It is apparently very true in my case that any reference to Card Captor Sakura would be enough to send me into paroxysms of bliss. Part of this is, I think, the relative age of CCS, especially when compared to recent outings like Tsubasa Chronicle and XXXHolic. CCS is a popular anime, but I believe Chobits beat it out for even more popularity, and I can barely find any other CCS fans anyway, compared to the overwhelming representation of stuff like Gundam.

And recent references to it (which are not in Tsubasa Chronicle) are rare. References to my other anime fandom, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, are fairly easy (some would say too easy) to encounter, since it is a new anime. The time of CCS was before the time of huge Megami posters and easy trading of pictures on imageboards, or even prior to the explosion of English-speaking anime blogs, which probably does not help its case.

This is, incidentally, one reason why I’m blogging CCS. It feels like some sort of repayment for allowing me the passion to create this anime blog in the first place, and I figured that instead of wishing that some other blogger cover the series, I may as well do it myself.

But that is beside the point of this post, which is the release of CLAMP’s new CLAMP in Wonderland video, titled, imaginatively, CLAMP in Wonderland 2. For those unfamiliar with the concept of the CiW videos, they are short (maybe five minutes or so) music videos featuring pretty much every CLAMP creation at the time of release. The first one was vintaged 1994, three years before mine beloved CCS was released, and featured characters from (among others) Magic Knight Rayearth and CLAMP School Detectives (I think; it’s been a while since I saw it, and I forget where I put it) set to “Anata dake no Wonderland” (by Junko Hirotani). Since I’m not so much a fan of CLAMP as a specific fan of CCS, it provided me with some entertainment, but was ultimately not as memorable as I hoped it was.

Yeah, I’m selfish. I admit as much, since I did rail in the beginning of this post against the lack of CCS material on Teh Intarwebs, but am guilty of being just as ignorant of the Old Days Of Anime.

This one, though, caters to people like me, and shares much the same appeal as Tsubasa Chronicle or, more accurately, Kingdom Hearts: these are the settings we recognize, the characters we are familiar with, the series we know. Like the debate on the merits of Lucky Star, points of familiarity work wonders with regards to enjoyability.

This post will be an exercise in seeing how many screenshots I can squeeze out of a video less than six minutes long. Also, expect it to be edited fairly often as I gain more information about who the unrecognized characters are.

Yes, I’ve been quite bad at finding time for this blog. Now, the good news is that as far as I know, and I say this with the full knowledge that this is tempting fate to an unreasonable and extremely dangerous degree, things have settled down some, and I’ll be able to turn my attention back to this blog. Even so, the future holds many mysteries for those brave enough to peer into its opaque depths, and as pointed out, fate has been tempted, and may yet rise to the challenge.

In any case, to further cement this blog’s as-yet-nascent reputation for being a CCS-centric blog (through no deliberate decision on my part, I assure you), I should probably ramble a bit (albeit a bit unfavourably) about the series many people seem to expect me to like for its featuring of CCS characters, except not really: Tsubasa Chronicle.