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:
“The child who would be an adult must give up any lingering childlike sense of parental power, either the magical ability to solve your problems for you or the dreaded ability to make you turn back into a child. When you are no longer hiding from your parents, or clinging to them, and can accept them as fellow human beings, then they may do the same for you.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“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.)
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it’s your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“The media have just buried the last yuppie, a pathetic creature who had not heard the news that the great pendulum of public conciousness has just swung from Greed to Compassion and from Tex-Mex to meatballs.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)