Worth a Look: Sasami and the Magical Girls Club.

Most people probably heard of Pretty Sammy by way of Tenchi Muyo, not me of course. On one of my all to many vacations to the continent of Asia I watched tons of anime. Some in the language of the land such as Sailor Moon, Bomber Man, some Transformers rehash that had the copyright logos from Takara. I also got to watch a few in English and unedited like Power Stone, Samurai X, Ghostsweepers, Dual, Transformers: Headmasters(uhg,) Powermasters(YEAH!) and Victory(whoopie).

There was one interesting and pretty obnoxious series. As soon as I got home I went to the local anime store to find it. A store dedicated to renting out and selling nothing but anime. I saw the star of the series on one of the boxes for Tenchi Universe. I took the box up to the proprietor and asked:

"Do you know of a series that has this girl but she wears pink, transforms, and has a talking rabbit that meows?" He immediately takes me over to the subtitled section and points out Magical Project S.

What does that have to do with anything? Nothing. It's my time to waste and nobody's forcing you to click on this.

For many years I dismissed Sasami: Magical Girls Club mostly based on the early descriptions. Overemphasizing the cooking club bit. Which was really only a minor part. And the costumes were God awful, even for a magic girl show. I was tired of the whole "Does this lipstick go with my shoes?" routine of these kinds of shows.

One day Amazon recommended Sasami: The magical Girls Club. I guess based on the similarity to Rosario Vampire and Deathnote. I can get the whole series for thirty dollars. Well, I had been watching House for a couple of weeks and needed a change. If I don't like it, I know some guys I can give it to, or donate it to my Grandma's church rummage sale.

This ain't Pretty Sammy. This series was par excellence. For the most part. Let's start with that. After many years of Tenchi I'm used to a certain character design. This is very different. It's good, different, but good. Voices: good actors were chosen, they did a good job acting, and the correct voices were used. However, I was disappointed that Chisa Yokoyama, Etsuko Kozakura, Sherry Lynn, or Kate T. Vogt were nowhere to be found.

The next two problems are the fault of the acting and writing. I thought we were done with gross mispronunciations of names back in the 90's. "Roy-o-oh?" I can't even begin to figure out how to spell out the way they pronounced "Sasami." The thing I would fault this series for is too many characters. They get no development what so ever. You have the three other girls with Sasami and Misao. Then there's the other magic girl club. All the witches in the other world. Plus their parents, and a bad guy that looks like a good guy. They all have their own stories, which are good, but no time was given to fully develop them. They should have left it to Sasami and Misao. Which was always the strongest part of any of the Pretty Sammy series.

This is the best part. I had been thinking the whole time :"When is Misao going to get hypnotized into Pixy Misa and fight Sasami?" Never happened. Instead the bad guy used trickery to play upon Misao's jealousy and anger towards Sasami to make the decision to turn on her friends and fight against them. That in my mind made it worth suffering through the asinine little girl stuff.

Of course Misao is taken over by the main bad guy, fights Sasami, rescued, and then gets to use Sasami's powers.

While watching this, I got that feeling of déjà vu again. I definitely recognized the imagery from Pretty Sammy, and even from Tenchi in Tokyo. But, there was something else:

 NAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
(Though I must say the ones on the left where both very difficult to get.)