Unfortunately, part 4 of SourcererZZ‘s thorough history of magical girl anime is not available in my country because of a copyright claim, so we have to skip ahead to part 5, where he starts with 1993’s superhero parody Moldiver. He continues from there through 1995. These are the years immediately after the appearance of Sailor Moon, when the genre enjoyed a surge in popularity.
I particularly enjoyed his discussion of Magic Knight Rayearth, an RPG-inspired adventure with a twist, which is the only story by CLAMP (that team of manga-ka that is both so prolific and so overrated) that I like.
Unfortunately, his sound quality is going down the tubes. SourcererZZ has always been hard to understand, but now he’s got a bad mike to go with the broken English. His description of Moldiver is more-or-less indecipherable, but he becomes intelligible shortly after that. In spite of the shortcomings (and, alas, the missing episodes), this is the most thorough overview of the genre I’ve ever come across. His research, and his insane ability to find clips from obscure cartoons from the days of laserdiscs and VHS, is quite impressive.
