How ‘Bewitched’ Inspired an Entire Subgenre of Anime
Bewitched seems like a quintessentially American TV show. The Stephenses are a perfect model of the mid-century American marriage, with a successful husband and supportive housewife; it’s just that one of them can bend reality to her will. It’s hard to imagine the series even airing outside of the U.S., let alone being wildly successful, but it became a sleeper hit in Japan of all places, where it aired as My Wife Is a Witch. Sitcoms might transcend cultures, but puns don’t.
The show’s popularity makes perfect sense, however, to Sailor Moon director Kunihiko Ikuhara. “What was so good about it was that the girl was able to use her powers to do things similar to Superman,” he said, who didn’t really have a feminine counterpart in Japanese culture. At the time, “I don’t think there was that much diversity in the way girls behaved,” he continued. “That’s why I think that’s why it was so free. If you think about it from that point of view, I think it was really fun for girls to be able to become wizards.”
It could be argued that it’s really fun for people to become wizards, and girls, despite what you might have been led to believe, are people.
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You might be understandably confused that this is coming from the director of Sailor Moon, possibly the most convincing evidence of Japan’s reverence for girls with magical powers, even if it came much later. That series is actually the biggest success of a genre known as “magical girl” anime, hallmarked by its focus on, you know, a girl who was magical, often accompanied by a hapless but devoted non-magical boy.
Sound familiar?
If so, it’s because what’s widely considered the pioneering property of the genre, a 1966 manga series called Sally the Witch, was directly inspired by Bewitched. While Japanese media had featured girls with magical powers before, Sally was the first witch who, like Samantha Stephens, was an otherwise normal, non-threatening, un-warty vision of 20th-century wholesomeness, paving the way for witchy anime like Kiki’s Delivery Service, Little Witch Academia, and yes, Sailor Moon.
Definitely a better legacy than that Nicole Kidman movie.
