Magic Knight Rayearth #5: Midnight Mediablasters 100 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles 05/30/2000

Back To M Listings

"This is so inappropriate," I can still hear our sometimes friend and erstwhile drinking companion Evan opine while in the car listening to the dulcet tones of Sandy Fox, the slow version of Magic Knight Rayearth's English opening playing on Bare's scarcely adequate car stereo as we travel through the barrens that comprise the majority of New Jersey. Inappropriate for four guys driving around in a car, maybe, but the somber tune with the trappings of future hope stirred something inside of me while sitting in the very school library where I type this review up. Magic Knight Rayearth has about as surprising an ending as one might be able to expect from a show with its background, but it's an appropriate one all the same. While the girls struggle to resurrect the last Rune God that will allow them to save Princess Emeraude the world of Cephiro quickly goes to shit. Alcyione, sorceress of balls as we called her, is back for a little more. She's quickly laid down, as is the strange elf with ambiguous gender who (for reasons unfathomable to me) turns into a wolf with bunny ears with no real explanation. You know, I think it's funny that the enemies just happen to show up at these shrines right when the Rune God decides that the Magic Knight du jour needs a test of their will. What would happen if nobody was there? I don't know, but it's pretty moot now, the way I figure it.

And afterwards the Magic Knights are free to fly around in their giant lego block robots and go assault the palace/giant clamshell where the princess is held captive. Her captor? Well you should know by now, but it's the evil priest, Zagato. I'm not sure about your take on the matter, readers, but if I were to build a bad guy up for about eighteen or nineteen episodes I would probably do a bit more than just have him pop in and die in the span of about five minutes (give or take a whole episode). I might just be weird like that, but all that build up with no reward reminds more of a date with the highschool prude than anything else. Why even have a bad guy? Because if there was no bad guy, who would reveal the WILDN'CRAZY plot twist that it's actually Emeraude that's causing all the trouble and she needs to die to get Cephiro back on the right track? If you say you saw that coming, you're a liar. I mean, I didn't see it coming and I've seen the show before, twice! That's a lie, but the fact still remains... I didn't really catch what was going on and it still makes me kinda sad inside that it had to end this way. On the plus side, the grown-up version of the princess isn't too bad looking... you know... for a cartoon.

That doesn't make it better, nor does it explain why she looks like a little kid during the whole thing, but it'd seem to be that this is yet another allusion to puberty. I doubt it's my place to say, me not being a woman and all, but my puberty didn't involve giant minotaurs threatening poor villages and magical spells called 'The Winds of Admonishment' (You're a stupid bad guy, clean your room! Consider yourself admonished). If a kind female viewer were to tell me that theirs indeed DID involve such things I would be happy to listen to their tale. Then I would take a time machine back to the moment I was conceived and turn myself into a little girl. I'm not a weird transsexual or anything, I just want to fight a minotaur, or a giant evil bunny-wolf. Either would be okay. But the older, evil Princess Emeraude was not available for comment, as she was busy trying to destroy three fourteen year old girls in her giant robot. This brings me to my next question, why do the evil people have giant robots? Why do evil giant robots even EXIST in this world? You know, I thought Cephiro was a nice place, a family place, not the kind that harbors two or three giant Ki'nex monsters that have a innate desire to totally wreck the world they're inhabiting. Where do evil robots come from? And why?

But before any of these questions can even be raised, we're forced to sit through a long montage of the enemies while Sandy Fox croons to us in the background. They're all here, sorceress of balls, the boy named after a neck piece, Caldina the sorceress of bells (that look like balls). I can't remember if the elfish man-woman was there, but I'm willing to take a leap of faith and say that he was. I don't understand, are Japanese girl's attention spans really so weak that they can't remember all the people that factored majorly in the show? For that matter, why do they even need to remember at all? They're all dead! Well... one of them is anyway. It still made me a little sad though, because Yuuzurenai Negai, as I remember the Japanese theme being called, is a sad song and Ms. Fox does ten times the job on this that she did on Freckles, the Rurouni Kenshin opening theme (which is really quite awful). Magic Knight Rayearth might not be a show for anyone my age, or anyone that's not a prepubescent girl, but you can bet that if I ever had a daughter, this would be my main man. And let me tell you, if there's any fourteen year old girls out there fighting minotaurs, I've got your back.