Cardcaptor Sakura was a very cute and ingenious anime based off of the Clamp manga series. The manga was very well received in Japan and is both one of the quintissential shojo manga and best manga around. The manga ran from 1996 to 200 and the anime ran in 3 seasons between 1998 and ended in 2000. Cardcaptor was a 70 episode anime where ten year old Sakura Kinomoto must recover 52 magical Clow Cards she accidently released. Each card has a specific ability and Sakura gains these abilities to use when she recovers a card. The cards have a spirit form and personalities and Sakura must stop them from wreaking havoc and capture them.
I originally watched this show so long ago, I'm not sure what format I watched it in originally. I think I caught a dubbed version on TV, but then later on picked up the deluxe sets on DVD in 2005 by Geneon, which were kind of packaged to look like the Clow Book and Sakura Book in which she stores the captured cards. This series has a young protagonist and her friends so the plots tend to be simpler and more innocent, adding to the charm of this show that features the themes of love and friendship. There are some darker moments, but in general it was a fun watch. There are several sub-plots to the series including her crush/love interest Syaoran who competes with her to get the cards, and Clow Reed, the sorceror who created the cards, so it isn't a one trick show. You couldn't watch a pile of shows like this, but between shows like earlier Sailor Moon, the original Pretty Cure, and Cardcaptor, you pretty much define the archetypes for modern magical girl anime genre.
I'm fond of this show and the original Pretty Cure with Cure White and Black. I believe this is the first magical girl anime I saw and it was pretty innovative with Sakura having to retrieve the cards using the special abilities given to her by other cards. It was often a bit of a puzzle to figure how to capture each card. The characters, such as her best friend, Tomoyo, who has a crush on her and films her in action were also unique for the time. Having Cerberus, the guardian of the Clow, be a cute plushie until transformed into his true form was new too. I have a post about magical girl anime here.
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Collected manga volumes. The anime has more Clow Cards than the manga.
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There was always a bunch of merchandise for this series, but because it was so old, figures and such were relatively rare until they did the Clear Card Series. Back in the early 2000s I did manage to pick up a few things and I'll show them below and then later on around 2016 there was a little mini boom in merchandise, some of it good for cosplaying or just collecting.
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These were blind box figures I picked up from JBOX in the early 2000s. They're pretty small and not bad for detail. They show Sakura from some iconic scenes from various anime episodes.
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Rollerblading to school.
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The school play.
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Summer sunflowers.
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Sakura with the Sakura Wand and wings.
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Sakura with the Clow Wand in fly mode.
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One of the things I had always wanted was a set of the Clow Cards or Sakura Cards (which the Clow Cards eventually convert to). In 2016 Takara Tomy released a book and all of the 52 cards along with a Clow Wand. I manage to pick up a set of these. There was a Sakura Set with the wand too that came up shortly after that. The neat thing about the cars is that they are plastic and they have an RFID chip in them so that the wand and the book can make various sounds and speech snippets based on the card when they are brought together.
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Clow Wand and Cards.
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There have been some really nice figure releases since then, but I've pretty much skipped out on them as they're pretty expensive and I figured I had enough items to remind me about the show.
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