Trivia / Azumanga Daioh

• Blooper: In the manga, after Sakaki and Kaorin win the three-legged race, the framing◊ has Kaorin stand in front of and at some measurable distance from Sakaki, as if they were no longer tied together. The very next strip◊, however, has Sakaki struggling to untie her leg from Kaorin's. The 10th anniversary release redraws these panels◊ to correct the mistake, having Kaorin consistently stay by Sakaki's side.
• Creator's Favorite: Kiyohiko Azuma considers Sakaki his personal favorite character in the series. Appropriately, she's the only member of the main cast to go through a full arc of Character Development, and the 2009 reprint's touch-ups focus on her to a much stronger extent than anyone else, going so far as to slightly modify the way she wears her shirt in the Okinawa arc despite it not being strictly necessary.
• Executive Meddling: Azuma had wanted to name the series Kurukuru School (lit. "Round-and-round School") or Sukusuku School (lit. "Growing-up School"). His editors didn't like the title and told him to go with either "Azumanga Daioh" or "Dengeki Azumanga". Azuma wasn't a huge fan of the new title and worked it into the story by having Yukari outright say "That's a terrible title..." at the beginning of the first chapter (which most of the foreign translations take as a joke on how she hates the start of the school year).
• Fandom Nod:
  • The strip "Read Between the Lines" has a bunch of characters call Yomi by name, with no punchline. It might seem confusing out of context, but the strip was made in response to Azuma receiving constant fan questions about Yomi's name, as he never gave it up until that point (in the first popularity poll, she was simply named "Meganekko"). "Read Between the Lines" is both a pun on the meaning of Yomi's name and a response to those fans.
  • The Extra Lessons chapters made for the 10th anniversary have Osaka finally pop the fandom's biggest question: is Kaorin gay? Kaorin gives a flustered non-answer which doesn't really help her case.
• He Also Did:
  • The anime's screenwriter, Ichiro Okouchi, would also go on to write screenplays for other anime, including, Planetes, Code Geass, Guilty Crown, Berserk: The Golden Age Arc, Valvrave the Liberator and Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress.
  • Studio Ghibli did some work on the backgrounds in the anime.
• Incidental Multilingual Wordplay: A few cases occur when Tomo gives Osaka an impromptu quiz.
  • In the anime, Osaka makes a pun on the word kaidan, which means either "horror story" or "staircase" depending on context. This pun translated easily into English, because of the double meaning of the English word "stor(e)y".
  • Tomo asks the riddle, "Who's always banging up cars?" The answer is "the dentist," because the Japanese word for "dentist" is phonetically the same as the word for a scrapped car (haisha). But in English, "dentist" works just as well in context. The anime could get this across through Osaka's diction; the manga simply replaces it with another joke instead of trying to convey the right enunciation through text (e.g. "dent-ist").
  • In the manga, Tomo asks, "If Nihongo (Japanese) is from Japan, then where did Eigo (English) come from?"; the answer is "Also Japan." Since the whole joke is that Nihongo and Eigo are the Japanese words for "Japanese" and "English," respectively, the translation simply flips the terms: "If English came from England, where did Japanese come from?" ("Also England").
  • One of the riddles work exactly the same in English and Japanese: "A truck carrying pumpkins, eggplants and tomatoes approaches a sharp curve; what drops?" "The speed."
• Irony as She Is Cast: Yomi can't sing, despite Rie Tanaka having a great singing voice. It's even more ironic when Yomi's Image Songs are sung beautifully.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • The anime was in limbo for a while after ADV Films went under, but it was eventually rescued by the company's successor, Sentai Filmworks. (For the cheapskate, every episode can be found on YouTube both subbed and dubbed.) As for the manga's reprints, Yen Press retranslated and reprinted the series in omnibus format, rendering ADV's old four-volume translation out of print in the process, meaning that the only easy way to get one's hands on the latter is to find older print copies.
  • The Animax English dub for the anime may well and truly be lost forever, as it's had no DVD or digital release or even any episode recordings put up online. The only evidence of its existence is a video compiling all the commercials for it.
• No Export for You:
  • The "Supplementary Lessons" chapters were never officially released outside of Japan, not even through Yen Press's reissue of the original manga. Consequently, scanlations are the only way to read them if you're not already proficient in Japanese.
  • Likewise, the 2009 reprint of the manga, which features redone art in places, new strips (in addition to the Supplementary Lessons), and rewrites, was never officially released outside of Japan, playing a big part in its greater obscurity.
• The Other Darrin: The entire cast was replaced going from Azumanga Web Daioh to the short film and anime series. For example, Chiyo, voiced in the web short by Ayaka Saitou, is now voiced by Tomoko Kaneda. Akiko Hiramatsu returned, but swapped characters — she plays Minamo in the web short and Yukari in the main series.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends:
  • A common rumor among fans purports that Mr. Kimura is meant to be a parody of Kiyohiko Azuma himself, and that Azuma confirmed this in an interview called Azumanga Daigaku. However, while it sounds plausible given that Azuma previously wrote a teacher-student hentai under a pseudonym, there's no evidence that the interview was ever conducted.
  • Another rumor states that Azuma had Creative Differences with the staff of the anime adaptation, and this is the reason why Yotsuba&! won't be adapted into an anime. This isn't true, though Azuma has said "it's not good to have two people competing over control of an anime production," implying that he prefers keeping his own creative control over Yotsuba&!. The actual reason is because Azuma feels Yotsuba&! just wouldn't translate well to animation due to its simplicity.
• Technology Marches On:
  • The manga's first volume has a bit with a computer that has a blocky 4:3 monitor and is treated as an unusual addition to a classroom. Nowadays, of course, computer monitors are generally flatscreen and computers are a common sight in classrooms. Chiyo's unfamiliarity with computers despite being a child prodigy from a rich background only further underscores how far things have come.
  • Of all the characters in the cast, Tomo is the only one shown to have a cellphone, and it's a very late 90s design.
• Throw It In!: When Norio Wakamoto was brought in to record the voice of Chiyo-chan's "father," all of his scenes had already been scripted and animated (which is typical in anime production). While he kept to the scripted lines, his delivery invariably ran longer than the animation (in one case, over a full minute longer). Rather than rerecord his lines, the staff reanimated the scenes to match them.
• What Could Have Been: Azumanga Web Daioh was originally created as a pilot to gauge interest in a possible web series adaptation of the manga, as its four-panel format could translate effectively to a series of cost-effective online shorts. However, the ONA ended up becoming so popular that the idea was expanded into a big budget theatrical short, and eventually a full-blown televised anime. Remnants of the original plan can be seen in the intro to the short, which includes a number of gags from the manga^note Yukari sleeping while carpooling with Nyamo, Tomo wreaking havoc in the mascot suit, and Sakaki playing the sharpshooting game at the shrine festival and cameos by Chiyo's dad, the biting cat, and Mr. Kimura, none of whom appear in the main plot of the short.

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