I will start this off with a disclaimer. If you are a major fan of the Pretty Cure franchise or children’s toys in general all these observations will be incredibly obvious to you. It will be like me letting you in on the secret that the sun rises in the east and then sets in the west. But for everyone else this might be interesting.

In Suite PreCure the big mystery has been who is Cure Muse. For a show for little girls they have been doing a decent job of throwing the audience red herrings on her identity. But recently Kara Dennison linked me to a picture that revealed the true identity of Cure Muse which ia still a major secret at the time this article goes up. How did she and many other people on the Internet know this fact? A leaked piece of adverting for Cure Muse merchandise. It seems that retailers get merchandising info for Pretty Cure merchandise far in advance. This is hardly unsurprising when you sit down and think about it. But when you see the sheer amount of merchandise that is available pretty much the day after a character is introduced on the show it is sort of amazing. Just this weekend Cure Beat was fully introduced with her big flashy attack using with her magical guitar wand.

And little girls in Japan can go to any toy store and pick up that same magical guitar wand with no delay.

And there is a metric ton of other merchandise of all stripes including talking Cure Modules, dolls, stationary, posters, clothing, and much more. And that is just new Cure Muse merchandise on top of the King’s Treasury they had of just the original two girls. Anyone who has seen a well orchestrated merchandising machine behind a popular property will know that this is hardly a unique phenomenon. But I think it shows what a phenomenon Pretty Cure is in Japan.

Machines like this are not impossible to set up but they require a good deal of faith from everyone involved. Just look at Sym-Bionic Titan. The merchandise infrastructure never came together and that show was killed in its prime. A franchise that has this level of support has to be a Goliath.

I think it proves that the fanbase of Pretty Cure is the little girls that it is marketed at. There is no denying that some of the fans are creepy otaku who have a less than pure interest in the underage heroines. But they are the minority. The majority is buying little plastic wands and dolls as the indented audience. Otherwise the marketing campaign would be very different. I think Pretty Cure has gained a reputation in the US as being a show for creepos when it is merely a show for children and nothing more. It is just that some icky otaku also like it.

I always knew that Pretty Cure merchandising was impressive. I just never knew it was this much of a well oiled juggernaut. It is almost a work of art how precisely it is run. No matter what your opinion of the show or the campaign around it you have to be slightly impressed by the grandeur of the process.