History Manga / Catseye

Both seasons of the anime are now streaming on Retro Crush and Creator/PrimeVideo. Creator/DiscotekMedia has licensed the series for release on Blu-ray. Its only North American TV broadcast was in French on [[Creator/{{CBC}} Radio-Canada]] in the late 1980s.

* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler: The manga's ending. Toshio decides to quit the police force and moves to America to be with Hitomi. When he gets there though, he learns Hitomi fell ill in the meantime and [[LaserGuidedAmnesia lost all her memories]]. Despite this, Hitomi vows to stay with her and fall in love all over again, seeing it as a sign that they can start a new romance without their status as cop and thief keeping them apart. The final scene has Hitomi and Toshio happily chasing each other at a beach.]]

* AdaptationalBadass: Lupin's Bride. In the manga, the girls find out her plan rather easily (since she doesn't resemble the woman she's impersonating ''at all''), and Hitomi casually dispatches her with a single blow before stealing her identity and eventually turning her over to the police. The TV adaptation portrays her as more cunning and capable, and fixes the identity theft problem by having her actually use a [[LatexPerfection lifelike mask]] to impersonate the art expert, with Hitomi only finding out the truth because of a coincidence the impostor hadn't foreseen. She even manages to turn the tables on the sisters after her men capture Ai, and is about to ''kill'' the three until she learns who their father is. And most importantly, she manages to evade capture this time.

** Toshio and Rui. Toshio once dressed as a female officer to try and get the drop on a crazed bomber, and was downright sexy. Rui, on the other hand, created the persona of a fictional male member of Cat's Eye, and was so beautiful that Mitsuko fell in love at first sight.

* BittersweetEnding: [[spoiler: The manga's ending. Toshio decides to quit the police force and moves to America to be with Hitomi. When he gets there though, he learns Hitomi fell ill in the mean time and [[LaserGuidedAmnesia lost all her memories]]. Despite it, Hitomi vows to stay with her and fall in love all over again, seeing it as a sign that they can start a new romance without their status as cop and thief keeping them apart. The final scene has Hitomi and Toshio happily chasing each other at a beach.]]

* CareerVersusMan: Done with both genders simultaneously. In one episode, Toshio is up for promotion, but the promotion comes with a transfer to a different city. This leaves Hitomi with the question of whether she should leave her sisters and Cat's Eye to be with the man she loves. In the end she decides that yes, she is willing to do so, and when she tells Toshio that's she'd be willing to move with him, he laments that he wished she had told him that a day earlier, because he had just deliberately tanked his promotion examination so that he could stay in town to be with her.

* ChickMagnet: Toshio. The sheer number of girls attracted by him is not just excessive, it's ''enormous'': apart Hitomi we have a girl he saved from a fire years earlier, Mitsuko, ''the entire Cat's Eye fan club in a women-only college'', and even Ai and Rui have shown some attraction (it's not clear if the latter is in love with him or was just trying to help him get closer to Hitomi and have some fun at the same time, while Ai just finds him cute).

* ColorCodedForYourConvenience: The outfits the girls wear while robbing, in the color drawings, have Hitomi wearing a blue one, Rui a purple one and Ai a yellow one.

* DancingTheme: Both endings features Cat's Eye doing aerobics.
* DatingCatwoman: Toshio and Hitomi, although the former remaining unaware of it is a crucial part of their relationship.

* DoesNotLikeGuns: Toshio, in spite of being a crack shot even with a {{BFG}} he never used before. Explained due him once [[IJustShotMarvinInTheFace fooling around on the range and shooting himself in a leg]], and being scared of holding guns ever since.

* FacialCompositeFailure: The first time the police get an eyewitness who actually saw Cat's Eye's face up close that is willing to testify, they try to get a sketch done. The resulting picture doesn't look anything like Hitomi, possibly because the witness was a seven-year-old who only saw her briefly in the middle of the night. Mitsuko actually tries showing the kid an actual picture of Hitomi to see if she recognizes her, but she doesn't.

** One of their enemies once framed Cat's Eye for murder. The police saw through this easily (he had described Cat's Eye as tall men, while the police already knew they were women), but played along to both gather more evidence against him (they had already arrested him once for theft of some of Heintz's paintings and arson, but the evidence disappeared and the higher ups had ordered him free) and to try to get the girls careless, only moving for the arrest when they had enough evidence to pin him with murder, perjury and attempted murder of the Cats and after Ai decided she had enough of his shit and [[ItMakesSenseInContext started tossing armored dogs around]].

* GoodVersusGood: The cops are unambiguously heroic, while the thieves have good intentions, and frequently act genuinely heroic — for example, they once rescued children from burning house, and also, they saved the detectives from truly evil criminals a few times.

* HiddenInPlainSight: The sisters' cafe is called the Cat's Eye and is placed into sight distance from a police station. Only Mitsuko ever makes the connection, but is unable to prove it.

* IdenticalStranger: The hitman in episode 60 looks exactly like Toshio, but with a mustache.

* LoveTriangle: A strange example: Hitomi and Toshio are together and later get engaged, but Toshio also has a crush on one of the Cat's Eye... Who is actually Hitomi. Gets even crazier when, due a series of circumstances, Hitomi starts dying her hair and wearing green lenses during the heists and tries to seduce Toshio as Cat's Eye.
** At one point Mitsuko believes she's in one with [[ItMakesSenseInContext Rui disguised as male member of Cat's Eye and Rui herself]].
%%** Toshio, Hitomi and Mitsuko constitute a more straight example. That is, if you don't factor Cat's Eye into the equation.
* LocalHangout: The Cat's Eye Cafe is this for the police force, even when it's just Toshio (who actually lives there with Hitomi), Hirano and Takeuchi.
* TheMasqueradeWillKillYourDatingLife: This hits Hitomi pretty often due to Toshio's fixation in catching Cat's Eye without ever knowing Hitomi herself is one of them.

* MeaningfulName: The Kisugi sisters chose Cat's Eye as name of their cafe and gang because it's their father's favourite cocktail: every single heist of Cat's Eye is a call for him.

* MovieSuperheroesWearBlack: The sisters wore black vinyl outfits in the live-action movie made in the 90's. The costumes were inspired by Comicbook/{{Catwoman}}'s look from ''Film/BatmanReturns''.

* OnlySaneWoman: Mitsuko Asatani is the only member of the squad assigned to arrest Cat's Eye to understand the inherent wrongness of discussing security measures ''in a cafe''. The average level of craziness only increased with the arrival of inspectors Hirano (a good shot carrying a {{BFG}}, and using it in all the most inappropriate situations) and Takeuchi (very short, but a capable martial artist. Also spends one third of his free time lecturing people on the True JapaneseSpirit, another third [[StalkerWithACrush trying to impress Ai]], and the final third protesting he's not an {{Ephebophile}}), and they were only the first two madmen to join the squad...
* OvershadowedByAwesome: Apart a few stupid habits, the officers assigned to the Cat's Eye case are very competent and easily capable of dealing with most crooks, and their plans to catch Cat's Eye are very sound. It's just that the girls are even better...

* PaperThinDisguise: The girl's Cat's Eye disguises are so thin as to be nearly transparent, seeing as they consist of unitards with a cleavage revealing neckline, with no masks or other facial coverings. The only reason why Toshio doesn't know that his girlfriend is a thief is the amazing number of ways the script finds for him to be within ten feet of Hitomi in Cat's Eye uniform without getting a clear look at her face, including darkness, Hitomi keeping her back to him, injury induced temporary blindness, and having off-prescription glasses locked on his head to distort his vision.

** In the final episode of the anime, Ai writes a play about Cat's Eye, and casts Hitomi in the lead role. Even after it's discovered that the real Cat's Eye has used the play as a cover to steal a valuable diamond from one of the lead actresses, Utsumi's boss doesn't even ''consider'' that Hitomi might have had something to do with it.

* ReverseCerebusSyndrome: Both the original manga and the anime are hit with this. Most noticeable in the manga however, where after the first 70 or so chapters, the tone shifts towards a romantic ensemble comedy as opposed to an action manga, the heists staged by the girls become rarer to the point of nearing TheArtifact territory and the heists that do appear become LighterAndSofter courtesy of Hitomi's recurring masquerade as the Blonde Cat's Eye.

* SeriousBusiness: Paintings for Cat's Eye. Smuggle, damage, steal or counterfait any painting without a good excuse and the girls will have you exposed, humiliated and arrested, usually with a crapton of property damage to ruin you financially in the process.

*** Doubles as a Shout Out to ''Franchise/LupinIII'' for Italian viewers, as Lupin's Bride voice actress in the dub was the same as Fujiko.

* StuffBlowingUp: The girls are surprisingly prone to use dangerous amounts of explosive when they can get away with it without harming anyone. It started with the girls blowing up all the windows in the target museum to ''distract the police'', and continued with the likes of a pissed Ai using well-directed low-powered explosions [[ItMakesSenseInContext to toss around armored dogs]] or the girls using copious amounts of plastic explosive to penetrate a bank vault (Kamiya, who was helping, called them maniacs halfway during the job. Then Ai pulled out the ''bazooka''...).

* {{Yandere}}: Spoofed by Mitsuko: after being proposed by Kamiya and noticed him being a CasanovaWannabe, she told him they'd die together and shot him... With a water gun.

%%* {{Bokukko}}: Ai is one of the early examples of this.

%%* ChristmasCake: Rui fits the age part, but doesn't care in the slightest. On the other hand, Toshio and Hitomi have tried multiple times to find her a boyfriend...

The girls reappeared in ''Anime/CityHunterShinjukuPrivateEyes'', marking their first on-screen appearance ''in decades'', complete with Creator/KeikoToda and Creator/ChikaSakamoto reprising their roles as Hitomi and Ai.[[note]]Toda [[TheOtherDarrin took over]] for [[ActingForTwo Rui]] as well due to Creator/ToshikoFujita's poor health and eventual death in 2018.[[/note]] Philippe Lacheau, the French director of the live-action film ''Film/CityHunterTheCupidsPerfume'', has a {{crossover}} sequel project with ''Cat's Eye'' in store, meanwhile. In Fall 2022, it was announced that an [[Anime/LupinIIIVsCatsEye animated crossover]] between ''Cat's Eye'' and ''Franchise/{{Lupin III}}'' would be dropping in 2023 as a Creator/PrimeVideo exclusive, with Keiko Toda and Chika Sakamoto once again returning as Hitomi and Ai, as well as Creator/YoshitoYasuhara returning to voice Toshio.

* RedemptionEqualsDeath: [[spoiler: Cranaff]] blows up himself with [[spoiler: the entire Cranaff syndicate]] to remove the main obstacle to the Kisugi sisters finding their father.

The girls reappeared in ''Anime/CityHunterShinjukuPrivateEyes'', marking their first on-screen appearance ''in decades'', complete with Creator/KeikoToda and Creator/ChikaSakamoto reprising their roles as Hitomi and Ai.[[note]]Toda [[TheOtherDarrin took over]] for [[ActingForTwo Rui]] as well due to Creator/ToshikoFujita's poor health and eventual death in 2018.[[/note]] Philippe Lacheau, the French director of the live-action film ''Film/CityHunterTheCupidsPerfume'', has a {{crossover}} sequel project with ''Cat's Eye'' in store, meanwhile. In Fall 2022, it was announced that an animated crossover between ''Cat's Eye'' and ''Franchise/{{Lupin III}}'' would be dropping in 2023 as a Creator/PrimeVideo exclusive, with Keiko Toda and Chika Sakamoto once again returning as Hitomi and Ai, as well as Creator/YoshitoYasuhara returning to voice Toshio.

The girls reappeared in ''Anime/CityHunterShinjukuPrivateEyes'', marking their first on-screen appearance ''in decades'', complete with Creator/KeikoToda and Creator/ChikaSakamoto reprising their roles as Hitomi and Ai.[[note]]Toda [[TheOtherDarrin took over]] for [[ActingForTwo Rui]] as well due to Creator/ToshikoFujita's poor health and eventual death in 2018.[[/note]] Philippe Lacheau, the French director of the live-action film ''Film/CityHunterTheCupidsPerfume'', has a {{crossover}} sequel project with ''Cat's Eye'' in store, meanwhile. In Fall 2022, it was announced that an animated crossover between ''Cat's Eye'' and ''Franchise/{{Lupin III}}'' would be dropping in 2023 as a Creator/PrimeVideo exclusive, with Keiko Toda once again returning as Hitomi.

Both seasons of the anime are now streaming on Retro Crush and Creator/PrimeVideo. Creator/DiscotekMedia has licensed the series for release on Blu-ray. The French dub also aired on [[Creator/{{CBC}} Radio-Canada]] in the late 1980s.

Both seasons of the anime are now streaming on Retro Crush and Creator/PrimeVideo. Creator/DiscotekMedia has licensed the series for release on Blu-ray.

%%* SympatheticInspectorAntagonist: Toshio

The girls reappeared in ''Anime/CityHunterShinjukuPrivateEyes'', marking their first on-screen appearance ''in decades'', complete with Creator/KeikoToda and Creator/ChikaSakamoto reprising their roles as Hitomi and Ai.[[note]]Toda [[TheOtherDarrin took over]] for [[ActingForTwo Rui]] as well due to Creator/ToshikoFujita's poor health and eventual death in 2018 [[/note]]. Philippe Lacheau, the French director of the live-action film ''Film/CityHunterTheCupidsPerfume'', has a {{crossover}} sequel project with ''Cat's Eye'' in store, meanwhile. In Fall 2022, it was announced that an animated crossover between ''Cat's Eye'' and ''Franchise/{{Lupin III}}'' would be dropping in 2023 as a Creator/PrimeVideo exclusive, with Keiko Toda once again returning as Hitomi.

The girls reappeared in ''Anime/CityHunterShinjukuPrivateEyes'', marking their first on-screen appearance ''in decades'', complete with their original voice actresses....sorta [[note]] Creator/KeikoToda and Creator/ChikaSakamoto are reprising their roles as Hitomi and Ai respectively and Toda's [[TheOtherDarrin taking over]] for [[ActingForTwo Rui]] as well due to Creator/ToshikoFujita's poor health and eventual death in 2018 [[/note]]. Philippe Lacheau, the French director of the live-action film ''Film/CityHunterTheCupidsPerfume'', has a {{crossover}} sequel project with ''Cat's Eye'' in store, meanwhile.

Both seasons of the anime are now streaming on Retro Crush and [[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085WH64V4/ Amazon Prime Video]] and Creator/DiscotekMedia has [[https://twitter.com/discotekmedia/status/1470594225158836227 announced that they've rescue licensed the series for release on Blu-ray]].

%%* ActionGirl: The three sisters.
%%* ActionGirlfriend: Hitomi to Toshio.

The girls reappeared in ''Anime/CityHunterShinjukuPrivateEyes'', marking their first on-screen appearance ''in decades'', complete with their original voice actresses....sorta [[note]] Creator/KeikoToda and Creator/ChikaSakamoto are reprising their roles as Hitomi and Ai respectively and Toda's [[TheOtherDarrin taking over]] for [[ActingForTwo Rui]] as well due to Creator/ToshikoFujita's poor health and eventual death in 2018 [[/note]]. The French director of the live-action film ''Film/CityHunterTheCupidsPerfume'' has a {{crossover}} sequel project with ''Cat's Eye'' in store, meanwhile.

* CareerVersusMan: Done with both genders simultaneously. In one episode, Toshio is up for promotion, but the promotion comes with a transfer to a different city. This leaves Hitomi with the question of whether she should leave her sisters and Cat's Eye to be with the man she loves. In the end she decides that yes, she is, and when she tells Toshio that's she'd be willing to move with him, he laments that he wished she had told him that a day earlier, because he had just deliberately tanked his promotion examination so that he could stay in town to be with her.

** The sisters are so self-confident that they sign their thefts before they even commit them. Said confidence stems from their ability to get the police to spill the beans on how they plan to thwart them and lip-read what plans Mitsuko manage to not have spilled (she has the habit of discussing them on the roof of the police station, which is separated from the cafe only by a public park, and Rui has a pair of binoculars). That, of course, when the force doesn't convne at the cafe itself within full earshot of the sisters.

Their modus operandi is to announce their forthcoming passage by leaving a CallingCard. Every time, the police will deploy forces in order to catch them, and every time they evade capture and make off with the painting they were after. It helps that the police detective assigned to their case is, in fact, middle sister Hitomi's boyfriend; while he has no idea of the sisters' nighttime activities, he unwittingly helps them stay one step ahead of law enforcement.

The girls reappeares in ''Anime/CityHunterShinjukuPrivateEyes'', marking their first on-screen appearance ''in decades'', complete with their original voice actresses....sorta [[note]] Creator/KeikoToda and Creator/ChikaSakamoto are reprising their roles as Hitomi and Ai respectively and Toda's [[TheOtherDarrin taking over]] for [[ActingForTwo Rui]] as well due to Creator/ToshikoFujita's poor health and eventual death in 2018 [[/note]]. The French director of the live-action film ''Film/CityHunterTheCupidsPerfume'' has a {{crossover}} sequel project with ''Cat's Eye'' in store, meanwhile.

In 2019, it was announced that the girls will be making [[https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2019-01-10/city-hunter-shinjuku-private-eyes-anime-film-trailer-reveals-appearance-by-cat-eye-trio/.141901 a guest appearance]] in ''Manga/CityHunter: Shinjuku Private Eyes'', marking their first on-screen appearance ''in decades'', complete with their original voice actors....sorta [[note]] Creator/KeikoToda and Creator/ChikaSakamoto are reprising their roles as Hitomi and Ai respectively and Toda's [[TheOtherDarrin taking over]] for [[ActingForTwo Rui]] as well due to Creator/ToshikoFujita's poor health and eventual death in 2018 [[/note]]. The French director of ''Film/CityHunterTheCupidsPerfume'' has a {{crossover}} project with ''Cat's Eye'' in store, meanwhile.

** The sisters are so self-confident that they sign their thefts before they even commit them. Said confidence stems from their ability to get the police to spill the beans on how they plan to thwart them and lip-read what plans Mitsuko manage to not have spilled (she has the habit of discussing them on the roof of the police station, which is separated from the cafe only by a public park, and Rui has a pair of binoculars). That, of course, when the force doesn't convene at the cafe itself within full earshot of the sisters.

* RagtagBunchOfMisfits: The Cat's Eye Special Capture Team, initially composed by [[IdiotHero Toshio]] [[DatingCatwoman Utsumi]], [[SunglassesAtNight Takeshi]] [[TriggerHappy Hirano]], [[{{Ephebophile}} Takeuchi]], [[DirtyOldMan Juzo]] [[FiveFingerDiscount Unno]] and [[DefrostingIceQueen Mitsuko]] [[OnlySaneWoman Asatani]]. It's the SpringtimeForHitler version: all members of the team but Asatani had embarrassed the police in some way (most with particularly embarrassing failures against Cat's Eye, and Unno by pickpocketing pretty much everything just because) and were reassigned so their original teams wouldn't get embarrassed anymore, but they soon prove to be a group of {{Bunny Ears Lawyer}}s and the only ones who have a chance against Cat's Eye, while supposedly elite squads would get humiliated even ''worse'' if they made ago at Cat's Eye.

* SharedUniverse: Shares one with ''Manga/CityHunter'' (also by Tsukasa Hojo). The café and the sister appears sometimes in the latter, and they also appear in the film ''City Hunter: Shinjuku Private Eyes''.