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  • Across the Tooniverse
  • Im Guk Yeong (bio)
    Translated by Emily Bettencourt (bio)

The Sailor Scouts had appeared, new guardians to protect Uranus, Neptune, Jupiter, and Saturn. The one who caught Mankyŏng's interest was Sailor Uranus, with her sharp blonde pixie cut and high-bridged nose. She usually wore an easy smile and made romantic comments to women, but as soon as a fight started, she donned her Sailor Scout uniform and beat the villains up. When she gathered her red energy in her hands and slammed them to the ground, a magma-like sphere would break through the ground and shoot towards the enemies. Ka-pow!

On the floor in front of the sofa, Mankyŏng and Suchin sat slightly apart from each other and stared at the television. Mankyŏng glanced back and forth, looking between Sailor Uranus on the screen and Suchin's face in profile, and thought to himself, Woman? Or man?

At the end of the 1990s, Korea was facing its most severe economic recession since the war. With large corporations going bankrupt, unemployment on the rise, and the rate of juvenile crime increasing, the atmosphere was gloomy and chaotic, as was fitting for the end of the century. [End Page 159]

—Tooniverse's airing of His and Her Circumstances

Those were strange times. The world was gripped with fear about "Y2K," the millennium virus, and a visual rock band with the same name was active in Korea. You could look upwards, wondering if the great king Angol Moa would be descending from the heavens, then lower your gaze to see Michael Jackson performing "Black or White" with Guns n' Roses guitarist Slash. Then you could look to the left and see someone throwing themselves into the Han River.

For most kids, the reality of the world was beyond understanding, and they weren't really interested anyway. To them, even more than the IMF or financial crisis, this was an era of memorable animated films and television shows like Sailor Moon. The Big Three public television channels competed by airing anime shows in the 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. time slot, right before the golden hours of primetime. There was MBC, showing The Brave Police J-Decker, Ai Tenshi Wedding Peach, and Akazukin Chacha; KBS aired Juuni Senshi Bakuretsu Eto Ranger, Saint Tail, and Sailor Moon; and SBS broadcast Slayers, Slam Dunk, and Cardcaptor Sakura. Countless Christian kids ditched their Sunday morning services in favor of watching Cartoon Festival or Disney's Cartoon Garden. Then, an all-anime, all-day cable channel called Tooniverse started broadcasting Ranma ½, a program in which the main character turns into a woman when doused with cold water and a man when splashed with warm water. It was hard to believe that just a few years prior, not only had this exact show been censored for being "full of provocative and perverted lines and scenes," there had even been a rumor that someone had gathered the video tapes together and burned them all.

The kids of that generation were enthusiastic and thoroughly enjoyed this type of media. They would meet up with their friends at school to talk about the episodes that had aired the night before and sing the opening theme songs together. Bakumaru, Hols, Gao, Cream! Drago, Nyorori, Pakaracchi, Souffle! There was one main [End Page 160] reason why kids were so enamored with the anime they watched: things happened in those worlds that could never happen in real life. The colorful main characters could gather magic in their palms and join forces with giant talking robots. There was an incredible new world unfolding inside their televisions that couldn't be explained by real-world logic. Wide-eyed kids dreamed not of reality but of those incredible places, and their imaginations took flight with the belief that those dreams could someday become real. Mankyŏng and Suchin were no exception.

Mankyŏng and Suchin both had older brothers. Their brothers were good friends who lived in the same apartment complex and went to the same middle school, and Mankyŏng's older brother often brought Mankyŏng along when they hung out. Suchin...

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