Escaflowne for Dummies MC-ers

This site is here because of my whim. My excuse is that I've mentioned Escaflowne so many times on MystCommunity that people are starting to look at me oddly and wonder what all the big deal is about anyway. So thus there is this craptastic ickle page here attemping to explain.

The Basics

Escaflowne is a television series. It is an anime--a piece of Japanese animation--and a rather good, if not very well-known, one at that. There are also several different series of manga (comics) and a movie. (I have a seperate page for my blather about the movie; see below for that.) However, I only know the series, and the series is, ten (or more) to one, what anybody will be referring to when they mention Escaflowne, unless they're deprived and have only seen the movie, or know enough Japanese to read the manga. The series is 26 episodes long, each episode being about 20 minutes. (This adds up to about 12 hours. My friends and I get together every once in a while and watch the whole thing in one sitting, with food and lively discussion. I think everybody sees Escaflowne when they close their eyes after that. ) The full title of the thing is Tenkuu no Escaflowne in Japanese, The Vision of Escaflowne in English (although it's more aptly translated as 'Escaflowne of Heaven'). The Escaflowne part refers to the central giant robot (it's an anime, of course there are giant robots ), so the pat answer to anybody who asks "what's an escaflowne?" is that image.

But I'm here to give you a bit more than the pat answer.

 

Other Parts To This Site

The Anime: a brief burbling about the characters and story, and attempts to explain the main references I make (spoiler-free, of course)

The Obssession: why do I like it so much anyway?

The Movie: why it is not the series

Obtaining: or, 'I'm curious, now where do I find the thing?'

 

For the record, all of the images on this site are DVD stills which my roommate and I captured (and which I changed from BMPs to JPGs and shrunk by fifty percent, so your loading time can thank me ), except for the GIF of Escaflowne (which I stole from here), the image of the Dragonslayers (which I stole from here), and the pic of Dilandau that my avvie's from (which I stole from one of Sarah-neko's multitudinous and excellent Escaflowne character shrines, all of which are currently down as she moves to a new server ). And Escaflowne is, of course, not mine. I'm only doing this for your benifit.