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INTEREST: Newest Cardcaptor Sakura Museum Asks: 'Why is CCS Being Rediscovered Now?'

"We need fantasies because all fantasies are prayers - prayers for the meaningless but valuable real world."

I went to the museum as well last Monday. Honestly, I don’t think this article did the exhibit much justice. There were both copy and original manga pages on display, and this article did t touch upon that. Seeing the original sketches of the power transfer sequence was really nice. I would have liked it if there were some actual cels or any artwork from the anime on display. Seeing as how they were showing the sequence of Sakura summoning her wand from Episode 40 in the check-out area, I don’t think that getting the rights to include the anime portion was an issue. Sadly, you could not take pictures of the artwork section of the museum, so maybe that’s why it wasn’t mentioned here.

they discovered that one anime show from the mainstream 90's past wasn't a "Perverted cancer on our society, with its magical-girl heroine dangerously promoting pedophilia", and, in fact, was actually pretty darn cute and addictive and made with a little high CLAMP quality.

...Those of us who were around back then, watching it on the Purple VHS's, knew that already.

Yet there's also something a little more… intangible about Cardcaptor Sakura's enduring appeal. To quote the museum text: “Cardcaptor Sakura introduced new perspectives and twists to Japanese comics. Its gentle words mask the radical ideas that it actually offers and that is one of its qualities that its fans are rediscovering after over 20 years.”

EricJ2 wrote:

they discovered that one anime show from the mainstream 90's past wasn't a "Perverted cancer on our society, with its magical-girl heroine dangerously promoting pedophilia", and, in fact, was actually pretty darn cute and addictive and made with a little high CLAMP quality. ...Those of us who were around back then, watching it on the Purple VHS's, knew that already.

You're not wrong about any of that. But what's ironic is that despite its cute, happy, and generally G-rated appearance, there is actually quite a lot of content in CCS which is actually fairly extreme, especially for the time it came out. I would argue that someone claiming it was "free from bad influences like pedophilia" wasn't paying very close attention.

Well, just saying that when they're not actually watching it and just talking about it in the newspapers, ANY anime show is now disingenuously seen as part of the Otaku Menace, which is "causing" the NEET plague, the job recession, and the low birthrate--
But that's not what they thought twenty years ago, when Sakura, Ranma, and Tenchi were showing on every afternoon TV. And what seemed like "What we watched as kids" (remember, responsible Japanese adults never try to "relive their childhood" like figure collectors do), now seems that the shows weren't all that bad, back when they had to sell just good universal, entertaining all-appeal shows to everybody, especially kids...And not just a few fanservice-pandered niche high-school kids late at night.

The point I was trying to make is that CCS actually contains a remarkable amount of potentially objectionable content, which is why I think it's ironic that it gets used as an example of unusually wholesome anime here.