Futari wa Pretty Cure's first 26 Episodes

I have before on this blog claimed we need more 2 Cour ideally 26 episode Magical Girl shows, that the genre is limited by being mostly stuck between single cour shows that have limited time to make their characters stand out, and kids shows it that go on all year.  The Pretty Sammy TV Anime is the one 26 episode show that exists and I give high praise but it's not very accessible right now.  The third season of the Nanoha franchise is 2 cour but it's barely still a Magical Girl show by that point.

However I had forgotten to really acknowledge that the first 26 episodes of the original Futari was Pretty Cure, the very start of the PreCure franchise, pretty much is a 26 episode show.

Every season of PreCure has some kind of midway point climax happen around this point, but it's not the same. To make a comparison to people only familiar with the Sailor Moon formula, most seasons of PreCure have at this point an event that feels similar to the Nephrite and Naru arc's resolution, or the resolving of the Tailsman hunt in episode 22 of S, or finishing the Amazon Trio at that point in SuperS.  However episodes 24-26 of Futari wa feel like 44-46 of the Dark Kingdom, and then episode 27 feels like a Reboot or Pilot of s new series just as much as the first episode of MaxHeart or Sailor Moon R does.

These first 26 episodes even go through a full set of 5 generals.

This aspect of how the first season is structured isn't talked about much, it comes up in neither Tyranno or Magical's videos on season 1.  But I find it fascinating.

I suspect the writers of this show originally simply planned a 2 cour show, and then when Toei said they wanted it to go all year like their prior Magical Girl shows, they decided to simply write a second season instead of dragging out their original plan.

I wish more seasons could have played out this way.  In every other way the future PreCure seasons are generally less "generic" then the original in their storytelling and ideas.  But this is a factor in why I really do think the original has the best pacing, and maybe more of the later shows would have kept me watching longer if they could have had the original's pacing.

And it proves you could write a version of Sailor Moon's Dark Kingdom Arc as a 26 episode show.  In this early part of PreCure each general has on average 5 episodes, you could increase that with only 4 generals instead of 5.  

And when you remove from the 90s Anime's Nephrite and Jedite arcs their most expendable/forgettable episodes, about 7 each is what they had.  So yeah for those Arcs I could almost show you what their 2 cour version would look like by just saying what to skip, except that I wouldn't kill off Nephrite before introducing Mako.