I also wanted to name this post "DTO at Crunchyroll" and "A better Sailor Moon". It sure was a fun whirlwind of pleasurable corniness.

First of all, the DTO. I was pleasantly surprised to find it and immediately downloaded a 400 MB file... Which turned out to be a 480-tall XviD ripped from a VHS tape, I guess. I don't know how that is possible. When I was younger, fansubbers packed better quality into 170MB files easily. The audio is especially bad: it sounds like something transmitted over an analog cellphone, albeit in stereo. This is very difficult to commensurate with the release date of 2004, well inside the epoch of DVD.

In fact, not just audio, but everything about the anime hails from 1996: the designs, the music, the magical girl played straight... It's an amazing throwback to the pinnacle of the pre-digital animation.

BTW, thanks to Evirus and his endless postings about Precure that wore down my resolve to procrastinate on this. Curiously, his old impression was not all that enthusiastic: he called the initial series "generally pretty mediocre" back then. That it went to dominate his blogging in years ahead may mean that it was a timeless classic. Also, he said that Max Heart was "better than he remembered". I think I see a trend. Anyhow, the $2 were well spent. I don't know if I want to plop $96 on the remaining 48 episodes yet, but this is a start.

UPDATE: My previous post and the DB were in error: the initial impetus to see Precure came from an illustration at Hanahalu, not Neorosi (do not click on index at work).