Plot: In America 1881, the young Wright Brothers meet the flying Space-Time Monster, Wing, who can give anyone and anything the ability to fly. Orville in particular grows attached to Wing after getting fed up with the way Wilbur treats him. Tokio, also feeling annoyed by how Sora treats him, sides with Orville and Wing, flying off with them in protest of their older siblings.
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Starting today, we have new title card art in the original. Instead of showing Genshi, we now show a bunch of Space-Time Monsters.
Title Change: Fly! Fly! Wing! is simply changed to Wing.
They add an establishing shot of the town before the establishing shot of the lab.
The original just says that Sora is older than Tokio. The dub specifies that Sarah is 327 seconds older than Tony.
Sora points out that Tokio blundered in his homework because she’s told him before to do the equations in the parentheses first but he didn’t do that. In the dub, Sarah says “When will you learn to multiply before you divide?” Uhh….
When we see him typing, he’s writing the numbers on the bottom fraction, which I think means he’s showing his work, but it doesn’t make any sense that this is the way the way the homework…works. And this is coming from someone severely math dumb.
Either way, he hasn’t multiplied or divided yet. He’s just writing out the way he thinks the fraction should be simplified, which isn’t correct, but still. If your criticisms of his work are also incorrect, you’re not helping anyone.
I’m going to see if I can do this equation just to make sure I’m not too math dumb.
The simplified version should be 6+1 ½, which would be 7 ½…..right? Did I do it? Are ya proud of me?
Genshi asks Ototan if it’s really that bad having siblings. Oto-tan says it’s just because they’re so close. In the dub, Flint asks Rocky why he doesn’t have a sister. Rocky says it’s because cave sisters eat their brothers for breakfast….Uh….huh?
Tokio just wishes he were the older brother, presumably so he’d be the one with the edge instead of Sora. In the dub, he says his homework would be a cinch if he were the older one…….How?
They insert a shot of the Masked Man after the closeup shot of Wing in the montage.
I’m shocked beyond belief that they got this next info correct. The Wright Brothers moved around a lot when they were kids, so the fact that anime writers knew to look up exactly where they were in 1881 (Richmond, Indiana) is commendable.
Also, Masked Man just says he and TP Lady can have a sky date if they capture Wing. In the dub, he says they could fly up and have a date on the moon. Yeah…..pretty sure just growing wings wouldn’t allow you to fly up to or survive in space, but you do you.
Orville says to Wing after Wilbur tells him to come down “Listen to him, Wing!” In the dub, he clunkily explains who Wilbur is to Wing and subsequently the audience.
Name Plate Removed:
Subbed:
Dubbed:
Orville yells down to Wilbur that Wing will get lonely if he comes down, so he’s staying in the air. In the dub, Wing, who can talk because it’s the dub, asks Orville what Wilbur’s problem is. Orville says Wilbur is jealous because he wants to fly more than anything, and he’s flying around in the air but Wilbur can’t.
Wilbur originally tells them to quit messing around and come down otherwise he’ll get angry. Orville refuses, mocks him and flies off with Wing. In the dub, Wilbur says, “Those wings aren’t flight-worthy!”…..Uh….they’re flying…..so…..yes they are. Also, he’s flying without flapping his wings most of the time and is able to hover perfectly still in the air without flapping as well, so they seem more than flight-worthy to me….they seem like budgetary restraints on animation.
While it took them until adulthood to develop a serious interest in aeronautics, the Wright brothers did have a love of aeronautics at a young age. When they were children, Orville seven years old and Wilbur eleven, their father bought them a model helicopter made of bamboo, paper and cork that they loved playing with until it broke. While they couldn’t really do much with their interest until later on, they did claim this toy was what first inspired them to get into aviation.
They buckled down and took a serious interest in flight engineering in 1896, when Orville was 25 and Wilbur was 29. This was when there was a huge boom in people experimenting in aeronautics. The death of Otto Lilienthal, a German aviation engineer, was cited by the Wright brothers as being the biggest turning point in their interest in aviation. Lilienthal had been testing a glider, but it crashed, causing him to break his neck. He tragically died the next day.
Orville: “They’re more flight-worthy than anything we’ve made so far! Just watch, brother!”
They haven’t made or attempted to make any actual flying machines at this point in their lives, but they did make a toy helicopter similar to the one they had that broke. It didn’t fly, of course, but it’s still cool that they made one.
The art and animation in this episode is noticeably worse than normal. Every shot just looks really bad. Did they cut their already paltry budget?
They extend Petra’s dialogue by reversing the shot of her pointing her finger at Orville and Wing.
In the original, Sora says Tokio better not be too reckless. In the dub, she says “This oughta be good for a laugh.”
*snort* That dumb vacant expression Wilbur has as the camera just holds on him being still for several seconds is gold. I really must reiterate – this episode looks AWFUL.
Tokio says Orville and Wing have been playing too many pranks, and it was mean to do all that stuff to the town. In the dub, he yells “I don’t know who you are, but Wing’s coming back with me!” Yeah, the best way you can convince the Time Shifter that you’re on their side is by demanding that they have no other choice but to go with you….
Orville originally asserts that he wasn’t playing pranks with Wing, he was performing research. In the dub, he oddly responds to Tony’s demands by saying “Take your hands off of me! I’m an inventor!”
That’d be like me saying “Take your hands off of me! I’m a blogger!” Like, who cares? Why is that a reason to let you go?
They repeat shots of Orville and Tokio talking to extend the scene.
Orville: “That’s right, a famous inventor!” No, you’re not. At least not right now.
In both versions of the flashback, Wing flies by saying “Wing!” but it’s already been established in the dub that he can speak English, so it just sounds like he’s saying his name for no reason.
In regards to Orville and Wilbur having any sort of sibling rivalry……….that’s a bit hard to say. They did have arguments, they didn’t agree on everything, but they seemed to get along much better than most siblings. They grew up together, shared everything, talked a lot, worked together, brainstormed together, played together, shared their toys, worked most of the same jobs in the same businesses, and they never really had much in the ways of issues.
I’m not saying this plotline of them having a sibling rivalry is unlikely, every pair of siblings has their moments of clashing no matter how close they are, but, from all I’ve read, I can’t imagine Wilbur would treat Orville like he was stupid and had no idea what he was doing.
Original!Orville: “Just because my brother’s grades are a little better in school, he always acts like I’m stupid!” This is actually true, barring the end part.
While there’s nothing to imply Orville ever did badly in school, he was quite bright and curious after all, he never seemed interested in pursuing higher education. He dropped out of high school and never had plans to go to college.
Wilbur excelled in school and he had high aspirations for his scholastic future, not only planning on finishing high school and going on to college, but choosing Yale as his college of choice. It was only after he badly injured his face in a hockey game as a teen that he abandoned those plans. He had lost his front teeth and suffered other injuries that left him in a lasting and deep depression. He, like his brother would, dropped out of high school and abandoned his plans for college, choosing to stay home, read and care for his ailing mother.
Again, though, I doubt Wilbur ever treated Orville like he was stupid because of whatever difference in their grades may have been.
The art is killing me. Tokio is just staring over Orville’s head as he talks to him.
By the way, I’m not going to discuss all of the controversy in regards to whether the Wright Brothers were really the first to invent the airplane. By all intents and purposes, and simplified as much as possible, they did. We can “Well, technically” and “But what about” until the cows come home, but in the end I feel confident in saying that they were the first. As much as I love doing research on random topics for these reviews, I really don’t feel like combing through hundreds of pages of articles debating this topic, especially since most of the articles I did read still ended up with conclusions stating the same thing, which is “We may never know for absolute certain who invented the airplane first, but the general consensus and evidence we have still support the Wright Brothers.” If you, personally, have a different view, that’s fine, I won’t fight you on it, this isn’t a hill I want to die on, just know that, in regards to criticizing and legitimizing the history covered in this episode, we are going to take them inventing the airplane as gospel.
Speaking of being technically correct, they ignore the fact that Wilbur and Orville were actually two of seven children. Orville and Wilbur had two older brothers, Reuchlin and Lorin, and one younger sister, Katharine. They also had twin siblings, Otis and Ida, but, sadly, they died when they were infants. They didn’t need to bring them up, and there was really no organic way to do it anyway, I just wanted explain that they’re not the only Wright siblings. I’m particularly disappointed that we won’t be able to discuss Katharine because she was a huge supporter of her brothers throughout their engineering of the airplane and helped them with building and testing. She wasn’t officially an engineer, but she was definitely mechanically inclined, and she was a key player in the woman’s suffrage movement in Ohio. She’s a very interesting person, but I understand why she’s not here. Not only are there the time constraints and difficulty in fitting her into the story to consider, but Katharine would only be about seven at this point, so she’s not really doing much besides being a typical little girl.
Orville originally says Tokio and him are brothers now. Tokio’s the older brother, Orville’s the middle and Wing is the little brother. In the dub, it’s the same, but instead of calling them brothers he calls them all expert flyers.
I love how Orville and Tokio’s big plan to get back at their older siblings and teach them to respect their little brothers was to mock them and then leave. That’s literally it. The entire plan. They went back to ‘protest’ their older siblings, bii-daa’d them, left, dicked around for few hours and then said ‘Well, I’m sure they’ve learned their lesson now.’
Tony: “Boy, I’m afraid our plans have started to backfire.” Boy, I’m afraid your dialogue has started to seem really awkward.
I love how the dub is also including propeller sounds when Tony, Orville and Wing are flying by when they’re clearly flying with regular wings and should be accompanied by wing flap sounds.
They change the animation of TP Lady whipping Wing to one that lasts a little longer and involves her waving it around a little more…..*shrug*
Name Plate Removed:
Subbed:
Dubbed:
Name Change: Waruwing is changed to Wing-kon.
Orville originally just exclaimed that Wing transformed. In the dub…
Orville: “This will have Wilbur shakin’ in his boots!” Orville, read the room.
Being fair, though, it doesn’t take long for original Orville to join him in being a little sociopath.
Waruwing attacks Ridon, sending Genshi, Sora and Wilbur hurdling through the air, and Orville responds by smiling and happily yelling that that will teach Wilbur a lesson.
Hey, guys, you want to hear a not-so-fun fact? Orville was the pilot on the first ever fatal airplane crash. On September 17, 1908, he took part in a flying demonstration on the Wright Military Flyer when the blade of a propeller split and hit a bracing wire, causing the propeller to shatter, the bracing wire to break free and the rudder to swivel to a horizontal position, causing the plane to veer out of control and nosedive into the ground. As a result, 26-year-old Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge was jettisoned into a wooden upright, causing a severe skull fracture which would prove fatal in mere hours. Orville had a fractured femur, four fractured ribs and a hip fractures that would continue to affect him for the rest of his life, though he did recover enough to work just fine.
What I’m trying to say is, Orville, flying is really dangerous, and your brother can’t learn any lessons if he’s a big red stain on the ground. So maybe not cheer when a living fighter plane crashes into him as he’s perched precariously on the backseat of a flying robot dinosaur bike above the clouds.
Also, if I can’t imagine Wilbur treating Orville like a useless idiot no matter what age they are, I certainly can’t imagine real-life Orville being giddy at his brother being in mortal danger.
Dub!Orville: “I want him to scare my brother so much he turns bright green!”…..Wh…how would that happen?
Waruwing’s little black wing dart things don’t have a name in the original. In the dub, they’re called Petra Darts.
Original!Orville: “Stop it! Brother is going to get hurt!” Oh NOW you care.
Dub!Orville: “Please, Wing! I didn’t mean it! I was just kidding!” No, you weren’t, you liar.
Orville originally calls out to Wing, but in the dub he tells Tony and Flint (I think) to get out of Wing’s way.
Rocky: *getting grabbed by Petra’s ship’s giant hand* “It’s a handasaurus!” Rocky, goddammit.
Hahaha, that shot of Orville falling right before Waruwing catches him. My god. It’s literally just a single oddly drawn unmoving frame of Orville straight on while the background moves. Wow.
TP Lady says her face is all muddy now. Dyna and Mite tell her she’s beautiful even with a muddy face. She should flap her wings and head to the sky like an angel…..I really don’t see how that makes sense other than they’re referencing the fact that they’re flying away right now.
Petra says she’s sick of being thwarted by Flint and his friends, she’s getting crazed with anger, and she won’t let them humiliate her again. Dino and Mite then say she should have worn her seatbelt, but it’s a good thing they did, Petra puts on her seatbelt before they fly off and leave. Sooo…Petra made a big declaration acting like she was about to attack again, then leaves?
Wilbur: “We decided from now on for the both of us to come up with ideas and make the airplane together.”
Aw that’s nice.
*Orville immediately produces a model biplane* Where the actual hell did you get that?! In the few minutes between TP Lady leaving and now how did you somehow build a wooden plane that perfectly exemplifies your combined ideas in a design that surpasses concepts that shouldn’t exist for like 20 more years? That doesn’t even look like the Wright Flyer, it looks like a more advanced biplane.
Tokio says things are better when siblings get along. Sora says with a pointed look “You say that now….” And Tokio gets a nervous/goofy expression on his face. In the dub, Tony’s responding to Wilbur talking about the ‘aeroplane’ and says “Yeah, that’ll be great. You can bet on it. Right, Sora?”
And then Sora says with her expression of suspicion “How about it, bro? Are we friends?” And Tony responds with the weird expression “Yeah.”
If they forgot everything involving the kids and Wing…..doesn’t that technically mean that Orville and Wilbur would just forget that they made up?
Old Timer: “If those two brothers hadn’t learned to get along, we’d still be traveling by horse and buggy.” No, no you wouldn’t. First of all, the automobile will be invented five years from this point. Second of all, I guess let’s just bop this topic one more time, many other people were testing with flying machines when the Wright Brothers had invented the airplane to the point where there were a ton of legal issues and controversy to this day about who actually invented the airplane first. If not them, you can rest assured the airplane would be invented, tested and patented in roughly the same amount of time. Who knows how different the world of aviation would be, but we’d definitely have airplanes.
Also, Sora and Tokio go back to fighting because they love each other so much and nothing was learned.
I wasn’t expecting the two to be best friends or anything, and I was definitely expecting the status quo to be restored by the next episode, but we’re literally exactly where we started. Sarah pestering Tokio about how he’s doing his homework wrong, him getting upset and Ototan explaining that they fight because they’re so close, which is a bit of a toxic mindset. My sister used to insult me and get into fights with me all the time, and I never once felt like it was because she cared about me.
Actually, let’s dissect this further. If a big sibling yells at you for being reckless or getting in trouble or something, then yeah, it’s reasonable to believe that they just love you and don’t want to see you get hurt. As children/teenagers themselves, they might not know how to protect you from these things without losing their temper or treating you like a little kid. But when it comes to acting like you’re stupid, being condescending and just overall being an ass, that’s not caring or love, that’s just, well, being an ass.
This episode was entirely Orville and Tokio getting treated badly by their older siblings and them having to learn a lesson while Wilbur and Sora just kinda went back to what they were doing. Wilbur seemed to have grown, but Sora clearly hasn’t. She didn’t even lend Tokio a kind word about how brave he was to tackle Waruwing so they could get a chance to escape or how heroic he was in catching Genshi when he fell. She just complains that he’s not understanding her explanations of his homework again.
Flint: “Oh yeah? Well, if that’s really true, I wanna get in on the fight!” See how weird that sounds?
You can really tell how much they were banking on this show being a hit because, after the credits, my copy of the episode keeps these little commercials for the CD of the soundtrack for the show, including the single of the ED performed by Manabi Mizuno, who was so proud of her work on the show that it’s not even listed on her IMDB page. Manabi Mizuno did go off to become a fairly successful singer and voice actress for several anime with a career spanning nearly two decades.
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Overall, despite some issues and TERRIBLE art and animation for whatever reason, this was a pretty good episode. Sora and Tokio butting heads has been a recurring enough issue for this plot to be engaging, and having Orville and Wilbur Wright act as their sibling rivalry counterparts was a decent enough choice, even if they really didn’t seem to have issues of that caliber at any point as far as I know.
Wing is a pretty cute Space-Time Monster with an interesting power, and his bad transformation is really cool. It not only has a really interesting design, being a vertical fighter plane with a vulture-like face, but it has two pretty intimidating attacks in a propeller that detaches and launches at his opponents, and two machine guns that shoot razor sharp feather darts.
The aerial battles were some of the best fighting scenes the show has had to offer so far. Being in the air changes the game quite a bit and makes it more exciting considering that, without Ridon, Genshi can’t fly. And he may be durable, but not even he couldn’t survive a fall from like 30,000 feet.
History-wise, there were some questionable things, but they actually got most things right…..or…should I say WRIGHT? Hahahahahahaha…..hah…..*cough*
Most of the stuff I went on about was just either built on conjecture, slight nitpicking or just things I found interesting that I wanted an excuse to share. The worst of it was the very ending where Orville magically produces a perfect biplane replica out of thin air after the battle with TP Lady. How? How? How?
Being fair, considering how they’ve been lately about this stuff, it’s much better than I ever feared. At least they didn’t have Wing build the plane for them and then they forget Wing and take credit for inventing it or something. And the stuff Orville learned from Wing was stuff that is very much akin to things Orville and Wilbur were researching in real life during adulthood. They studied birds and their wing shapes to help them design the wings of their future planes, creating the concept of “wing warping” which would help stabilize the plane in flight and allow for better control.
In the show, Orville learned about flying from watching Wing, who is technically a bird, and observing how everything else flew when Wing gave them the ability to fly with those bird wings. Of course, he couldn’t really learn much from that considering Wing’s powers seem more magic than realistic. I mean, they fly with their wings perfectly still, tiny wings could flip TP Lady’s ship, etc. but this is another moment where I’m just being a bit nitpicky.
If there’s one thing I’m very hung up on about this whole story is….they’ve been trying to build the world’s first airplane….They have a Space-Time Monster who can make anything fly, they’re battling a woman who has a flying cat-shaped spaceship and they’re befriending people who have a flying dinosaur bicycle. Why are they not more amazed by this stuff? Why are they not asking more questions? Why are they not taking notes on how these things work?
Next time, TP Lady takes control of Ammon, putting Kyoichiro in danger.
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The Anime Madhouse 