Turn of the Century Magical Girl shows.

I've already talked quite a bit on this blog about how the late 90s and early 2000s were a transitional period in Anime.  Often with a particular eye on the Magical Girl Warrior sub genre.

Something interesting I've recently noticed is two now relatively obscure shows that were airing at the turn of the Millennium.

Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne and Corrector Yui were airing at about the same time over much of 1999 and 2000.  Both qualify as Magical Girl Warrior shows with somewhat distinct twists.  But certain differences in their aesthetic and tone result in my kind of viewing Jeanne as the last Magical Girl show of the 90s and Yui as the first of the 21st Century.

Perhaps I should try harder to explain the difference I'm thinking of.  But it's kind of a ,"you'll know what I mean if you've seen enough of them" kind of thing.  That Yui doesn't from what I've seen so far have a Tuxedo Mask analogue is one minor example.

Kamikaze Kaitou Jeanne was a Toei show airing with a lot of carry over creative staff from Sailor Moon and Cutey Honey Flash and so definitely feels like it's their spiritual successor, (it also has a connection to Wedding Peach via Sukihiro Tomita).  And would be the last show to really fill that role till we got the Live Action PGSM.  It's also hard not to see it as partly derivative of Saint Tail.

Corrector Yui is not a Toei show, Toei was prototyping the Pretty Cure aesthetic around this time with some Magical Girl shows of the non Warrior variety like Fun Fun Pharmacy, Yume no Crayon Oukoku and Ojamajo Doremi.  But for a Magical Girl Warrior show this one kind of feels the most like PreCure before PreCure.

And beyond the Mahou Shoujo realm Corrector Yui is kind of .Hack and Sword Art Online before either of them existed in any medium.  It's not the first Anime to deal with the Internet obviously, I've talked about others on this blog already.  But it is perhaps the first to really reflect how normalized the Internet had become by the end of the 90s.

It always fascinates me when I can see one era ending and another beginning at the same time.