Interest

Uma Musume's Mayano Top Gun To Promote Tom Cruise's Top Gun: Maverick

The Uma Musume Project's official Twitter account recently announced that the Uma Musume horse girl Mayano Top Gun has been appointed as a "promotional pilot" for Tom Cruise's 2021 action film Top Gun: Maverick, and that there will be further promotional activities leading up to the film's premiere.

In response, Top Gun's official Japanese Twitter account greeted its newest pilot with the now-iconic line from the first Top Gun film:

The horse girls of Uma Musume Pretty Derby are said to possess the spirits of (and share names with) famed racehorses, but aside from her namesake, Mayano Top Gun's character design is also heavily inspired by the Top Gun film. The horse girl wears an aviator jacket and parachute harness, speaks lines such as "You copy?", and her skill animation even sees her parachuting off a plane.

Top Gun's official Twitter account has acknowledged this special connection to their franchise for a while, as they posted a tweet celebrating the birthday of the character's namesake racehorse back in March. Unfortunately, Mayano Top Gun (the horse) would not live to see the film franchise's upcoming entry, as it had passed away on November 3, 2019.

Top Gun: Maverick premieres in Japan on November 19, 2021. Paramount Pictures describes the film:

After more than thirty years of service as one of the Navy's top aviators, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Tom Cruise) is where he belongs, pushing the envelope as a courageous test pilot and dodging the advancement in rank that would ground him. When he finds himself training a detachment of Top Gun graduates for a specialized mission the likes of which no living pilot has ever seen, Maverick encounters Lt. Bradley Bradshaw (Miles Teller), call sign: “Rooster,” the son of Maverick's late friend and Radar Intercept Officer Lt. Nick Bradshaw, aka “Goose.”

Source: Otakomu