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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.

Madhouse was hired to make Galaxy Angel into 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 casual 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). So the tropes listed below are the ones present in every episode or series to some degree or another.

The series was initially licensed in the U.S. by Bandai Entertainment, but the series eventually went out of print and then Bandai closed. Luckily, Nozomi Entertainment rescued the series and released it on Blu-ray in 2017 (and uploaded the first series to their official YouTube channel later that year). They re-released Galaxy Angel Z in 2018, and A in August 2019.

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


Tropes:

  • 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: Any sequence involving the Angel or Twin Star Troupes' Emblem Frames.
  • Abhorrent Admirer: Forte keeps running into an octopus alien who does nothing but declare his love for her even after she fires a submachine gun to keep him away.
  • 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
  • All Musicals Are Adaptations
  • Animated Actors: The final episode of X reveals the cast to be these... or not.
  • Anthropomorphic Personification: The villain of one episode turns out to be a manifestation of the survivors' grief and anger after an accident killed countless people.
  • Anyone Can Die: For comedic effect.
  • Art Shift: Happens frequently, for comedic effect.
  • As Long as It Sounds Foreign: Episode 19 of the first season has a cake shop with a sign that reads what is very clearly keyboard smash.
  • 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 Milfeulle while she is baking.
  • Big Ball of Violence: When Milfeulle accidentally insults the other Brigade members and Major Mary at a tense moment, they all whip out blunt instruments and attack her in one of these. Milfeulle actually sidesteps the whole thing, which raises the question of who they're beating up.
  • Blatant Lies:
    Forte: You ate [the forbidden Lost Technology sweetened chestnuts], didn't you?
    Giant Milfeulle: No, I didn't.
    Forte: You ate them, didn't you?
    Giant Milfeulle: No, I didn't.
  • Body Horror:
    • One piece of Lost Technology causes several characters' heads to grow a long, skinny neck from the top with a smaller head on it. It manages to not be too horrifying.
    • A spider jumping into Forte's mouth somehow causes her to start spitting cobwebs, grow extra limbs, and turn purple, before winding up as a largely human-looking spider-themed superheroine.
  • Bowdlerize: While the content and tone of the show remained the same, when the show moved to TV Tokyo starting with Z, Ranpha and Forte's outfits had to be made less revealing due to airing in a Sunday morning kids' timeslot, this change would also carry over to Galaxy Angel Rune for the same reason.
  • Call-Back: Believe it or not, there are numerous callbacks in the later seasons to gags made in the earlier ones, such as Milfeulle singing the theme song for a Combining Mecha or Chitose, Kokomo and Malibu growing larger due to eating sweet broiled chestnuts.
  • Cast from Hit Points:
    • A Lost Technology has the ability to give anyone whatever they desire when activated, at the cost of a random amount of the user's lifespan.
    • Another one gives Reality Warper powers but drains the user's energy, causing them to become emaciated and die unless they eat huge amounts constantly.
  • Cipher Scything: The anime tosses out several aspects of the games it's based on, including the male lead.
  • Class Reunion: Or rather, a military reunion. An episode has Volcott reunite with the old members of the Angel Brigade, all of them looking older versions of the current members. Sure enough, when they flashback to their days of their youth, they all look exactly like the current group, but with a younger Volcott alongside them.
  • Clap Your Hands If You Believe: In one episode the angels are on a space ship trying to defuse a time bomb. Meanwhile, Milfeulle 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
  • Criminal Doppelgänger: "Fallen Angel Dark Space Chazuke" opens with Milfeulle having been seemingly replaced by a fake and getting arrested. The rest of the Angel Brigade then break her out of prison, thinking there's been some sort of mistake, but then the real Milfeulle comes back from shopping, revealing that there really was an evil doppelganger. The fake Milfeulle taunts them by hologram, and reveals that there is an entire Fake Angel Brigade, but while the fake Milfeulle looks identical to the real one, the rest have swapped around heights, body types and personalities.
  • Cuteness Proximity: The entire Brigade (even Vanilla) are affected by this around babies, most notably in the episode where they all adopt babies created by a Lost Technology.
  • Dead Artists Are Better: The plot device with a faked death skyrocketing popularity and recognition is used almost perfectly, although with a military officer instead of an artist.
  • Distracted by the Sexy: One episode had the Angel Brigade dress up in swimsuits in order to distract the opposing team in a baseball game.
  • "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune: All opening and ending themesnote  are performed by the main cast, the Angel Brigade (except for Season 4's first ending theme, performed by Milfeulle and Chitose's VA). Season 2's opening theme appears as part of a string of nightmares Milfeulle has in a Season 3 episode (It Makes Sense in Context), and Season 4's opening is sung by the girls while they are undercover stewardesses on a plane.
  • Edible Theme Naming: The five girls are named after foods and spices. Every episode has some kind of food worked into the title as well.
  • Elephant in the Living Room: There's a planet ruled by a king who has a light fixture pull cord (actually a piece of Lost Technology) sprouting from his head. This is a planet where disrespecting royalty is punishable by death, so everyone pretends it's not there — except the visiting Milfeulle, who can't stop blabbering about it even though she knows she shouldn't.
  • Ensemble Cast: While some episodes focus on one Brigade member to the others' expense, nobody gets to dominate the series.
  • Even the Girls Want Her: When Forte gets transformed into a man, Ranpha starts gushing over her.
  • Everyone Is Related: A particularly baffling episode has Forte and Chitose turn out to be sisters and Milfeulle discover that Vanilla, Malibu and Kokomo are her siblings, Volcott is her uncle, Ranpha is her mother and Mint is her father. This probably shouldn't be taken seriously, insofar as anything can be in this series.
  • 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 Milfeulle. Then Forte starts waving her finger in a circle...
  • Food as Bribe: In one episode, three new Angel Brigade applicants get Milfeulle, Mint and Vanilla to vouch for them using (respectively) whipped cream, popcorn and carrots.
  • For Science!: Malibu builds a machine to predict the future.
  • "Freaky Friday" Flip: The Angel Brigade and Volcott had this happen to them due to a Lost Technology. Day after day, they switch to the wrong bodies. It was then revealed that the Lost Technology's purpose was to send people's souls to Heaven.
  • Freeze-Frame Bonus: Letters shown onscreen tend to have nothing to do with the scene. One is supposedly a love note, but is actually an old Times of London article about the stock market. Another is just word salad.
  • Frog Men: In one episode, the Angels have to deal with a rebellion of froglike humanoid aliens.
  • Funny Octopus:
    • There's a sushi bar run by a giant, Jerkass octopus. They decide to eat him when they've had enough of his abuse.
    • In another episode, the Brigade meets an octopus alien, who is supposedly rich and famous on his home planet. All he does is declare his infatuation with Forte. He reappears several more times and invariably makes passes at her.
    • Later, Ranpha claims that the prince of a planet fell in love with her. The only reason she didn't marry him is because he's an "octopod" alien.
  • Gag Series
  • Gender Bender: One particular Lost Technology invokes this. It swaps the genders of Forte and Volcott in its featured episode. It also invokes Attractive Bent-Gender in Forte as Ranpha becomes infatuated with him later in the episode, to the point where she decides to marry him. In a desperate effort to stay out of the wedding, Forte starts using the Lost Technology to gender bend everyone in the altar.
  • Generation Xerox: Volcott goes to a reunion with his former squad, the Fairy Brigade. Turns out everyone looked like the members of the Angel Brigade in their youth, save for Volcott, who was clearly much younger then.
  • 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.
    • Also in the one where Milfeulle saves her squadmates from a grenade. She's remembering wrong; actually, she accidentally tossed the grenade back at them, and is now the only one who isn't dead.
  • Here We Go Again!: "Shamefully Over-Fried Oysters" ends this way, with Ranpha and Mint demanding that Forte do another challenge to make up for accidentally eating Milfeulle's snacks again. Normad says the exact stock phrase in the dub.
  • 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
  • Hypno Pendulum: Used by Normad in "Shamefully Over-Fried Oysters" to turn Forte into a Girly Girl who has no problem flirting with strange men.
  • Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Every episode has the name of a food inserted.
  • I'm Melting!: Milfeulle melts in one episode as a result of her wishing that she was ice cream.
  • Indirect Kiss: Ranpha invents a recorder made of candy that replicates the taste of when you found your crush's recorder in school and snuck an indirect kiss by playing it when no one was around. Apparently almost everyone in the Galaxy Angel world has done this.
  • Ironic Hell: One episode has the Angels go here, except for Milfeulle who's in an Ironic Heaven.
  • Kewpie Doll Surprise
  • Konami Code: Vanilla uses this in a Dating Sim to unlock an option for 'praying' when asked about her interests.
  • 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 a Lost Technology looking like a pillow, including realities where the Angel Wing is completely serious about their jobs, a pop band, a pirate gang, a basketball team and humanoid lizards.
  • Mundane Afterlife: The episode where everyone went to a domestic hell, acting out insanely boring jobs, after dying during a mission. Except Milfeulle, of course.
  • Muscles Are Meaningless: Ranpha and Forte have typical slender leading-lady builds but are incredibly strong, able to fight much larger enemies hand-to-hand.
  • Negative Continuity: Although the series has a number of call backs to previous episodes, there's no story arc and the frequent Snapbacks mean that trying to arrange the show into a timeline would be an exercise in futility.
  • Offscreen Moment of Awesome: In "Boiled Tiger of Trauma," the Brigade and Volcott are being chased by guerrillas, who start a forest fire to flush them out. They evade the guerrillas by running into the fire... and in the next shot they've made it through, singed but alive and well.
  • The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Normad develops this attitude toward Forte during the episode when they're scheduled to fight in a boxing match.
  • 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.
  • Overly Long Gag: Nomad's full name (for the record, it is: "MA347612890GT4078579132R74 00Z 17924398TZR Two Thousand Modular Guided Type 452963752391MQTO Gold Launch System GLS-equipped Self-Judgment Model Type Double-O Three Seven 293165734285YGNKTIO1200YMCA4126PPPKG53 Normad").
  • Paper-Thin Disguise: Oh no, Milfeulle 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...
  • Philosopher's Stone: There's a gem stored in Angel Base that's a philosopher's stone in all but name (bright red, turns lead into gold, grants eternal youth), and an episode centers around preventing it from falling into the hands of rebel forces. None of this may actually be true, since the episode has a pretty Mind Screw-y All Just a Dream ending.
  • 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.
    • Forte as well when she's genderswapped.
  • Reset Button: Sometimes blatantly invoked with no explanation whatsoever for comic effect. In one episode, all the characters are hanging off a cliff edge, develop various ways to fly, then suddenly lose their methods of flight for no explained reason and are hanging off the cliff again. Normad is terribly confused.
  • Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Volcott goes on one when the Perot boys insult his mustache.
  • Running Gag:
    • In "Lost Item Pot au Feu", Vanilla casually tossing away an item that Milfeulle exerted quite a lot of effort retrieving for her.
    • A character starting to explain how cans of corned beef got their shape and then getting interrupted.
  • Secret Government Warehouse: Shown several times, where Lost Technology is stored on shelves out in the open. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
  • Shout-Out:
  • Snapback: In many episodes the majority of the cast is killed off, the universe is destroyed, or someone is altered permanently in some drastic way.
  • Stable Time Loop: The one where a mysterious suitor asks Vanilla out. It turns out to be Normad, having gone back in time to pre-empt the mysterious suitor who was asking Vanilla out.
  • Stock Ness Monster: In the first AA special, the lake that contestants fly over for the Shine! You Chicken Bastard contest is haunted by a cartoonish-looking serpent called the "Loch Bro Monster," which knocks contestants out of the air.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Surrounded by Idiots: Normad seems to have this attitude generally toward the Brigade (Vanilla excepted). He also drops the line specifically after getting kidnapped by the cat-masked gangsters when they're enacting a convoluted plan to sabotage Milfeulle's entry in a baking contest.
  • Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Parodied in the Super Sentai episode, where Volcott dies and is replaced by his younger brother, a clone, a Body Double, and an Identical Stranger, who all die off-camera. They're up to the younger brother's Backup Twin before it turns out the colonel never actually died in the first place.
  • Taken for Granite:
    • Happens to anyone who challenges an infuriated Volcott to a fight and loses. They turn into memorial statues of themselves, which Malibu calls the "Loser Stone."
    • Subverted in "Fish Jerky Over a Thousand Nights," as instead of actually turning to stone, Vanilla is just encased in a thin layer of stone, and breaks free at the end to resume chasing the now-elderly Kokomo.
  • 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 Milfeulle to awaken Mint's true power... which takes the form of flying and reciting tongue-twisters perfectly.
  • Unexpectedly Dark Episode: Usually one in each season, sprung with sudden viciousness (often involving Forte). Maybe not pitch-black, but with almost zero jokes and with surprisingly real stakes.
  • Unsettling Gender-Reveal: One episode had Kokomo find out he's actually a girl when Ranpha's Bratty Half-Pint nieces come to visit. Turns out Ranpha isn't too far from the truth...
  • Unwanted Assistance: After associating with Milfeulle 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 Milfeulle's particular brand of "friendship".
  • Weight Woe: Indulging in Milfeulle's sweets results in one for the cast. While they don't look any different, their combined weight puts them over the limit for the base's escape capsule during an emergency simulation, prompting Forte to create a torturous weight-loss program of trekking through a desert in sauna suits until they're emaciated. Afterward, they can use the capsule, but to make the simulation "realistic," it provides life support by force-feeding them, causing them to gain huge amounts of weight.
  • When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Or, in this case, a chikuwa.
  • Xenomorph Xerox: The aliens in "Commander Flavored Invasion" look very much like xenomorphs, though they go about their invasion in a completely different way.


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