Proving that this Mikan box thing isn’t new, this one is going back a bit – to 1996 for the first TV adaptation of Pretty Sammy, released in the US as Magical Project S (and no doubt now really hard to find), as opposed to the earlier OAV series or the more recent Magical Girls Club thing that Funimation are releasing pretty soon. Yup, this one goes back to those mythical days where shows were drawn on things called cels, coloured with something called paint, and had OP sequences which ended up looking like horribly grainy VHS transfers when they were re-released on DVD.

I’m not much of a fan of Tenchi Muyo, actually. I tried the old OAVs back in the mid-nineties when they were new, and whilst they were enjoyable, I never really got the enthusiasm that a lot of the anime press of the time held for the series. I guess a lot of it came down to it being very different to a lot of the things we got in the UK back then (though we did get some really, really bizarre and niche things back then if you cared to look), but as far as old, milked to death AIC series of the 90s go, I’ve always been more of a El Hazard fan. As far as Pretty Sammy went, back in the day I only saw the first of the OAVs – it was alright, but the embarrassment generated by having a VHS cassette with Pretty Sammy emblazoned along the side on my shelf was a little more than my sixteen year-old self could take at the time, and I purchased no more.

So, imagine my surprise when I discovered that Pretty Sammy is actually surprisingly good, as far as monster-of-the-week shows go. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it subversive, but it’s all a very, very tongue-in-cheek take on the Magical Girl genre, and long-time readers will realise that I’m all over that stuff.

After a few episodes, I actually paid attention to those credits in the OP sequence, I did notice something that went some way to explaining it’s surprising quality – notice that second name under Series Structure? It’s Hideyuki Kurata, who I actually mentioned the other day in relation to the forthcoming Kannagi, which he’s scripting. I think it’s the only Tenchi series he’s worked on, so that may explain why it’s the one I’m most favourable towards.

Yousuke Kuroda is still working today as well, coincidently – he’s still even working with Kurata on Hellsing Ultimate. His back-catalogue is rather less consistent than Kurata (Ground Defense Force Mao-chan isn’t that great), but the good outweighs the bad overall.

All that said, the show is very, very 90s. At worst, some of the voice acting verges on ear-bleedingly shrill, but generally it’s show just feels a little messy. It’s not really hard to watch, but it’s more than a little odd to watch going back from the rather more slickly composed modern efforts. The character designs take a while to get readjusted to from modern designs as well.

On another note, unrelated to Pretty Sammy and Mikan boxes as such, but related to spotting random visual memes in anime, I noticed this in an episode of xxxHolic the other day.

Author was talking about how it was strangely common to see people using knives with break-off blades in anime in IRC the other day (I missed the start of the discussion, but I presume it was related to his later post on Hidamari), though the only example we could really think of at the time was Noein. When I saw this blade, I couldn’t help but immediately think “Oh, I’ve got to screen cap that!”, and have just been waiting for a suitable excuse to post it.

My worry here is that this is yet another thing that’ll end up distracting me whilst watching anime – I already end up pausing and rewinding shows every time I think I see mikan box (which, more often than not, I haven’t), and tend to pay too much attention to what juice-boxes people are drinking in shows (strawberry flavour is surprisingly common when they aren’t making jokes about particular flavours, as with the Peach Sludge in Air, or Yues crazy selections in Negima). Now I’m going to be distracted ever time I see someone wield a small blade in anime, and am going to be pulled out of the show as a result.

Thanks, Author 😛

(Coincidently, if you are wondering why I was watching Pretty Sammy, it’s part of my backlog of old Geneon releases I picked up back then they closed their operations a while back. I’ve got pretty much the whole Tenchi back-catalogue there, but I went with Pretty Sammy because I actually though it was the show in my in-pile with the highest choice of having a Mikan box in it. No, really).