Trivia / Sentou Yousei Yukikaze

• Actor Allusion: If the film were to be made, it would not be the first time Tom Cruise plays a hot shot fighter pilot, facing a mysterious alien force that makes heavy use of attack drones, or appearing in an adaptation of a Japanese science-fiction novel.
• Development Hell: The live-action film was announced in April 2013, and the last update on it was a few months later in July. What happened to it after that is anyone's guess.
• Dueling Works: With Macross Zero. Both series were 5-episode CGI sci-fi air combat OVAs that were released from 2002 to 2004 (Macross) or 2005 (Yukikaze). The winner differs on region:
  • In the West, Macross Zero definitely seemed to be the winner. Many Westerners who watched Yukikaze loved the air combat but were put off by the characters and found the plot confusing. It earned the derogatory nickname of Brokeback Air Force. As for Macross Zero, it was helped by the fact that Macross & Robotech have a long history in the West, and the plot was much easier to follow.
  • In Japan, Yukikaze appeared to be the bigger winner. It won the prestigious Tokyo Anime Award for Best OVA twice in 2003 & 2006. The main complaint Westerners had about the show, which was the hard-to-follow storyline, was probably alleviated by the fact that the novels are extremely well-known in Japan and most viewers watching were probably already familiar with the books. As for Macross Zero, it got largely overshadowed by its successor Macross Frontier (though Frontier was also quite popular among Western viewers).
• Follow the Leader: The gameplay of the video game is very reminiscent of Ace Combat.
• No Export for You: Despite being untranslated for years, the first and second novels (which the anime was based on) have recently been translated and released in English. However, the third novel, "Unbroken Arrow", was written in 2009 and is not part of the anime; whether it will make it out of Japan is yet to be seen.
  • The video game never left Japan, and it wasn't until August to September 2018 when a complete playthrough was uploaded onto Youtube by an English-speaking Brazilian fan of the franchise who provided commentary and basic translation of the game's dialogue and important text as he played.
• Schedule Slip: The anime was originally meant to be finished by the end of 2004, but production problems that GONZO ran into meant the final episode wasn't released until mid-2005.
• Sequel Gap: Yukikaze was published in 1984. The second book, Good Luck, Yukikaze was published in 1999, a fifteen year gap. The third book, Unbroken Arrow, was published in 2009, a ten year gap. The fourth book, Aggressors, released in April 2022, a thirteen year gap. Needless to say, Chohei Kambayashi takes his time with this series.
• Technology Marches On: The first novel was written in 1984, with the second in 1999, and both were only translated around the 2010s. As a result, a lot of what was then cutting edge aviation technology - e.g. GPS, fly-by-wire controls, thrust vectoring control - is now viewed as ordinary. In the second novel, Rei uses what is described as "a multimedia terminal" to search for news articles on Earth. Today, that would probably be a laptop or a tablet. In addition, the science of "profacting" as described by Edith Foss sounds very similar to the modern data-mining industry, and TFacPro II may be based on real-life statistical analysis software such as Stata or SPSS. Meanwhile the "high-velocity" missiles are based on an American technology from the early 80s that was never operationally deployed.