Cutie Honey F
Out of curiosity borne out over many, many years, I decided to watch the first ep of Cutie Honey F, the "successor" to the Sailor Moon anime - same timeslot, same studio, apparently the same core staff.
This was a relatively unsuccessful attempt to turn Cutie Honey into a shoujo series, although it still got 39 episodes and my understanding is the ending is pretty final so I don't think they could have spun it off any further. Even though it's shoujo, they still keep the original lyrics in the OP about how tiny her bum is...
Bear in mind that the show predates the Utena anime by about a year, so imagine my surprise at these shots:
alas, no forest behind the school, and the Wakaba in this show is pink-haired and irritating. Also not pictured - SD weirdo headmaster.
Otherwise it's clear that there's a lot of design influence from Sailor Moon in the monsters and Panther Claw's lair, as well as stylistic elements like the flowers (and florid speeches!) that adorn so many scenes.
oh, and the bishounen. The brown haired one is Honey's dad, the silver one is "the Twilight Knight" *cough*TuxedoMask*cough*.
Otherwise, it's not the most exciting of first episodes, despite car chases and fights on blimps. Honey's whirlwind transformations and fighting really needs the energy that Re: Cutie Honey provided as the way she's presented here is too restrained, and the supporting characters don't get enough screen time to prove interesting at this stage.
Surely Seiji should guess pretty much immediately that the one person he knows called Honey, that most common of Japanese names, might be the same person as Cutie Honey? Nah, too simple.
