I'm enjoying my new, blu-ray intensive rewatch of the entirety of Pretty Cure. I have the bluray, 1080p, huge gigabyte per episode versions of all the seasons but three. And I expect Max Heart will come out in bluray before I need it, since I have to rewatch all of Futari wa before I can even start on Max Heart, a direct sequel to Futari wa.
There are 16 great seasons of Pretty Cure -- the first 13 are all great, a seemingly dauntless juggernaut of quality destined to be the #1 anime of all time. Then it slips for two seasons. But confidence in the show is restored when seasons 16-18 are all great -- Star Twinkle, Healin' Good and Tropical Rouge -- only for the next two seasons of Precure to suck again (including the recently ended Hirogaru Sky).
This next season, Wonderful Precure, will be the make it or break it moment for the series -- was the 16-18 one last gasp, one last flickering of the candle before the wick goes out?, or was season 19-20 the anomaly and Precure will return to form? We'll know in a few days, but I suspect Wonderful Precure will also suck, and it will be time to look only backward, not forward, to Precure. (The key to Precure F's success was its shameless backward looking towards all the best moments of Precure past).
In particular I love seasons 8-10 of Pretty Cure. This was the Suite, Smile, Doki Doki trilogy that really cemented Precure's claim to fame. If Pretty Cure is too long for you just concentrate on these three seasons and you'll get most of the value of the series in a much denser format.
Every time I see one of my Precure waifus onscreen I'm reminded why they were chosen. They're all such beautiful, valiant and bright girls -- Honoka, Mai, Nozomi, Urara, Haruka and Riko are all so well characterized and valorized. Pretty Cure is so long, which gave these girls more time to be characterized than virtually any other character in anime, and every second around them is a pleasure.
To be fair, if you subtract out repeat animation and overlapping themes (like 'have confidence in yourself, have the courage to chase your dreams', etc.), you should probably half the length of Pretty Cure in terms of total great episodes. This would give it a more reasonable length of 431 eps of great anime (eps that would be on par with eps of Fairy Tail, SAO or the like, using this definition.) However, even with this halving, Pretty Cure still looks amazing compared to its competition. Only one series has more episodes than that, #3 One Piece. So that would imply, just mathematically, that Pretty Cure should at least be ranked #4 in my rankings.
Nobody has to watch the bad seasons of Precure, so there's no real reason to count them against the overall worth of the series. Each season of Precure is an independent story so you don't have to watch the bad seasons to understand the good ones. I don't hold filler arcs against Bleach so I shouldn't hold bad seasons against Precure, they're equally dismissible.
Meanwhile, the 49ers had a hard-to-believe comeback to win the NFC championship, while the Chiefs created two turnovers in the endzone to stymie the high-flying Ravens. Now we're looking at the same Super Bowl that was played four years ago, 49ers vs. Chiefs. It's a shame, I wanted a new team to win a Super Bowl, not two dynasties going at it yet again. But now that we're here I'll cheer for the Chiefs. Go Republicans beat Democrats!
What they're doing to Trump with all these specious lawsuits and criminal cases is a disgrace. It deeply angers me that injustice is so rife in America. I'm reminded of the most disgusting aspect of pre-civilized England that Hume reviewed so contemptuously, the arbitrary use of law to destroy your political opponents instead of as a protector of the powerless. We're right back to that level. Or the last days of the Roman Republic, which also saw law weaponized against anyone who stood up for freedom or integrity. But I still believe that Trump, who is leading in the polls, will prevail against all these gadflies. He will win his 2nd term and turn the tables on all these people, and soon they'll be going to jail for all the enormities they've done to him and the Republic for the last 8 years. The professional misconduct and malfeasance, the malicious prosecution, is in fact illegal under the law, and all those double standards will no longer be ignored -- like Hillary's mishandling of classified documents, or Biden's, or Hunter's bribery schemes, suddenly all of it will be back on the docket and we'll start seeing real justice. No one will be above the law, not even Democrats, one year from now. Their favorite catch phrase when referring to Trump will suddenly come baying for them like a pack of unleashed hounds. I'm excited for November. I can't wait for that moment on election day when Democrats all across the country realize the jig is up and they're about to meet their maker. The look of horror and realization that Democratic operatives and politicians are about to be hoist on their own petard, the poleaxed look of the butcher Zelensky as he realizes his dictatorial days of warmongering have come to an end, there will never be a more satisfying day than November 5th, 2024.
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