Friday, February 26, 2010

Darker Than Black bullet blooper


What do you call inconsistencies in a show? Bloopers? Anyways, here is one from an anime called Darker than Black that bugged me enough to write a post about it.

In Episode 10 when the mafia girl is loading her revolver, she is loading it with automatic pistol rounds. Wonderful, as they will slide right through the revolver cylinder instead of firing, or jam nicely at an inconvenient moment. The rim on a automatic round doesn't stick out (flare) as it does for revolver rounds.

Btw those are seriously thick rims on those bullets. It's like the artist thinks the notch there is cosmetic.

Here's two similarly sized bullets here for comparison -
  • The top one, a 9mm Luger, is an automatic round (no flared rim) These are designed to be stackable. The inset rim is for the mechanism to grip the end of the casing for loading.
  • the bottom one is a .38 Special, a revolver round.. Note the flared rim. These flared rims are a stopper to prevent the shell from sliding through the revolver cylinder.


Just as a curiosity, the cop listens for 5 shots and then runs across mafia girl's field of fire, with the revolver going click-click. I thought it was weird that it was 5, so I looked it up - it seems the standard police/security .38 revolver in Japan is a 5-round cylinder, not 6. Pretty risky though, to assume mafia girl is using a police revolver and not an import.

Darker than Black isn't really a gun otaku type anime, so I guess they didn't really consider it. In case I need to clarify, I actually do like this show, it's just that occasionally some things in it bug me.

Upsen.

P.s.

I think the worst I've ever seen in anime is in Dogs: Bullets & Carnage - The animator didn't realize that the gun's slide (on the top half) moves back when firing, exposing the barrel. Instead they animated the barrel thrusting forward out of the gun, in gratuitously slow-motion shots. Somehow this passed QC in a show with "Bullets" in it's title. Someone shoot them please.

P.p.s.
I had a stack of empty casings for like 2 years, with both 9mm auto and .38spl samples in it, that I threw away during the new year. It ALWAYS happens - throw something away and find that you need it soon thereafter. A closeup photo showing the difference would have been perfect for this post.

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