Trivia / Vision of Escaflowne Abridged

• All There in the Manual: The brief Escaflowne Commentary involved some pretty fun character insights.
  • Allen can be pretty condescending and patronizing to Van but is ironically the only one who "gets" him (as a fellow Closet Geek).
  • Van was into Hitomi at least as early as Episode 4, but was just very dismissive of her because he's used to treating Merle like crap but still getting fawned over, and just didn't occur to him that that's not the way you're supposed to treat women.
• Creator's Favorite: Dornkirk is hbi's favorite character.
• Orphaned Series: The Escaflowne Commentary was abandoned after just five episodes.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: All over the place due to Escaflowne being a much more ambitious and corroborated series than Berserk or Gantz Abridged.
  • He designed several opening credits for Escaflowne, but couldn't think of any one that was good enough to play in front of 26 episodes, then decided to just use them all, so the opening credits became a Couch Gag.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: hbi admitted to doing this for his Berserk and Gantz Abriged series, but averted for Escaflowne since he had many other voice actors collaborate for it and needed to have scripts finalized before recording for each episode.
• What Could Have Been: The Commentary episodes include a lot of fun tidbits.
  • Hitomi would eventually learn from Dornkirk that her pendant is not actually a MacGuffin since it doesn't fit the parameters of the trope (it's just called that because her grandmother's last name was MacGuffin), but rather a Plot Device. But there was no way to naturally work it into the script, so it got scrapped.
  • hbi wanted to include more gags lampshading how weird it is that (in canon) the Mole Man was this weird random character who's not directly involved in the plot and yet is always hanging around the group, but due to how plot-heavy the rest of the show was these gags fell by the wayside.
  • Amano would sound exactly like Allen Shezar, but slightly younger and breathier. This was quickly abandoned when he realized Amano was too much of a bit character to put that much work into.
  • Austurians like Allen and Dryden would have grand, theatrical, slightly Shakespearean accents, but it would have been difficult to get enough emotional range and would have been unfair to ask the other voice actors to do the affect.
  • Hitomi would have no future-seeing powers at all (at least with tarot) and that she does cold readings every time she uses her tarot cards. He quickly realized it'd be hard to make that gag funny and interesting every time, and decided to limit it to a one-time gag on Allen's airship. (With an in-universe justification that her powers were temporarily blocked by an herb Van gave her last episode.)