Hello there and welcome to the second installment of my experiment to see if people actually do take me seriously. If you don´t know what I am talking about, I invite you to go back and read the first installment of this quote on quote series. For the rest you, jump inside and see for yourselves if I finally manage to string a coherent sentence.
Part 2: The Max Heartening
Last time on my “I really need to get myself a different hobby” series, we covered a few of the basics of Tokusatsu, gained a basic understanding of the Pretty Cure franchise and developed a plan to achieve world peace which I promptly edited out of the final version. Now that I have all that groundwork deployed, it is time to get to the actual meat of this venture; as I hinted last time (with all the subtlety of a landmine), Precure has a habit both taking inspiration from Tokusatsu AND making (relatively) small nods and references to the genre, and since this can be something of a controversial subject, from here on out we are going to take a look at each PreCure series and try to get a better understanding of how they relate to Toku, analyze some common misconceptions about this phenomenon and, if we have the time, rethink some of the current theories on the human condition.
Ok, so this is how it´s going to roll: since there are a lot of Precure series to cover and I would like to keep these things relatively short and to the point (message from me of the future: I am going to fail hilariously at this), I am going to cover a certain number of shows on each entry and focus on highlighting the themes and nods on each season that I find relevant, either because I feel they add a certain level of deepness to the show or because they make me giggle (mostly the latter).
*Giggless*
This time we are going to take a look at the first three season of the franchise, because I like chronology and I had already written the title of this entry by the time I typed this paragraph, so my hands are kind of tied.
DISCLAIMER: Let`s clarify something; while I am certainly knowledgeable about these subjects, I am by no means an expert and there will probably be a few details that I will miss. So, if you notice something that flew right over my head or want to add your grain of salt, feel free to mention it in the comments. Also, some of my observations can be a tad ambiguous or biased, but I will try to remain as objective as science allows me to, only to fail awesomely at it.
Futari Wa Pretty Cure
First let me get this out of the way: the first five seasons of Pretty Cure are considered to be the “first” era of the franchise as they were all produced by Washio Takashi. This distinction is important because this period has a really particular style to it, and whiles the Tokuness (let´s pretend that´s an actual word) of this era is pretty light in terms of direct references, there is a heavy reliance on the use of certain themes that are rather common of Japanese super heroes. Case in point, I give you Cure Black.
I could have probably used a better picture.
There is no way to sugar coat this so I will just say it: Cure Black is a goddamn Superhero. Just think about it, besides the obvious exceptions she has no magical powers to speak off, and even the design of her outfit is accommodated to the fact that she is a brawler through and through; she kicks, she punches, she jumps and then kicks some more. There really is nothing farther away from the classic definition of Magical Girl, and while you could make the same case for Cure White, she does embraces several Magical Girls tropes and plays the role almost to a ‘T’ while Black goes out of her way to subvert some of those ideas and highlight the fact that she is a goddamn hero.
Now that´s more like it.
Really, there are a lot of moments in the show where she intentionally tries to pull off something cool or ‘Heroic’, and you can tell she actually enjoys doing it, even though she does complain constantly about how annoying this whole ‘fighting evil forces’ deal is. This aspect of her derives from the fact that she is a girl that grew up watching Super Hero shows, something that the series actually points out a couple of times, and now that she is a PreCure she finds joy in emulating the heroes she looked up to, even if by the show´s own admission, it is kind of absurd. This is probably a good moment to address the big Black elephant in the room that if you didn´t saw coming then you probably need to have your eyesight checked: the character of Misumi Nagisa AKA Cure Black, shares a surprising number of similarities with Minami Koutarou AKA Kamen Rider BLACK.
*fawns*
When doing PreCure/Tokusatsu comparisons, there are a lot of times when you wonder if the creators of the show are intentionally making a particular reference or is it just one big coincidence and your mind is playing tricks on you. Well, this just happens to be the perfect example of that: both Black and BLACK share a base color, both are good at sports, they have a strong sense of justice, a penchant for protecting others and their primary fighting style relies entirely on punches and kicks. Heck, you could even make the case that their base outfits are kind of similar. A lot of these things can easily be circumstantial and not direct references, but you still get the feeling there has to be a connection, particularly because BLACK is a pretty popular show and it is hard to not get the feeling that Nagisa is the type of girl who grew up admiring someone like Koutarou and now hopes to emulate him. Also, Cure Black has the exact same hair style as Minami Koutarou.
No, really.
The funny thing is, even if you go beyond her character you can still see some odd parallels in the shows, like the similarities between the three evil seeds and the Golgom Priests or how the dynamic between Nagisa and Honoka seems to mirror the one between Koutarou and his best friend/brother Akizuki Nobuhiko: not only you have the Black and White/Silver scheme, but also both Koutarou and Nagisa are described as being the athletic ones of the pair while Honoka and Nobuhiko are smarter ones, which pretty much defines most of their character traits, from their personalities to their battle styles.
At this point you are probably saying “Damn, this guy really wants to believe that FwPC is based on KR BLACK!”, and to be fair I do want EVERY show to be KR BLACK, but in this case I actually believe that these parallels are a matter of correlation and not causation. You see, there is actually one thing that both shows do have in common, and that is the use of the Ying Yang concept; both shows take the idea of complementing opposites as a base (not to mention the Dark/Clear color scheme), and while FwPC definitely uses it to a greater extent than KR BLACK ever did, you can still see how the color themes and the idea of Brain vs. Brawn influenced the conception of the main characters for both shows. So really, one show is not based on the other as much as they are both borrowing from the same base concepts.
Yes, kicking counts as a ‘concept’
All things considered, Futari Wa Pretty Cure is a very traditional Magical Girl show, but the ways in which defies the norm stuck out like a sore thumb: while the personalities of Nagisa and Honoka are pretty much standard Magical Girl fare (now that´s a sentence I don´t use often), their alter egos defy almost every convention of the genre, to the point that Cure Black herself seems to be determined to deconstruct the very concept of what most people at the time considered a Magical Girls should be (reminder: this show came out in 2004). You know, I really can´t overstate how unusual Cure Black is, from her particular way of fighting to her altruistic tendency of valuing other people´s happiness over her own, she is more reminiscent of your classic hero that fights for freedom than the common ideas one associates with word like “Magical” and “Girl”.
Seriously, there´s like a million of these pictures
To be fair, it can be argued that by their very concept Magical Girls have always been Super Heroes, but what really distinguishes the PreCure franchise on this regard is their approach to this idea: instead of creating Magical Girls who do heroic things, they created Super Heroes that just happen to be Magical Girls, and Futari wa Pretty Cure is where this idea really got started.
Futari Wa Pretty Cure Max Heart
As you can probably tell from the title, Max Heart is a direct sequel to the first season, and as such, pretty much all of its elements are carried onto this one, which is humble-speak for “Cure Black and Cure White are still kicking all the ass”. Now, in order for me to NOT repeat myself (which paradoxically, is pretty much all I do on these things) I want to focus on the one element this season had that the previous one didn´t: The Character of Houjou Hikari/Shinny Luminous.
Why of course she is a blonde!
I am aware that my following statement might prove controversial or even inaccurate, and I will be the first one to say that it is most likely a trick of my imagination, but I have always found some strange parallels between Max Heart and the 2001 Kamen Rider Series, Kamen Rider Agito. First and foremost are the odd similarities between the series´ protagonists: on the PreCure Side we have Houjou Hikari, a girl with no memory of who she is but with a kind heart that is actually the wielder of the power of light which allows her to transform into the shinning life, Shinny Luminous. On the Kamen Rider side we have Tsugami Shouchi, a man with no memory of who he is but with a kind heart that is actually the wielder of the power of light which allows him to transform into the evolved light, Agito.
Why of course he is a (Japanese equivalent of) blonde!
I know it’s a ridiculous comparison, but the characters do have a lot in common: both of them are very good at house work like cooking or cleaning, neither of them has any family so they were “adopted” into someone else´s and since both of them are envoys of light, they are destined to fight against the envoys of darkness. This last point is particularly interesting since both shows feature a character that is literally the God of Darkness reborn as a human being that appears early in the show, remains on the sidelines for most of it and becomes the final villain by the end, which actually brings me to the fact that both shows use very similar base concepts for their story lines.
Sadly, Max Heart suffers from a severe lack of Hikawa-san
The back story of both shows features the conflict between two deities, the Queen of Light/Overlord of Light and the Dark King/Overlord of Darkness, and the demise of one of them (the one of light) kicks off the main events of both series. Admittedly, both shows end up following very different paths, with Max Heart being more about the meaning of being alive and Agito being about people with very dramatic lives that refuse to talk to each other, but by the end both shows actually arrive at a very similar morale about trying to control life versus believing in its potential and letting it grow.
Max Heart has the most epic finale, though
Again, these are parallels that probably only my deranged mind sees, but I honestly think that, just like in the previous series, this is a case of two shows that borrow from the same basic ideas: in this case, dual light/dark all mighty deities, an innocent character who both learns and teaches about the importance of being alive and following a destiny against living your own life. This is certainly not the most solid interpretation of the material but hey, I had to fill this section with something.
And sadly, I don´t have enough pictures of Hikawa-san for that. Probably.
Futari Wa Pretty Cure Splash Star
As you can probably NOT tell from the title, Splash Star is not a direct sequel to the previous seasons, but since this show was essentially the first attempt at branching out the series into an actual franchise, a lot of the elements from the previous seasons were carried over. This was not necessarily a bad thing since they did try to improve upon several of those elements, and for the most they did succeeded, though there were certainly downsides: due to the popularity of the previous seasons and they focus on the fighting, the producers were forced to tone down the fighting. As a result this season is somewhat tamer, but the Cures still displayed super human capabilities and even if direct punching was no longer allowed, the girls were still pretty damn powerful.
By virtue of Lasers.
The way the show downplayed the action while giving a mayor focuses to other elements like the secondary cast and the villains made of Splash Star the most traditional Magical Girl show in the whole franchise… which means that is also the show with less Toku elements in it. Granted, that is not a bad thing at all, but for the purpose of this article it does give me very little material to work with.
What could I possibly say about this!?
That said, the show still works within the same infrastructure of the previous seasons, and what´s more, given how this is where the show started to become a franchise, you can actually see how they started to adopt elements from shows like Super Sentai in order to serialize it. This is particularly notable in the rotating cast of villains that are not only far more entertaining than their predecessors, but also have personalities and dynamics that resemble the ones from the most lighthearted seasons of Sentai. I should also point out that the final villain of the season pulls off a scheme not unlike the ones seen in Megaranger or Maskman, albeit he is far more successful at the whole ‘destroying the world’ thing.
Actual picture of the show
One more thing that is important to note about Splash Star is that, given the rising popularity of the franchise (though admittedly, this season was not as popular as the previous ones) and the relation by association that it formed with Tokusatsu, this was the point where Toei really started to focus on marketing PreCure together with Super Sentai and Kamen Rider, the two shows that aired right before it and that inspired its creation. It is certainly a bizarre tactic, but you cannot argue with the results.
On second thought…
The Seiyuu Connection
Here´s a fun game that is great for parties (and if it´s not, you are probably going to the wrong ones): let´s see how many voice actors we can find that have had roles in both Precure and Tokusatsu. I admit that this might not sound all that amazing, after all Japanese voice actors have plenty of roles in different media, but for some reason PreCure has this habit of overlapping with Toku in bizarre/awesome ways, and as such sometimes we end up with pretty amazing coincidences, like for example:
First off we have the famous voice actress Yukana, who played Yukishiro Honoka/Cure White and a few years later went on to portray the villainous Greeed Mezool from Kamen Rider OOO!
Funnily enough, Mezool´s human form is a high schooler
Allow me to say that I do find this fact a little creepy since after growing attached to the character of Honoka, hearing her voice coming from someone as wicked as Mezool is rather disturbing.
Following that we have another famed voice actress, Rie Tanaka, who in 2005 gave life to the innocent Hojou Hikari/Shinny Luminous, and in 2011 became the voice of one of the main villains from Kamen Rider Fourze, the space-warping Virgo Zodiarts!
They are as perplexed as we are.
This I don´t find nearly as disturbing because Rie Tanaka has a great vocal range, so it is actually really hard to hear Hikari´s voice on Virgo´s and vice versa. That said, I do find it hilarious that Hikari´s birthday is September 9, which means that she is indeed a Virgo. What did you say? What is this ‘Trap’ you speak off?
Okay, everyone knows this one and it is hardly a surprise, so let us just get it over with: Youko Honna, who played Misumi Nagisa/Cure Black, also appeared in this little show known as Kamen Rider BLACK!
She hadn´t gotten the hang of posing yet
Unlike other examples, Youko was a child actor that appeared as the ‘tag-along kind’ in episodes 32 of BLACK and episode 09 of its sequel, Kamen Rider BLACK RX. This is one of those miracles of TV that are amazing because of how prophetic they are, and it really plays nicely into that ‘she looks up to super heroes’ angle I was rambling about earlier. I should also note that, while she only appeared in those two episodes, her roles were quite remarkable.
In episode 32 of BLACK, she plays a kid who lost her mother and is plagued by poltergeists, which it turns out is a plot from Golgom to use special mushrooms to transform the Japanese youth into delinquents (it was a really weird episode). She doesn´t speak much in this episode so at first I wasn´t sure if it was really her, but once she is kidnapped and taken to the Mushroom sub dimension (again, it was really weird) she spends a lot of time screaming, at which point I said ‘yep, that is definitely Nagisa’. Also, the first half of the episode is heavily focused on her, to the point that Minami Koutarou only appears until the eight minute mark.
Yes, this happened
Then, in episode 09 of RX and in what is probably one of the most bizarre cases of typecasting, she plays a little girl who lost her mother and this time is plagued by a Cactus Monster. The funniest thing about this episode is that this time Youko speaks a lot, and while she is still young and her voice barely resembles the voice of Nagisa, her speech pattern is exactly the same. Seriously, I know some voice actors use their normal voices when playing a character, and I now believe that Youko Honna used her normal voice when playing Nagisa since the child in this episode speaks exactly like her, from her particular accent to the expressions she uses, she really only needed to say ‘Arienai!’ once and I would have lost it.
Since I could cap these episodes forever, let me just say that in retrospective…
Wait, does this makes her a Century King?
…Youko Honna riding on the BattleHopper is simultaneously one of the most adorable and badass things ever. It was technically a dream sequence (again, weird episode), but still.
Moving on onto smaller manlier characters, one of the Fariry Mascots for Max Heart, the resident Smartass Mepple, was played by Tomokazu Seki, a prolific voice actor who once upon a time also played Bibidevil of Denji Sentai Megaranger fame.
One is a smartass, the other one is Bibidevil
Yes, the irony of him playing what amounts to an ‘Evil Fairy’ does not escape me, though to be fair… what´s that? Are you telling me that he also provided the voice for…
The Japanese Human Torch?]
…GlenFire of the Ultraman Zero Movie? Damn, I did not see that one coming, that is quite a broad range you got there Seki, I don´t see how you could top that on-
Hi-IKAAAA!
-HOLY ICE CREAM ON A STICK!! Are you telling me that the voice of Mepple is also the current voice of IkaDevil!?
I… I don´t know what to do with this information. I need to sit dow-
Pictured: Badan Generalissimo as a goddamn Dinosaur
Okay, that is just showing off.
Moving onto Splash Star, here is one I did not see coming: Tokusatsu actor Takayuki Godai, known for playing Takayuki Hiba/VulEagle II in the 1981 entry for the Super Sentai Franchise, Taiyou Sentai SunVulcan, also played the main antagonist of Splash Star, the leader of Dark Fall, Akudaikan.
Ichi tatsu ni tatsu Supurashu Suutaaaa
Leaving the really awesome name(s) aside, this is actually quite surprising because, well, Takayuki Hiba was a really nice guy, so it is odd to see him playing a bad guy, though I should really be used to this by now. Admittedly, Godai has had a diverse career, both as a voice AND regular actor, so this kind of thing is not really that odd, after all he was VulEagle II 20 years before PreCure was even a thing.
Moving on onto less villainous characters we have Kappei Yamaguchi, another well-known voice actor who provided the grating voice of Flappy, the “loyal” companion of Cure Bloom, and more recently became the voice for Ticket-kun, the smartass companion of The Conductor from the currently airing (at the time of this writing at least) Ressha Sentai ToQger.
Now you cannot un-hear it
You have no idea how much I laughed at this. Seriously, from now on every time Ticket-kun says something, my mind will automatically add ‘-lapi’ at the end. Also, his is also the voice of the ToQger´s equipment, which only doubles the hilarity.
Going to the villain side (again), we have Keiichi Nanba, a voice actor who portrayed the sambastic villain Moerumba in Splash Star and also lent his voice for the tragic-yet-heroic Ultraman Hikari!
Fun unrelated fact: there are asexual Ultramen
I have conflicting feelings about this because I find Moerumba to be highly disturbing, and yet I truly love Ultraman Mebius, not to mention that Ultraman Hikari´s theme song is really, really awesome. Seriously, I don´t know what to do with these feels.
And to close this off we have the other main antagonist of Splash Star, the Devious Gooyan, who was played by none other than the very prolific voice actor Toshiyuki Morikawa who amongst his many, many roles, recently provided the voice for Torin of Zyuden Sentai Kyouryuger, also known as KyouryuSilver!
Yes, all of them are freakishly tall
This is not all that surprising since Morikawa is a popular voice actor, but still, it is rather fun to think about how once upon a time, the Brave Torin beat the hell out of a couple of little girls, wiped out the earth, was bing-banged into oblivion by the power of friendship and then reincarnated as a silver brontosaurus who was also a space-bird.
You know what, if this is how Buddhism works, i´m in.
Closing Thoughts…
Even though PreCure is a relatively new franchise (does a Decade still counts as new?), the way it evolved has been quite interesting; while the first three season certainly took inspiration from the Super Hero genre, they still relied on the classic magical girl tropes and it can be easily argued that they were magical girl shows through and through, albeit with a greater focus on action. Still, the recently born franchise proved to be popular at the time, but when sales started to decline the producers tried to re-invent their formula into a more diverse and marketable format, and as we will see next time, the place from where they took inspiration was rather fascinating…
This, my children, is called 'foreshadowing'
So, what do you think? Is BLACK the standard we should all live by? Did i really neglected Cure White? Will i ever get over Hikawa-san? To be honest i will never get around to answer those questions, mostly because this section is a gimmick and is not meant to be taken seriously. In any case, if you want to share your thoughts that´s what psychic powers are for, but if you are not the next step in human evolution then you will have to make due with a comment below.
See you in a week for Part 3!!
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