Bridge Bunnies / Anime & Manga

• Macross:
  • Kim, Shammy, and Vanessa (along with Misa and Claudia) from Super Dimension Fortress Macross are the Trope Namers.
    • The Robotech novels by Jack McKinney have Kim, Shammy, and Vanessa affectionately referred to as "the Bridge Bunnies" by the rest of the crew. The snarkier ones who dared used the nickname "Gloval's Harem" learned very quickly from Claudia to never say that to their faces.
  • Macross II, a sequel to Super Dimension Fortress Macross made without the original creators, included three young female mecha pilots (Natasha, Saori, and Amy) who fulfilled a similar function.
  • Sally and Miho from Macross 7.
  • Macross Frontier has a team of bunnies on the job on the Quarter, as well as Bobby, the male helmsman who is camp enough to count.
  • Another set of three bunnies is present in Macross Delta.
  • The American-created sequel film to Robotech, The Sentinels, genderflips this trope by having the Commanding officer of the SDF-3 (and former Bridge Bunny), Admiral Lisa Hayes-Hunter, select a trio of handsome men to fill the same roles on her bridge.
• Agent Aika has a spaceship filled with (almost) nothing but women in stripperific clothes. They also all have the personality of a piece of toast, though they are obviously very capable in fighting and flying a gigantic spaceship.
• Martian Successor Nadesico's bridge crew were competent ship-runners supporting their Genius Ditz commander. Ruri and Megumi, particularly, had several focus episodes.
• All series of the Mazinger trilogy (Mazinger Z, Great Mazinger and UFO Robo Grendizer) featured Bridge Bunnies. They used to be a male trio, though, and wore white uniforms. They performed the ordinary functions of Mission Control, collecting and interpreting data and reading it to The Professor or the pilots of the Humongous Mecha, as well as sending them orders or receiving their messages. The trio of Grendizer Bridge Bunnies were called Hayashi, Yamada, and Aoi.
• On Simoun, the Arcus Prima had them, but the Messis didn't. Of course, given the Simoun universe, it's possible that some or all of the Bridge Bunnies could have been young men who hadn't lost their female secondary sex characteristics yet.
• Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny: the lone female bridge bunny (Miriallia Haw aka Milly who was also one in the previous series) plays a relatively large role in the story. In the original Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, after going from Rich Bitch to Fallen Princess, Fllay Alster becomes a bridge bunny under Natarle Badgiruel's orders in the Dominion. The Archangel, meanwhile, has the female (acting) captain Murrue, Milly herself, and a group of male bridge bunnies leaded (sorta) by Sai Argyle. All of the Dominion bunnies, along with Natarle and including Fllay, get killed in the final battle when Le-Creuset blows up their escape pod for the kicks. The Archangel ones survive.
• Mobile Suit Gundam had Sayla Mass, Frau Bow, and Mirai Yashima (who actually was the pilot of the ship, making her The Lancer to The Captain Bright Noa), in addition to two male Bunnies named Marker and Oscar whose posts are over everyone else's heads. Sayla eventually gets promoted from Bridge Bunny to fighter pilot. Averted in Zeta Gundam, where the bridge bunnies that helped Captain Henken Beckner and later Captain Bright are male.
• Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha: Amy Limietta together with Those Two Guys Allex and Landy for the Arthra in the first two seasons. The third season has Shario Finieno, Alto Krauette, and Lucino Lilie for Long Arch. In both cases, the commanding officer is also female, along with almost everyone else in the show.
  • This is later subverted in the third season, after the destruction of Long Arch, Alto becomes the new helicopter pilot who replaces Vice, and Lucino becomes the helmswoman of the Arthra which replaces Long Arch, leaving Shario alone with Griffith.
• Most of Kaiba's monitoring staff during the Battle City tournament and Kaiba Corp Grand Prix arcs (and they all look the same except for their hair colors). Hilariously lampshaded in Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series:
  Mokuba: You have a harem big bro?
  Kaiba: Yes. I created them to shun them with my cold indifference.
• Tenchi Muyo! GXP: Yamada Seina's constantly-growing harem effectively serves as his bridge bunnies. Earlier, Those Three Guys filled the role before being Put on a Bus.
• Starship Operators: Naturally, most of the cast are female. This is justified by the fact that they're essentially a renegade ship funded and filmed by a television company that demanded that they switch the crews of the three bridges to all-female except the Captain (eye candy for the viewer, both in real life and in-universe).
• Idolmaster: Xenoglossia: Naze, Sorewa, and Nareba.
• Ah! My Goddess surprisingly had this in The Movie, with Peorth having three subordinates in overseeing the Yggdrasil system: Ere, Ex, and Chrono. It's worth noting that, excluding their unseen boss, all professional employees of Heaven's Headquarters are women, excluding ceremonial (and menial) guards who're posted outdoors.
• Digimon:
  • Digimon Tamers features the Hypnos operators Riley/Reika and Tally/Megumi. Riley advances to Ascended Extra status (due to her relationship with Yamaki), but Tally's role never expands beyond "We've got another Wild One; deploying tracer."
  • Digimon Data Squad brings us another set: Miki and Megumi. (Yes, another Megumi with short blonde hair and no, she doesn't get any more character development. Be sure to check them out when the episode is animated by the 'fanservice' team.)
  • Savers subverts it occasionally, when they actually go out and assist in the battle. The two PawnChessmon seen doing menial chores around the base belong to them.
• Ghost in the Shell:
  • There is a line of mass-produced female Bridge Bunny androids. Different organisations use different models, but every bunny-bot in the organisation is identical - Section 9 have brunette androids in red blazers, and the army seem to use models with short black hair and glasses. Not only can they man the control centre, but they also come in handy when in one episode, two are used as sexy twins to distract the guards.
  • Besides serving coffee, Section 9's operators are also the sole pilots of the unit's tilt-rotor aircraft, and can even take care of children.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion has Maya Ibuki, Makoto Hyuga, and Shigeru Aoba. There are a bunch of others as well, but none are given names, distinctive character designs, or personalities. In a break from the normal pattern, Maya is the lone female bridge bunny of note, and the remainder are evenly distributed between the sexes.
  • In the Rebuild of Evangelion movies, Midori Kitakami, Hideki Tama, Kouji Takao and Sumire Nagara join the cast as the bridge bunnies of the Wunder alongside the original trio. While Hyuga and Aoba haven't changed much during the Time Skip aside from picking up facial hair, Maya has turned into a misandric Drill Sergeant Nasty delivering orders to the junior bunnies at the top of her lungs.
• Played for laughs in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. The immensely popular episode "Day of Sagittarius" has our Five-Man Band thrust into the roles of space battlefleet commanders, and their ships are all staffed with Bridge Bunnies of their own imagining.
  • Haruhi's ship has assorted aliens.
  • Itsuki's ship is staffed with henohenomoheji, actually a simple drawing exercise using hiragana characters to make a face.
  • Mikuru's ship is staffed by stuffed animals - which really originated from doodles that Haruhi's voice actor Aya Hirano left on her scripts.
  • Yuki, the unimaginative one, has staffed her ship with nothing but clones of herself.
  • Only Kyon's ship has the more traditional Bridge Bunnies if you ignore their uniforms.
• Belvedere Coco, Celtic Midori, and Amarone Slantheav from Vandread. Averted to a certain extent, because the only male on the bridge is the ship's navigator, and most of the female bridge crew are wearing relatively conservative outfits (one is pregnant, one dresses in a full-body bear outfit, and the captain is an old woman), whilst the guy is obliged to be naked in quite a number of scenes. Finally, the most scantily-clad woman on the bridge is later revealed to be a man in drag.
• Xenosaga:
  • Mary and Shelley are the Bridge Bunnies of the Durandal.
  • The half dozen or so 100-Series Realians that were engineered to look exactly like Jr's (the captain) first romantic interest. Physically they are 12-year-old girls. The girls had added combat value against Gnosis, due to their ability to activate the Hilbert Effect.
• Mobile Suit Gundam 00 has both female (Christina and Feldt) and male (Lasse and Lichtendal) Bridge Bunnies, but the girls, along with Bunny-Ears Lawyer captain Sumeragi, get much, much more attention. Presumably, this is because they, like all but two women in the series, have...er...rather prominent bosoms.
  • The survival rate is equal for Bridge Bunnies of both genders: 50%. Lichty and Christina die together and very tragically, Lasse and Feldt make it and return for Season 2, and are soon joined by another female bunny, Genki Girl Mileina Vashti, and much later by Mileina's mom Linda..
  • Marie Parfacy, Saji Crossroad and Anew Returner join the crew as bridge bunnies. The first two mentioned only filled the roles temporarily, as they promoted themselves to Sixth Rangers (complete with Combining Mechas) by joining the Meisters in action ( Marie works with Allelujah, Saji works with Setsuna). Anew became the love interest to one of the Meisters until it is revealed that she is a Manchurian Agent and her subsequent and tragic death.
• Ryouko, Saki and Megumi in Dragonaut: The Resonance. Besides the standard Bridge Bunny duties, they also handle the Post-Episode Trailer.
• Geneshaft "justified" this with the explanation that, thanks to LEGO Genetics, society now consists mostly of women, and only a controlled number of men (to cut down on violence). This is just the beginning of the utterly stupid science in the series.
• Ayame Futaba, Ichijiku Hinata, and Mutsuki Minase from Code Geass R2. One magazine lampshaded this by saying that the girls were carrying out "the long-standing robot anime tradition of the trio of operator girls".
• Gall Force is what you get when you make a team of Bridge Bunnies into the protagonists.
• Tsubael from Blue Drop is perhaps more the competent Mission Control type, but her role in the series fits this trope rather well.
• RahXephon - In reference to an attractive female character, one male extra comments to another, "Whoa, check out the sweet new bridge bunny."
• Godannar had a couple, who apparently got promoted to mecha pilots by the end of the series.
• Full Metal Panic! references the trope: Teletha "Tessa" Testarossa, captain of the Tuatha de Danaan, is young and attractive. When Kaname first meets Tessa, she assumes she is a Bridge Bunny, and Tessa plays along for a while.
• Yuki(Nova) from Space Battleship Yamato.
• Outlanders has a set of bridge bunnies on Earth operating project Pheonix. They aren't given names, but one of them, without warning, guns down power-mad General Togo.
• Hosuke, an amoral mad scientist who wants to Take Over the World in Cannon God Exaxxion, has a great many of these to act as support crew for his mecha. Some of them are robots he's created, some of them are scientists he's brainwashed, and all of them have been programmed one way or another to love him and be absolutely loyal to him. (It's exactly as twisted and repulsive as it sounds.)
• Cross Ange has Pamela, Hikaru, and Olivier acting as the communications for the team of pilots who fight against DRAGONs at Arzenal. Later on, they transfer to the Aurora submarine where the three of them handle control, navigation, and communications respectively.
• Transformers: ★Headmasters relegates former Action Girl Arcee to this role, pretty much becoming Fortress' secretary.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans has the Teiwaz group - the Turbines - being an entire legion of these led by the only male leader Naze...and they're all his wives. Note that they all wear visible bras under their otherwise normal uniforms and they like to put on makeup or fix their nails while on-duty.

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