Girls Und Panzer: TV Collection [Blu-ray]

You may have heard of kung fu, but the girls at Oarai Academy practice gun-fu - really, really BIG gun-fu, in fact. It's called Tankery, and it's the martial art of operating armored tanks! And even though the Tankery program at Oarai has been defunct for years, the student council has taken a sudden interest in the art and no one they set their sights on is safe. Which is how Miho Nishizumi, who transferred to Oarai specifically to stay out of tanks, gets drafted to join the newly revived Tankery divison. But it's not all bad, because joining her in Team Anglerfish are her new found friends Saori, the highly receptive radio operator; Hana, a flower arranger turned gunner; Mako, their brilliant, but chronically sleepy driver; and combustible tank fangirl and loader Yukari. They may not be on the half-track to fame and fortune, and maybe some of them would rather shop for tank tops than become tops in tanks, but once their focus is locked and loaded, they're absolutely driven. It's mad, it's metal and mayhem is guaranteed! It's GIRLS UND PANZER! The school adventure series Girls Und Panzer (2012) combines a kawaii (cute) cast of teenagers with World War II-vintage tanks, a juxtaposition even more incongruous than the big eyes/big breasts/big guns cliché. Shy Miho Nishizumi comes to Oarai Girls' School because the curriculum doesn't include "tankery." Her family has a long association with tanks, and her brittle older sister has rejected Miho for sacrificing an interscholastic match to save her teammates from drowning. But the Oarai student council president adds the program, announcing that training for amateur tank warfare makes girls "polite, graceful, modest, and gallant." Miho and her friends, a standard array of anime girls' school types, form the crew of one tank. To no one's surprise, Miho's talents for planning strategy and commanding subordinates lead to victories, first in intramural scrimmages, then in contests with expensive, high-ranking academies. They fight on a variety of terrains, all of them built onto a sort of aircraft carrier the size of a large island. As Takaaki Suzuki, who served as military adviser on Strike Witches, also worked on Girls Und Panzer, it's not surprising that the two series have a similar feel. But Strike Witches was an inane fan service adventure set in a British Neverland. Having characters praise a specific tank model as a favorite of Rommel's or a key armament in the Blitzkrieg may strike American viewers as tasteless, if not offensive--as a series about the Enola Gay might offend Japanese audiences. But Girls Und Panzer proved popular, generating a novelization, a video game, and a manga adaptation, plus a theatrical feature slated for 2014. The extras include two programs of "Introductions," recycled footage of the characters with some extra narration describing them. (Rated TV 14V: violence, violence against women, nudity, potentially offensive WW II and Nazi imagery) --Charles Solomon

(1. Tankery, Here It Comes! 2. Tanks, We Ride Them! 3. We're Having a Match! 4. Captain Does Her Best! 5. Veterans of Their Trade: Sherman Corps! 6. Our First Battle Comes to a Climax! 7. Up Next Is Anzio! 8. We're Fighting Pravda! 9. Last Ditch Effort! 10. Classmates! 11. The Battle Gets Fierce! 12. The Battle We Can't Back Down From!)