The Crystal Star Compact is hardly compact…
With how amazingly popular Sailor Moon wound up becoming, it’s easy to forget that the series was not the first to have explored… well… practically any of the concepts that made it famous. Not to downplay the achievements Ms. Takeuchi’s genre-defining classic, of course, but nearly everything that we know Sailor Moon for nowadays had already been done in other series before it.
Many of the so-called “tropes” that 21st century fans would readily attribute to Sailor Moon were in fact already well-established before our favorite sailor-suited warriors were even conceived.
While Usagi may have made the idea of a “magical compact” famous, the great grandmother of magical girls is the one who made it a staple in the genre.
Today we’re going to take a look back to the earliest days of the “magical girl” genre and tell the story of one of its earliest pioneers!