K-ON!! - Episode 25

The main event of the girl's graduation may have taken place in last week's episode but fear not!  For K-ON isn't through with us just yet, treating us to a pair of "extra" episodes to make up for having us all blub like... well, graduating school girls, on a couple of occasions of late.

Of course, these extra episodes serve up their delicious side dishes as if they were a main meal by going back in time a little - in fact, we figure out exactly so far simply by Yui's haircut (which places us between episodes twenty-one and twenty-two for continuity freaks).  The focus of this particular story begins as Azusa finds a promotional video created by her cohorts prior to her joining the light music club - a reasonably slick piece, culminating in Mio in a nurse's outfit, which probably tells you who helped out with this effort.

Crouching Ritsu, Hidden Drumkit

This discovery leads to the decision that the club needs to create a new, improved video to help Azusa recruit new members to join her in the future, which of course leads us through plenty of madcap and genuinely funny ideas and concepts, from the more obvious (Azusa being cute with cat ears) through to the rather more surreal (such as murder mysteries and Hollywood-style trailers).  With the threat of revealing costumes from Sawako hanging over them, it's eventually left up to Azusa to take the script writing reins for this outing - a decision which led almost directly to my brain exploding, as we watch this slice of life anime turn in a scene where the light music club girls record themselves going about their business in a slice of life fashion.  In the end, mixing together some interviews and concert footage leaves them with the slick(-ish) marketing material they need - a promotional tool which will surely beat out those animal costumes of past years?
After all the emotional stuff of last week and the slow, relentless march towards the moment of graduation for all of the girls bar Azusa, we really needed some light relief and boy did we get it here, with a sparklingly funny episode that packed in great gags and in-jokes aplenty.  The Hollywood trailer and film spoof material was always liable to be funny, but it's other moments such as the over-enthusiastic Mugi, Nodoka's attempt at becoming the "voice" of Ton-chan and most of all Yui's hammy acting during their slice of life recording (accentuated all the more by Ui's unwavering use of the camera to focus on her sister) that really made this episode.  If this was to be the first episode of K-ON you ever watched then you'd miss at least half of the jokes, but for us stalwarts it was comedy gold.  Can't we just travel back in time like this every week for another fifty episodes or so?  I hardly dare contemplate that next week this show really will be over, no more extensions...