Magical Girlfriends in Western Media
Tiffany White of Pop Matters, in her review of the Mannequin movies, classifies magical girlfriend movies with this template:
• Main protagonist is a loser who has no luck with girls or has a real girlfriend who doesn’t understand him.
• Main guy finds magical girlfriend (usually an angel, mermaid, or science experiment) and they fall in love.
• An antagonist lurks about, and its sole purpose is exposing the magical girlfriend.
• In the end, the protagonist and the magical girlfriend escape persecution, gain public acceptance, and spend the rest of their lives happy ever after.
A.E. Sparrow of IGN, in reviewing Mamotte Shugogetten, also relates magical girlfriends shows to their western counterparts: "She's completely devoted to protecting her new "master" from any misfortune, utterly oblivious to the ways of the modern world, and (in cute girl manga terms) a total knockout. If you're not completely immersed in the world of manga yet, think "I Dream of Jeannie". If you are, then think "Oh! My Goddess!". Either one works if you're looking for a comparison."
Examples of magical girlfriend in Western media include: Samantha from Bewitched, Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie, Lisa from Weird Science, Jenny/XJ9 from My Life as a Teenage Robot and Madison from Splash.
Read more about this topic: Magical Girlfriend
Famous quotes containing the words magical, girlfriends, western and/or media:
“What art can paint or gild any object in afterlife with the glow which Nature gives to the first baubles of childhood. St. Peter’s cannot have the magical power over us that the red and gold covers of our first picture-book possessed. How the imagination cleaves to the warm glories of that tinsel even now! What entertainments make every day bright and short for the fine freshman!”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Her girlfriends asked that innocent,
“What? What appeals to you?”
when her pregnancy cravings appeared.
Her gaze merely fell
on her husband.”
—Hla Stavhana (c. 50 A.D.)
“Cinema is the culmination of the obsessive, mechanistic male drive in western culture. The movie projector is an Apollonian straightshooter, demonstrating the link between aggression and art. Every pictorial framing is a ritual limitation, a barred precinct.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity—much less dissent.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)