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Uma Musume's Top Gun: Maverick Collab Visual Revealed

The Uma Musume Project's official Twitter account revealed its tie-in visual to cross-promote Tom Cruise's action film Top Gun: Maverick. The image features the appropriate horse girl Mayano Top Gun as a "promotional pilot."

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, and even posted a tweet celebrating the birthday of the character's namesake racehorse last year. The collaboration was first announced last September, ahead of Top Gun: Maverick's planned premiere in Japan on November 19, 2021. However, the film's release was delayed due to COVID-19 and will now open on May 27 in both Japan and the U.S.

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.”