Euro-manga

Very cold Thanksgiving this year, with snow the next day – which melted on Saturday, the only day since Thursday with sun. Rain today, but a pleasant 50 or so. Still, I installed our Holmes brand 1500-watt HeatSafe Portable Heater in the downstairs bathroom. But “install” is too complicated a term for what I did. I parked it on top of the toilet tank and plugged it in. The downstairs bathroom is small, with room only for a shower, toilet, and sink with medicine cabinet.

Why didn’t I think of this last winter, or the year before? This heater’s been in storage, in the old house and this one, since after the great furnace failure of 1998. That little bathroom warms up nicely in about 10 minutes, up a few pleasant degrees from the 68 F we keep the house during cold-weather daytimes. And the heater’s toddler-proof. If Ann entered the bathroom and knocked it over, it would switch off. I’ve seen it do that when disturbed.

Couldn’t stick to buying nothing on Buy Nothing Day (Friday), since I went to a nearby hardware store and got a furnace filter and some vacuum cleaner bags. Then, since the kids were along, we visited the spanking-new McDonald’s on Roselle Road, across the parking lot from the hardware store, a redevelopment of an older McDonald’s on the same spot. It was fairly crowded. Maybe McDonald’s is a way to decompress after a previous day of feasting.

Anyway, it was an education for me, since the kids’ meal promotions were figures from a cartoon under the Disney banner called W.I.T.C.H. That was the first I’d ever heard of it. Lilly, on the other hand, knew all about it. She’s in the target demographic, I figure, and Disney used ABC Saturday mornings to get to her.

What do I know? I see witch and I think, “She’s a witch! Burn her! What burns besides witches? More witches!” This line of patter didn’t go over very well with Lilly, who explained that these were good witches -- girls with special powers, really. Looking suspiciously like Sailor Moon and her ilk, I thought. Looking like anime, at least.

Later I looked into the matter a little further, but not to the point of actually watching the cartoon on Saturday. This from a Disney press release: “W.I.T.C.H., an animated action series based on Disney Publishing's comic magazines of the same name that have quickly become an international sensation, will add 26 half-hours in its second season which debuts in fall 2005. Combining epic adventure, magic and comedy through the lives of the five young heroines (Will, Irma, Taranee, Cornelia, and Hay-Lin) designated to maintain the natural order of the universe… at the same time they cope with the daily trials and tribulations of being teenagers, W.I.T.C.H. is a production of SIP Animation.”

SIP Animation? Then to World Animation magazine. According to an article on its web site, “Jetix on Toon Disney and ABC Kids is currently showing W.I.T.C.H., a series from S.I.P. Animation based on the comic (32 editions, 65 countries, a million copies sold a month — ‘the most sold comic in the world’) developed at Disney Italy.”

Disney Italy? No wonder Google pulled up so many of the references to this cartoon in various European languages. It’s Euro-manga. Japanese-inspired Italo-anime, making money for its American masters. Remarkable world we live in, right down to the details on the bags in McDonald’s.