Pizza Hut: Taking over da World.

If you haven't already noticed, a lot of Pizza Hut signs, restaurants and scenes with characters munching away on pizza have been popping up in the recent anime series, most notably Code Geass and now, Darker than Black. Which is all the more remarkable given that brand names when they appear in a series, are often purposely mispelled despite their dead giveaway trademarks. Take the nearest recognisable name in Darker than Black; Mac Donness a dead ringer replete with the yellow M against a red background. Pizza Hut on the other hand remains identical and untouched.

And in case you're wondering just how often and blatant this advertising is, it's really often. Especially in Code Geass where the peeps at gg fansubs noted that the Pizza Hut sign appeared in 8 of the first 13 episodes. Not that I'm complaining, I have to admit this form of sublimal advertising is rather effective. Makes you feel like calling Pizza Hut while watching. ^^

For all the Code Geass fans out there, a little news to cheer ya all up amidst the Odex Inquisition. It's been officially announced that Season Two will be out sometime around Fall 2007! Which should conclude the series with another 25 episodes hopefully.

Darker than Black meanwhile just keeps getting better. On top of absolutely stunning stellar animation and resolution, the storyline is engaging and keeps getting better. The background might be a bit hard to comprehend in the beginning but you pick it up fast and it contains the right amount of comedy, action and drama. Which helps especially since Bleach has been really draggy lately with that seemingly never ending series of fillers. Yawn.><

Currently on Episode 14 now and things keep getting better. My only gripe is the ridiculously small font size the Sudo Anonymous fansubbers subbed episodes 13 and 14 with when they released in the avi format. Video Quality was a tad compromised too. Thankfully, they've returned to .mkv from episodes 15 onwards with the awesome resolution at the small price of higher CPU consumption.

If you haven't already caught this series, you should.