a large collection of model starships which we never got a chance to see.

263 We last saw Gryphon's study in Twilight, where it was the scene of Skuld's arrival in Midgard.

328 I've always been fond of this image. In my mind's eye they always have that semi-crouched posture that ninja minions always have in anime.

330 This track is so historically over-used for Colossally Important Battle Scenes and whatnot that I decided to use it for something frivolous.

408 Signature line from Giant Robo, adapted.

448 Skuld customarily dresses in white and red, so it's just coincidence that she's very Santa-esque today.

467 It appears Skuld is chaotic good.

482 But not forever.

496 It is unknown whether Miki performed the full version of the Frozen Punishment, which involves the victim's pants.

546 "Of course, Professor. You're the only one who knows that Tiny Robo is nuclear-powered!"

551 Skuld is the Norn of Tomorrow and has been known to see the future; she probably doesn't know exactly how the situation before her will eventually be resolved, but she can certainly tell even from a cursory examination that there is, and will be, a situation.

575 At this point I'm not entirely certain myself.

605 This is a hard copy of the Codex Cybertronica, the most ancient Autobot historical document.

615 It's a positronic network probe, used for mapping the connections in a positronic processor such as a droid brain.

647 The Turing Institute (and the planet it's on) are named for the late Alan Turing, a British cryptographer and early AI researcher.

665 By using the phrase "sentient artifacts", Corwin also takes in things like "disembodied" software intelligences, not just robots and their kin.

731 The parallel between R. Dorothy's situation and that of the Rose Bride is not exact, but it's close enough to occur to Utena, since she's a bit preoccupied with the Rose Bride anyway at this point.

823 One of the many places where a permutation of this line from Better Off Dead... turns up in the UF canon.

848 Why Zoner can quote from Star Wars when Obi-Wan Kenobi (by another spelling) was a real person who lived 3,000 years before this story is a question better not examined too closely. It's probably connected to the fact that, as Chaoswalker, he's one of the few people who can remember what the universe was like before it was completely (and inadvertently) re-created by CLULESS in 1991.

898 Corwin, for example, in Symphony 2. Yeah, I already figured that was going to happen, though I wasn't entirely sure how or when.

918 What a horribly worded line. I regret it intensely.

976 As we now know, the Rose Bride can't leave until the tournament is completed.

994 It's because what Zoner just said is almost exactly what Prince Dios said to Utena the first time they met, when she was just a little girl.

1054 We'll find out what this was in the first entr'acte, Azalynn's Winter Holiday.

1204 WPI really has a tiny nuclear reactor. In the original UF it was modified by the forces of evil and later exploded, destroying the entire city of Worcester, for no really acceptable reason.

1224 I liked doing this bit because it's the same scene as the original description of Utena, except with the narrator on the other side of the room, as it were, and that kind of thing always pleases me when I get a chance to work it in.

1320 Tetsuo Asagiri, an Earthman, and Talar Kem, a Jedi Knight from the planet Bismoll, were traveling companions for decades during Earth's first great colonial age. They created the Asagiri Katsujinkenryuu together, fusing together elements of the Jedi path with Tetsuo's family kenjutsu form, Asagiri Shinjinkenryuu.

1350 Gryphon is probably wrong about this, but it seemed like a reasonable estimate at the time.

1367 Ardie was greatly amused by the line "Miyamoto Musashi killed many men with wood," which I admit I could've phrased a bit better.

1450 Kaitlyn, as we will later see, has a similarly hardass "sensei mode", presumably because she learned from Gryphon.

1480 For the second time today, someone's said something to Utena that unknowingly and eerily mirrored something somebody told her before. In this case, Gryphon unwittingly quotes Akio Ohtori's mocking dismissal from their final duel, which sets her off like a bomb.

1483 Gryphon is Force-sensitive and not entirely a stranger to magic, so he perceives Prince Dios's aura as he manifests within Utena, though he doesn't understand exactly what he's seeing.

1501 Zoner and I had a lot of fun blocking out this scene.

1574 Nonstop, no meal, no beverage service.

1598 Another use of the Force in Katsujinkenryuu, though a proper kenjutsuka would call it zanshin. In K-ryuu, at least, zanshin is itself a Force technique.

1640 Larry's "sidekicks" in this context are his two Red Guards, Adam Kawalsky and Nico Feretti, who accompany him almost everywhere he goes.

1671 Well, second tallest, anyway; GENOM Tower is second only to the Entire State Building in height, but neither approaches the Aztechnology Pyramid in square footage.

1721 Such as the fact that she didn't lose her heartsword so much as it was destroyed.

1761 Utena is still unaccustomed to thinking in terms of a world with multiple sentient races. What she really means here is more akin to "Are you mortal?"

1892 Asimov's First Law of Robotics: "A robot may not harm a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm." Though many robots and droids in the UF universe are built with Asimovian behavior restrictions, Dorothy is not among them.

1908 Once again someone unwittingly quotes something from Utena's old life at an oppportune (or inopportune, as you take it) moment. Dorothy's line here is very close to the way Anthy used to describe herself when she believed herself to be nothing more than a cog in the eldritch machine that is the Duelists' Code - which is why it makes Utena so angry to hear another girl dismissing her own value this way now.

1969 Optimus Prime, of course.

1987 A permutation of Roger Smith's "that's what it means to live free" speech from the last episode of the original Big O run.

1996 Not in that way.

2057 Corwin's too out-of-sorts to catch that Zoner's quoting Chris Knight from Real Genius.

2061 Anthy. Like his mother, Corwin is occasionally prescient, though his visions usually take the form of dreams and are often unusefully vague.

2122 Post-Twilight Zoner doesn't embody luck, but Utena's closer than she thinks.

2168 Strictly speaking, it's against the rules to kill the king with a card effect in Knightmare Chess, but they were getting a little tired of the game by that point and just wanted to get it done with a bang.

2179 This is a type of Italian cut-and-thrust broadsword known as a schiavona; I based it on a model that used to be offered in the Museum Replicas catalog.

2205 Among the enchantments laid on the Thorn of the Rose: It always returns to its owner when needed; it cannot be broken by any mortal force (nor most magical ones); it cannot be used against its owner. In D&D3 terms, it's a masterwork adamantine longsword with an enchantment bonus to hit and damage.

2252 CAST IN THE NAME OF GOD, YE NOT GUILTY appears on a display screen in Big O's cockpit whenever the Megadeus is activated in Big O. The Cartoon Network broadcast version changed it to "CAST IN THE NAME OF GOOD" - in some kind of bizarre effort to avoid riling up the religious right, I suppose. Personally, I think "FORGED IN THE NAME OF GOD" would be more appropriate for a weapon, but hey, I didn't coin it. Regardless, the motto traditionally appears on all Valkyrie weapons, including Corwin's draconic warstaff Stick, which was neither cast nor forged, being made of wood.

2304 Wordbinding is practiced not only by the Aesir, but also the Vanir and most of the peoples of Jotunheim, Alfheim, and Svartalfheim.

2354 The Avalon Centre Common Bowl is a spiritual descendent of amphitheatres like the Hatch Shell in Boston and the Hollywood Bowl, which in turn can trace their ancestry back to ancient Greece.

2395 This internal struggle of Gryphon's - which is, after all, the eternal struggle faced by fathers for millennia - will be revisited in The Rose that Blooms in the City of Light.

2441 One of New Avalon's many retro touches: Avalon Bell's phone booth of choice is a large, old-fashioned model like the one in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, updated with a video/data terminal and switchable privacy glass. In Claremont and City Center, one may also encounter red-framed British-style phone boxes.

2448 The hat was Geoff Depew's idea, which led to his being dubbed "Haberdasher to Androids".

2474 Foundation Day is referred to in several other stories, including Titans #2: Welcome Home, as Founders' Day. Foundation Day is more correct, since it's supposed to be a day for celebrating the foundation of New Avalon rather than the founders themselves, but more people call it Founders' Day.

2478 Jerry Walker is based on my high school band and drama teacher, A.J. "Jerry" Walker, who was undoubtedly my favorite member of the Stearns High faculty. He had a habit of staging Eugène Ionesco absurdist dramas for things like the statewide one-act play festival, much to the consternation of the judging panels, who were expecting lighthearted romps through the unchallenging world of pop Americana. We never won, but we always left satisfied.

2485 The sausage carts of Avalon Park hearken back to the hot dog stands one used to find (and perhaps can still find, I haven't been back in years) on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

2489 Fuu Hououji, originally from Magic Knight Rayearth.

2502 Louis Prima, 1936; made famous by the Benny Goodman Orchestra. This song turns up repeatedly in UF (and once in Gods Willing, in which it's performed by the ghosts of Benny Goodman and his band).

2524 A river that falls from the mountains of Alfheim, near the city of Draconia. Well-known for its salmon and rainbow trout.

2608 Allard's is named (out-of-story) for Kent Allard, AKA Lamont Cranston, AKA The Shadow. It's located in the Hotel Monolith, which is named after and resembles the hotel in the 1994 feature film The Shadow.

2715 As it turns out, Vivaldi wrote a couple of different pieces called "Concerto for Two Trumpets". This one is the one in the key of B. Ironically, the iTunes Music Store has it on a compilation of mostly-baroque classical pieces intended for use in weddings.

2760 Unlike many New Avalon features, Chandler's Point is not named for a comic-book creator, but rather for detective novelist Raymond Chandler.

2767 The Wizard of Oz, 1939.

2789 At this point I already knew that Kaitlyn, Utena, and the gang would be leaving Earth at the end of this school year. My initial plan, for which we see abandoned groundwork here, was for their school to relocate to the abandoned original WDF Academy campus on Zeta Cygni II, which is - and this, I admit, would've been a bit mindbending - also a copy of Worcester Polytechnic's 1991 campus. When the time came to commit to that in Reflections in Transition, they ended up going to a totally new school on the Bajoran moon of Jeraddo instead. The original Utopia Planitia shipyard ring complex Corwin alludes to, however, would find new life in later Symphonies as the International Police Space Force's shipyard.

2809 As Juni-chan will discover in Ash Knight.

2813 Specifically wpi.test, home of the WPI online community's flamewars in the late 1980s and early 1990s despite the existence of wpi.flame.

2835 Much has been made in some circles of Gryphon's apparent dictatorship over the Republic of Zeta Cygni. In truth, he's nothing of the sort; most of the matters of day-to-day policy in the Republic are handled by electronic plebiscite (instant voting), and there are well-developed organs of government for both the City of New Avalon and Avalon County that don't involve him at all. He is the Republic's head of state and authorized to speak for the people of Zeta Cygni in matters of international relations and national policy, but only by the continued sufferance of the citizenry, and he cannot abridge the rights and freedoms guaranteed to Zetan citizens by their constitution (which include freedom of speech and of the press, religious freedom to the point where it impacts public safety, and the right to due process of law). It happens that most Zetans agree with him, and that is perhaps to be expected, since he built modern Zetan society largely on his own ideals and that would have tended to attract like-minded settlers, but his power is neither absolute nor permanently guaranteed. One of the reasons why more strictly codified governments like the Earth Alliance hate dealing with the Republic of Zeta Cygni is because its governmental structure is so nebulous - strict governmentalists can't understand how a society that doesn't have a titular head of state, standing military, legislative body, etc. can function, let alone prosper.

2913 Frigits (which really should've been spelled "Fridgits") were magnetic mechanical-puzzle things intended to be set up on refrigerator doors like a sort of vertical Rube Goldberg machine. Zoner bought a set and spent hours fiddling around with them while this piece was in production, and Truss and I were forever knocking them off the fridge while walking through the kitchen and otherwise being frustrated with them.

2928 James Bond movies used to end with "James Bond Will Return In... " and whatever the title of the next movie was going to be.