About Cardcaptor Sakura and Cardcaptors

Cardcaptor Sakura is a magical girl series about Sakura Kinomoto, a ten year old fourth grader who is good at sports and hates math class with a crush on her older brother's friend. One day when she comes home after school she hears a strange noise in her basement and discovers a strange book. After opening the book and accidently releasing a magical deck of cards Sakura enters into a contract with Keroberos, the book's lazy guardian to gain magical powers in order to retrieve the cards back.

This series is by Clamp, a group of four women who originally began doing Doujinshi comics. It first started in June 1996 in Nakayoshi Magazine, a monthly manga magazine targeting 'tween girls. The anime version by Mad House Animation came soon after in 1998. The manga ran for five years and is twelve volumes long while the anime is 70 episodes long and branched off two movies as well as several video games and an entire sea of merchandise.

Hoping to spawn the same popularity in the US as in Japan, the English rights to the series were bought by Warner Brothers and dubbed by the Canadian company Nelvana in 1999 and renamed 'Cardcaptors'. Despite the excellent voice cast and publicity blitz on KidsWB, this was not the case as fans of the original series were angry at Warner Brothers' decision to show the episodes out of order and tone down the romantic elements of the show. In 2001 Cardcaptors was cancelled in the US, only 39 episodes aired. In other parts of the world all 70 of the original episodes were dubbed and shown in the correct original 'Cardcaptor Sakura'order, though with the edited romantic elements and anglified names like the US and Canadian version, much to the ire of many fans. Better success came with Nelvana's contract with Pioneer Entertainment (now known as Geneon) to release the uncut subtitled-only version. The manga company Tokyopop holds the right to the translated version of the manga, which exists in a western 'left to right' format, originally released in monthly comics and an 'authentic' right to left format. In 2003 Geneon dubbed the second movie with a new English voice cast, but fans of the voice actors of Cardcaptors disliked them it just as much as fans of Cardcaptor Sakura.

To this day Cardcaptor Sakura (and Cardcaptors) still remains one of the most popular series in both Japan and the US. It also has been translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portugese, Tanalong and Korean. NHK, the original network to air Cardcaptor Sakura did a rerun of the series starting in 2002, cosplayers in Sakura's trademark costumes are common in conventions and much to the delight of fans the main characters of the series, Sakura and Syaoran(Li), were reborn in Clamp's most current series Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle. And with many fans finally forgiving the relatively minor changes made to the dub, and interest in Cardcaptors has been renewed online.