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the_sun_is_upLately on the Magical Girl Project, I've been focusing my researching on merchandise. Specifically, I've been mostly ignoring the requisite deluge of posters, stationery, coloring books, figures, dolls, love-pillows, and other random crap, instead focusing on the toy versions of objects that appear in the actual shows — mostly wands and transformation trinkets — because this is the area of merchandising that seems to have a visible effect on the evolution of the genre and on how these shows are made.
There are several common tropes in the Magical Girl genre which I think can be traced back to this type of merchandising:
1) Magical Girls have more than one magical doodad at a time. In the early years of the genre, heroines would either have no magical doodads at all, or they would have just the one. As the genre progressed, it became standard for each Magical Girl to have at least 2 magical doodads on hand at all times — usually one for transforming and one for attacking — and sometimes more than that.
2) Magical Girls periodically switch out older magical doodads for newer ones. This trend started with Hana no ko Lunlun, who traded out her magic brooch for a different one halfway through the series. This mid-season switch was continued by Minky Momo and the Pierrot girls, except they also traded out their wands for new ones. Then Magical Girl shows started running longer and the switching-out of magical doodads became something that happened every season, starting with Sailor Moon, who burned through 5 transforming devices and 6 wands plus the disguise pen and the Holy Grail over the course of the anime.
3) Magical Girl doodads are designed with their merchandising potential in mind. Somebody on TV Tropes quipped that in the Precure franchise, "it's usually obvious that at least one magical trinket per season was designed to be a toy first and an implement of magical ass-kicking second," and this phenomenon is not limited to Precure. Sailor Moon, Doremi, and other merch-driven shows with high ratings tend to feature magical devices that a) blatantly look like they're made of plastic thus making it easy to replicate them in toy form and b) look like they'd be fun to play with but not so practical in a fight. As technology has marched on, the genre has seen a wave of cell-phone-looking magical doodads, and shows as far back as Minky Momo and the Pierrot oeuvre have consistently used doodads that emit colorful flashing lights when certain buttons are pressed, making the average Magical Girl's arsenal look less like mystical artifacts summoned from a foreign world and more like stuff you'd buy for your 5-year-old at Toys R Us.
The designers working on these shows are obviously smart enough to know that the success of their work is largely reliant on having a solid merchandise deal that sells well, so it's easier and more practical to just design the show's magical doodads to look and act like toys to begin with, rather than designing them as realistic weapons and then having to toy-ify them later. I've heard that when Neon Genesis Evangelion was in development, one of the hurdles it faced was that the merch people wanted Anno and co. to redesign the Evas to look more like standard mecha, because they were concerned that it would be difficult to make plastic toys out of the curvy, fluid, muscular Evas.* Apparently someone talked them into it, but if they hadn't changed their minds, I imagine it would have been a big problem. If the toy people don't want to make merch for your show, you're screwed, so it seems like the average Magical Girl bling designer tries to avoid this situation altogether by keeping the need for merchandising in mind right from the get-go.
4) Magical Girl doodads get added for an anime adaptation. Saint Tail for example has a golden gem-tipped cane that she uses in the anime, and I've heard that she didn't have any such thing in the original manga. Why did the anime creators add it in? Because merchandising, that's why. On my merch searches, I've also encountered a number of doodads that appeared in the anime version of Rayearth but which I don't recall being in the manga. Since the only bling in the Rayearth manga was the girls' swords, which would be difficult to toy-ify, I'm guessing that's why the anime added some extra doodads to sell as toys.
Anyway, I think it's interesting how something like toy merchandising can shape the evolution of a whole genre and its aesthetics. However there are some shows that avoid these merch-driven tropes, and they tend to be a) shows aimed at dudes, because the toy merch is almost always restricted to the shows aimed at little girls, and/or b) artsy auteur-ish shows like NGE whose creators apparently didn't need or want to rely on merch money to get their show off the ground. Shows like Devil Hunter Yohko, Princess Tutu, Earth Maiden Arjuna, Pretear, Uta Kata, Mai-Otome, Saint October, and mostly recently PMMM avoid excessive bling, design their bling to look like it was made from precious metals rather than plastic, and/or give their heroines practical-looking conventional weaponry.
* According to Wikipedia, Anno designed the Evas that way on purpose: "With recent robot anime series there have been too many instances of toy makers sticking their big noses in from the design stage so they can get a spec that is easy to turn into a toy. I don't want any interference from toy makers, so I'm going to design a robot that just cannot be turned into a toy." Lol oh Anno. a) Your resistance was futile and b) no wonder your show ran out of money.
There are several common tropes in the Magical Girl genre which I think can be traced back to this type of merchandising:
1) Magical Girls have more than one magical doodad at a time. In the early years of the genre, heroines would either have no magical doodads at all, or they would have just the one. As the genre progressed, it became standard for each Magical Girl to have at least 2 magical doodads on hand at all times — usually one for transforming and one for attacking — and sometimes more than that.
2) Magical Girls periodically switch out older magical doodads for newer ones. This trend started with Hana no ko Lunlun, who traded out her magic brooch for a different one halfway through the series. This mid-season switch was continued by Minky Momo and the Pierrot girls, except they also traded out their wands for new ones. Then Magical Girl shows started running longer and the switching-out of magical doodads became something that happened every season, starting with Sailor Moon, who burned through 5 transforming devices and 6 wands plus the disguise pen and the Holy Grail over the course of the anime.
3) Magical Girl doodads are designed with their merchandising potential in mind. Somebody on TV Tropes quipped that in the Precure franchise, "it's usually obvious that at least one magical trinket per season was designed to be a toy first and an implement of magical ass-kicking second," and this phenomenon is not limited to Precure. Sailor Moon, Doremi, and other merch-driven shows with high ratings tend to feature magical devices that a) blatantly look like they're made of plastic thus making it easy to replicate them in toy form and b) look like they'd be fun to play with but not so practical in a fight. As technology has marched on, the genre has seen a wave of cell-phone-looking magical doodads, and shows as far back as Minky Momo and the Pierrot oeuvre have consistently used doodads that emit colorful flashing lights when certain buttons are pressed, making the average Magical Girl's arsenal look less like mystical artifacts summoned from a foreign world and more like stuff you'd buy for your 5-year-old at Toys R Us.
The designers working on these shows are obviously smart enough to know that the success of their work is largely reliant on having a solid merchandise deal that sells well, so it's easier and more practical to just design the show's magical doodads to look and act like toys to begin with, rather than designing them as realistic weapons and then having to toy-ify them later. I've heard that when Neon Genesis Evangelion was in development, one of the hurdles it faced was that the merch people wanted Anno and co. to redesign the Evas to look more like standard mecha, because they were concerned that it would be difficult to make plastic toys out of the curvy, fluid, muscular Evas.* Apparently someone talked them into it, but if they hadn't changed their minds, I imagine it would have been a big problem. If the toy people don't want to make merch for your show, you're screwed, so it seems like the average Magical Girl bling designer tries to avoid this situation altogether by keeping the need for merchandising in mind right from the get-go.
4) Magical Girl doodads get added for an anime adaptation. Saint Tail for example has a golden gem-tipped cane that she uses in the anime, and I've heard that she didn't have any such thing in the original manga. Why did the anime creators add it in? Because merchandising, that's why. On my merch searches, I've also encountered a number of doodads that appeared in the anime version of Rayearth but which I don't recall being in the manga. Since the only bling in the Rayearth manga was the girls' swords, which would be difficult to toy-ify, I'm guessing that's why the anime added some extra doodads to sell as toys.
Anyway, I think it's interesting how something like toy merchandising can shape the evolution of a whole genre and its aesthetics. However there are some shows that avoid these merch-driven tropes, and they tend to be a) shows aimed at dudes, because the toy merch is almost always restricted to the shows aimed at little girls, and/or b) artsy auteur-ish shows like NGE whose creators apparently didn't need or want to rely on merch money to get their show off the ground. Shows like Devil Hunter Yohko, Princess Tutu, Earth Maiden Arjuna, Pretear, Uta Kata, Mai-Otome, Saint October, and mostly recently PMMM avoid excessive bling, design their bling to look like it was made from precious metals rather than plastic, and/or give their heroines practical-looking conventional weaponry.
* According to Wikipedia, Anno designed the Evas that way on purpose: "With recent robot anime series there have been too many instances of toy makers sticking their big noses in from the design stage so they can get a spec that is easy to turn into a toy. I don't want any interference from toy makers, so I'm going to design a robot that just cannot be turned into a toy." Lol oh Anno. a) Your resistance was futile and b) no wonder your show ran out of money.
