Md. Taqi Yasir
Anime for young children has seen its better days. Ever since the rise of Pokémon in the late 1990s carried a new wave of fans into the Internet age, the anime industry has largely set its sights on teenagers and young adults by catering to their desires for the more mature stories and fidelity to the original Japanese versions. In this environment, it seems unthinkable that someone would put out a dubbed anime series with “Americanized” character names, missing episodes, and an entirely new soundtrack, but that sort of cross-cultural recklessness is the name of the game for HaimSaban, aka Mr. Power Rangers. Saban recently partnered with Netflix to release Glitter Force, a heavily edited, English-language reversioning of the magical girl series Smile! Pretty Cure.Pretty Cure (or “PreCure” as it’s often abbreviated) is a huge franchise in Japan, where it has been the dominant magical girl series for nearly a decade now. Like Gundam, it relies on a simple genre framework—a team of girls meets a magical familiar, dons multicolored costumes, and fights bad guys—to produce annual series that are just similar yet different enough to sell a new generation of toys and accessories to a new generation of kids.
Smile! Pretty Cure (2012) is the ninth series since 2004’s Futariwa Pretty Cure.Glitter Force retains the basic story of Smile!, with five middle-school girls (each a different color-coded archetype, from the pink, bubbly airhead to the orange, hot-blooded tomboy) given magical powers and tasked with saving their world and the fairy kingdom of “Jubiland” from the denizens of the Shadow Realm.