From Totali at Subculture, taken from Minami-ke Okaeri Episode 9, apparently. What is unusual about this particular mikan box is that it actually appears to be holding oranges. Who’da thunk it?

I guess I’ll have to give Totali this one, though I don’t actually watch Minami-ke myself – I’m trusting him not to have photoshopped that image in an attempt to make me look incredibly foolish in revenge for Ringo-gate. Those reading should not take this as a cue to start photoshopping the things into random screengrabs in an attempt to confuse me…

Many, many moons (well, OK, about a year) ago, Totali tried to convince me that a Mikan Box appeared in Clannad episode 21. On that occasion, he was proved to be foolish, given that the box in question had an apple on it, clearly making it a Ringo box. Silly Totali.

That said, it turns out that there was actually a Mikan box in Clannads very first episode – scope out the box against the back wall on the right.
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Yes, I did buy all three versions. At least I’m not crazy like that crazy Japanese fan who bought 39 copies of the game (Sankaku, so possibly NSFW) in order to get all the different stores pre-order bonuses. Instead, I just got three sets of the alternative sleeves for the game. Sourcing import PSP games in the UK is actually a bit of a pain, as a few of the more popular retailers won’t ship PSP or PS3 releases over due to Sony winning a court case against Lik-Sang for selling import PSPs before the UK release. As such, my copies are the marginally more expensive Japanese release of the game. It’s nothing to do with being snobby (though I’m aware a few import gamers are a little anal about the fact), but rather it was easiest version to source back when I pre-ordered. Apparently the marginally cheaper Asian release not only comes with everything pictured above, but also a no-doubt useful English instruction manual, so it probably a better purchase if you can find it.
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From the second ED sequence, Kaede using a Mikan Box as a table!
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Erm, you are standing on the beach of a tropical island, and Natsumi has just been kidnapped by a robotic crab. Is it really the time to be worrying about car chases, Giroro?

Having heard that a decent, subbed release of the Evangelion 1.01 movie had been released in Hong Kong (legally, of course), I ended up heading over to Yes Asia to grab a copy. The thing with HK DVDs, though, is that the releases of Asian movies tend to be pretty cheap (£6-7-ish), and as a result the intention to order just one DVD ends up escalating to more like a dozen, though it is a shame it’s pretty slim pickings when it comes to anime. This probably goes some way to explaining exactly why I have a copy of obviously terrible The Oneechanbara, and is also why I picked up the ended up picking up the first three Keroro Gunsou movies (even though I already have the first on R2).

Anyway, the English subtitles on those HK releases that sport them are a bit of a crap-shoot in terms of quality – those on the Evangelion movie, aside from few minor typos, are pretty good. The same can be said of the subtitles to the first Keroro movie – there’s nothing overwhelming wrong with them.

The same can’t really be said of the second Keroro movie. I’m inclined to think that whoever wrote the subtitle script at least had a grasp of the Japanese language (or maybe Cantonese?), but it’s almost like they based the translation on just the audio without any idea of the context given by the visuals – aside from a few points where they’ve clearly misheard the audio, there’s a lot of lines which would make sense given different circumstances. It just a shame that the movie they were probably imagining was likely more exciting than the one I watched, though at least the subtitles added some additional humour value…