As promised, the review of the first DVD of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. This is likely to be long and overly obsessed with minor details.

The DVD case itself has Haruhi on the front cover holding a lemon. Why a lemon, I do not know. The artstyle resembles Itou Noizi's original rather than Shoko Ikeda's KyoAni version, but this may be incorrect. In any case, the blurb on the back:

I thought that when I entered high school, my days of believing in aliens, time travelers and ESPers were going to be over. That is until she introduced herself. Claiming to be interested in only aliens, time travelers, and ESPers, Haruhi Suzumiya was the strangest girl I've met in a long time…

Before I knew what's going on, I've been dragged into her weird club, and it looks like I'm not the only one who has been drafted into this 'SOS Brigade' of hers, because there are three other students who don't seem to be so ordinary themselves.

Either way we've all found ourselves caught up in Haruhi's quest to search for all things extraordinary. And what's this I hear about us making a movie? http://asosbrigade.com

Colours are approximations. They are also significant, because each one links to another small (circular) icon-sized image: namely Yuki Nagato's introduction in chronological episode 1, a chibi Haruhi doing the famous eyelid-tongue thing, Haruhi in her ouendan male uniform in the opening, Haruhi and Mikuru's first bunnysuit appearance in chronological episode 2, and the SOS emblem (non-reversed). The ASOS Brigade website URL doesn't seem to link to anything else (apart from the obvious).

The cover is not reversible; there's nothing on the flip side. Not that I was really expecting anything there, but one never knows. There's no insert, which I had been expecting, but I suppose the other extras make up for it. The case itself is an Amaray case with the two nubs, which may seem trivially unimportant to anyone who doesn't remember the old Scanavo cases. Yes, those Scanavo cases. If you don't know, be glad. But I digress.

The DVD has four episodes, namely the first "student movie" Episode 00, followed by the first three chronological episodes.

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