Videos

History of Magical Girl Anime, Part 1

I recently found this series of videos on the history of mahou shoujo anime by SourcererZZ.  Somehow, he’s managed to dredge up clips from early shows, including some that are quite hard to find.  He seems to know his subject very well.  Depending on what he gets into, some of his later videos might be NSFW, but this first one is a pretty good overview of the evolution of the genre from its origins with Sally the Witch to the early 1970s with Cutie Honey (that last getting a little racy toward the end of the video).

He’s a little hard to understand and rather quiet, but if you turn on the closed captions, he’s added accurate subtitles.

Whoever Made This Video Needs to Watch More Older Stuff

I wrote my own list of top magical girl anime once, and it looked rather different. It’s unfortunate how quickly stuff goes out of print in both anime and manga. If you don’t get it when it’s out, it might be gone, and unless some streaming site archives it or it gets a re-release, you might not be able to find it at all. It can become more-or-less impossible to acquire, as in my fruitless quest to find a set of Creamy Mami, or prohibitively expensive, as in that opportunist on Amazon who wants seventy-five bucks for the final volume of Sugar Sugar Rune, which they tell me is the greatest of the “cute witch” magical girl stories, except I wouldn’t know because, well, seventy-five bucks? Seriously? My magical girls are precious to me, but so are my dead presidents.

I’m grateful for re-releases or longer running releases when they happen. All the furor over some bad decisions aside, I’m glad Viz picked up the original Sailor Moon to release the whole thing with subtitles, and I’m quite pleased with my collector’s set of Revolutionary Girl Utena, a series I have a love-hate relationship with. And I really like my DVD set of Princess Tutu, which in my humble opinion might be the greatest magical girl series ever made (yeah, yeah, Madoka, whatever).  It was also when Crunchyroll started archiving more older shows that I finally decided to pay them for a subscription.  Specifically, it was when they got a set of Cardcaptor Sakura, another series I have a love-hate relationship with.

By way of an update, I’ve been so busy getting Jake and the Dynamo going that I’m behind on other projects. I should have a review posted this week, at least. Jake and the Dynamo will have a new chapter every Monday for as long as I can sustain that pace, which will be at least three months.  Then I might change the schedule if necessary.

I’m also tweaking the look here.  This blog’s only a few weeks old, and it’s still running on the default theme.  For the time being, J&tD have their own spot in the sidebar, and the chapters will also be navigable.

Microsoft’s Magical Girls

 

I learned something new today while browsing the web. I didn’t know that turning out magical girl mascots was a regular thing for Microsoft.

I do however remember that back in 2013 there was a little buzz over the video featuring a personified Internet Explorer:

If this personified Explorer was more realistic, her transformation sequence would take fifteen minutes to load, and she’d crash unexpectedly right in the middle, only to find herself standing in the street, completely naked. Heck, even Microsoft has now given up on Explorer: they’ve replaced it with something called Edge. I bet nobody actually uses that one, either.