Have you ever noticed that in many anime, there seem to be "gratuitous" shots thrown into seemingly random locations? Such shots are called "fan service." Although I don't know where the term was first coined, Gainax (of Evangelion, Gunbuster, and Nadia fame) is well known for sprinkling such shots into their works. Such terms as the "Gainax bounce" (aka "to Gainax" or "to daicon") fall under the banner of fan service. Evangelion too has many examples of fan service. (Recall the episode preview: "Next time, service, service!"

Fan service is often used by studios as comic relief or parody. Mai Shiranui from the SNK game "Fatal Fury" is also quite "bouncy" following Gainax's lead and caused many chuckles when it was first seen in my local arcade. Anime like Magical Girl Pretty Sami, which we are showing today, can almost be considered an entire work of fan service, derived from the fan response generated from the character in the Mihoshi Special. If you don't believe me, check out just the opening credits. If the pictures I included didn't fall under censorship by the newsletter staff, what 8-year-old do you know has breasts of that size? Plus, that skirt shot is only 4-frames long, surely a scene that tries to be "hidden" if I've ever seen one.

The scenes are long enough to let everyone know what's going on, but short enough to avoid provoking or offending everyone. Regardless of whether a particular scene evokes chuckles or an exasperated "Ohhh God! How could they do that?!," at least now you have a new word in your anime vocabulary to describe that scene in an... "innocuous" way.