Ground Defense Force! Mao-chan (陸上防衛隊まおちゃん, Rikujō Bōetai Mao-chan?), also known as Earth Defender! Mao-chan, is a 26-episode comedy anime, created by Ken Akamatsu, the author of Love Hina.
It stars three eight-year-old girls, Mao, Misora and Sylvia, as they try to defend the earth against invading aliens. The world's defense has fallen to unlikely straits because the aliens are excessively cute, of which combat engagements are televised: if the forces battling the aliens were not cute themselves, the general public would revolt, as it would be seen as "bullying". Consequently, three military leaders chose their granddaughters to be the defenders, fittingly, becoming a team even cuter than the aliens. They each have a clover-shaped badge that enables them to transform. (This transformation provides no apparent special ability.)
The series itself is rife with parodies and references, particularly to Akamatsu's earlier work Love Hina. The girls' commanding officer bears a resemblance to Naru Narusegawa from Love Hina. See also below in the characters, and anime episode 20, manga chapters 17 and 25.
Read more about Ground Defense Force! Mao-chan: Characters, Powers and Abilities, Episodes
Famous quotes containing the words ground and/or defense:
“Imagine spending four billion years stocking the oceans with seafood, filling the ground with fossil fuels, and drilling the bees in honey production—only to produce a race of bed-wetters!”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)