Cutey Honey is one of those franchises I know a lot about even though I haven't actually watched much of it yet. I just over the last 24 hours watched the Sentai Dub of Cutey Honey Universe and that is the first Cutey Honey Anime I've completed. I once a long time ago temporarily owned the New Cutey Honey DVD but watched only the first episode where my mind perhaps read too much into some parallels to The Dark Knight.
Cutey Honey Flash aired right after the 90s Sailor Moon Anime finished, taking over it's time-slot and involving a lot of the same creative staff. It is known for being much more Shoujo in style then the franchise usually is, because Toei wanted it to fill the shoes of Sailor Moon.
It's not a highly regarded entry in the franchise from what I've seen. I think that's partly because the very demographic they were trying to appeal to with this change in approach instead felt insulted. Lots of women liked Cutey Honey already as she was, so it felt kind of sexist to assume you'd have to turn it into Sailor Moon season 6 to appeal to young women.
Ironically it just may be the people most inclined to like this the best of any Cutey Honey show are people like me, Cis-Het Men who are tired of patriarchal assumptions about what does and doesn't appeal to the male demographic. I'm tired of the assumption that a female Superhero needs to be constantly objectified in order for us to be interested, and that we're only minimally interested in romantic melodrama. I am interested in the basic premise of Cutey Honey but would like a version where she isn't constantly ogled and groped. And the very things a lot of women are tired of being told they're supposed to be into are things I'm tired of being told I'm not allowed to be into.
My main concern as of not actually starting the show yet is the apparent insertion of a Tuxedo Mask clone. Honey already had love interests (both male and female) they could focus on. I like Tuxedo Mask, but his clones in a lot of other Magical Girl shows I feel often seem to be missing the point of his character. However this issue has not yet been enough to completely break my enjoyment of one.
The thing about certain of these 90s and early 2000s Magical Girl shows being made to capitalize on the success of Sailor Moon is that they actually have some of the same key creative minds behind them as the 90s Sailor Moon Anime.
The main writer of Cutey Honey Flash, Ryota Yamaguchi, was also the head writer of Sailor Stars. The Series Director of CHF had previously been an Episode Director on Stars, and the Series Director of Stars (who also worked on prior seasons even going back to Goldfish Warning!) was an Episode Director on CHF. CHF also had four other Episode Directors who'd been directing Sailor Moon episodes, one of them being the director of the S and SuperS movies. We see a similar phenomena with the Assistant Directors.
To get the common Visual Aesthetic connection we could also mention Yoshiyuki Shikano, Miho Shimogasa, Shigetaka Kiyoyama, Katsumi Tamegai, Kenichi Tajiri, Hidekazu Nakanishi, Hashimoto Kazuyuki, Taniguchi Junichi and I'm sure more. (Masahiro Ando contributed to the movie at least.)
However not all of Cutey Honey F's former Sailor Moon staff were ones who's most notable contributions were arguably to the last two seasons. Katsuyuki Sumisawa had been a Sailor Moon writer for the first three seasons then left to be the lead writer on Gundam Wing, but then he returned to Toei for CHF. Some of his Sailor Moon episodes are personal favorites of mine, for example he did a number of the Ikuhara directed episodes including the Lesbian Animators episode from the Nephrite arc and the episode that introduced HaruMi. He also wrote the two parter once known in English as Birthday Blues, which were episodes I greatly enjoyed. He also wrote a couple key episodes of the Doom Tree Saga and it's Minako and Rei spotlight/attack upgrade episodes. And in the future he will be the lead writer of the first 26 episodes of Corrector Yui, another show I've been meaning to watch but keep putting off.
Some people make it sound like Flash has the least Yuri appeal of any version of Cutey Honey. But one of those was a person who also seemed to think Universe was lacking in Yuri so that I can't take seriously. I don't want to get my hopes up going in, but given Sumisawa's involvement in some of Sailor Moon's Yuri highlights, and how much Wing appeals to Yaoi fans, I would not be suprised if Flash has some queer subtext most people are overlooking.
There is one Cutey Honey Flash writer who is more notable for what they've done since then what they did before, and that is it seems also the only Woman on the writing staff. Reiko Yoshida would go on to write much of the Maria-Sama Anime, Girls Und Panzer, Romeo x Julliet, High School Fleet, and she's on the staff of the newest Pokemon series interestingly. But most important of all she's the writer of almost everything directed by Naoko Yamada, they seem to be a pretty good team.
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