#suki suki majo sensei

[haveyouseenthistoku]

[cosmic-orchaid]

Tokusatsu Shows I Have Watched Master List

Ultraman 1966 : Completed

Ultraseven : Some Episodes

Return Of Ultraman : Completed

Ultraman Ace : Couple Episodes

Ultraman Taro : Some Episodes

Ultraman Leo : Some Episodes

The Ultraman : Know it

Ultraman 80 : Completed

Ultraman Powered : Know it

Ultraman Great : Know it

Ultraman Tiga : Couple Episodes

Ultraman Dyna : Know it

Ultraman Gaia : Completed

Ultraman Cosmos : Completed

Ultraman Nexus : Know it

Ultraman Max : Completed

Ultraman Mebius : Completed

Ultraman Ginga/Ginga S : Completed

Ultraman X : Completed

Ultraman Orb : Couple Episodes

Ultraman Geed : Completed

Ultraman R/B : Completed

Ultraman Taiga : Completed

Ultraman Z : Completed

Ultraman Trigger : Completed

Ultraman Decker : Completed

Kamen Rider

Ultraman Blazar : Completed

Ultraman Arc : Planning to

Kamen Rider 1975 : Some Episodes

Kamen Rider V3 : Completed

Kamen Rider X : Completed

Kamen Rider Amazon : Couple of Episodes

Kamen Rider Stronger : Know it

Kamen Rider Skyrider : Know it

Kamen Rider Super-One : Couple of Episodes

Kamen Rider Black : Know it

Kamen Rider Black RX : Know it

Kamen Rider Kuuga : Completed

Kamen Rider Agito : Completed

Kamen Rider Ryuki : Couple Episodes

Kamen Rider Faiz : Couple Episodes

Kamen Rider Blade : Couple Episodes

Kamen Rider Hibiki : Some Episodes

Kamen Rider Kabuto : Couple Episodes

Kamen Rider Den-O : Completed

Kamen Rider Kiva : Couple Episodes

Kamen Rider W : Completed

Kamen Rider OOO : Couple Episodes

Kamen Rider Fourze : Couple Episodes

Kamen Rider Wizard : Couple Episodes

Kamen Rider Gaim : Know it

Kamen Rider Drive : Completed

Kamen Rider Ghost : Couple Episodes

Kamen Rider Ex-Aid : Completed

Kamen Rider Build : Couple Episodes

Kamen Rider Zi-O : Couple Episodes

Kamen Rider Zero-One : Completed

Kamen Rider Saber : Completed

Kamen Rider Revice : Completed

Kamen Rider Geats : Completed

Kamen Rided Gotchard : Currently Watching

Super Sentai

Gorenger : Some Episodes

JAKQ : Know it

Battle Fever J : Know it

Denjiman : Know it

Sun Vulcan : Know It

Goggle V : Know it

Dynaman : Know it

Bioman : Know it

Changeman : Some Episodes

Flashman : Know it

Maskman : Couple Episodes

Liveman : Completed

Turboman : Know it

Fiveman : Know it

Jetman : Some Episodes

Zyuranger : Know it

Dairanger : Some Episodes

Kakuranger : Completed

Ohranger : Know It

Carranger : Know it

Megaranger : Know it

Gingaman : Know it

GoGoFive : Know it

Timeranger : Know it

Garoranger : Completed

Hurricanger : Couple Episodes

Abaranger : Know it

Dekaranger : Some Episodes

Magiranger : Completed

Boukenger : Couple Episodes

Gekiranger : Couple Episodes

Go-Onger : Currently Watching

Shinkenger : Completed

Goseiger : Couple Episodes

Gokaiger : Completed

Go-Busters : Know it

Kyoryuger : Know it

Together: Couple Episodes

Ninninger : Know it

Zyuoger : Completed

Kyuranger : Couple Episodes

Lupinranger vs Patranger : Couple Episodes

Ryusoulger : Couple Episodes

Kiramager : Completed

Zenkaiger: Completed

Donbrothers : Completed

Other Toku Shows

King Ohger : Completed

Boonboomger : Currently Watching

GARO : Know it

Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon : Completed

Balala : Completed

Poiturine : Know it

Suki Suki Majo Sensei : Some Episodes

[super-heroinecomparisons]

1960's and 1970's heroines. Click for full size.

[funakounasoul]

~Hikaru-sensei~

[tokumon]

Space Plant Pirazumon from ep. 3 of Suki! Suki!! Majo Sensei

[bunnymajo]

Wing Girls: An early example of an all female transforming hero team

We've all heard the take that in 1992 Sailor Moon is the first anime to focus on an all-female super heroine show akin to "Super Sentei" or "Saint Seiya", aimed at girls, and that is true. But I want to talk about another very early example I've never seen mentioned: The Wing Girls, a plot element that shows up about midway of the 1984 shonen anime "Yume Senshi Wingman"

Yume Senshi Wingman is a show very aimed at teenage boys. It focuses on Hirono Kenta, a huge tokusatsu nerd with his own hero persona, Wingman. He's chosen and gifted with the Dream Note that can make anything he draws in it come true so he can become Wingman for real and defeat and evil organization from taking over his world. Another big point about Wingman is it's focus on love triangles and fanservice, between Kenta's ladylike classmate Miku and the more bold and flirtatious Aoi, who is a resident from the world that the Dream Note came from

The opening visually explains I think what kind of dynamic they were going for here: (also if nothing else, the music in this show is really good)

In episode 33, Airing on November 13, 1984 - Kenta and his classmates are visiting a shoot of a liveaction henshin hero episode. Agents from the evil organization are rumored to be part of the cast and Kenta's not able to focus his attention on it, so the female classmates who know his secret are given their own special forms in case something goes wrong and they need to step in

Enter the Wing Girls, consisting of Aoi, Miku, along with his other classmates Momoko and Kumiko

More of a backup squad to Wingman himself, they're still given similar abilities to instantly change forms with the power of the dream note and enhanced physical abilities for punching and kicking

They make a few other appearances throughout the show but this is their big solo moment. They even get their own theme song on one of the drama CDs, and figure merch in 2009.

I just think they're a neat little part of magical girl history.

Side mg history in case someone brings it up:

The idea of female super-hero magical girls as main characters goes as far back as the early 1970s with "Suki! Suki! Majo-sensei" and "Cutey Honey" and continues to sporadically appear through the decades. But these only focus on one heroine compared to an entire team.

Another early cited example of a mg team is the Studio Pierrot crossover special "Majokko Club Quartet: Alien X from A Zone" a direct-to-video special from 1987 that shows the heroines from Pierrot's line of magical girls: Creamy Mami, Magical Emi, Fairy Persia and Pastel Yumi, team up against alien invaders and parodies sci-fi tokusatsu tropes in the process. While the original TV series are all aimed at children, and the special is still within the realm of SFW, I would argue this OVA is more aimed at adult fans of the series due to its content and release format. So that's why I tend to not think of it on the same level as Sailor Moon.

[cina-full-moon-xanadium]

Got in a big tiermaker mood suddenly so I've added a couple more that I've had coming for a while - Ishinomori Tokusatsu and Metal Heroes! Because there is a distressing amount of sad robots in our lives

[ai-yo]

I've been going mad for the last 2hrs trying to find 1 damn clip from Suki Suki majo sensei of Hikaru becoming Andro Mask and I can't find shit!!

the official toei tokusatsu youtube only has the first 2 episodes and miss moon teacher doesn't transform until episode 14. I swear down there were bare clips on youtube back the day did toei really remove them all

[mgtitlecards]

“Suki! Suki!! Majo-sensei” - October 3, 1971

[farmerinthesky]

Finished coloring my Sennome Sensei/Teacher with a Thousand Eyes tribute. Kaoru Chigusa is one of my favorite Shotaro Ishinomori characters and I'm very proud of this artwork I made. I really wish to see this series rediscovered someday.

[haveyouseenthistoku]

Redemption Round

100% of the voters voted that they have not seen Suki! Suki!! Majo Sensei (1971-1972).

[mahounomanga]

Sennome-sensei (and Suki! Suki!! Majo-sensei)

In my last post I talked about a live action TV show that got adapted to manga thrice over. If you read that post and found it all a bit convoluted, buckle up. Today I'm here to tell you about a manga that got adapted into a live action TV show, which in turn got adapted into at least four additional manga.

Starting at the beginning, Sennome-sensei (which approximately translates to Teacher with a Thousand Eyes) is a 1968 manga about a high school professor named Kaoru Chigusa who possesses strong psychic abilities including telepathy, telekinesis, premonitions, and hypnosis. She travels from school to school in search of teenagers who have recently awakened psychic abilities of their own who can help her fend off an impending invasion of Earth. Over the course of the series, she teaches at two schools: an all-girls private school in a metropolitan area and a coed public school in a small fishing town. Along the way she meets students who are fellow espers, trains them to hone their powers, and on occasion helps them out in their personal lives.

Although other magical girl psychics exist (examples include Esper Mami and Dr. Rin), this series is notable for having a distinctly sci-fi twinge, incorporating paranormal and mystical beings such as extraterrestrials, mermaids, and youkai. Artistically drawn-out panel compositions help lend an ethereal and almost eerie vibe, and the story gets darker than one might expect, even and especially from shoujo manga of this vintage.

Sennome-sensei was originally published from May 14, 1968 to November 19, 1968 in the weekly shoujo magazine Teen Look, which itself was only in print from 1968 to 1970. Chapters were first collected in two tankobon volumes by Asahi Sonorama on December 15, 1970 with reprints published on July 30, 1976 and February 28, 1979. In the 2000s, the two volumes were combined into one for a reprint by Futabasha on April 1, 2001 (this is the edition pictured above) before being split apart again for their final physical reprint published by Kadokawa Shoten in 2006. Most recently, both volumes were given a digital rerelease, also by Kadokawa Shoten, on June 27, 2014.

There's a certain detail I've deliberately left out up to this point because I figured it might overshadow everything else, which is that Sennome-sensei was created by the legendary Shotaro Ishinomori. Ishinomori was an award winning manga artist, and an acquaintance of Osamu Tezuka. He created so much beloved work in the course of his lifetime that even now, more than 20 years after his death in 1998, he still holds the world record for most comics published by a single author. Although science fiction was Ishinomori's bread and butter, he's known to have written in a number of other genres across both shoujo and shounen manga. He had a penchant for introducing storylines to shoujo that would have been uncommon in the medium at the time, and Sennome-sensei itself is an example of this. He is the first mangaka I've mentioned on this blog to have his work adapted into anime, starting in 1966 with Rainbow Sentai Robin, and his most well known work, Cyborg 009, would continue to be readapted well into the 2010s. Other Ishinomori manga-turned-anime include Genshi Shounen Ryuu, Chikkun Takkun, and Miracle Giants Doumu-kun. As far as early magical girls are concerned, Sarutobi Ecchan began life as Ishinomori's 1964 manga Okashina Okashina Okashina Ano Ko (loosely translates to That Strange, Strange, Strange Girl). It is also worth mentioning that Ishinomori worked in live action television on a number of tokusatsu productions, creating, among other things, Kamen Rider and the Super Sentai series (best known in North America as the basis for Power Rangers).

The tokusatsu connection is important here because the main thing Sennome-sensei is known for is being adapted into a tokusatsu program in 1971 titled Suki! Suki!! Majo-sensei (approximately We Love You! We Love You!! Professor Witch). While this series retained the basic premise of "teacher with mysterious powers helps her students in some capacity", very little else carried over. The stoic and aloof high school teacher, Kaoru Chigusa, was swapped out for a cheerful and eccentric elementary school teacher, Hikaru Tsuki. Rather than ESP, Tsuki-sensei gets her powers from a magic ring that channels the power of the moon. Indeed she is a princess from outer space who came to Earth to study humans. The series draws heavily from The Tale of Princess Kaguya, and as such Hikaru rents a room from an elderly couple and is accompanied to Earth by a rabbit companion, here depicted as a crotchety old man. It's also worth noting that this TV show generally has a much lighter and goofier tone than the manga from which it originated.

Nowadays Suki! Suki!! Majo-sensei's claim to fame is that halfway through the series, Hikaru acquires a magic compact that lets her use her moon magic to transform and fight monsters as Andro Kamen, making her one of the first fighting heroines in the magical girl genre, beating even Cutie Honey to market by a solid two years. Sennome-sensei may have been modestly successful in its own right, but Suki! Suki!! Majo-sensei was a huge hit in its day. Plenty of merch was made, including but by no means limited to stationary, apparel, handkerchiefs, vinyl records (this was the 70s after all), and of course toy rings and compacts. It should come as no surprise then that Andro Kamen found her way back into the pages of manga... many a time.

One thing that's worth noting right up front is that some of these publications blur the line between manga and picture book. For example, Asahi Sonorama published a Suki! Suki!! Majo-sensei book on December 1, 1971 as part of their Song & Story series, which came with a small flexi disc of music from the show. Despite being labelled as a TV manga right there on the cover, the illustrations take up whole pages and the text isn't confined to word balloons.

By contrast, Hikari no Kuni published two Suki! Suki!! Majo-sensei stories, one a retelling of episode 5, the other featuring an original plot. These ones are classified as picture books, and yet the panel layout and text composition are more in line with what one would expect from a manga.

Also, since I'm on a bit of a tangent anyway, I feel like y'all should know there was an official crossover between Suki! Suki!! Majo-sensei and Sarutobi Ecchan published by Sun Planning, though I'm not sure what sort of crossover it was. It too was packaged with a small flexi disc, but as for the contents of the book, I could only find one picture of the inside, and it was a step-by-step guide to drawing the characters rather than anything plot-driven. Still, it's neat that this is out there.

Anyway, there were three manga based on this series that got your typical magazine serializations. One was created by Hideo Azuma and ran in TV Magazine from the December 1971 issue to the April 1972 issue. This is the only version to get published outside of its original magazine run, with the chapters being rereleased as a single tankobon volume on April 10, 1981 by Animage Comics and Tokuma Shoten. In the realm of magical girls, Azuma also created a manga adaptation of Chappy the Witch, as well as his own original magical girl series, Nanako SOS in 1980, which would receive an anime in 1983. His only other work to be animated was his 1977 manga Pollon of Olympus, which was adapted into Ochamegami Monogatari Korokoro Pollon in 1982. Speaking more generally, Azuma is known as the "father of lolicon", which... *sigh* I knew I was going to have to talk about lolicon on this blog eventually.

Okay, so, for those of you who don't know what that term means, first of all, I envy you, but lolicon (or loli for short) is an art style and a genre that centers on sexualized depictions of prepubescent girls. Sometimes this entails just drawing them to look younger than they are, and sometimes they really are just straight-up children. Lolicon would rise to popularity in manga and eventually anime in the 1980s and was a staple of otaku culture at that time, which is part of what gave otaku such a bad reputation. The magical girl genre was undergoing key developments during the lolicon boom, and certain iconic magical girls from this era, especially Minky Momo, were quite popular with that crowd (albeit unintentionally), so the two genres overlap in some... interesting ways. This would result in the creation of magical girls designed to cater specifically to the lolicon demographic later down the line, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. For now, all you need to know is Hideo Azuma is cited as a key innovator in this movement. I have some very strong feelings about loli, but I would rather not start discourse and drama on this blog, so I'm just going to let you draw your own conclusions and move on, m'kay?

I will say that it strikes me as ironic that Azuma would be tapped for an adaptation of one of the few magical girl shows to star a grown adult woman as the protagonist given what he would eventually become known for, but based on what I've seen of it, his take on Suki! Suki!! Majo-sensei is thankfully non-sexualized, arguably moreso than the TV series. On the whole, this version seems more distinctly kiddie than most-to-all of the others, relying way more heavily on slapstick humor than any other iteration of the series.

One of the other manga was published in Tanoshi Youchien from the December 1971 issue to the April 1972 issue, thereby running parallel with the TV Magazine run. This one leans more into the shoujo aesthetic, so it's a shame that I wasn't able to find any information about the mangaka, Saki Shinomiya. As far as I can tell, this is the only work she ever authored, though if anyone out there knows of anything else she's done, I would love to hear about it.

Lastly, a version of Suki! Suki!! Majo-sensei ran in Nakayoshi from the January 1972 issue (published December 6, 1971) to the June 1972 issue (published May 6, 1972) for a total of seven chapters (one of which was published in a special edition of the magazine). This one was handled by Chizuko Beppu, a prolific manga artist whose genre of choice is romance in shoujo and josei. She was quite active around this time, even penning an adaptation of Cutie Honey for Otomodachi, and she continued working in manga well into the 2010s. This version makes some notable changes over the others, some of which are purely cosmetic. For example, Hikaru is depicted as having green hair here, and a more curlicued version of the logo is used for the first few chapters. What fascinates me the most about this take on the story though is that it continued publishing after the show ended, and yet at no point in it does Tsuki-sensei transform into Andro Kamen. She still does magic mind you, but the manga also focuses very heavily on a romantic subplot between her and another teacher which, to the best of my knowledge, isn't present in any other iteration of the story. They even go so far as to (spoiler warning for a hard-to-find manga from approximately fifty years ago) end the series with the two of them getting married. It kinda makes sense given that this is Chizuko Beppu we're dealing with, but the idea that this is the S!S!!M-s manga that ran the longest, even outlasting the show they were all based on and THAT is how it ends is absolutely wild to me.

Alas, none of these manga have ever been translated as far as I'm aware. In the case of Sennome-sensei it's a real shame, but in the case of Majo-sensei, to be honest, I would recommend the TV series over any of its' manga remakes. If you do want to watch Suki! Suki!! Majo-sensei, I have good news and bad news. The good news is the series was included on Toei Tokusatsu World Official, an official YouTube channel where you can watch tons of tokusatsu free and legally. The bad news is as of this writing, most of the series is no longer available. All 26 episodes were up at one point but for whatever reason, episodes 3-26 have been hidden. The first two episodes are still up with English subtitles, and they provide a good look at how Tsuki-sensei's powers operate in the pre-Andro Kamen part of the series (which is the part most heavily emphasized in some of the manga), but sadly, Andro Kamen herself doesn't make an appearance. I do hope the rest of the episodes will become available again at some point, but with the state of availability for most older magical girl series being what it is, there's a part of me that's still thankful we even have this much.

[super-heroinecomparisons]

Andro Cross transformation and fight.

[funakounasoul]

Andro Kamen, just vibing~

[tokumon]

Phantom from Suki! Suki!! Majou Sensei

[prettywarriors]