Trivia / Magic Knight Rayearth

• Acting for Two:
  • Some of the main and supporting English voice actors acted for two — or in some cases, three — at various times. For example, Terrence Stone voices Ferio, Celes and Inouva; Lex Lang voiced Rayearth, Windam, Zagato and Lantis; and Wendee Lee voiced Umi and Emeraude.
  • In the Latin American Spanish dub, Lafarga and Geo Metro are both voiced by Rubén Trujillo.
• Actor Allusion: A dragon-based "Mashin" from a fantasy world summoned using a sword, voiced by Tesshō Genda. Are we talking about Selece or Ryujinmaru?
• Bonus Material: The manga has omakes in between chapters/volumes, as well as character mini-bios and artwork of the main trio wearing Pimped Out Dresses. There's also an "omake" option on the North American DVD release.
• The Cast Showoff: Fuu's actress, Hiroko Kasahara, gets to show off her singing abilities at one point in the second season.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: In the second season, Lady Debonair is voiced by veteran actress Atsuko Takahata, who is more known for her Tokusatsu roles such as Maribaron in Kamen Rider BLACK RX.
• Completely Different Title: In Italy, the anime was titled Una porta socchiusa ai confini del sole^note A half-open door at the edge of the sun for its TV broadcast.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: Ascot, a young boy, was played by a woman (Minami Takayama). So were Eagle Vision (Megumi Ogata) and Sang Yung (Satomi Koorogi).
• Directed by Cast Member:
  • Deneb Film's Italian dubs of the TV series and OVA were directed by Gabriele Calindri, who also voiced Eagle Vision.
  • In Yamato Video's Italian dubs of the TV series and OVA, Stefania Patruno is the narrator as well as the ADR director.
• Dueling Dubs: There are two Italian dubs of the TV series, both produced in Milan. Deneb Film first dubbed it for Mediaset's 1997 broadcast, with Elisabetta Spinelli, Patrizia Scianca and Daniela Fava respectively voicing Hikaru, Umi and Fuu. For Yamato Video's 1998 VHS releases, Rayearth was dubbed by DEA Digital Editing Audio and everyone was recast, with Alessandra Karpoff, Cinzia Massironi and Emanuela Pacotto voicing the Magic Knights; this dub was later carried over to Yamato's DVD releases.
• God-Created Canon Foreigner: Several characters who are exclusive to the anime, such as Innouva and the second season's villains Debonair and Nova, were created by CLAMP themselves; Nanase Ohkawa (the manga's lead writer) was heavily involved with the anime's script, and Mokona (the manga's lead artist) designed the new characters.
• I Am Not Shazam:
  • "Magic Knight Rayearth" refers specifically to Hikaru and her Mashin, not the entire trio (who are just "the Magic Knights").
  • Rayearth is a Mashin/Rune God, not a Magic Knight.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The Sega Saturn, Super Famicom and Game Boy games have long since been out of print, with the latter examples having never seen export of any kind, so outright piracy is often the only choice curious prospective players even have. Working Designs' closure also ensures that the Saturn game will remain OOP for decades to come.
• Milestone Celebration:
  • For the TV series' 15th anniversary in 2009-10, Media Blasters released the seasons on two remastered R1 DVD box sets.
  • Kodansha Comics' box set releases of the manga in 2020 coincided with the series' 25th anniversary.
• No Export for You:
  • In this case, partially. For the longest time the R1 DVD releases were missing the second opening "Kirai ni Narenai" and the third ending "Itsuka Kagayaku" due to only openings 1 and 3 and endings 1 and 2 being dubbed, though they were included as extras on the previous R1 DVD's, eventually this was fixed in the remastered R1 DVD's and the Hulu streams, so after so many years we finally got all 3 openings and all 3 endings in Region 1 land with the original Japanese credits, episode titles and next episode previews intact.
  • While Hulu streamed the series in the United States, it wasn't made available for a digital streaming release in Canada.
  • And then there's the novelization of the second season of the anime which included drawings from Clamp themselves. It never got an official Western release.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Kōhei Miyauchi, who voiced Chang Ang for episodes 27 through 30, died in June 1995 due to abdominal varices, so the late Takkō Ishimori replaced him for the remainder of the second season.
  • Working Designs was responsible for the English-language release of the Sega Saturn video game, with Melissa Gulden, Jennifer Stigile and Tammy Jones as the respective voices of Hikaru, Umi and Fuu. Then, by the time Media Blasters released the anime in 1999, they dubbed it at Bang Zoom! Entertainment in Burbank, with Julie Maddalena, Wendee Lee and Bridget Hoffman respectively replacing Gulden, Stigile and Jones as the Magic Knights.
  • For the anime's first season, Mira was voiced by Wendee Lee. In the second season, Lee was replaced by Mona Marshall.
• The Other Marty: Originally, a pilot episode of the dub was recorded at Vancouver's Ocean Studios in 1995. However, when Media Blasters licensed the series in 1999, it was instead dubbed at Burbank's Bang Zoom! Entertainment with a different cast.
• Playing Against Type: Megumi Ogata is more known for playing young males or tough women with deep voices. That applies to Eagle Vision, but not with Princess Emeraude.
• Playing Their Own Twin: Melissa Fahn voices Tatra and Tarta in the second season's English dub.
• Posthumous Credit: Kōhei Miyauchi died three days before the second season episode "The Magic Knights & Aska From Fahren" premiered on Yomiuri TV.
• Produced by Cast Member: In the English dub of the TV series' second season, Keiko Sakamoto was the ADR co-producer as well as Mokona's voice actress.
• Referenced by...:
  • In The New '10s, after vanishing from the eye of popular culture for more than a decade, the Rayearth cast returned as guests for an obscure Japanese-only game, Gothic wa Mahou Otome, to mark Rayearth's anniversary. This was also the first sign that after so long, the trio of Magic Knight seiyuus would always reprise their roles despite the anime having long since finished its broadcast and with the voice actresses in question having reduced presence in the industry in the years since Rayearth.
  • Then the show made its first debut for the Super Robot Wars series in Super Robot Wars T. Magic Knight Rayearth is rather famous among the SRW crowd, and has been a constant request for inclusion in a game in the series since the show's initial run (and never made it in, even after decades), which led fans to believe that CLAMP was rather defensive about its properties and it's only in 2018/2019 that they relented and allowed its debut. Series producer Takanobu Terada, however, explained that back in the day, series inclusion policy was stricter and that Rayearth didn't make the cut as something that could be included. After the release of Super Robot Wars X-Ω, however, Bandai Namco started loosening the policy to the point that Rayearth could pass the inclusion policy. (As a side note, SRW T also marks the first time characters of the second season (Eagle, Geo, Lantis, Nova, Debonair) appear in a video game, since the official Rayearth games so far only included the first season.) The series would return in the next game, Super Robot Wars 30.
  • And after that, Hikaru, Umi and Fuu became collaboration characters for the gacha game of the Valkyrie Profile series, Valkyrie Anatomia. They still retained their old seiyuus as well.
  • In The Odd1sout's video "My Thoughts on Roommates", James complains about how one of his roommates used to watch anime on high volume late at night, with one example being him being kept up to the blaring sound of the Magic Knight Rayearth opening song.
  • The Shoujo / Super Robot anime Granbelm mimics the most iconic key visual of Rayearth at the end of its opening song, with the main characters posing on the shoulder of the Giant Robot.
• Rereleased for Free: The TV series can be watched for free on TMS Entertainment's YouTube channel, as well as on Crackle, Tubi and Prime Video via Freevee.
• Role Reprise: The Japanese cast for the TV series reprised their roles for the Sega Saturn game. To the surprise of many, the leads happily reprised their roles a good twenty years later for new crossovers like Super Robot Wars T.
• Screwed by the Network: Fox Kids bought the rights for the anime (along with Slayers) to keep Toonami from developing it in the US. Then they sat on the rights until they expired and the Cartoon Network higher-ups no longer considered Rayearth a good investment for the block. (Even a good twenty years later, Jason DeMarco, one of Toonami's founders and producers, was quite willing to make clear that he wanted the show for Toonami very much and was still upset about how it shook out.)
• Self-Adaptation: Nanase Ohkawa, the manga's lead writer, was the supervising series composer for the anime adaptation's first season and would eventually become the second season's sole scriptwriter. Mokona, the manga's main artist, also designed characters who are exclusive to the anime, like Nova and Debonair.
• Star-Making Role: For the three leads in Japanese, Hekiru Shiina, Konami Yoshida and Hiroko Kasahara.
• Swan Song: The Sega Saturn game marked the last hurrah for the system in North America by the time it was finally released in 1998.
• Troubled Production: The Saturn game was initially listed as one of the first games for the system. It didn't show up in the U.S. until three years after the Japanese release and six months after support for the system came to an end, effectively being the last North American Saturn game. What caused this game to fall this far down? Numerous problems, including:
  • The usual need to translate and dub the voiced bits from Japanese to English. This took months by itself.
  • Part of the source code being lost due the computer holding the data for the game crashing, forcing Working Designs to rebuild pieces of it.
  • A fight between WD and Sega over what to name the main heroines (Sega had realized Rayearth was a good enough series to franchise to the States. However, as it was common at the time, they wanted to give them English names. Both Sega and WD had different names for the girls before they both threw their arms into the air and left them Hikaru, Umi and Fuu.)
• What Could Have Been:
  • Before Media Blasters had licensed Rayearth and dubbed it at Burbank's Bang Zoom! Entertainment, a pilot was dubbed in 1995 by Vancouver-based Ocean Studios and used the names suggested by TMS International's catalogue (Luce, Marine, Anemone), that had also been used in other foreign-language adaptations. It would have possibly aired on Fox Kids, but negotiations for the series fell through. At least 12 other episodes were dubbed in total through the Summit Media Group (who may have also redubbed the first episode for the TV run) before production ceased, and the series was given a completely different opening theme. The pilot was a bonus feature in Discotek's Blu-ray.
  • Working Designs had issues over naming the characters during the game's development, as they'd wanted to use their own set of names at first, but were then ordered by TMS to use their set of names (Luce, Marine, Anemone) for the game. They fought over it, and eventually wound up having to use the Japanese names in the end.
  • The Saturn game was originally scheduled to be released in July 1996 in North America, before a hard disk crash in Japan forced the game to be delayed.
  • The Mixx translation of the manga (by Stu Levy) was going to use the names "Blaze" (Hikaru), "Nautia" (Umi), and "Windi" (Fuu) for the three leads, but wound up using the original names in the end. Another alternate set of names considered were "Lustere", "Marin", and "Wyndy".
• Written by Cast Member: In the English dub of the TV series' second season, Terrence Stone was the ADR co-writer as well as Selece's voice actor.
• You Sound Familiar:
  • In the Japanese version, Yuri Shiratori, Jurota Kosugi, Emi Shinohara and Megumi Ogata, who are the respective voices of Mokona, Zagato, Presea and Emeraude, would later go on to voice Primera, Lantis, Sierra and Eagle Vision for the second season.
  • In a similar vein for the English dub, Lex Lang, Barbara Goodson and Mari Devon, the respective voices of Zagato, Alcyone and Presea, also voiced Lantis, Sang Yung and Sierra in the second season.
  • In the Latin American Spanish dub, Rubén Trujillo, who voiced Lafarga, would later go on to voice Geo Metro for the second season.

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