Trivia / Angel Beats!

• Acting in the Dark: Emily Neves only got the script for the final episode just before the session.
• Anime First: From a creator best known for Visual Novels. The 2017 manga The Last Operation was made to expand upon the anime's story, presumably to add things that were lost in production. Same goes for the Visual Novel adaptation.
• Copy Protection: On the 3rd day of the first Visual Novel episode, anyone playing on a pirated copy gets stuck on an infinite loop.
• Creator Backlash: While Seiji Kishi is proud of what he and his crew were able to accomplish with the show in its final form, he admits he had a stressful time in production thanks to the Executive Meddling cutting the episode number down by half.
• Creator's Favorite: Maeda has stated that Yurippe is his favorite character.
• Enforced Method Acting: In the English dub, Angel's voice actress, Emily Neves, was crying her eyes out while recording her dialogue for the final scenes of the anime. She'd only gotten the script just before the session.
• Executive Meddling: Originally written for 26 episodes, executives abruptly cut it down to thirteen while the second and third episodes were already in production (the latter of which would end up becoming "Hell's Kitchen"), forcing several loose ends to be tied up hurriedly late into the series and some characters' backstories being unexplored and their issues left unresolved on-screen by the time it ended. Director Seiji Kishi was not happy about this at all, plus this decision has helped contribute to a lot of the flak this show has gotten.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Sentai Filmworks' rights to the anime expired in 2017, and the series was out of print and unavailable on streaming networks until Netflix rescued it in 2019.
• Missing Episode: "Hell's Kitchen" was released as the second special OVA in 2015, but it was conceived, scripted and recorded to be the third episode of the series, with Yuri directly mentioning the Guild mission from Episode 2 at the start and the episode going on to build up Iwasawa's character, who got her focus and sendoff in what ended up being the actually aired Episode 3, "My Song."
• Non-Singing Voice: Miyuki Sawashiro voices Iwasawa, and Eri Kitamura voices Yui, but neither of them sing for their own characters, even though they have sung in other series.
• No Dub for You: The second OVA, Hell's Kitchen, released in 2015 bundled with the Blu-rays of the series in conjunction with the first Visual Novel volume, was never licensed or dubbed by Sentai Filmworks.
• No Export for You: Uses the exact same region restricting measures as Rewrite.
• The Other Darrin: A few of the minor characters in the dub had different voice actors for early and later episodes.
• Still Born Franchise: The visual novels unfortunately suffered this fate. They were originally going to be released in a series of several volumes, each having multiple routes that focuses on the various characters in the series. The first volume released in 2015 and there hasn't been any since.
• Vindicated by Reruns: The series was received divisively when it first aired but picked up a following through DVD sales and streaming services.
• What Could Have Been: The anime was originally planned to have 26 episodes to have more Character Development among the other side characters. While Kanade's replacement by Naoi on the Student Council and the following conflict with him would still have been close to the halfway mark, the second half would've given more focus to Kanade and Otonashi's efforts to help the Battlefront members make peace with their lives and move on as well as the emergence of the Shadows, which is where much of the backstory information and Character Development would come from. Since it was cut in half some of the disappearances invoke We Hardly Knew Ye, with exceptions to Yui and Naoi.

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