Initial Notes on ‘Wedding Peach’

I managed to finish all of Saint Tail, but I have nothing to add to my earlier review. It’s an undemanding but sweet story, and I recommend it.

I’ve moved from there to some other mid-9os magical girl titles. I’m right now watching Magic User’s Club, which Nozomi Entertainment has kindly added to its YouTube channel. I am also reading the manga version of Wedding Peach, which I am having to gather slowly, piecemeal, much as I did with Saint Tail.

Wedding Peach is a title that a lot of magical girl fans love to hate, mostly because it appeared a mere three years after Sailor Moon and closely resembles it. Its creator, Sukehiro Tomita, was in fact a writer on the Sailor Moon anime. Wedding Peach has the same relation to Sailor Moon that Day Break Illusion has to Puella Magi Madoka Magica: it’s a little too obvious in its coattail-riding, so it provokes some ire.

That being said, I like what I’ve seen of it so far. The manga, at least, one-ups Sailor Moon in its art quality (not that that’s hard). The characters are likable, and the action is a tad gritty, with an unexpected amount of blood and bruising.

Wedding Peach is an almost perfectly stereotypical magical girl story. The heroine, Momoko, is the daughter of a wedding photographer, and her two best friends, the aristocratic Yuri and tomboyish Hinagiku, have families that own a wedding boutique and floral shop, respectively, so with that kind of pedigree, it’s no surprise that the goddess Aphrodite tapped these three middle school freshmen to transform into love angels and use their magical marriage powers to fight demons. So they literally fight monsters with the power of love and friendship.

There’s something oddly satisfying about seeing a girl kick ass in a wedding dress.

My initial thought is that this franchise gets an undeservedly bad rap. Yes, it’s derivative, but so is everything to some extent. From what I’ve seen of it so far, it stands on its own. On that note, there’s an interesting comment from Eric Searleman, an editor at Viz, in the back of the second volume, which I think is worth quoting in full:

I stumbled into a great little video store in San Francisco the other day and right off the bat, I noticed they sold lots of hard-to-find Japanese anime. Could it be, I wondered? Could it be that such a place would have copies of the hard-to-find Wedding Peach series? I had to ask.

“You mean that Sailor Moon rip-off?” responded the guy behind the counter.

I’d heard it before, of course. You can’t bring up Wedding Peach in polite conversation without some wiseguy invoking the name of the Sailor Scouts.

Sailor Moon predates Wedding Peach by a whopping three years. But it’s hardly without precedent itselt. Remember a series called GiGi and the Fountain of Youth (“Magical Princess Minky Momo”)? Or how about Creamy Mami? Sailor Moon is but one entry in the lexicon of magical girl anime.

But that’s not to say it didn’t influence Wedding Peach. You’d have to be a pretty dull stick to not see the similarities.

Similarly, you can see how Sailor Moon owes a heavy debt to (of all things) the Power Rangers. Ultimately, all these shows borrow and steal from each other in equal parts.

Was Wedding Peach influenced by Sailor Moon? Without a doubt. Was it a rip-off? No way.

Feel free to enjoy both shows, that’s what I say. And if you have the time, check out Fancy Lala and Pretty Sammy, too. There’s plenty of magical girl adventures to explore.