Kawaii Jenny series background

[daburuwosagase]

The first batch is finally here!

I provided the raws for this and called in a lot of favors to get it this far. Thank you [T-N]!!
I first ran across Kawaii Jenny while specifically researching female-centric tokusatsu one day. I watched one random episode and instantly wanted to see more, but only the first handful of episodes were available online. I went looking for the DVDs... and they were an average of 4000 yen per volume. To me, that suggested that it was a hidden gem. So began a long period of watching auctions like a hawk. Upon obtaining a whole set, I was delighted to find that yes, Kawaii Jenny is a remarkably fun series that deserves some more attention.

Unfortunately, Jenny was not given very much attention while it was first broadcast, either. Despite being an all-ages show, it aired on local television stations past midnight. Luckily, it got some reruns (also past midnight) and online streaming. The Kawaii Jenny-branded toys were also limited run and could only be bought at Licca-chan Castle. They didn't even have transformed versions! It's hard to call this show a toy advertisement when kids couldn't watch it on TV or buy the toys in stores.

Notable cast and staff:
Most of the tokusatsu staff previously worked on the Chouseishin series. You can see everyone's exact credits in the interview bonus feature. Two of the scriptwriters worked on multiple Sentai shows.
Akira is voiced by big-name seiyuu Kobayashi Yuu.
Sister B is voiced by singer Momoi Haruko, who also did songs for Akibaranger.
The composer Takanashi Yasuharu has done soundtracks for the Chouseishin series, Ultraman, and multiple Precure entries.

The show's main concepts can be attributed to Imai Satoshi, the assistant director. Imai was creating indie doll tokusatsu with his friends for DECADES before Kawaii Jenny. His circle, Maiei, has quite a repertoire, a small portion of which can be viewed at this youtube playlist (RAW). I think it's fascinating from a historical perspective.

Maiei also has its own site established in the 90s and regularly updated up until a few years ago. It's full of so much documentation that I can't dig through it all, especially because it's the combined work of people who have been friends for decades. It's like stepping into a time capsule.

The most relevant work to Kawaii Jenny is Dream Sentai Barbie V, which later became Dream Angel Jenny V. It's so old that it started before the Jenny toyline branched off from Barbie. The in-universe explanation for the name change is actually quite persuasive, too.
The series was filmed over the course of 12 years and never actually finished. There were often shots in the next episode previews that didn't make it to the finalized storylines. It was considered for and won quite a few amateur awards!
Barbie/Jenny V was a very genuine show with character focus episodes for each of the Dream sisters (the five main transforming heroes). One of their recurring friends is "played" by a doll of Ranze from Tokimeki Tonight. Despite a few clichés, I'd still call it surprisingly feminist for its time.
Funnily enough, its opening song is riffed from Goggle V — back in 1983, when Goggle V was almost the latest sentai! This show is probably one of the earliest sentai parodies.
I'd say its biggest fault is that the video quality is not great, and some of the copyrighted audio has lately been muted on the youtube upload. Still, it's a miracle that this series is available to watch at all.

Many concepts from each of the Maiei productions can be seen in a polished form in Kawaii Jenny. I'd like to think that this was a dream come true for Imai Satoshi (as well as his partner Imai Akiko, the costume designer) to work on an official Jenny production in collaboration with veteran Godzilla guys. In recent years, Satoshi has been doing other toymation shorts whereas Akiko is still doing doll customs and dress commissions. It's rather heartening to see that they still know exactly what they like.

Lastly, some notes about the staff interviews: Kawakita and Urasawa are not good at enunciating or clarifying the subject, respectively. It was very difficult to make sense of what they're saying.
It didn't help that Kawakita just says some incorrect stuff. Urasawa was never credited on Sazer-X, but he was briefly on JustiRiser. Additionally, I wasn't able to find any info about Shanghai anime fairs in late 2006 that showed Legend of the Sacred Stone. It's a Taiwanese production and it's not anime! So while the other staff members are pretty intelligible, I'd take any info from Kawakita with a grain of salt.

[takenoko]

So I stumbled across this series back in the mid aughts (I'm so old). I thought it might be a fun series to pick up since it was weird and starred Card Captor Sakura. I even had the songs timed and I had pirated the soundtrack off Japanese p2p

I've had this pic of Momoi Haruka in the powerglove forever, maybe even used it for a front page post when releasing AkibaRangers. I even forgot where it came from and just thought it was a cool pic of a girl wearing a power glove:


But obviously too-much-on-the-plate syndrome and it never really materialized beyond that. So big thanks to Double for actually getting this series subbed!

[daburuwosagase]

The Momoi Haruko power glove pic has such an incredible energy to it. Should've been the album cover.