Podcast Cohost Lauren 4/27/23

Humanity is in peril and only a teen girl is qualified to be gene edited and thrown into combat without even a “Hey, are you cool with this?”. Tokyo Mew Mew(2002)’s reboot (Tokyo Mew Mew New(2022)) joins anime reboots from Lauren and Izzy’s childhood such as Sailor Moon Crystal(2014) and Fruits Basket(2019); meaning these podcast hosts have hit 30 and may reminisce about back when *I* was the target audience for this! Funnily, while both hosts watched Fruits Basket back in the day, we are split on Sailor Moon (Izzy) and Mew Mew Power (Lauren). Note that is the 4kids edition of Tokyo Mew Mew that aired on American television as one of the first anime available in my broadcast area. Izzy cites cliché fatigue for failing to join the viewership of 4kids’ 2004 mangling of my first foray into magical girl ensemble cast. The stakes were high: aliens return to reclaim Earth from polluting human inhabitants! The costumes were cute: café maids and Victorian? inspired magical underclothes as outerclothes! And the localization was bad.

Recently, Izzy and I sat down to watch the first three episodes of Tokyo Mew Mew New and constantly question how old any of these characters are. Ichigo, our protagonist, starts her first day of highschool and witnesses Kendo star Aoyama’s match which ignites true love. She goes and gets the deets on him from her supportive besties who reveal they have five-year-plans. Mint is introduced to the audience an episode earlier than the original and sets up Ichigo on a date to an endangered species exhibit with animal-loving Prince Charming. At this point I was flummoxed: Mint is a spoiled rich girl who goes to rich girl school and does not want to get dirty fighting aliens with commoners! Why is she schoolmates with Ichigo? It turned out to be a true set-up as Mint in this iteration is the first Mew-mew and lured the other girls to the location to be collectively zapped by an unethical experiment run by older men! Although Mint was the first girl to be transformed, the next episode reveals that getting the red costume makes you team leader. Also all the girls have to work as maids at the café operated by Ryou(who is actually a 15 year old and it makes no sense) and Keiichirou(maybe 21 which also really doesn’t track) atop their secret base. Ichigo’s first task is to find the other Mew-mews. How did they already lose track of their uniformed test subjects? Someone take away their grant money. Lettuce is conveniently being bullied by her fake-friend classmates at the café and Ichigo is able to witness her transformation into a powerful porpoise girl at an after school dare. The third episode takes us on another disaster date between Ichigo and Aoyama. They go to see normal boring animals at the zoo and Aoyama confesses that he is nervous to be there with Ichigo because they got separated on their last date and he was worried about her. This absolutely is what immediately happens again. Luckily the fourth Mew-mew is there when the Aliens finally make their debut. Pudding is a younger girl who already has a job as a street performer. The gentlemen back at the café must be rubbing their hands together and cackling over how they will circumvent all the child labor laws. This episode also starts our love triangle (possibly more polygonal if it follows the original anime) with Alien Kish (pronounced Quiche) kissing Ichigo and mocking her about being a play thing. It doesn’t get less weird when upon reuniting Aoyama initially scolds Ichigo for running off then attaches a cat bell from the neck of an actual cat to her. You need to have been on more than two dates for that to be a cute in-joke, buddy.

This anime reboot does bring some updates to the original to keep a returning viewer interested. New animation is pop-ier, more fluid, and more consistent in quality than the 2002 release. The plot also seems to be fast-tracked and not having watched past episode three, I can’t say if we will be missing any side effects of magical girl power on the team’s social lives outside of the alien threat. Izzy also discovered a male version of the manga Tokyo Mew Mew Ole , which may or may not be in continuity with the girls’ story. The cover art is something else.