C&C: Rivals in only one thing
by K. Butler
Episode 3 - The Cave
Summary
SaKOOra and her classmates are away at camp for a few days,
leaving Kero behind at home. While swimming, SaKOOra notices
that Li is acting a little oddly, and she wonders if it
might be a Clow Card. She dismisses the idea, though, and
joins her friends in playing on the beach. Later, they all
gather fish and help prepare dinner, and spend the night
in cabins, where Nikki tells a scary story.
SaKOOra finds that she can't sleep after that, so she sneaks
out to talk to her teacher, but runs into Li instead. They
have a discussion on the beach about Card Captoring.
The final activity for camp is to take a hike through a
spooky cave. SaKOOra is nervous about it, and she only
grows moreso when she and Madison discover that people
are starting to disappear. Eventually she figures out
that it's a Clow Card, and she and Li make their way
to the shrine to discover and capture the Erase card.
It turns out that the Erase card also erases the memory
of the experience, so no one remembers what happened
the next day. Someone suggests a game of volleyball, and
SaKOOra and Li hurry to join.
Comments
This episode makes it absolutely clear that Nelvana intends
to remove any and all evidence of crushing from this series.
Chelsea and Zach are cousins, though their Japanese counterparts,
Chiharu and Takashi, are simply very old friends. I'm not
sure why this change was necessary, since these are 10 year old
children. Boys and girls can be friends without being relatives.
The recent dub of Sailormoon S which made Michelle and Amara
cousins just makes this all the more suspicious looking.
Gone also are both Sakura and Li-kun's crushes on Yukito. While
this is understandable, it also makes Julian's role in the story
much less important for this half of the show, and consequently
makes Tori less important as well. It also makes the competition
between SaKOOra and Li more one-dimensional: in the original
episode, they're not only trying to prove themselves as card captors,
they're also competing for Yukito. It lends depth to
Li's character, making him more human and less arrogant brat.
A random comment about the spooky walk through the cave -- in Japan
this is called 'kimodameshi', and as I understand it, the object
is to follow a set path (usually through scary territory) in the
dark. It shows up in quite a lot of anime, since it's a good way
to get a boy and a girl alone together in a position where she can
glomp on him. (Off the top of my head, there are also kimodameshi
episodes in Maison Ikkoku, Marmalade Boy, and
Hime-chan no Ribon.)
Editting
The script, of course, was completely rewritten for the
American audience. While the capture of the card went more or
less as before, the non-card portion introduced some new
facts and confirmed some changes.
- Chelsea and Zach are cousins
- SaKOOra and Li don't really have any interest in Julian at all.
There were a number of small video edits to this show, mainly to
remove evidence of the crushes, but there was also an
inexplicable edit of a scene where Chiharu beats on Takashi. Since
I happen to have an uneditted version of this episode, here are
some screencaps of parts which were cut:
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