YMMV / Kaitou Saint Tail

• Harsher in Hindsight: Episode 26 has a scene where Eimi is briefly hypnotized into believing she's a cat. Near the end of the series, we learn that her hated rival Rosemary uses hypnosis as her main skill.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The unlucky, over-confident fop named Sawatari? Hmm...
• Macekre:
  • The first DVD dub tried to remove all references to God, including scenes where Meimi and Seira (in nun garb) kneel and pray in a church.
  • The Italian dub made a change that's particularly mocked nowadays: in the attempt to both have Seira act as an actual nun in training (as all Italians would have found the original version to be too jarring) and prevent a nun from being involved with repeated thefts, Seira's character was made in the twin sisters Sara and Mara, of which Sara would be the nun-in-training who confides with Lisa (Meimi) about the troubles of people in need and Mara the schoolmate of Lisa and the accomplice of Seya (Saint Tail). The change is mocked due both the attempt to preserve the innocence of the nun and the execution being sloppy enough that it's not clear if Sara doesn't know or is just pretending and trying to redeem her while still revealing info on what she has to steal. That, and it's still obvious that Sara is violating the confessional secret, a truly disgraceful act for a member of the clergy.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Takamiya started out as The Scrappy (at least to the original fanbase) for how she was written to have strong-armed her way both into the Saint Tail investigations and Asuka and Meimi's budding romance; in fact, she was so heavily disliked by manga fans that even Tachikawa was surprised at her role as a Hate Sink working too well. She was better received later as the series went on thanks to the Swan two-parter, which showed signs of her being more than just abrasive and jealous girl with a crush on Asuka Jr., and the final chapters have her show genuine niceness to Meimi.
• Subbing vs. Dubbing: Tokyopop got some criticism from parents when some volumes of the show were released only in Japanese with subtitles, because young children could no longer follow the stories.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The series takes place smack in the middle of The '90s and thus is often reliant on the exact state of technology available at the time, meaning you can see Asuka Jr. using a laptop computer even when the cast is restricted by things like:
  • The most glaring one is the lack of easy Internet access^note it did exist at the time, but it was significantly less accessible and wouldn't become fully mainstream until the end of the decade, especially for fourteen-year-olds a small town like Seika, something that would have easily offset the issue of "no one knows how Saint Tail actually works" since people would be able to discuss her on online forums or social media instead of simply relying on what the newspapers had to say. On top of that, all of the characters struggling to identify the "winter flower" in chapter 15/episode 23 would have been able to solve the problem in no time flat if they had modern Internet access.
  • Saint Tail and Asuka Jr. make The Promise using a phone booth and a mobile phone since it's one of their only ways to communicate at a distance, whereas there would probably be multiple better options in the modern era (let alone the fact it's hard to even find a phone booth anymore).
  • The film caper in chapter 12/episode 11 relies on there being a delay between Sawatari taking the photo and the photo film being properly developed, giving Saint Tail time to steal the only copy before it goes public. Likewise, in episode 31, Meimi is able to prevent Sawatari from inspecting a photo he'd taken of Saint Tail by using the photo's development time to swipe the film and destroy the cartridge. Naturally, all of this would have likely been much more complicated in the age of digital cameras and smartphones.
  • Part of Kuroda's farce about the UFO photo in episode 22 relies on the fact that enlarging it would theoretically be a very long and time-consuming process, and Saint Tail is able to steal the photo purely by taking the physical projector slides. The entire episode's premise also relies on Shota's photo being the only known clear photo of it, something that would be unlikely in the modern age of smartphone cameras.
  • The race in episode 32 ends on the note of Mikako and Hiroko tying for first place, something that probably wouldn't be possible with modern high-speed cameras being able to ascertain who crossed the finish line first by milliseconds.
  • Asuka Jr. fussing about Meimi getting lost in crowds wouldn't be as much of an issue if both had mobile phones (the closest option would be beepers, but Asuka Jr. rejects the idea of having beepers late in the series due to them being associated with a Japanese lovey-dovey fad).