The Mike Toole Show

A Bit 'O Honey

Sometimes, it's hard to come up with a good subject for these damn things. My previous column, all about the weird connections between Gobots, Machine Robo, and Transformers, started off as another Super Robot Island installment before abruptly mutating into a treatise on wacky cartoon robot cross-importation. Obviously, the thing to do was to push Super Robot Island to this week's entry, but hang on-- I just did a column about robots! Clearly, I need to mix it up a little.

Fortunately, a good subject presented itself yesterday when our pals at Banpresto Mazinger Z arcade game-- and again, I just did a column about robots-- so I figure this one can be about Cutey Honey instead.

Maybe it'd be a bit more apropos to focus on the full body of work of one Gō Nagai, the guy who created both Harenchi Gakuen. So pretty early in the game, Nagai found himself with not just several talented assistants ready to turn his ideas, concept sketches, and roughs into full-blown manga, but an entire office staff to manage his characters and brands. As a result, he turned out literally dozens of titles per year, and is one of only a small handful of manga artists to run no less than five ongoing serials concurrently at a few points in his career.

If you ask most anime fans about Cutey Honey, maybe they'll be able to talk a bit about the story, featuring brave schoolgirl Honey Kisaragi facing off against the nefarious Panther Claw organization and its leaders, Panther Zora and Sister Jill. Or they'll hum a section of the catchy, remarkably persistent theme song, which is present in every screen version of the series and holds a stature somewhat akin to the iconic themes of fare like Gegege no Kitarō. Or maybe they'll mention that Cutey Honey was kind of a game-changer, an early magical girl story that popularized the idea of a “henshin” sequence where the heroine undergoes a stylized stock-footage transformation into her super-powered self. Indeed, what makes Honey's henshin sequences stand out is that she pretty obviously loses her clothes in between them-- so to a lot of fans, Cutey Honey isn't really a thing for small children.

The funny thing is, Cutey Honey totally started off as a thing for small children! The series’ origins in 1973 came during a period when Nagai and his studio weren't doing a lot of Toei's usual spot for magical girl fare.

But along the way, things changed unexpectedly. That space was given to Popy released a few toys, notably a Rider Honey motorcycle, but those planned dolls never appeared on shelves to compete with Licca-chan. A couple of short comics were also scripted by Nagai and drawn by shoujo artists during the show's broadcast in ‘73 and ‘74, but that was about the extent of Cutey Honey’s original “for girls!” angle.

That isn't to say that the resulting Cutey Honey TV series was some sort of goofy, adolescent-boy raunchfest. The naked transformation sequences were strictly Barbie-doll fare, and Nagai's manga tale, in which comely Honey is the objet d'affection for not just potential boyfriend Seiji but most of her female classmates and teachers, was toned down quite a bit for the small screen. Honestly, I'm curious about how well fans are going to receive a 35-year-old series that, for all its importance in establishing magical girl genre conventions, is awfully zany, with gags and chase scenes that remind me more of Scooby Doo than Nagai's seminal robot and action fare of the 70s. At the end of the day, though, Cutey Honey is still the adventures of a pretty robot girl who dons a skintight outfit to fight the forces of evil with a goddamn sword, so I'm looking forward to it.

Nagai did manage to pull off a full-press magical girl show with 1978's franchise's profile way up.

Interestingly, aside from those crummy comics, New Cutey Honey is the only version of the series that's gotten release in the west-- it was an early Violence Jack make it in.

Then, more than twenty years after the original plan to make Cutey Honey a role model for little girls across Japan was scrapped, the old plan finally came to fruition with 1997's Cutey Honey Flash. The look of this 39-episode series is amusing; the characters are clearly tweaked for shoujo sensibilities, but Honey retains her bodaciousness from Nagai's original works, which is all the more humorous when you start sniffing around and find old TV commercials for the many, many dolls and other toys that Cutey Honey Flash yielded.

Yep! Anyway, Cutey Honey Flash was slotted into the “Sailor Moon Stars wrapped, so its success was always pretty likely. But Toei did a good job with the series, which was zippy and fun; the game was changed by tweaking the plot to make Honey a human with super powers, and the show also introduced a rival and partner for Honey, the mysterious Misty Honey, along with a variety of somewhat less ferociously gendered trasformation forms (the stewardess transformation, which bears the somewhat eyebrow-raising moniker “Escort Honey,” is still present, though). Best of all, the full shoujo-ization of the series still didn't prevent numerous classic Gō Nagai references from sneaking in. My favorite? Gorgon Claw, one of the show's bad girls, is a female version of one of the beefy, scary monster baddies from Mazinger Z. Check it out!


I somehow managed to see the majority of this show on VHS fansubs-- those? No, of course you don't. But what Cutey Honey Flash managed to do, aside from causing Hideaki Anno.

Yeah, that Hideaki Anno-- the Re: Cutie Honey.


I mentioned Re: Cutie Honey in a column a ways back about neglected mid-2000s anime. A couple of years on, Re: Cutie Honey is still sadly neglected. Ostensibly helmed by Anno, this 3-partner is really an excuse for the director to turn his hyperactive animation director team of Otakon. She liked the OVA too, but had misgivings about the way it potrayed Honey herself-- because she's kind of stupid in this one. That's too bad-- Honey's a merry prankster in Nagai's original work, she's a valiant, self-sacrificing heroine in New Cutey Honey, and she's a pretty nice girl in Cutey Honey Flash, so there's no real reason to make her an airhead. Oh, well. I still want this damn thing on DVD!

To bring things home, Honey would make an interesting return to live action in a 26-episode tokusatsu series in 2007, entitled Cutie Honey: The Live. This series maintains many proud tokusatsu traditions, like questionable acting, cheesy dialogue, and weird-looking CG and composite special effects-- but it also has the good tokusatsu stuff, like fun fight scenes, entertainingly epic storytelling, and fabulous costumes. (If you ask me, series lead Mark Musashi as one of the bad guys; he gets to swear in English a lot!


I've always found Cutey Honey interesting to think about. Not only can we all argue about whether to spell it “Cutey” or “Cutie,” the story that drives Gō Nagai's manga and animation and cinema is both quite empowering and a little sexist. Honey frequently resorts to playing dress-up as a model or stewardess (heck, one of her big final transformations in Cutey Honey Flash is as a bride-- shades of Wedding Peach!) and gives both the audience and her adversaries an eyeful every time she transforms, but at the same time, her “true” form, the redhead in the form-fitting getup, is a confident, trash-talking swordswoman who fights against evil and wins. And okay, sometimes the powerful Honey still needs rescuing from Seiji and her other pals, but Nagai himself is quick to point out that, before her, there weren't any popular shonen manga or anime that featured a girl as the main character. Still, one wonders if the next reboot (just wait, we'll get it eventually!) would be improved by putting aside the torch singer and nurse getups in favor of atomic scientist Honey or CEO Honey. All I can leave you with this this enduring image of a good girl fighting valiantly against evil.


So which of Honey's costume quick-changes is your favorite? Which version of the cartoon and live-action stuff is the best one? Sound off in the comments!